Roy Tang

A quote:

“I just wanna keep being proof that good people with no hidden agendas still exist in this world.” - @diorkenn on Twitter

The world:

• This past week in Metro Manila was very cold and rainy, which came with the attendant problems like flooding and such. There’s a typhoon nearby, but I don’t think it’s in the PAR; instead it’s just doing this thing where it drags in rains and winds via the Habagat monsoon.
• The feared delta variant is here in the PH and has been since May. The DOH confirms local transmission. And the response in Metro Manila is to revert back to “GCQ with heightened restrictions”. For only a week? Seems super optimistic.
• Local food delivery app FoodPanda is in a bit of a PR crisis after suspending some drivers for protesting. Here’s a twitter thread about it. Some lawmakers are already calling for investigations into whether local food delivery drivers should be treated as employees and given benefits, which this level of control certainly implies. We’ll see if that goes anywhere.
• Internationally: The 2020 Olympics held their opening ceremony this past weekend. Yes, that is surprisingly still on, in spite of (waves arms around) all of this. Gamers everywhere were surprised to hear some of their favorite video game soundtracks during the opening ceremony.

Links of interest:

• Rands reminds us that we should know to ask for help.

• A conversation with VR pioneer Jaron Lanier on Silicon Valley’s politics, being quoted by Mark Zuckerberg, and what went wrong with the internet.

  • “Because as long as you have advertising, you have this perverse incentive to make it manipulative. You can’t have a behavior-modification machine with advertisers and have anything ethical; it’s not possible. You could get away with it barely with television because television wasn’t as effective at modifying people. But this, there’s no ethical way to have advertising.”

• Noahpinion asks us to imagine what greener cities would look like. This (unrelated) article helps us with imagining by actually animating some urban areas being greenified. Is that a word?

• Bookbear Express tells us why it’s important to have a community that makes you feel safe.

• I bookmarked this SQL article about FETCH FIRST ROWS because I didn’t realize there was an ANSI standard alternative to LIMIT

• D&D’s Drizzt books were built on racist tropes, R.A. Salvatore wants to change that. His future books will include new Drow factions that flesh out the dark elf race and show they aren’t all evil.

• And for something only tangentially related: Here’s a list of 100 guys you might meet in the line for the outhouse at your local fantasy tavern

Visit the Links page for more links of interest.

From the archives, this week in history:

• 2019: Jonathan Hickman took over the X-Men books with House of X #1! Can’t believe it’s been two years of this Krakoa Kraziness!
• 2018: The last time I managed to participate in the MTG PH Nationals. Not sure if I’ll ever get that deep into paper Magic again.
• 2007: Inmates at a Cebu prison went viral for performing the “Thriller” music video (I’m surprised this has survived all these years without being DMCA’ed or whatever)

My stuff:

• the annoying thing about all this rainy weather we’ve been having is that I don’t get to go out on my daily walks. I’ve tried doing some time on the stationary bike instead, but I am much less inclined to do that (it’s more boring!), so less exercise for me this week overall. I should try to do the bike thing while watching TV stuff maybe?
• Still sketching; As it usually happens, I am behind by a couple of sketches during the weekend. I think part of it is because the Friday prompt on the subreddit is always free draw, and I’m often too lazy to think something up, so I get blocked. Anyway, I used up one of this week’s daily sketches to participate in the #Tumindig thing on Twitter:

• Watching:
  • Movies:
    • Die Another Day (2002), Army of the Dead (2021), Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017)
    • During this week’s Saturday gaming session we managed to watch Gunpowder Milkshake (2021). Will include a review in my next “Reviews” post.
  • TV: Finished Superstore season 5. Also, Ted Lasso season 2 has started! I had also forgotten that Masters of the Universe: Revelation is out on Netflix this weekend, we ended up binging it during the Saturday gaming session as well, so I’ll also include it in the next reviews post.
• Gaming:
  • Still the usual regular games Horizon Zero Dawn and Guilty Gear Strive. Been trying to start some new games like Avadon the Black Fortress, but nothing has stuck yet.
  • Still drafting the latest MTG set Adventures in the Forgotten Realms on Magic Arena, you can follow via the MTGAFR tag. I only managed one (terrible) draft this week though, we’ll see if we can get more done next week since there’ll be Quick Drafts available now. Instead, I seem to be doing well in constructed this month! I managed to hit Mythic early, and then the next day I managed to win the Standard challenge!
  • Regular Saturday group played some Root and Blood Rage again, as usual. I just keep copying this sentence over from previous weeks lol.
  • I finally managed to win a game of Advance Wars By Web! It was a three-way free-for-all game so it took a while with a lot of back and forth. I’m a bit worried about this web-based game because it’s obviously not licensed by Nintendo and it keeps running into server issues, so it might not be long for this world lol. But I am grateful for the chance to play some Advance Wars again.
• Reading: Mostly just comics again this week, but I did mange to read The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin, which is much more of a short story than a book, but I’ll count it in my “books read for 2021” anyway.
• Oh, we joined an online quiz night this week, it was the PopQuizPH fifth anniversary game! We actually did fairly well, ending up in a triple tie for first place, but the tiebreaker was about local actress Jolina Magdangal and we were terrible at it, so we finished the night in third place.
• In addition, the trivia team is still enjoying the NY Times crosswords and spelling bee, which we now regularly do on the weekends whether there is a quiz night or not.

This coming week:

• it’s the last week of July! Supposedly we are getting the Great Ace Attorney Chronicles on Steam this week, as it says it’s releasing July 2021, but we don’t have a definite release date yet.
• Our erstwhile president is delivering his last SONA tomorrow. I kind of want to unplug from social media for the day mostly because I don’t want to hear about his nonsense.