Roy Tang

It’s August!

A quote:

“Here’s the thing: there is no real life. There is no full, meaningful, “best life.” There are, at best, more and less meaningful pursuits, from your perspective, based on your upbringing, imprinting, and your own specific cocktail of longings. It is natural for us to feel anxiety about how we spend our limited time. No matter how happy you convince yourself to be, you will sometimes feel the vague ache of other possible lives.” – SandwichBear via Amy Hoy

The world:

• Some good news for the country last Monday, and it wasn’t the old man’s last SONA (where I heard he spent more time talking up China than discussing the pandemic response). The good news was actually that the country finally got an Olympic gold via champion weightlifter Hidilyn Diaz, after we some commentators described our country during the opening ceremony as having the dubious distinction of having won the most Olympic medals without a gold. Additionally, a couple of our boxers are still in the running for another gold, currently guaranteed a silver and a bronze each. Go sports!
• Now that the delta variant is here, on Thursday the IATF announced that NCR would be on “GCQ with heightened restrictions” up to Aug 15, despite calls for a “circuit breaker” lockdown to face the delta threat. Not 24 hours later, they changed their mind and said the NCR will undergo the stricter ECQ lockdown starting Aug 06. I suppose we should be happy they flip-flopped reasonably quickly? As is typical for the pandemic response so far, we still don’t have a clear idea what specifically this new season of ECQ will entail and whether or not there will be ayuda for the poor.

Links of interest:

• Katie Baker reminisces about The Day The Good Internet Died
• Ed Zitron over at the Atlantic talks about Why Managers Fear A Remote Work Future
• Ryan Donovan over at the StackOverflow blog interviews Tarn Adams, solo developer of the almost 20-year Dwarf Fortress game.
• Some dev stuff: What is a diamond dependency conflict?
• A twitter thread that reminds us that we are allowed to leave uncomfortable situations.
• Youtube: Ghostbusters Afterlife trailer
• Youtube: Trailer for Brooklyn Nine Nine final season

Visit the Links page for more links of interest.

From the archives, this week in history:

• 2016: Our trivia team won the inaugural Pop Quiz!
• 2008: I bought a cellphone with my own money for the first time. It was a Nokia 5800

My stuff:

• Still sketching; My favorite sketch this week was this Roy Mustang one I did early in the week:

• Watching:
  • Movies:
    • Casino Royale (2006), Gunpowder Milkshake (2021), Batman the Long Halloween (2021)
    • During this week’s Saturday gaming session we did a rewatch of Mortal Kombat (1995), a fitting followup to our rewatch of Street Fighter a couple of weeks ago.
  • TV: Here’s the review for Masters of the Universe: Revelation (season 1 part 1). I also watched the new season of The Movies That Made Us on Netflix; not much commentary needed here, but I really enjoy learning about the ins and outs of movie production and how movies can sometimes take years to get off the ground, even before filming.
• Gaming:
  • I think I’m close to completing all the Horizon Zero Dawn (PS4) Frozen Wilds quests.
  • Finding matches on Guilty Gear Strive has gotten a bit more difficult lately. I think it’s mostly because I got promoted to a higher floor? A new DLC fighter came out last week though, so hopefully that means a resurgence of players?
  • Went ahead and bought The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles on Steam! I did a Let’s Play + commentary with some friends for the first hour or so of the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-jAUOpQUO4
  • Magic Arena: Still drafting the latest MTG set Adventures in the Forgotten Realms on Magic Arena, you can follow via the MTGAFR tag. I managed a couple of quick drafts this week, one of them a 7-winner! I may end up wrapping up the AFR run this coming week because on the 12th we’re getting Jumpstart Historic Horizons which was just unveiled last week, and I’ll probably want to focus on collecting that. There’s also a Standard Open going on this weekend, and I somehow managed to qualify for Day 2.
  • I managed to hit both Mythic on Arena and Masters on Eternal this past month, a feat I haven’t managed to do in a while!
  • Regular Saturday group played some Root and Blood Rage again, as usual. I just keep copying this sentence over from previous weeks lol.
  • A friend has been trying to convince me to get the just-released Orcs Must Die 3 on Steam, but I complained that we haven’t even finished our long-running coop run of Orcs Must Die 2 yet, so we did just that this weekend.
• Reading: Mostly just comics again this week.
• No quiz night this past week, just the usual NY Times crosswords and spelling bee with the trivia team.

This coming week:

• August is fairly stacked, and that kicks off this week with James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad, which should be out by Friday. Despite being an MCU fanboy, this is the superhero movie I’ve most been looking forward to this year!
• There’s also some Street Fighter V reveals/updates slated for Aug 3. I’m not playing the game regularly anymore, but I am willing to be sucked back in, especially since the upcoming DLC character Akira is a favorite of mine from Rival Schools.