Roy Tang

It’s already May? April felt like it came and went so quickly. But then again, time has little meaning in this accursed pandemic.

The world:

• The brouhaha over community pantries (as described last week), seems to have calmed down and they are now generally coordinating with LGUs for assistance in maintaining health protocols
• Meanwhile, the government has embarked on a propaganda campaign to assert that we aren’t the worst in terms of pandemic response in the world
• Certain congress people continue to promote the usage of the drug Ivermectin, which has no known effect on Covid-19, as a Covid-19 cure or something. The DOH/FDA keep saying there’s no sufficient evidence, but that has no effect when the people promoting it aren’t motivated by evidence.
• Looks like the Office of the Solicitor General of the Philippines accidentally leaked a bunch of sensitive legal documents due to a misconfigured public directory on their web server.
• Apparently last weekend was the Oscars, which just goes to show how irrelevant they are now that I didn’t even know until I saw the tweets about it happening live. They tried to re-arrange the awards with Best Actor last, apparently with the hope of ending with a posthumous award to Chadwick Boseman, but the award went to Anthony Hopkins instead, who wasn’t even at the ceremony. Awkward.

Links of interest:

• How to have better arguments online

  • “I have this mentor. And one of the best pieces of advice that he gave me is ‘always give someone the golden gate of retreat’, which is: give someone enough compassion, enough opportunity in a conversation for them to look good changing their mind. And it’s a really important thing to be able to do, because if you’re just like, ‘Oh you said this thing! You’re racist!’, you’re forcing that person to say, ‘No I’m not’. Et cetera. There’s no golden gate of retreat there. The only retreat there is to just barrel right through the opposing opinion.”

• Why Lichess will always be free. I sometimes use their site (lichess.org) to play some quick rounds of chess, so this is good to know.
• How to live in wonder

  • Make a constant practice of getting curious about all of the aspects of your experience. Not with the intention of receiving any adult-mind narrative answers, but with the curiosity of a talking monkey who has no ability to understand the universe. … By continually introducing the immediate experience of not-knowing to your operating system, you will undo the stale old perceptual and cognitive habits of the adult-mind that thinks it knows, that thinks it has seen it all, that it has seen any of this before. It’s a skill like any other, and as you improve with practice you will get better at meeting everything for the first time.

• Yahoo the Destroyer, on the once-great internet company not being great at preserving the content under its purview. I’m still bitter over not being able to recover my Yahoo Messenger convos.
• Drew DeVault writes about how cryptocurrency is an abject disaster. I was tempted to write about my own experiences working with crypto, but I worry that not enough time has passed for me to talk perhaps a bit unkindly about some of the companies I’ve worked with.
• Manuel Matuzovic writes about his current HTML boilerplate, which at the very least is a good look at how many different tags and other things one needs to put in by default to support various modern web things including social media previews and such.
• Someone shared to me this version of Never Gonna Give You Up with Japanese lyrics that I enjoyed for some reason.
• Extremely satisfying: Belgian man parks his car in a super narrow garage
• I found this Philippines inflation calculator online. Prices have almost doubled from when I started working back in 2003!

My stuff:

• For some reason all the sketches for the past week were done with pen and paper on this tiny pad I keep near my desk. Much quicker to do, but the sketches are also much simpler than anything I do in Procreate.
• Watching:
  • Movies: Caught Green Hornet (2011) on cable, a movie I didn’t even know existed. I should resume my James Bond run soonish.
  • Watched the second season of Jack Ryan and finished up season 1 of Invincible, both on Prime Video
• Gaming:
  • Been drafting a bit more Strixhaven on Arena. I thought the Sealed Open was this weekend, but turns out it was actually next week. I’ll probably shift to Quick Drafts next week.
  • Played a bunch of Horizon Zero Dawn on PS4 already after it dropped for free last week. Wasn’t a big fan of the intro sequence, but I’ve warmed up to it as the story and the world gradually opened up. I can tell this will take a while to finish though.
  • Played a bit of Street Fighter V again this week, though I’m still languishing in the Bronze ranks again. Have tried shifting to Balrog (Boxer) as my main, though I’m not super familiar with the combos and matchups. We’ll see how that goes.
  • My regular Saturday gaming group immediately picked up the new Riverfolk expansion for Root when it dropped last week and we had a lot of fun with some of the creepy new additions last night. And I really should get on with that Root review!
• Books: I am close to finishing Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, should be done this week, hopefully have time to write the review as well.
• Trivia: Didn’t do too well in this week’s About Quiz, so we ended up in a distant finish in the league overall. No trivia next week!

This coming week:

• No new One Piece, BNHA, etc, I assume due to Golden Week. Boo!
• Strixhaven Sealed Open on Arena next week, for real this time!
• Getting my second shot of Sinovac next Sunday!

This post was a bit rushed, so typos etc are a feature, not a bug.