Roy Tang

A quote:

“Ask yourself: Why am I seeing and feeling this? How am I growing? What am I learning? Remember: Every coincidence is potentially meaningful. How high your awareness level is determines how much meaning you get from your world.” – Ansel Adams

• via Nitch via Swiss-Miss

The world:

• Metro Manila is back under Enhanced Community Quarantine, this is season 3. The delta variant continues to spread, and the case counts over the past couple of days have reached peaks not seen since April. And the response from congress is to… investigate an independent research group that provides covid data analysis?
• Meanwhile, on the eve of the ECQ, unknowing citizens flooded vaccination centers thinking that they won’t be allowed outside if they’re not vaccinated. Where did they get that idea?
• The Olympics are over, and the country not only got our first ever gold medal, but we also registered our best performance ever, with a gold, two silvers, and a bronze. Still a long way to go, but a pretty good outcome nonetheless!

Links of interest:

• The most unbelievable things about life before smartphones
• Paint Everything Everywhere: a nice and short puzzle game. It’s even mobile-friendly, I played through all 20 levels while lying down in bed.
• Jeremy Keith talks about why browsers should avoid breaking changes
• Cory Doctorow talks about the social media silos’ complicated banning/reinstatement processes, and the scammers taking advantage of them. As is typical with this author, some great detail in the links.
• Why medieval city builder games are historically inaccurate
• Drew DeVault writes in praise of PostgreSQL. I honed my database chops on Oracle for 10+ years, but this blog currently runs on Postgres, and frankly it’s pretty good for a free, open-source alternative.
• SCIENCE! Eternal Change for No Energy: A Time Crystal Finally Made Real. This is my first time hearing of these time crystals as well. Haven’t delved too deep into the science, but it seems like exciting stuff.

Visit the Links page for more links of interest.

From the archives, this week in history:

• 2010: Google killed Google Wave
• 1991: The first ever website is published

My stuff:

• Still sketching; My favorite sketch this week was this update + redraw of a pencil sketch from 2016:

• Watching:
  • Movies:
    • James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad was fairly good. Spoiler-free review. Full review.
    • James Bond run continued this week with Quantum of Solace.
  • TV: No new series watched this week, but I have started a new Parks and Recreation rewatch as my background noise. Series is still great.
• Gaming:
  • I think I’m close to completing all the Horizon Zero Dawn (PS4) Frozen Wilds quests. I only have 1 sidequest left, plus finishing the hunting grounds (1 out of 3 done so far). Might have less PS4 during the ECQ though.
  • Still managing to play a bit of Guilty Gear Strive on weeknights. I also tried playing some Street Fighter V again after the announcements this week, with the view of earning a bit more money so I can just unlock new DLC fighter Akira for free when she drops on the 16th. Coming back to SFV is weird after playing GGS for a couple of months; I lost my first match back because my instincts were all wrong, but I kind of got back into the groove by the second and third matches. I’ll try to do both GGS and SFV on my nightly runs.
  • Magic Arena: Streamed the final episode for my Adventures in the Forgotten Realms drafting on Magic Arena, you can follow via the MTGAFR tag. The last stream lasted more than 3 hours! You can view the whole Youtube playlist here.
  • Regular Saturday group played some Root and Blood Rage again, as usual. I won this week’s Blood Rage!
• Reading: Mostly just comics again this week. When I say I’ve been reading “comics”, I mostly mean I’ve been trying to make my way through a stack of printed comic strip collections that someone had given to me earlier this year. I’ll make a blog post about them presumably when I’m done.
• No quiz night this past week, just the usual NY Times crosswords and spelling bee with the trivia team.

This coming week:

• August continues to be stacked! This coming week we have:
  • Marvel’s What If on Disney+ (Aug 11)
  • Jumpstart Historic Horizons dropping on Magic Arena (Aug 12)
  • Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s final season starts (Aug 12)