A quote
“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.” – Ernest Hemingway
The world:
- This week was the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, and a recent tweet highlighted how the HK government, which used to freely allow commemorating the event, is now cracking down on the former colony’s freedoms.
- StackOverflow has been sold to an investment company. The Q&A site founded by Joel Spolsky and Jeff "@codinghorror” Atwood completely changed everyday software development when it launched in 2008. To this day, there are numerous programmer memes about how programmers can’t get anything done without Stackoverflow (and also the corresponding memes about how hostile Stackoverflow responses can be). Hopefully the founders selling the site doesn’t cause any major negative changes.
- New version of Firefox released, which came with a UI refresh I’m not fond of.
- Local fast food giant Jollibee found itself in trouble this past week as a post complaining about a woman’s order of fried chicken instead being replaced with a fried… towel?? went viral. Hard to imagine how that could have happened. A friend says the woman who ordered is a friend of his sister’s (chismis-chain much) and he says the family was approached by several lawyers and even by local hustler-trying-to-replace-the-justice-system Tulfo hoping to cash in on the phenomenon. A second post that said “our competitor threw in the towel” went viral and McDonald’s had to deny it was them.
- Manila Mayor Isko Moreno urged the gov’t to scrap the face shield requirement. I feel like it’s the sort of the thing this admin wouldn’t rollback out of pride. I did get a kind of funny story about the face shield requirement early in the pandemic though.
- “Isolated cases”: A local policeman to face murder charges after he was caught on video killing a 52-year old woman while he was drunk. The New PNP chief made a whole show of berating the cop. Not 6 months ago, the same cop posted that he was “proud to be a good cop” following a case of another cop shooting his neighbors. While the PNP were busy saying people shouldn’t judge all cops for the sins of the few, another cop kills a different cop in a drunk shootout. I think they just shouldn’t be allowed to drink while carrying firearms.
Links of interest:
- Youtube: “Welcome to the Internet” by Bo Burnham. Anything and everything, all of the time.
- Youtube: New Disaster, a new Barenaked Ladies single. Glad to see they are still going strong.
- Indie Bundle for Palestinian Aid on itch.io. More than a thousand games, for a good cause, reminiscent of the bundle for racial equality last year.
- The everyday racism of offshore call centers talks about what it’s like working in a call center here in the Philippines.
- Why Emotionally Intelligent Minds Embrace the Rule of ‘Writing in Reverse’
- How We Brought the Online Collections into the Modern Age using Web Technology of the Past. My interest in this is purely because they used Hugo to generate more than a million static pages, and it looks their performance was much better than anything I ever got with the 20k+ pages on this site. I think it’s because they’re strictly generating a single page per record - while this site has stuff like listing pages, group pages, tag pages, archive lists and so on.
- Eric Meyer looks back on 25 Years of CSS
Visit the Links page for more links of interest.
From the archives, this week in history:
- 2020: The saddest day in the history of Twitter
- 2017: Grand Prix Manila
- 2015: I got a driver’s license for the first time. I still don’t drive a car.
- 2013: The Red Wedding happens on HBO’s Game of Thrones series shocking viewers much to the amusement of bookfags.
- 2011: Grand Prix Singapore
- 2010: I made my first Steam purchase!
My stuff:
- As of last Thursday, everyone in the household has received their second vaccine dose. Hooray!
- After my recent fitbit strap troubles I had a new problem with it: the charger stopped working! Wasn’t really a surprise, since I’ve been having trouble with it for the past few months. I just immediately ordered a new one, these are way cheaper than a new strap. I did lose a couple of days of Fitbit data before it came in though.
- After struggling through the terrible summer heat, we finally decided to get our one airconditioner in the house repaired, just in time for the onset of the rainy season. Oh well, at least I saved a lot on the electricity bill which has historically been very high in May!
- Still sketching, though I spent most of the week catching up on sketch backlogs from the previous week. I caught up, but I’m a couple behind again today! Anyway, here’s a memorial of that time Trump played with an orb:
- Watching:
- Movies: Advanced my James Bond agenda a bit this past week by watching the very campy Moonraker (1979). I’ve now crossed over into “Bond movies released when I was alive” territory.
- Only one movie this week, but I did also manage to binge the final season of Kim’s Convenience and also have been running the new Jeopardy episodes on Netflix in the background while I do other stuff, am about halfway through them. Also managed to get caught up with Legends of Tomorrow, Supergirl and Flash. What’s that, more episodes are coming?!?
- Gaming:
- Still playing a bunch of Horizon Zero Dawn on PS4 and Root with the regular Saturday group. I should pick up something new for playing on the PC maybe?
- Tried to go for Master rank in Eternal at the end of the last month, failed miserably.
- Reading: I finished another Agatha Christie book this past week. Not yet sure what to read next. Should probably transition into some nonfiction again?
- Trivia team joined a sci-fi themed quiz this week but we only finished second. More interestingly, we recently got into doing the NYT crossword together. Here’s a couple of videos. Like and subscribe to the Youtube channel!
- Spent some time this weekend working on a personal project that I can’t really talk about publicly. I am learning a lot though.
This coming week:
- Loki starts on Disney+ on June 9
- Guilty Gear Strive releases June 11! Still trying to convince myself to get it lol.
- Trese is also out on Netflix this weekend. I’m not sure I’d watch it, but a lot of my friends are fans and are looking forward to it.
- Am planning to join the GMTK Game Jam next weekend (Jun 11). Same as last time I have low expectations. I recently rewatched the video of the top games from last year’s version of this jam and everything seems so great, hopefully I can come up with some innovative idea too!
See Also