During a recent session of spelunking through old web stuff, I managed to find some older versions of the blog that I hadn’t found before (and hence aren’t available in the ancient archives). Screenshots of those old versions have been inserted back in the timeline.
I guess it’s one of those things I never bothered to archive because in theory all of that content had already been exported from Blogspot to Wordpress and eventually to the current site.
Blog: Traditional blog posts, usually longer than other types, with a title. You can subscribe to an RSS feed of this list.
Apr 2021
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So after reading Neuromancer last month, I was looking for a bit of lighter fare, so I decided to work on some Discworld books and started with the first book of the City Watch subseries, Guards! Guards!. I was already quite a bit in when I was like “why does all of this seem so familiar? Are Discworld books really so same-y that it feels like I’ve read this before?” The good news is that it wasn’t true, Discworld books aren’t super-samey; I have read it before, way back in 2016 in fact.
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It’s April! Or as it’s otherwise known, March 2020 month 13. As is usual, we are suffering the sweltering summer heat. Also, it’s Easter Sunday, if that means anything to you. The world: Surprising almost no one, the PH government extended the ECQ lockdown in the NCR+ bubble. Anyone with half a brain could have told you that the one week ECQ was no way going to be enough, given what we know about the virus’ life cycle.
Mar 2021
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It’s the last weekend of March. It feels like the month went by quickly. The world: Local covid response: The government introduced the concept of an “NCR Plus” bubble last Monday, restricting travel in and out of the NCR and adjacent provinces, in response to the rising cases. Still, the daily counts kept rising, hitting record highs of almost 10k cases daily. Even before the dust has settled on the bubble response, they decided to announce last night a reversion to the stricter ECQ.
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See also: Justice League spoiler-free review (2017) This is basically a movie that’s more than 3 years old, we’re not holding back on spoilers here. plot basically follows the same beats as the theatrical cut except this time we have a lot more team setup time (one of my criticisms from the previous version), giving the characters stronger backgrounds, especially Cyborg and Flash Ray Fisher was right to complain; in this version he’s one of the important characters of the ensemble while he was basically a minor guest character in the theatrical cut more DC characters make appearances in this version, among them Ryan Choi, DeSaad, Granny Goodness, Martian Manhunter, the Joker and of course Darkseid himself I accept this version as a better version of the original theatrical release and is my new DCEU headcanon it never would have worked in theaters anyway, given the four hour runtime.
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The world: Over the past couple of days, our nationwide daily covid cases broke 7000+, the highest recorded so far. Have to be super careful when going out for errands. Not that I wasn’t being careful even before, mind you. Just now, government has announced we are still under GCQ (see my post about the PH quarantine levels), but with more restrictions, etc. Looks like they are still hesitant to provide a stronger lockdown which would require paying people to stay home so they don’t starve to death.
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Over the past couple of weeks or so, I’ve made quite a few changes to the site, mostly focused on frontend/layout/UI changes. The changes are more or less done, so here’s a changelog entry. The main driver of the changes was this post about best practices for text websites. Not all of it applies to the site, since I do have a bunch of image content around as well, but enough that I was spurred to apply many of the points and also include some additional changes I’ve been meaning to do.
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It took me more than three weeks to get through Gibson’s influential work Neuromancer, a book that pioneered the cyberpunk genre and even introduced terms like cyberspace, ICE and “the matrix” into popular lexicon. It’s not because the book is bad or anything, it’s just that Gibson tends to describe everything very vividly, and almost all of it from the POV of our lead character Case, who is sometimes in the real world, sometimes in cyberspace, and sometimes simply just drunk or high.
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When I was much younger, I used to strongly identify as Lawful Good. Whenever I’d play any of the old-school DND RPGs like Baldur’s Gate or Neverwinter Nights, I’d find my main character almost always being a Lawful Good Paladin goody-goody type. This was back when I was younger and more idealistic and a stronger believer in “rule of law”-type principles. As the years have gone by, I’ve found that my alignment has shifted considerably.
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Happy Pi Day! The world: It’s the one year anniversary of the world’s longest lockdown. In some kind of sick anniversary celebration, local covid cases are on the rise. Yesterday, 5000 new cases were reported, the highest daily rate in 6 months or so. And now a Philippine variant has been detected. Now is not the time to be complacent, we all need to be more careful. The government seems unwilling to impose another widespread ECQ and are focusing on targetted, granular lockdowns.
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Over the past couple of years, I’ve been regularly playing digital boardgames online on Steam with one of my friend groups, I thought I’d do reviews of them. Today’s review is for Blood Rage: Digital Edition. This is a Norse mythology themed game based on a IRL boardgame. It’s one of those “place your guys on the map” boardgame where each player vies for control of provinces. The game is divided into three ages, and at the end of each age one of the provinces is destroyed as part of ragnarok.
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March has begun. Did it ever really end? The world: Vaccination finally starts in the country, with initial donated batches of Sinovac and AstraZeneca vaccine arriving in the country. Just in time for the one year anniversary of the world’s longest lockdown. SinoVac isn’t the best choice, but many of my doctor friends say they’ll settle for it if that’s what’s available for them. I think QC is planning to use AstraZeneca for their citizens, but worrying is that AZ’s efficacy has been shown to be not so good against certain variants such as the South African one, which has already been detected in the country.
Feb 2021
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Today is the last day of February. Tomorrow, we march on. The world: Biden ordered his first military strike last week. America is back, etc. This past week, embrassingly our local police and anti-drug agency got into a shootout against each other near the Ever Gotesco mall in Quezon City. Both sides claim they were doing a buy-bust, which is impossible. As usual, there is little transparency about what actually happened, and many promises of “impartial” probes and investigations.
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A while back, on a whim I purchased this indie game Knightin’ on Steam. I forget how I came across it and why I decided to buy, but no regrets. It’s a tightly-focused dungeon crawler in the style of original Legend of Zelda/Link to the Past dungeons. Each dungeon is a set of rooms you clear one at a time, until you get to the dungeon boss and beat him. Clearing rooms involves defeating enemies, solving puzzles, avoiding obstacles and opening chests.
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I read Ghost of My Father by Scott Berkun this past week. This book isn’t my usual fare. It’s a memoir about the author’s father and their relationship and family life. I’m familiar with the author’s work, but mostly in the realms of tech, design and public speaking, but this book was largely personal, and mostly talking about strangers I had no real interest in. I think the only reason I have a copy at all is because I was on the author’s mailing list and got a review copy of some sort.
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Over the past couple of years, I’ve been regularly playing digital boardgames online on Steam with one of my friend groups, I thought I’d do reviews of them. My second review is about Scythe: Digital Edition. Scythe is a competitive game where you play one of seven factions in an alternate history post-war Eastern Europe. Players vie to control territories, hire workers, build mechs, accumulate resources, accomplish secret objectives, and other such goals.
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Last week of February is about to start. Time flies, as they say. The world: Texas (and other parts of the southern US I guess) have been hit by heavy winter storms, with accompanying power grid failures and such. We have some relatives there so it’s a concern. Meanwhile, their governor falsely blames renewables for the power problems and their senator went to Cancun. Facebook cut off Australian news links.
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Walkaway is a novel by blogger Cory Doctorow. It tells the story of a near-future world and a trend of people going “walkaway”. This term means walking away from what they call “default society”, characterized by late stage capitalism, massive inequality, ever-present surveillance, and a world controlled by what they call the zottarich, or simply zottas. Not too far from our own present reality of course. Later, the novel also delves into the near-future (?
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Over the past couple of years, I’ve been regularly playing digital boardgames online on Steam with one of my friend groups, I thought I’d do reviews of them. The first one is Sentinels of the Multiverse. We’ve played the IRL boardgame of it before during one of our sporadic in-person meetups. If you’re not familiar, it’s a comics-themed coop game where up to 4 people play as a group of heroes to beat a villain (basically comic book shenanigans).
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The world: Trump has been acquitted in his second impeachment trial, proving yet again to the world that the US is a flawed democracy dominated by corruption at the highest levels Duterte says he cannot be brave in the mouth against China. Back before the 2016 elections, somebody I used to know claimed that we needed a “rottweiler” like Duterte as president because he would be tough against China. I remember this sometimes and laugh and then am also sad.
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Lauren R. O’Connor talks about a childhood lesson about pleasure: When I was eight years old, I saw the movie Back to the Future for the first time, and I fell in love. All I wanted to think and talk about was Back to the Future. I dreamt about Back to the Future at night. I rode my bike down the steepest hill in my neighborhood and pretended I was flying, approaching 88 mph, about to zap myself back in time.
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Will Schreiber argues that decentralization is a narrative mirage: Human history is a story of increasing centralization. From roaming the plains of Africa, to settling down and building homes, to buying food in central markets, to instituting courts of law. Progression is compression. How can I make it so everybody isn’t making their own shirts? Deciding their own justice? Tabulating their own spreadsheets? I’ve argued a few times on here in favor of decentralization (see 1, 2, 3), and the whole concept of movements like Indieweb is a preference for a decentralized internet where everyone has his or her own personal site, instead of reliance on centralized large silos like Facebook or Twitter or whatever.
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A post from Austin Kleon reminded me of the proposed conceptual international fixed calendar: (Click to view full-size) 11 Feb 2021 1:53amClose Basically: each year would be 13 months of 28 days each, plus a bonus day at the end of each year, for a total of 365 days. This way, the first day of each month would always be a Sunday, the 2nd would always be a Monday, the 3rd a Tuesday, and so on.
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A while back I wrote about how I wasn’t a big fan of the recent trend of newsletters. Since then, I’ve realized Substack actually publishes RSS feeds for their newsletters, so I’ve been following a a bit more of them. I thought I’d recommend a few that I’ve found to be quite interesting/useful: Money Stuff by Matt Levine. The only non-substack entry on today’s list, this Bloomberg column covers financial matters like stock market and investment stuff.
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On 3 Feb 2021 3:11pm I wrote: Please write more. Not just on social media, FB, Twitter, whatever. Write on your own sites and blogs. On your tumblrs, wordpresses, whatever. Long-form, rambling, incessant. The world could use more sincere blogging. The above was written mostly as a response to finding so many of my friends’ old and inactive blogs in my RSS reader. I like the term I coined there, “sincere blogging”.
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“The Year Without Pants” is a book by writer Scott Berkun about his time as a team lead at Wordpress.com back in 2010-2012. This book came out in 2013, and the conceit of the book back then was that Wordpress.com, run by Automattic, was a fully remote company, something that was still a rarity at that time. It’s weird reading this book in the context of the current pandemic, where remote work is now the norm among tech companies.
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1 For a while now, I’d been meaning to go through the links section of this site and clean up/organize all the bookmarks I’ve logged there over the years (first via delicious and later via pocket). One of the first things I had to do was to go through and identify any broken links. So I wrote a quick Python script to ping the URLs and it turns out there were a lot of them, unsurprising given the archives go back to 2004.
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It’s February! We are nearing the one year anniversary of being in the longest covid19 lockdown in the world! The world: Myanmar’s military staged a coup, and have apparently cut off the country from the internet, maybe? Last night during an international voice chat, the two of us who were in the Philippines were suddenly dropped/disconnected and one of my first thoughts were “Wait, is there a coup happening in our country RIGHT NOW?
Jan 2021
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It’s February tomorrow! Somehow, the world still turns. The world: Somehow the most viral world news this week doesn’t seem to have been about any kind of politics, but rather about capitalism. The Gamestop/stock market brouhaha was a sage of retail investors on reddit going head-to-head with hedge funds over the stock price of a dying gaming company (among others) that dominated most of my feeds for the week. It’s actually a lot more compliced than that.
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Wow, January is almost done. Wouldn’t you know it. The world: Biden inaugurated as US president, world celebrates US getting rid of Trump. Biden isn’t exactly unproblematic, but he is at least sane and boring. There will be time enough to criticize him later, for now let them be enjoy victory. My expectations of him are at least moderately higher than the ones I had for Trump the internet gets inundated with an inordinate amount of Bernie Sanders memes locally: the govt continues to bombard us with controversies, this time stirring up a red-tagging hornests nest by abrogating the DND-UP accord, paving the way for militarization of campuses and stifling of free expression Links of interest: Someone made a Mandalorian trailer in the style of old-school spaghetti westerns.
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Discussions on tech censorship came to the forefront in recent weeks due to the aftermath of the Jan 6 capitol insurrection in the US. I’ve been writing down a bunch of thoughts about the complicated issue, let’s see if I can hammer them into a blog post. (I also wanted to defer posting about it until after the Biden inauguration, in case more things of interest happen.) Here’s where I am now:
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I finished the book The End of Everything (Astronomically Speaking) by Katie Mack. I got a Kindle copy on sale on Amazon at the top of the year, figured it was a good way to kick off a year of hopefully reading more books. This is a short review. I figure it’s probably not a spoiler to tell you the book is all about how the universe ends. Or at least, the many possible ways it could end.
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This is 2021 week 3. Or week 2. Two and a half? How do calendars work? The world: relatively calm compared to the chaos of the previous week. However in the US, a storm may be brewing over Biden’s inauguration next week locally: still a lot of confusion/inconsistencies around the vaccination plan. Or at least some senators think so. Meanwhile, we are close to breaching 500k cases. Links of interest: I’ve been reading a lot about personal note taking recently, in a bid to find ways to improve my own systems.
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We are barely more than a week into 2021 and it has already been quite a year. The world: the week started off with something as innocuous as a guy going viral for making his daughter work six hours to figure out how to use a can opener and open a can of beans. I can’t explain Bean Dad, but it was so weird and surreal the way it took over the internet for a while.
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I used to collect quotes a lot. Maybe I still do. Here are a couple of collections I’ve posted online. Tang In Cheek - a list of quotes (allegedly by me) Email signatures - a list of quotes I used as a pool to randomly select an email signature from. I rarely send email these days, and when I do it’s usually web-based, so I can’t use these anymore. There’s probably a better way to organize these.
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One habit I now have that I wish I had started much, much earlier in life would be conducting regular, periodic reviews. These reviews are a sort of written introspection of the time period in question, the target audience being future me. I’m reminded of the important of this because I had been going through old files the last few months and I really enjoy reading through some older entries and basically traipsing through younger me’s mind.
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A while back I saw this tweet talking about drawing memes from before the internet, and I was reminded that was a thing we had around here too when we were kids! We had our own version of that “giraffe in the window” drawing, except the one I remember was made so that you could switch the answer to “cat hugging a pole outside the window” to troll whoever you were asking to guess: -
Word clouds! They used to be a thing right? I was reminded of them yesterday and I wish I had thought of this in time for the 2020 year in review, but here we are. I thought I’d generate some word clouds for the blog anyway! Here’s the word cloud for all my blog posts for the year: 2020 blog post word cloud (Click to view full-size) 2020 blog post word cloud
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I’ve been using the Flipboard iOS app as my daily morning news reader pretty much since I first got an iPad. It offered a nice, magazine like UI where you can flip through pages full of images and short article blurbs until you can find something you want to read. The past couple of years and iOS versions though, the app has been performing terribly. Crashes a lot, reader view often fails to load, or flickers and reloads continuously and so on.
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It’s a brand new year, a brand new week, a brand new day. There’s no real reason to believe 2021 will be a better year, but we can choose to try to be better, and maybe that in itself is better. Last week’s New Year’s Eve transition played out pretty much as expected. We just stayed at home, actually had an early media noche dinner (around 9ish) and observed the fireworks for a little bit.
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It’s always weird for me when people do their “year in review” or “X of the year” any time before Jan 1st of the next year. You’re making Dec 31 feel left out. It’s one thing the Oscars get right. Anyway, here’s my personal year-in-review, such as it is. Essay-writing section It’s probably impossible to talk about 2020 without talking about the Covid19 pandemic that has ravaged the world. My country is sadly still under a state of quarantine/lockdown, I believe the world’s longest.
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Happy New Year! Something I’ve gotten used to as the New Year rolls in: make a checklist of things to do for the new year. I generally copy stuff over, but the list changes a bit every year. In no particular order: Ponder why people give so much significance to the transition between an arbitrarily-chosen pair of 24 hour periods Take stock and reflect on the past year Count your blessings for the past year and be grateful Greet your loved ones and friends and anyone else you hold dear.
Dec 2020
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I started doing these weeknotes at the top of 2020, so this one signals one complete year of doing my weekly reviews/notes in public. I thought it appropriate for a review! Did it turn out to be a good practice? I think for me yes! Not necessarily for anyone following the blog (all 3 of you), since a lot of the weeknotes stuff might seem boring or irrelevant to you. But for me, forcing me to publicly write some thoughts about the past week has been good for my own self-awareness and keeping me writing regularly.
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This was the year when a lot of Christmas traditions were broken, due to the pandemic. There are cultural/country-specific Christmas traditions of course, but usually each person or family also has their own personal traditions that they do every Christmas. Here are some of mine: Christmas Eve dinner, or as it’s popularly known here in the Philippines, noche buena. Growing up, our immediate family/household unit usually celebrates Christmas Eve with a late noche buena, an extra meal that happened after dinner and starting at around midnight.
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It’s the penultimate week of the year, and I’m sure I’m not the only who’s had enough of this accursed year and looking forward to moving on to the next one. I know that’s silly since the world won’t magically become better when the calendar flips over to January the first, but I think it helps our mental health to have this sort of “fresh start” mentality, even if it’s on an arbitrarily chosen date.
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I’ve talked a bit about mentoring in software development before, and how early on I used to get feedback about me being “intimidating”. I never got any concrete feedback regarding that, so I don’t know what problems I had specifically. Though I was recently reminded of one particular incident that was a bit cringey for me personally. This was a bit more than 10 years ago I think. I was usually assigned to mentor new hires, which means fresh graduates who usually needed guidance with a Java (which was our primary programming language at that time) and with our in-house web framework, which could be a bit challenging to work with.
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Time passes yet again. I think I have to get used to not having much personal stuff to report in the weeknotes on certain weeks (aside from the watching/gaming parts), especially given the pandemic where I’m at home 90% of the time. Speaking of the pandemic, the UK started vaccinations last week, and the US FDA approved the Pfizer vaccine as well, so hopefully this is where things start to turn around.
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This week felt like another set of those moments-in-between, where not much seemed to happen, but it somehow still went by quickly anyway. I think the household and the family has slowly gotten used to the idea that any big Christmas celebration isn’t happening. My niece’s birthday was last weekend, so we sent her gifts via Grab delivery instead of being able to get together. Most likely something similar’s going to happen for gift exchanges on Christmas.
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While digging through some old stuff recently I found a copy of the late 80s/early 90s US sitcom Perfect Strangers and decided to binge through all 8 seasons of it (really more like 6 and a half, since seasons 1 and 8 were an abridged 6 episodes each). I grew up watching this series, on live tv even, before we had cable or Netflix or anything like that. During the binge-watch I remember a good number of the episodes from the first season all the way up to the end of season 7, which implies almost all of it was broadcast on local TV, kind of a rarity I think?
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A while back someone I know went from working as a developer to working at a senior/management type position at a bank, and that new job came with the corresponding dress code, which meant he was now going to work in long sleeves or barongs. That kind of thing is not for me - back when I still considered a regular office job, one of the fastest ways to get me to run away from an “opportunity” would be an overly stringent and/or formal dress code.