Roy Tang

Weeknotes 2021-08-15

hello@roytang.net (Roy Tang) — Sun, 15 Aug 2021 08:39:06 +0000

A quote:

“Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it.” - Eckhart Tolle

The world:

We are one week into the current NCR ECQ lockdown. Covid19 and the Delta variant continue to rampage through the country; the DOH reported 14k+ new cases today, the 2nd highest daily rate since the pandemic started, the positive testing rate staying above 20% for more than a week (signaling not enough testing - WHO recommended rate is 5%). The hospitals are starting to fill up again. Rumors are already circulating that the lockdown might be extended; businesses have pre-emptively said no, but what are we going to do if the cases just keep going up?
The US is completing their withdrawal from Afghanistan this month, and the Taliban has rapidly made advances, capturing and now they are poised to take Kabul. Yet another failed American war?

Links of interest:

Divergent association task. I did relatively well I guess. One of my friends suggested we take all the words we chose and put them in a Codenames pool.
Nestflix is a website that presents a faux Netflix-like service except it lists out fictional movies and TV shows that were featured in actual movies and TV shows
The case for optimism. It’s been difficult to stay optimistic with everything happening in the world, but we need to remind ourselves to still remain optimistic to help us find a way forward. Somewhat related: here’s a twitter thread about climate despair.

Visit the Links page for more links of interest.

From the archives, this week in history:

My stuff:

I celebrated my forty-third last week! “Celebrated” might be a bit of a stretch, since we are still in a pandemic, and the day was largely uneventful.
Early this week, the Metro Manila mayors decided to ban outdoor exercise during the ECQ lockdown. So I haven’t been able to do my usual outdoors walking. It’s actually not likely that anyone accosts me for outdoors exercise as long as its within the confines of my subdivision, but I like to pretend that I’m following the law, even if the law is ridiculous.
Still sketching; I am once again behind on the weekends, as it happens. Here’s a sketch of Gandalf. It’s not particularly good, but it turned out looking a lot more than Ian McKellen than I thought it would:

Watching:
- Movies: This week’s movies: Skyfall, Jumanji and Police Story
- TV: Parks and Recreation rewatch is up to season 6. I found the first episode of What If to be a bit underwhelming. Final season of Brooklyn Nine Nine has started, and I know they had to address all the policing issues of the past couple of years, but the first two episodes felt a bit heavy handed.
Gaming:
- No Horizon Zero Dawn (PS4) this week, instead I played through four cases of The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles. I’m enjoying the game, and I am getting a lot of screenshots for the eventual review.
- Daily fighting games ongoing on weeknights: both Guilty Gear Strive and Street Fighter V. I’ve already earned enough fight money in SFV to unlock Akira (the only season 5 DLC character I want to get) when she releases later this week.
- Magic Arena: I was looking forward to the release of Jumpstart Historic Horizons this week, but that has been delayed most likely for software development reasons (which I of course understand completely!). They’re giving us some free drafts as compensation, so that’s something. I also tried playing Standard for a while, but Winota mirrors are so boring, so I decided to explore the Standard 2022 queue. Still not doing well, but at least it’s more varied. I like the idea of Standard 2022, it’s kind of like Block Constructed, which deserved better.
- Regular Saturday group played some Root and Blood Rage again, as usual. I think I won’t be logging this moving forward until we pick up new games.
Reading: Still comics again this week. Comics are books, but I should also start looking up for new traditional books to read.
No quiz night this past week, just the usual NY Times crosswords and spelling bee with the trivia team. I also started doing the Newsday crossword online, which are the same ones I’ve been doing in the daily newspaper, having them online is more convenient.

This coming week:

Aug 16 Akira releases on SFV! Oro releases too, I guess.
Aug 18 Free demo of Tales of Arise is coming out!

Reviews: Skyfall, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, Police Story

hello@roytang.net (Roy Tang) — Thu, 12 Aug 2021 15:26:51 +0000

Skyfall (2012)

Bond film no. 23, Daniel Craig’s third. I watched this in the theaters back in 2012, so this is the last rewatch of my James Bond run. Back then my main complaint was that Bond’s plan in the last thirty minutes of the movie was terrible. The same complaint stands even now, especially given the eventual outcome of that plan. Make no mistake: the entire defending the house sequence is one of the best things about the movie from an action standpoint, but tactically it was terrible.

The whole film is basically a swan song for Judi Dench’s M, exploring the extremes of her relationship with Bond and how fond they are of each other in spite of everything. Ben Whishaw appears as the new Q, who starts his run appropriately, by letting MI6 get hacked. The film still calls out the old Bond film tropes, with Q telling Bond they’re not really into exploding pens anymore. Bardem gives a good performance as the villain Silva, but the character felt a bit underdeveloped as we didn’t get his background until an info drop around two-thirds through.

The theme song here by Adele won the Oscar for best song; it’s not my cup of tea, but I can see how it could win.

This film also brings cyberterrorism into the modern Bond era, and the usefulness of MI6’s focus on human intelligence during the modern era is called into question. It will be interesting to see how technology further changes the Bond films moving forward.

The film ends with basically the Connery status quo - Bond answering to a male M, flirting with his assistant Moneypenny, and assisted by Q. It’s something I wouldn’t have appreciated back when I first saw the film in 2012, given that this was only the 4th Bond film I’ve seen at that point, and none of them had that Connery setup.

Next up is Spectre, which I haven’t seen before and is the last one of the run before No Time To Die comes out in September!

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017)

I watched this even if I hadn’t seen the old first movie. I didn’t have a high opinion of The Rock, er… Dwayne Johnson’s acting skills, because I’ve previously seen him only in silly sports films like The Game Plan or The Tooth Fairy, but he does a good enough job here, portraying a nerdy high schooler trapped in a buff, macho, adventurer hero type. Same goes for Jack Black portraying a teenage girl in… well, Jack Black’s body. I like how the Jumanji game evolved from a board game to a video game for more modern times. The movie overall is a pretty good popcorn movie and has a few funny bits.

Police Story (1985)

This one was just something that I saw was on Netflix and was like “Why not?” Had to watch with Cantonese voice and English subs, the only alternative was Japanese voice. Pretty good, for its time. As you’d expect from Jacky Chan, all the action/fight sequences are great; I especially like the bus chase sequence and the ending fights in the mall were great. Apparently that sliding down the pole stunt is considered one of the best action film stunts of all time. The film glorifies police excesses though.

Forty Three

hello@roytang.net (Roy Tang) — Mon, 09 Aug 2021 06:29:45 +0000

Had some trouble thinking about what I wanted to write for this year’s birthday post. And while I was thinking about it I accidentally published an empty draft of this post earlier today. Sounds about right.

I like to consider myself an optimist, but it’s been a challenging 365 days. We are still very much in the throes of a pandemic, threatening to overrun our vaccine defense with mutated variants. The entire twelve months since the last birthday have been spent in quarantine. The world is burning, experiencing record levels of heat. The internet is dominated by big silos that incentivize spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories. Democracy, freedom of speech, and human rights are being threatened by ever-encroaching authoritarianism. Tensions are rising between two of the world’s biggest economies. The world doesn’t feel like it’s in a good place.

It is very difficult to remain an optimist in these trying times. But birthdays are a good time to look back and reflect and consider what the future holds, and perhaps to unapologetically turn back to hope and optimism. I want to believe.

As for me personally, I am in a good place. I am privileged enough that the pandemic doesn’t deprive me of my daily needs or to still take part in many of the things I enjoy (though I wouldn’t mind being able to go see a movie in theaters again). Still able to enjoy the love and company of family and friends, albeit online only. Work is light to nonexistent, by choice. I have been exploring and trying out some new things, trying to see if I can find a new path for me moving forward, as every time I think about going back to full-time employment that seems like a terrible idea. Nothing solid yet, but that’s alright, there’s nothing wrong with just being a wanderer, if that’s how the world decides to turn.

Hopefully the coming year will be better, both for the world, and for me personally, and that I have better things to write for the future post titled “Forty Four”.

Weeknotes 2021-08-08

hello@roytang.net (Roy Tang) — Sun, 08 Aug 2021 05:09:43 +0000

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)

The Suicide Squad

hello@roytang.net (Roy Tang) — Fri, 06 Aug 2021 14:25:12 +0000

First, the spoiler-free review:

On 6 Aug 2021 10:27am I wrote:

THE SUICIDE SQUAD spoiler-free review:

great, fun, violent, hilarious, possibly best of DCEU so far

trailers have spoiled waaaay too much of this movie

first act was ok, second act felt a bit meh, third act was great

hard to comment on actor performances without spoiling things, but Daniela Melchior was great and Idris Elba took the role seriously

there is a post-credits scene

Full review on the blog later

Second: I have to say, titling it “The Suicide Squad” is super annoying especially for anyone who does data processing/indexing, since “The” is what differentiates it from the 2016 word, and that’s usually ignored in stuff like search engines and such. Oh well.

Anyway, it turns out I don’t actually have very spoiler-y stuff to say though; the film is pretty straightforward. I guess I’ll try. It’s a marked improvement over the 2016 film in all aspects. It’s also visually a feast; James Gunn obviously had way too much fun with many of the shots. I am less a fan of the music/soundtrack choices here than in Guardians of the Galaxy though.

Some of the DC characters here are very strange choices, but most of them are used well. At least, the ones that survived most of the movie are pretty good. The rest were mostly cannon fodder who got killed off in like the first 5 minutes. King Shark was hilarious; Bloodshot and Peacemaker’s “rivalry” was great; you find yourself strangely rooting for Polka Dot Man; and Ratcatcher 2 was indeed the heart of this film, as promised. Also, I like how they straight-up just played Starro true to his comic book roots, and he’s just a giant kaiju starfish. He even walks around like Patrick Starr lol.

I am disappointed at how much the trailers have spoiled though. Specifically thinking of that scene where they’re about to go rescue Harley but she just shows up outside and are all “What are you guys doing?”, that would have been a great gag on first watch. Also I would’ve led with that scene first before cutting to “X minutes earlier” and THEN show Harley tearing her way through the building to escape. I actually didn’t like the “Harley getting captured” subplot too much though, as it felt like unnecessary filler that was added just because they needed to give one of the big stars more to do.

Still overall pretty good, and a welcome entry to the DCEU.

"Async read access to your brain"

hello@roytang.net (Roy Tang) — Thu, 05 Aug 2021 05:36:44 +0000

I read this quote from Twitter recently that I really liked:

Blogging is creating async read access to your brain. Highly recommend. – @brian_lovin

I feel like this is very true for me because a lot of the time, I write posts in an unfiltered, stream-of-consciousness manner, so in many ways it is in fact a direct look at how I think (barring the limitations of language of course). Basically a documentation of thought processes. More often than not the beneficiary of that documentation is myself, or at least, a future version of me; but having a blog also gives other people insight to what and how I think.

Somewhat related: I read this post from Jamie Rubin about unposted writings:

Before a post goes into the world, there is really only one person who can judge whether it is good enough to be posted and that is me. This blog is a one-man operation. I play the role of writer, editor, and marketing department all by myself. And sometimes I write something and think, nope, that just isn’t very good. It used to be that I’d post the bad stuff anyway, but over time I realized that I wanted to show the very best of what I write. So I’ve gotten better at weeding out the bad stuff.

This time I found it interesting because it’s the opposite of how I approach things. Generally if some thread of thought surfaces in my brain that I feel is good enough to at least start writing a post about, I’m going to write it out and probably publish it, even if the end result is not super coherent. It’s part of my blogging process being mostly unfiltered - you kind of get the bad with the good here. It’s part of an evolving thought process: if ever I decide to revisit the topic in the future, I have this reference for my thoughts on it at the time and see how my views and opinions may have changed or become clearer or whatever.

How you blog is of course a mostly personal affair. What topics you discuss, what quality of writing you expect from yourself, these are all personal decisions, and what works for some people may not work for others. I don’t expect other people to blog the same way I do; it’s not like I’m a wildly successful blogger worth emulating, but I think my methods generally work for me.

I do find that recently my standard for “what deserves a blog post” has gotten a bit too high though, as I am blogging less and mostly reliant on the weeknotes to document my thoughts, and I may be leaving too much on the table, leaving quick thoughts mostly to social media or the notes folder. I’m kind of tempted a bit to lean in towards blogging more like I did in the early days before social media, with shorter, more frequent posts. We’ll see how it goes.

Quantum of Solace

hello@roytang.net (Roy Tang) — Tue, 03 Aug 2021 16:00:13 +0000

Bond film no. 22, Daniel Craig’s second outing. I actually watched this back in 2008, but apparently I wasn’t super impressed (and I wish I wrote more back then lol). I suspect I didn’t really like it because this movie is actually a direct sequel to Casino Royale which I hadn’t seen until this year. It picks up on several hanging plot threads, and some of the characters appear again, and Bond in this film is primarily motivated by anger over the events of the previous film. Not to mention I had only seen two Brosnan movies prior to watching Quantum of Solace at that time, so I really didn’t have either the franchise foundation or the context from Casino Royale to appreciate this film.

This film sets up more of the gritty tone for modern Bond. Unlike the black and white factions of the cold war, the geopolitical setup here is more complicated, with even Bond’s traditional allies the CIA mostly turning against him. The villain’s plot and motivations seem kind of thin and the plot itself is a bit forgettable; while I recall many of the scenes from my previous watching, I didn’t remember what the overall plot was until it just happened.

Olga Kurylenko gave a great performance here. The film also has some great action sequences, and even hits the trifecta of land, sea, and air chases/vehicle fights. The theme song here is “Another Way to Die” by Alicia Keys and Jack White (of the White Stripes), which was ok but I didn’t particularly enjoy. Stana Katic makes a bit appearance here towards the end, before her run on Castle. Also I just chuckle to myself whenever Bond tries to use a 2008-era dumbphone like it was a modern smartphone, such as taking pictures good enough for facial recognition from like a hundred feet away.

Still, the movie is a decent watch. Overall I’m enjoying modern Bond, but I have to admit I kind of miss the campy tropes of classic Bond, but I can understand why they’d have no place in a modern action franchise. I mean, Craig still hasn’t even got a Q or any fancy devices! (Yes, I know he gets a new Q eventually). Anyway, next is Skyfall!

Performative Politics

hello@roytang.net (Roy Tang) — Tue, 03 Aug 2021 08:38:14 +0000

I read this article about how a US Democratic representative says his Republican colleagues are like WWE wrestlers (excuse me, they’re called “Superstars”) who behave differently in private versus in public. Basically their politics are performative, they act a certain way in public to appeal to their bases, but in private they don’t actually really believe in many of the things they say in public. It speaks to a certain lack of integrity and deceptiveness. It’s the kind of laying and salesmanship that I really dislike.

Reading this article reminded me of supporters praising Duterte back during the 2016 campaign (or even until now) because he is a totoong tao (i.e. an authentic person). I guess it’s kind of appealing to people who are sick and tired of two-faced performative politics, such that they applaud his “authenticity” even when he says terrible things in public. It’s the same thing for people who support Trump because he “tells it like it is”, I guess?

It’s a weird kind of “authenticity” because Duterte is actually two-faced in public as well. There’s his formal “good Duterte” version where he pays lip service to human rights and being a decent human being, then there’s his ranting extemporaneous vindictive mode where he’s cussing everybody, making misogynistic jokes, threatening and/or admitting murder or other crimes, etc. I agree that this is probably “authentic” to who he is in real life, as in, he is probably two-faced in real life as well, saying what he thinks his current audience wants to hear. I assume Trump is the same way.

I think their supporters think their being two-faced in public is “authentic” because they assume people/politicians are naturally like this and people like Duterte are just showing their true selves in public. At the same time other politicians who always present in public as “decent” (a term that one would assume to be universally accepted as positive, but has been degraded by negative propaganda) are rejected as “plastic” because people assume they just behave just as badly as Duterte in person/private? It’s like they don’t believe good people can exist. This is my same reaction whenever someone is criticized for “virtue signaling”, it’s kind of a similar thing.

I look at politicians like the Vice-President Leni Robredo, whose public image is generally both decent and competent and may or may not run for President next year, with cautious optimism. We can’t really know what public personalities are like in person since we aren’t in their inner circles, but I think in generally, we should at least prefer politicians with good public images, instead of praising someone who behaves badly in public as “authentic”. After all, no matter how they behave in private, it’s their public actions and statements that are more likely to affect society.

(Obviously, I don’t approve of presenting as good/decent to hide bad/illegal activities, but absent such problems, I think it’s fine to be cautiously optimistic about people’s good nature.)

This felt a bit ranty. Kind of like Duterte. I’m like this in person too, if you’re curious.

Weeknotes 2021-08-01

hello@roytang.net (Roy Tang) — Sun, 01 Aug 2021 06:04:54 +0000

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:

Roy Mustang #sketchdaily 205/365 I enjoyed this one and liked how it turned out, but it took me over an hour because I was playing with various #Procreate tools and brushes. Here’s a timelapse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOYUkG1ac38 (Click to view full-size)

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.

Reviews: Casino Royale, Gunpowder Milkshake, The Long Halloween, Masters of the Universe Revelation

hello@roytang.net (Roy Tang) — Thu, 29 Jul 2021 11:13:24 +0000

Some stuff I’ve watched lately. Spoilers for Gunpowder Milkshake and MotU: Revelation are marked.

Casino Royale (2006)

Bond film no. 21, and the first for Daniel Craig. The final era in this James Bond run, looking forward to it. Casino Royale is new to me, but I’ve seen two of Craig’s Bond films, so I have an idea of what to expect: a more serious and much less campy James Bond, grim and determined. The tone here is much closer to Dalton’s two films than any of the other runs. Since it’s kind of a reboot, it takes place early in Bond’s career, in fact he earns his double-O status right in the cold open. Craig’s Bond is younger, brasher, more vulnerable, and a bit more prone to mistakes, like letting himself getting caught on camera assassinating a prisoner.

The theme song here is “You Know My Name” by Chris Cornell of SoundGarden fame. It’s a bit more alternative than recent theme songs; I like it.

Judi Dench is back as M, the only actor carried over from previous incarnations. We don’t get any of the usual support staff like Moneypenny or Q. Bond spends most of the first half of the film alone in the field, and the second half supported by treasury agent Vesper Lynd (played by Eva Green). Mads Mikkelsen plays the protagonist, terrorist financier Le Chiffre, who Bond challenges to a high-stakes poker game at the titular Casino Royale. Also making an appearance is an old Bond ally, CIA’s Felix Leiter, who we last saw mauled by a shark in Dalton’s License to Kill. (He has been recast as a black man for the modern age of James Bond.)

The plot is reasonable and action-packed. Daniel Craig probably feels the least “Bond-like” compared to what his predecessors have established for the role, but his Bond is pretty good and is portrayed as relentless and unstoppable, in spite of his mistakes. The on-foot chase scene in Madagascar near the start of the film is great, especially all the crane shots. Le Chiffre seems a bit incompetent for a villain. The final third of the movie (after the poker game) plays out a bit strangely, for a while I was like “What the heck is going on?” There is a betrayal in the end that I didn’t see coming, which erased any doubt in my mind whether I had actually watched this one in the theaters.

Looking forward to the rest of Craig’s run!

Gunpowder Milkshake (2021)

We watched this during our Saturday online gaming session watch-along. I didn’t have high expectations for the film, as I thought it was kind of an ultraviolent grim John-Wick style thing and I didn’t really think Karen Gillan and Lena Headey would be good to lead that kind of movie. It does turn out to be ultraviolent, but not super grim, and in fact maybe even a little goofy. There are some great action sequences and fight scenes here, but as soon as I saw that

(Spoilers)

Karen Gillan was going to have a fight scene in the doctor’s office with her arms all floppy from anesthesia

, I was like, ok this movie is already worth watching. It doesn’t have a very deep, complicated plot or anything, but overall a decent popcorn watch. A fun, ultraviolent, very bloody, very much not for kids movie.

Batman: The Long Halloween (2021)

This is a 2-part entry to the DC Universe animated movie line, an adaptation of the famous comic of the same name by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale. The story covers an early year of Batman’s career as he works with Captain Jim Gordon and then-district attorney Harvey Dent to face both the Gotham mob and a serial killer that kills once a month, on the holidays. The film mostly covers the same story beats as the comic (which I had to review because it’s been probably more than a decade since I read it!), with a bit of a twist towards the end of the first part that changes the eventual ending in the second part.

I can’t help but compare this storyline to The Dark Knight (2008) as it covers some of the same elements: organized crime in Gotham and the origin of Two-Face among others. In fact I believe the comic book was one of the inspirations for Nolan’s eventual plot for TDK. I would guess that TDK changes were largely due to the need to focus on The Joker, who is more of a minor villain The Long Halloween, and I can’t help but imagine what if Nolan had chosen to stay more faithful to TLH storyline, what kind of movie could we have gotten?

Anyway, this particular animated version is pretty good, mostly faithful to the source material, and I like the animation style here. Jensen Ackles is a serviceable Batman voice, and Troy Baker is a pretty good Joker; for a moment I wondered if it was Mark Hamill in the role. Part one was released back in June, and part two just last week, so I only watched both parts today.

I think the next DCU animated movie project is Injustice, based on the game series of the same name, also looking forward to that!

Masters of the Universe: Revelation (season 1 part 1)

We also watched this during Saturday’s watch-along. This one is a bit controversial, so I thought I’d write about it even though technically the season is only halfway through. The controversy is because the show’s plot mostly focuses around Teela and a quest she undergoes after the events of the first episode:

(Spoilers)

He-Man and Skeletor are presumed dead in a battle and Teela leaves the service of King Randor out of anger over having Adam’s secret withheld from her for so long.

The voice work is pretty good; we immediately recognized Lena Headey’s voice as Evil-Lyn, and Mark Hamill as Skeletor is unmistakeable. We didn’t recognize Sarah Michelle Gellar as Teela though! The storyline so far is okay, though not super original. It kind of felt like a typical JRPG party-gathering and going on a quest thing, really.

A lot of old fans didn’t like the focus being taken away from He-Man and focusing on a female character, which many imagined as purely a diversity play. I feel like it’s much too early to judge the season overall, since it’s only halfway through, but even then, there’s nothing wrong about focusing on some other characters, as the show is explicitly titled “Masters of the Universe” without the “He-Man and the… " prefix. It’s probably best to see where Kevin Smith takes us for the eventual second part (for which we have no release date yet).

Weeknotes 2021-07-25

hello@roytang.net (Roy Tang) — Sun, 25 Jul 2021 04:42:28 +0000

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:

I guess I’m doing this #Tumindig thing as well, despite my shaky hands. Inspired by @KevinKalbo. Also #sketchdaily 203/365 Context: https://www.gmanetwork.com/news/lifestyle/artandculture/796248/viral-illustration-sparks-solidarity-among-pinoy-artists-to-stand-in-dissent/story/ (Click to view full-size)

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.

Reviews: Die Another Day, Army of the Dead, Valerian, Superstore, Omelas

hello@roytang.net (Roy Tang) — Wed, 21 Jul 2021 02:37:25 +0000

I used to do these “Watching Lately” posts to talk about movies/tv/books I’d recently consumed, but for a while I folded up the reviews into the weeknotes and sometimes via short notes but the reviews have been getting longer so I guess I’m bring the “Watching Lately” tag and series of posts back.

Die Another Day (2002)

Bond film no. 20 and Brosnan’s final appearance. The main question for me going in was: have I actually watched this before in the theatre? My memory says no, but this movie does have the ice palace scene I originally thought was in World is Not Enough. I can’t remember any of the other plot details though. I think I would have if I had seen it before, because I actually really liked the film and think it’s the best of the Brosnan run. I mean, I didn’t even remember the betrayal towards the end, and that took me by surprise this time. The likely explanation seems to be that I had caught the later parts of the film on cable tv which is why I remember the ice palace thing, so I will consider this NOT a rewatch.

When I read up on it after watching, apparently this film had a mixed reception, but I liked it. It has the campiness of the earlier films, and some good throwbacks and references, as it’s the 40th anniversary of the film. I mean, I agree the invisible car was a bit silly, but maybe about as much as everyday use of a jetpack (Thunderball) or going into space (Moonraker). There’s also an actual honest-to-goodness sword fight here that goes on quite a bit, first with fencing swords and later with actual swords. Maybe it’s just that I really enjoy swordfights lol. I also liked the car vs car battle later on in the movie; Bond has not had to face anyone with the same level of fancy car gadgets before, so it was fun. Also, the villain plot was to use something akin to C&C’s ion cannon! A space laser! I really would have remembered that!

I liked the opening theme performed by Madonna, but didn’t actually recognize her in the cameo. This is the first film without Desmond Llewelyn as Q, as he had passed away the year before release. John Cleese is an adequate replacement, but this is also his final appearance in the role. This movie was also apparently Rosamund Pike’s first film. Hally Berry is ok as a Bond girl, nothing too exceptional. Her character was quite competent at first but then got captured (twice) in the second half. I believe this film is also the first time Bond has faced a North Korean villain.

Overall I think a fitting end to the Brosnan run and as a 40th anniversary celebration of the series. The campiness is fine, especially since the upcoming Daniel Craig era would be much more serious and gritty.

Army of the Dead (2021)

Watched this yesterday, mostly as background while I did other things, so not paying 100% attention I guess. I remembered reading that Tig Notaro (who plays the helicopter pilot) was never on set with the other actors (due to covid or something I guess) so every time she would be in a scene I’d mentally note how she’s not shown together with the others or was possible just edited into the shot. I really led with that lol, it’s what was foremost on my mind while watching.

It was a reasonable action movie and zombie/heist flick, if not a bit predictable. I liked that safecracker guy, he really had a passion for his work, too bad he died. I actually thought more of their team would survive, but maybe I just haven’t seen enough zombie flicks. There’s an obvious setup at the end for a possible sequel, but Batista won’t be coming back.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017)

Ended up watching a second movie later in the day. I had been meaning to watch this for a while as it looked good. It’s an ok sci-fi movie to watch, but not a must-see as the plot is kind of predictable / cookie clutter, and there’s this one sequence in the middle which felt unnecessary and was just an excuse to get Cara Delevingne in a dress. Visuals are super pretty though, all the space stuff and the special effects and the City of a Thousand Planets all look great. The main guy Valerian fights waaaay too well, so that needs a bit of suspension of disbelief.

I only learned after watching that this movie was actually a French production directed by Luc Besson (of Fifth Element fame), and was based on a French comic called Valerian and Laureline. That’s right, the comic actually had Laureline on equal billing with Valerian but noooo, the movie had to be titled for Valerian only. Actually, the comic seems more interesting from the wikipedia description as it seems to be more time-travel focused (Laureline is actually supposed to be from 11th-century France), but the movie doesn’t really give us much background on either of them.

Unfortunately, this movie got mixed reviews and was a flop, so a follow-up in the same universe seems unlikely.

Superstore season 5

I binged the first four seasons of Superstore on Prime Video back in 2020, and over the weekend I saw the fifth season was already up, so I had it as my background watching for most of the weekend and actually finished it already by Monday. Season 5 is pretty much more of the same flavor, though there are a bit more Filipino references (which I always enjoy) since there’s a stronger focus on the character Matteo, who in the last season was arrested by ICE because he was an illegal immigrant from the Philippines.

The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin

Someone gave me a copy of this because I mentioned I’d never read any Le Guin before. It’s super short but quite thought-provoking, making you think about what costs any possible utopia could have. But I also think the ending is projecting a bit of optimism, in that no matter what darkness you discover, there’s always the option of just walking away.

I wasn’t sure whether to log this in my “books read list” category, given that it’s not really a book and the length is actually barely a short story, but hey it’s my list, I’ll do what I want. It did make me want to seek out other Le Guin works, I’ll see what I can find.

Weeknotes 2021-07-18

hello@roytang.net (Roy Tang) — Sun, 18 Jul 2021 06:00:04 +0000

A quote:

“The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.” - George Eliot

The world:

Fitch downgrades PH credit rating outlook to “negative”
Pacquiao ousted from PDP-Laban by an opposing faction, just as he’s preparing for his upcoming fight.
Covid-19 delta variant has been detected in the PH, let’s hope the government can keep it under control.
Valve has announced the Steam Deck, a handheld PC for playing Steam games

Links of interest:

Hobson’s Browser: How Apple, Facebook, and Google Broke the Mobile Browser Market by Silently Undermining User Choice
The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday. The article itself is mostly about bootstrapping a startup, but the concept of “just showing up everyday” really resonated with me.
Twitter thread: Dogecoin co-founder Jackson Palmer shares his current thoughts about cryptocurrency
A little personal story regarding something the author thinks Automattic does especially good (sic)
Cory Doctorow on Facebook’s alternative facts

Visit the Links page for more links of interest.

From the archives, this week in history:

2015: I travelled to London for work for 3 months!
2015: The first time we won a quiz night?
2015: RIP Satoru Iwata

My stuff:

had a couple more family escort missions this week, but those should be the last ones til August.
Still sketching; As is typical, I’m behind by a couple of days again. I liked this sketch I did of the Cantina band (or part of them at least):

Cantina band #sketchdaily 194/365 (Click to view full-size)

Watching:
- Movies: Actually managed to watch a fair amount of movies this week!
  - James Bond run continues with Brosnan’s The World is Not Enough (1999)
  - The watch-along movie during this week’s Saturday gaming session was one of my all-time favorites: Street Fighter the Movie (1994). Still super quotable!
- TV: Watched Barry season 1 and of course the Loki season 1 finale. Also started watching Superstore season 5, since I saw it’s on Prime Video now.
Gaming:
- Still playing Horizon Zero Dawn and Guilty Gear Strive regularly. Also decided to revive my Wasteland 2 save for some reason. Also woke up my Disgaea 4 (Vita) save game since I had to wait in a corridor for a while during an errand this week.
- Still drafting the latest MTG set Adventures in the Forgotten Realms on Magic Arena, you can follow via the MTGAFR tag
- Regular Saturday group played some Root and Blood Rage again, as usual.
- Some friends got me into playing this web-based version of Advance Wars, which hopefully Nintendo takes a while to notice.
Reading: No books this week, mostly just comics. Yet again.
No online quiz night for the trivia team this week, we just indulged ourselves with the NY Times crossword and spelling bee again.

This coming week:

Huh no big events coming up, maybe I can actually get some stuff done.

Reviews: The World is Not Enough, Barry season 1, Loki

hello@roytang.net (Roy Tang) — Wed, 14 Jul 2021 10:22:07 +0000

Warning: Spoilers for the just-ended season of Loki at the end of this. I have a spoiler-free review of that if you’d like.

The World Is Not Enough (1999)

Bond film no. 19 and Brosnan’s third. Pretty sure I saw this in the theaters when it came out, but for the life of me could not recall any of the plot details at all. Turns out it was because the plot was a bit unnecessarily convoluted. It’s easy to tell straight away that Sophie Marceau is on the bad guy side, given her henchmen, so that was no surprise. Renard was a bit boring, revenge yada yada, bullet in my head, etc. The master plan here, originally misdirected as terrorism, turns out to just be financial all along. What assured me that I wasn’t insane and that I did see it in theaters was that as soon as I saw Denise Richards name in the opening credits I remember she played a nuclear physicist in this one. Probably the weakest of the Brosnan ones so far.

I still have a scene of Brosnan in some kind of ice building (?) in my random access memory, and it wasn’t here so I think that’s a sign that I may have actually seen his next and last Bond film Die Another Day before and just blocked out any memory of it for some reason. We’ll find out next week I suppose!

Barry (season 1)

I started this late last week, and the season is only eight episodes but I only finished last night because each episode is a bit stressful to watch. Stressful in the sense that you pretty much expect that bad things are going to keep happening and that things are just going to get tougher for the protagonist. It’s a bit like Breaking Bad, where the protag just keeps getting into deeper and deeper trouble, but where Walter White started to revel in his notoriety, Barry just wants out, but he can’t get a break, and keeps on finding himself forced to do bad things. It’s very good, but also very dark. The season ends in a surprisingly satisfactory manner while still setting up possible follow-up storylines. I’m a bit tempted to just stop there and be happy with the show as it is and not continue to the second season as the show might actually get worse, we’ll see how long I hold it off.

Loki (season 1)

Season finale ended earlier today. As noted above, there is a spoiler-free review:

On 
<a href="/2021/07/1415238174377340930/"><time datetime="2021-07-14 09:14:09">14 Jul 2021 9:14am</time></a>
I wrote:
<blockquote>
    <p>#Loki spoiler-free review:</p>

overall plot was fine, if not predictable, given what we knew about mcu phase 4 going in
weak pacing and writing in most episodes; could have easily been a two hour movie instead of six one hour episodes
good watch for mcu fans because of the larger phase 4 implications, but much weaker as a standalone series

</blockquote>

I think overall, the plot of Loki delving into the truth behind the TVA and eventually causing the return of the multiverse was entirely predictable given the series’ premise and what we knew of the larger MCU even before the series aired. The whole thing is even telegraphed completely in the first episode: removing the TVA means multiversal war; we are told the stakes from the very beginning and nothing really changes in that regard even up to the final episode and the reveal of who was actually behind the TVA.

Speaking of which, I’m not a fan of the whole “reveal a new character and info dump his background in the last episode” treatment that character got. I get that the reveal was necessary for the larger MCU set up, but there’s no reason it could have been done or hinted from earlier episodes so that he didn’t have to monologue his back story for like 60% of this episode.

The pacing of the entire six-episode runs just seemed so off to me; basically nothing interesting happening during the first three episodes (other than the reveal of a female Loki variant, which should surprise us why?), then some interesting stuff in episodes 4 and 5 and finally this disappointing finale was like 90% dialogue.

The ramifications for the entire MCU at large are huge of course, and as a setup vehicle for the greater cinematic multiverse the series does the job well. But on the smaller scale, as a series standing by itself we got an anticlimactic finale, Renslayer and Mobius don’t get any kind of resolution or advancement to their character arcs, and our protagonist ends up right back where he was from the start - lost and alone. So unsatisfying.

I will of course still watch the eventual season 2, and I’m looking forward to What If in August, but this finale just left a sour taste in my mouth.

Weeknotes 2021-07-11

hello@roytang.net (Roy Tang) — Sun, 11 Jul 2021 04:53:28 +0000

A quote:

“You are the books you read the films you watch, the music you listen to, the people you meet, the dreams you have, the conversations you engage in. You are what you take from these. You are the sound of the ocean, the breath of fresh air, the brightest light and the darkest corner. You are a collective of every experience you have had in your life. You are every single second of every single day. So drown yourself in a sea of knowledge and existence. Let the words run through your veins and let the colours fill your mind.” – Jac Vanek

The world:

The president of Haiti was assassinated
Richard Branson is scheduled to go to space this weekend, kicking off the billionaire’s race to get off the planet they ruined.
Covid19: The delta variant continues to ravage many parts of the world, including the US and even our neighbor Indonesia. Surprisingly, despite lax border controls the variant is not yet widespread here, though some people fear we are undergoing a silent surge with less people willing to be tested and undergo quarantine restrictions.

Links of interest:

Manuel Moreale writes about how the internet isn’t broken, people are. The weird thing is that I don’t remember sharing this via pocket, but it appears I did, and it’s a decent enough read, so yay?
NPR’s Joy Generator: A nice experiment
The songs that inspired the Super Mario Bros. soundtrack (warning: Tiktok)

Visit the Links page for more links of interest.

From the archives, this week in history:

2020: Philippine Congress shuts down ABS-CBN
2014: We bought a Nintendo console again after more than a decade!

My stuff:

HELTH: Had a bit of a scare early in the week, as I ran a fever starting from Sunday evening. Pre-pandemic, it’s nothing I’d just take some biogesic and sleep it off, but now we have to worry about Covid. To be sure, I had an RT-PCR swab test taken by Monday lunch time. My brother and his family had passed by the house Sunday morning and we hung out a bit outside shooting the breeze, so aside from the seniors I live with, I was worried for them, so the test was mostly to be sure and for peace of mind. I thought the test itself would be uncomfortable, but it was super quick, swab went in and out once per nostril, then one more in the throat. It was a bit pricey, as someone comes to your home to do it, but the results came quickly, got the NEGATIVE result the next morning. Hugh sigh of relief. By then my fever had gone down. I self-isolated for a couple more days just to be sure. Am completely fine now.
I wrote a bunch of words on the blog this week. Other than the usual media reviews, there’s this post on Compshop culture in the Philippines and also some commentary on what it takes to be President of this country.
Still sketching; Nothing I’m too proud of this week, kind of phoned in a lot of them. Here’s Squeeks from Transformers: The Last Knight:

Watching:
- Movies: Actually managed to watch a fair amount of movies this week!
  - James Bond run continues into the Brosnan era with Goldeneye (1995) and Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)
  - Black Widow came out this week of course, bringing the MCU back to the movies. Linked review starts spoiler-free.
  - Watched some dumb movies (America the Motion Picture (2021) and Ice Road (2021)) during the Saturday gaming watchalong.
- Not much TV this week apparently. Still keeping up with Flash, Rick and Morty, Loki. Mildly annoyed that Loki has one episode to go and we still don’t have any real idea who the big bad is.
Gaming:
- Reduced gaming a bit during the few days I was sick, but I did resume Horizon Zero Dawn and Guilty Gear Strive towards the end of the week.
- Latest MTG set Adventures in the Forgotten Realms has dropped on Magic Arena! I’ve started streaming drafts as usual, you can follow via the MTGAFR tag
- Also thinking of streaming some non-MTG Steam games next week, we’ll see if that pushes through.
- Regular Saturday group played some Root and Blood Rage again, as usual.
- Steam Sale ended without me taking any damage! Also, I think I’m pausing this month’s Humble Choice again.
Reading: No books this week, mostly just comics.
No online quiz night for the trivia team this week, we just indulged ourselves with the NY Times crossword and spelling bee again.

This coming week:

Loki season finale!

Black Widow

hello@roytang.net (Roy Tang) — Fri, 09 Jul 2021 14:13:20 +0000

We finally return to the MCU films, a full two years after the last film was released! Breaking a decade-long tradition, I am unable to watch it in theaters this time (and probably won’t get to watch any of the others this year in theaters either), but at least we are moving forward now, onto the next phase!

Spoiler-free review first, then spoilery bits follow afterwards.

incredibly good as an action movie, great fight sequences and set pieces and chases etc. Felt like I was watching something from Mission Impossible or James Bond
fairly stand-alone, though some knowledge of what happened in Captain America: Civil War would give context to where Nat is at the start of the film
The pacing is good, alternating between character moments and action sequences.
terrific performances by Florence Pugh and David Harbour, hope to see both again in the MCU at some point
a bit of humor sprinkled in there, mostly via Florence and David’s characters, but it’s definitely not the funniest MCU movie.
happy to see Natasha getting her own solo movie and get some development outside of the ensemble casts, though I wish it could have happened sooner
There is one post-credits scene, at the very end
Magugustuhan ba ni Mama? Possibly! She occasionally enjoys action movies. The themes are very family-focused, despite all the violence. She would probably ask a lot of questions though.
Solid 4/5 for me
Overall a decent start to phase four. Looking forward to the other films this year, maybe by some miracle I’ll get to watch them in the theaters!

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Nitpicks:

is Nat a super soldier now? I mean, she survives a car exploding and tumbling in midair, and also a fall from several stories high where she bumps her head a couple of times along the way. She basically just gets up and shrugs it all off, it’s helluva plot armor.
Taskmaster fight sequences were great, but the character was severely underused, and the actress really got off easy I think?
the scene at the end with Nat not wanting to leave with the others on a plane even while Ross and his men are still a ways away seems ridiculous, and the cut to “2 weeks later” leaves much to be desired; some people on Reddit claim there was probably a scene where she made a deal with Ross but the scene was cut; regardless, it’s an annoying discontinuity in the theatrical cut
I wish they could have managed one or two more fanservice cameos, and not just Valentina in the post-credits scene. Like, I would have wanted to have Chris Evans’ Cap meet up with Nat in the “2 weeks after” scene so they go break out their friends together.

Other than the above, I don’t seem to have any complaints about the main plot itself. I watched very few trailers and didn’t have any real idea about the other characters like Red Guardian or Yelena, so I didn’t have any expectations to fail.

The whole “family” theme reminded me of the recent Fast and Furious memes about family lol.

On Being President

hello@roytang.net (Roy Tang) — Thu, 08 Jul 2021 11:33:03 +0000

During a company holiday party in the mid-2000s our theme was “statement shirts” and I decided to jokingly go with a somewhat tight-fitting purple shirt with the caption “ROY TANG FOR PRESIDENT”:

I’m not even running yet and I already have opposition! (Click to view full-size)

(This was the best picture of the shirt I could find; It’s probably still in the house somewhere, but it probably wouldn’t fit me anymore.)

Eventually, this phrase became a running joke among my friend groups, especially since I tended to be opinionated and to comment a lot on current events on social media and such. It was not uncommon for me to post some rant about something stupid our political leaders have done or some essay about how things could be improved, and someone would comment with the eventual “Roy Tang for President!”

It’s a joke of course. Running for president requires some level of fame, political experience, connections and even ridiculous amounts of money. I’m a nobody who has none of these things. there’s no way I’m running for president! That being said, I’m not going to claim I’ve never thought about it; it’s the sort of thing that’s fun to fantasize about once in a while.

It actually feels like a really insane idea to run for president. Being president is a terrible, thankless job. The country has so many systemic issues that it’s simply a gargantuan task to address them all or even make a significant dent in a single term. Even assuming you’re an honest, well-meaning person who just wants to do good things for the country, you’re going to run afoul of so many vested interests who will stand in your way and try to take you down: politicians benefiting from corruption, elites and oligarchs profiting from inequality, the criminals and corrupt who want to evade accountability, basically anyone in power looking to preserve the status quo.

You can’t run the country alone, so you have to be lucky enough to know or find people to work with who you can trust to be honest and well-intentioned and not abuse their authority. And because we aren’t in a dictatorship, the president would often have to find a way to work with many different parties and sectors to get things (such as legislation) done, even if some of those people may be part of the very vested interests opposing you. You would have to do all of these tasks while constantly being criticized for your every move, and also managing public opinion and handling whatever random tragedy or crisis happens every week. And you have to find a way so that when everything is done, somehow the small gains you’ve made will be preserved and be built upon by future leaders.

And it’s not a job with a lot of work-life balance; you don’t step being president after 5pm. I can only imagine that once you decide to take on the job, you are basically committing six years of your life to the country, and not everyone has that privilege.

I was thinking about these things for the past couple of weeks as I read many of the testimonials given by people who’ve worked with the recently deceased former President Noynoy Aquino. By most accounts he was an honest, sincere person who wanted to do a good job. He was a data driven President and tended to work hard, often making his staff work late into the night and such.

He had some issues he had trouble dealing with, namely in transportation and crisis management. But his biggest problem was his lack of charisma and political savvy; he tended not to show emotion and he wasn’t good at espousing his own causes or letting the public know how hard he worked or empathizing with other people. His political opponents capitalized on this and he was the target of bad propaganda, ending his term with him and his family name mocked and vilified by certain sectors of society. Someone I know called him a “misunderstood nerd” and I think it’s a stereotype that fits perfectly - the sort of awkward person who knows how to do the work, but not how to effectively manage his relationships with other people and the public.

So hard work and good intentions are obviously not enough for the job. You also need charisma, political will and the savvy to navigate the cesspool of politics. With all of these challenges, it’s very difficult to find truly good and honest people willing to go for the job of president. Most will be experienced politicians who are already compromised in some way, perhaps thinking they can still leave a good legacy behind; or worse, some will be the truly corrupt, who see the position as an opportunity to further their own agendas, whether that be power or enrichment or whatever.

And the scary part is that often, it’s the bad ones who have the knowhow or skills needed to get elected, which means elections here will always be a challenge. Maybe someday we’ll figure things out or just get really lucky and roll a chain of natural 20s and actually get a series of good presidents (or candidates even), enough to make some headway in improving the country, instead of the typical riffraff we find running for president.

In this country, there is a constitutional requirement that the president must be at least 40 years old which for me means next year’s elections would be the first one where I would actually be eligible to run for president! The presidentiables are already starting to make their moves so I want to make this clear: I have not yet decided whether or not to run for president. (Lol.)

I’m not even running yet and I already have opposition!

Tomorrow Never Dies

hello@roytang.net (Roy Tang) — Wed, 07 Jul 2021 10:37:32 +0000

Last night I watched Tomorrow Never Dies (1997). Bond film no. 18 and Brosnan’s second. Also the first one I actually saw in theaters when it came out so officially my first rewatch! That said, it was 24 years ago so while I remember the general overarching plot (Jonathan Pryce playing a multibillionaire media mogul inciting a war between China and the UK to profit off the news), I have forgotten many of the finer details.

I did remember Michelle Yeoh in her role as a Chinese agent who ends up working with Bond. (She looks so young here, especially compared to Star Trek Discovery where I last saw her! I guess Asian women do age somehow.) I forgot about Teri Hatcher being here though, apparently in the middle of her heyday on the Lois and Clark TV series. She looked great too, but had little screen time, so maybe that’s why I forgot about her.

I also remembered the scene with the remote controlled car as I remember thinking that was pretty neat back when I first saw it. Now that I’ve actually learned how driving a car works (not that I actually drive), it seems ridiculous that Bond could have such fine control using only a touchpad. It’s 2021 and the touchpad UX isn’t even that great for laptops, let alone a car!

This is the first time possible conflict with China came into play in the Bond series (though they have made appearances before as “Red China”), maybe a sign of China’s rising prominence at the time? This was also the same year that Hong Kong was ceded back to China by the British, so perhaps appropriate for Bond to be working with a Chinese agent this time, in the spirit of international friendship?

The choice of villain may have been a bit prescient, given our current woes with billionaires and their platforms endangering the world and/or democracy, although if this film were made today the company would be more tech/internet focused than mass media, as that age has passed.

I like the theme music here (performed by Sherly Crow) better than the one in Goldeneye, possibly because I kind of still remembered how it went (or the chorus part anyway).

Trivia: There were no more unadapted Fleming stories remaining so this is an original film story, but the original title was meant to be Tomorrow Never Lies, which would have made a lot more sense! But there was a typo when the potential title was sent over to MGM, and they liked the current version better.

Overall Goldeneye seemed the stronger film, though this one appeals to me too because it’s my second watch; It’s aged rather well I think.

The next film is the only other Brosnan film I’ve seen, The World Is Not Enough, but I seem to remember even less about it than this film, can’t even call the plot to mind. I seem to remember some kind of… ice building? I suppose I’ll find out when I get to it, probably next week.

Anyway, here’s some commentary from the movie about software development.

ComSat and CompShops

hello@roytang.net (Roy Tang) — Wed, 07 Jul 2021 01:19:40 +0000

I was on a Twitch chat for a local streamer yesterday and someone bought up the term “comsat”, popular in local computer shop or “compshop” (also called “internet cafes”) culture. In the context of multiplayer games, it means to spy on what your opponent is doing by peeking at his screen. I’ve never heard this term used other than by Filipino gamers, so I have reason to believe it’s a local thing. There is an Urban Dictionary entry, but the submitter might just be a Pinoy as well.

Some of the younger gamers weren’t familiar with the origins of the term. Someone even said they thought it mean “computer satellite”, as in someone who hovers over the opponent’s computer to see what they’re up to. The term actually originates from the original Starcraft, it’s a Terran building used to enable scanner sweeps. Starcraft was one of the earliest popular LAN games in the Philippines; we used to play it a lot on the lab computers after hours in college. I’m not sure if this kind of thing is now frowned upon, but back then one of the regular players in our lab was one of the younger teachers, so whatever. I suppose when compshops started to proliferate, many of the initial patrons were familiar with Starcraft and hence the term comsat and it propagated to later generations of gamers who played mostly games like the various versions of DOTA or Counterstrike.

Compshops were a popular small business back in the day. In fact, I briefly considered running one myself, the startup capital needed wasn’t too high. (But like many potential endeavors, it felt like too much work.)

Compshops in the Philippines of course had their uses other than gaming - many students used them to do schoolwork or get something printed. But they became popular mostly for gaming, especially among the youth. Many were so obsessed we got memes like the one below with kids continuing to play despite floods, an image I’ve seen even in international gaming forums.

Baha na, nde pa GG! (Click to view full-size)

I never got too much into compshop culture, particularly playing versus strangers and all that. I think part of that is because I was already graduating when they really took off in Metro Manila around the mid 2000s. But I also wasn’t really a fan of the multiplayer games that became popular locally - the aforementioned DOTA and Counterstrike - or the popular MMOs like Ragnarok Online.

The only multiplayer PvP games I really played over LAN were Starcraft (mostly with labmates during the college days) and occasionally Warcraft III. I was comfortable with Warcraft III because I played it on Battle.net back home so I didn’t mind playing it with friends. I never really got into that phase where I would hang out in compshops and play with strangers. Between work and my home gaming, I didn’t really have time for that.

I did enjoy the occasional game night out with coworkers after work - there was a small compshop near Tektite we’d go to. The only games I remember playing this way were Left 4 Dead / Left 4 Dead 2. I find that coop games like these tend to generate more funny moments overall, and we had a lot of fun shouting over the computers to try to get our party’s act together. Once we got tired of L4D, I’d take my leave to go home early while the more hardcore players stayed behind to play DOTA or CS late into the night.

It’s probably been a decade or even more since I’ve last been to a compshop. Interest in this kind of LAN gaming kind of faded among PC owners in the 2010s, around the same time that most games stopped offering LAN play in favor of online gaming. The writing was on the wall when Starcraft 2 announced in 2009 that they wouldn’t support LAN. There was no reason for compshop owners to spend for legit copies of Starcraft 2 just so their clients could play it. PC owners who preferred to play SC2 or other newer paid games ended up mostly just playing online at their own homes. And with the rise of modern online voice chat, you could still replicate the experience of shouting at your teammates or opponents, although of course it wasn’t really the same as hearing the trash talk in person at a compshop.

Compshops still continued to exist well into the 2010s of course, though perhaps not as prevalent as before. They offered mostly F2P or freemium games, although many still came with old / pirated copies of the classics - many players still played the older games because that’s what they knew. The clientele became primarily the less privileged who didn’t have access to a PC or internet or the latest games at home, many of them minors.

I think even during the pandemic, compshops still managed to survive. They’re kind of essential for less privileged students who all have to take online classes now. I imagine the industry will still be right there well into the 2020s - so long as the inequality and lack of access to PCs and internet persists, so will the humble compshops be there to help the less privileged enjoy some PC gaming as well.

Goldeneye (1995)

hello@roytang.net (Roy Tang) — Tue, 06 Jul 2021 01:42:52 +0000

The Bond film reviews were starting to get a bit long for Twitter/notes, so a full blog post it is.

Goldeneye (1995). Bond film no. 17 and first for Brosnan. The films are starting to look “modern”, but might just be because this is the first Bond film to come out after I graduated high school and that’s what I see as “modern”. I didn’t see this in theaters when it first came out though.

We get that dry wit and humor back, and a bit more modern armaments. Not sure if I’ve ever seen Bond use an automatic weapon before (usually it’s just the PPK). Sean Bean is here as 006, but I knew that already. I imagine him coming back was intended as a huge twist in theaters, but that’s kinda spoiled with him getting top billing in the opening credits sequence. Unremarkable opening theme by Tina Turner (not really a fan of that genre of music).

First appearance of Judi Dench as M, who gets a bit more characterization compared to her predecessors. The film tries to address some of the series’ more problematic tropes, with M telling Bond he’s a “sexist, misogynist dinosaur, a relic of the Cold War”. New Moneypenny (Samantha Bond) is less enamoured over Bond. His CIA ally even complains about the “stiff-assed Brits” and their “codes and passwords”.

Famke Janssen gives a great and insane performance as the sadistic henchman Xenia Onatopp. Not sure why that Russian general was involved in 006’s plan, he was introduced as some kind of “iron man of Russia” so I initally thought he had some kind of political ambition. In the end it was all about money after all (and vengeance for 006).

Might proceed to the next film (Tomorrow Never Dies) later today!

Books: Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman

hello@roytang.net (Roy Tang) — Mon, 05 Jul 2021 07:18:21 +0000

Someone gave me a copy of this book last week, just after I had finished the previous book (Excellent timing!). Einstein’s Dreams is a short book which explores different concepts of time. It’s filled with short vignettes, each 1-2 pages long, describing an alternate universe where either the rules of physics are altered so that time proceeds differently, or humans perceive time in different ways. The book is framed as being a collection of dreams of Albert Einstein in 1905 as he develops his theory of relativity - there are short interludes where Einstein discusses his theories with his friend Michele Besso.

I enjoyed the different time concepts and how they were presented. The prose is precise and elaborate, filled with detail despite the short length of each vignette, exploring the lives of the people living in each portrayed universe. The book is fairly short, the copy I got was only 60+ pages long (I believe there are 30 “dreams”) so I finished it in 3 days. Easily recommended for anyone who enjoys timey-wimey stuff.

Weeknotes 2021-07-04

hello@roytang.net (Roy Tang) — Sun, 04 Jul 2021 04:53:28 +0000

It’s the Fourth of July, which really only means something in the US. Over here it used to be “Philippine-American Friendship Day”, but apparently that was phased out while I was still in grade school.

A quote

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts” - W. Churchill

The world:

Our current president and one of our possible future presidents, who are ostensibly allies / partymates have been feuding over the past week. Just another sign of how tenuous political alliances in this country are; they are no match for ambition.
The DOH says we are now “low risk” for COVID-19 (which feels a bit like Obama awarding himself a medal, but whatever). While it’s nice to be optimistic, we should still be cautious, especially in light of the delta variant ravaging our neighboring countries.
Other than the pandemic, if you need to be reminded of the world’s other problems, the Pacific Northwest in the US and Canada have been experiencing record-setting heat waves over the past week or so. Also, the ocean was on fire for a while.

Links of interest:

The Rotting Internet. Related: Link Rot
A Responsive Grid Layout Without Media Queries. Just a CSS thing I’m using to revamp the photos view on this site.
Github recently announced Github Copilot: Your AI Pair Programmer, basically autocompletes code snippets based on your intent? They do have access to a large dataset of written code so this just might turn out to be the next big thing for making things easier for devs. I’ve signed up for the technical preview, let’s see if I get in.
I enjoyed this twitter thread of people posting great shots from movies of the past decade, although I have a complaint.
I like this Tumblr post about Bert and Ernie at the end of the world

Visit the Links page for more links of interest.

From the archives, this week in history:

2020: It’s been one year since I deactivated my Facebook account! Here’s the corresponding essay.
2013: Google shut down Google Reader, forever changing the adoption trajectory of RSS.
2011: Google launched Google Plus

My stuff:

Was again a busy week due to family-related errands, mostly involving escort missions to the hospital (nothing major, just routine checks and such.)
I hit the 900 daily streak on Duolingo! Road to 1000!
Still sketching; this week, I really liked my rendition of the classic Icy Manipulator:

Watching:
- Movies: Actually managed to watch a fair amount of movies this week! Watched both Dalton Bond films: The Living Daylights (1987) and License To Kill (1989); looking forward to Brosnan next! Caught the Matt Damon film Downsizing (2017) because I was stuck in a waiting room, and Under Siege (1992) because the Saturday gaming group decided we can do watch-alongs while playing our online boardgames. I actually have been paying attention to r/movies lately so I keep wanting to actually watch more movies, let’s see if that happens.
- Managed to catch up with most of the Arrowverse stuff this week. That’s Flash, Legends of Tomorrow and Superman and Lois (Supergirl still on hiatus). Current season rankings: S&L > Legends > Flash. These shows are pretty good to have in the background while I do other stuff.
Gaming:
- Dove into the Frozen Wilds DLC for Horizon Zero Dawn on PS4! Apparently I wasn’t too tired of the game yet, despite playing it for over two months now.
- Still playing Guilty Gear Strive. Wrote some words about it here.
- Regular Saturday group played some Root and Blood Rage this weekend, same as last weekend. I finally rolled Lizard Cult in random select!
- Still managing to avoid Steam Sale damage! (A few days still remain.)
Reading: Finished reading: Linchpin by Seth Godin and also Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman (will probably write a short review this week)
No online quiz night for the trivia team this week, although we’ve still been regularly doing the Saturday NY Times crossword and spelling bee.

This coming week:

New Loki, Rick and Morty, etc episodes.
Black Widow is out this week!
New set Adventures in the Forgotten Realms drops this week on Magic Arena! I’m not a big D&D fan (though I am a bit familiar), so I’m not super hyped specifically for the set, but any shakeup to constructed formats is welcome.

Book Review: Linchpin by Seth Godin

hello@roytang.net (Roy Tang) — Tue, 29 Jun 2021 13:56:13 +0000

Linchpin: Are You Indispensible? is a 2010 book by Seth Godin. The book’s primary thesis is that in the modern world, you have to avoid being a conforming, replaceable assembly line worker, and instead be a linchpin, someone who is indispensible, someone who goes the extra mile, who invests emotional labor into his work and his art. The book covers topics such as the problems with the “old way” of working, what it means to be a linchpin, the resistance from your lizard brain, gift culture, connection, the importance of shipping, etc. He summarizes the book as:

All I wanted to do in this book was sell you on being the artist you already are. To make a difference. To stand for something. To get the respect and security you deserve.

The book is structured into chapters each of which are broken into 1 or 2 pages worth of discussion on one aspect of the chapter’s topics, each about as long as a blog post. Given that Seth Godin is a prolific blogger, I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of this book evolved directly from his posts.

As someone who has mostly soured on late-stage capitalism, a lot of this is preaching to the choir. I don’t need to be told that something is wrong with the way our companies and labor are currently set up. Concepts like the resistance and the lizard brain aren’t new to me either. I did enjoy the chapters about gift culture and how being an artist means being willing to give a gift to the world, instead of having everything be a commercial transaction. And I do appreciate the overall message of avoiding being just another cog in the capitalist machine, of going above and beyond in whatever you do and gifting your talent to the world.

Here are some parts I highlighted from the book for whatever reason (yes, I just discovered the Kindle app lets you export your highlights!):

THINKING ABOUT YOUR CHOICE

Go to a McDonald’s. Order a Big Mac. Order a chocolate milkshake. Drink half the milkshake. Eat half the Big Mac. Put the Big Mac into your milkshake and walk up to the counter. Say, “I can’t drink this milkshake . . . there’s a Big Mac in it.” The person at the counter will give you a refund. Why? Because it’s easier to give her a rule than it is to hire people with good judgment. The rule is, “When in doubt, give a refund.”

BECOMING THE LINCHPIN

Donald Bradman was an Australian cricket player. He was also the best athlete who ever lived. By any statistical measure, he was comparatively the best at what he did. He was far better at cricket than Michael Jordan was at basketball or Jack Nicklaus was at golf.

(Okay, I highlighted this one only because I might be able to use it in a trivia question somewhere.)

IS IT POSSIBLE TO DO HARD WORK IN A CUBICLE?

The process of making the art and the results produced are solely aimed at the creator. Whistling as you walk through the woods is a form of art, but you’re not doing it hoping a squirrel will applaud.

…

The easier it is to quantify, the less it’s worth.

THE RESISTANCE

Shipping isn’t focused on producing a masterpiece (but all master-pieces get shipped). I’ve produced more than a hundred books (most didn’t sell very well), but if I hadn’t, I’d never have had the chance to write this one. Picasso painted more than a thousand paintings, and you can probably name three of them.

…

In difficult economic times, the resistance explains that we’d better get a steady job, because the world is fraught with uncertainty and this is no time to do something crazy like starting a company. And in great times, of course, the resistance persuades us not to start a company because competition is fierce and hey, salaries are high. “Don’t be stupid,” it says.

…

If shipping were easy, you would have done it already.

Are Fighting Games Too Complex? Also, Guilty Gear -STRIVE- Review

hello@roytang.net (Roy Tang) — Mon, 28 Jun 2021 14:56:26 +0000

Dan Fornace, creator of Rivals of Aether writes:

After 8 years of working in fighting games, I’ve accepted the fact that no matter how “easy” you make your game, pros will absolutely demolish new players.

Well-known fighting game Youtuber Maximillian talks about the casual appeal of Guilty Gear -STRIVE- and expands a bit on the above:

I think there is definitely a serious learning curve when it comes to fighting games. They’re typically difficult for the uncommitted casual gamer to get into. There’s a lot of stuff that needs to be learned: inputs, commands, matchups, systems, etc. I mean, I’ve been playing FGs since Street Fighter II came out and I’m still pretty bad at them competitively, but I’m pretty sure I can crush most casuals who pick up a fighting game for the first time simply because I understand the lingua franca a bit - I know how throws work, what overheads and antiairs are etc.

If you’re a casual picking up a fighting game for the first time, all this stuff can get confusing. The simple matter of blocking attacks can be daunting: some attacks need to be blocked high, some blocked low, and how do you know which is which? You don’t, you kind of have to learn them along the way, so getting over the learning curve requires getting beat up a lot. There are some visual cues - sweeps look like sweeps so that’s easy to figure out, but not all of them do, and definitely not all overheads look like overheads (GGS has a universal overhead via standing dust, but most of the ones I’ve seen don’t look like overheads at all.)

Can you air block? Maybe, depends on the game. You can dash, unless you’re this character. I can just block all the attacks right? No, there’s throws and command grabs and unblockables, etc.

Not all fighting games play the same even. Like, I play mainly motion input games like Street Fighter and Guilty Gear, but whenever I try a game like Tekken, everything feels and plays differently and matches just flow differently so I don’t really understand it.

There’s always a whole lot to learn, and the best games have a lot of characters which increases the learning curve significantly. It’s like playing an RPG with a lot of character classes and enemies to study, but instead of getting all the abilities one at a time and encountering each enemy according to a difficulty track, everything is available all at once so it’s easy to get overwhelmed. And all the battles are in real-time and you have to make split-second decisions and react quickly and sometimes you blink and you’ve already taken a 100% death combo.

That being said, I think the items Max enumerated above would be helpful for casual adoption (which is necessary to birth more genre fans) - specifically making it easier to do cool, flashy stuff, and good matchmaking and netcode go a long way towards building an audience. GGS is certainly an example of that.

I usually try to review games when I’ve finished them, but that’s not really a thing with fighting games so I might as well use this space to write a quick review of Guilty Gear -STRIVE-.

I had been looking for a replacement for Street Fighter V which I’d been playing for a while but never really got very good at, languishing in the bronze ranks for most of its run. It had also gotten more and more difficult to even find matches, and I don’t really enjoy doing training/labwork to get better, so that was unacceptable. I happily purchased GGS on Steam when it was released June 11. (I think it’s actually been a while since I purchased a game full price on Steam at launch!)

Strive looks great, everything looks cool and flashy as mentioned above, which is amazing given my PC is 6 years old and I’m running on an RX570. It’s also easy to get into, and a lot of that is because of the the fantastic “tutorial” via the Missions Mode, which walks you through simple to advanced concepts so you can learn all the basics and the systems of the game. A friend rightly points out that it still doesn’t tell you when to use most of these tactics in a match, but it’s actually still a great improvement compared to other fighting games out there in terms of making it easier for new users to learn the system.

That being said (and despite Max claiming in the video above that Strive has been toned down to appeal to casuals), this is still a very complicated game, especially compared to something like Street Fighter V. Typical for the franchise, there’s a lot of movement options and systems to consider: dashes, back dashes, air dashes, jump cancels, high jumps, double jumps, recovery options, launchers, tension gauge, burst gauge, RISC, positive bonus, Roman cancel (FOUR DIFFERENT KINDS!!) and so on and so forth. I am not sure I would recommend it to casuals though it is VERY flashy.

It does look like there has been some simplification / standardization in terms of character movesets. Most characters now have a HCB->F+HS super, the dust button acts a standard button for throw, sweep, overhead and launcher attacks, etc. Combo damage is stronger, so you don’t need to be able to do super long combo strings to be able to do significant damage.

One thing I was disappointed with is that the game doesn’t have Instant Kills, which have been a staple of the series since the first game. They’re not very useful competitively, but when playing casually with friends on a single monitor it’s always been fun to try to pull them off (especially when you’re losing!) I hope they get added back at some point.

I’m still not particularly good at the game. In the video above, Max says everyone on ranked floor 5 and below is a casual, and I seem to be waffling between floors 5 and 6 constantly, so I’d say I’m mostly a casual who sometimes glimpses something more lol.

The importang thing of course is that I am having a bunch of fun. It’s quite easy to find matches, and the netcode is pretty good. I live in a third-world country still and even with fiber broadband online gaming can get spotty, but my network experience has been relatively good. I’ve only been playing Ky and Potemkin online, so I still have a bunch of characters to study and learn and such, but I expect to be playing this game for a good long time to come.

Anyway, here’s a video of me being Ky:

Related: Fighting games

Weeknotes 2021-06-27

hello@roytang.net (Roy Tang) — Sun, 27 Jun 2021 05:01:29 +0000

It’s almost July, which means 2021 is just about halfway done, and yet here we still are in pandemic mode.

A quote

“Each year that passes rings you inwardly with memory and might. Wield your heart, and the world will tremble.” - Doran the Siege Tower

The world:

Last Thursday, former PH President Noynoy Aquino III passed away quietly. This led to the usual condolences and accolades from across the political spectrum, although many noted the delay in the palace issuing a statement (I suspect it was because the current president was still asleep). Many of his friends and supporters came out with stories of his time in office, many portraying him as misunderstood, uncharismatic, and quiet; holding his emotions close to his chest, but devoted to the job. My favorite entry is this post by his former speechwriter. His legacy was tainted by several problems and a lot of black propaganda near the tail end of his term, leading many online to preface their accolades with phrases like “He wasn’t perfect, but…”, perhaps to avoid being tagged with the divisive “Dilawan” label or to avoid being targetted by the hordes of online trolls. This is silly; no one is perfect, so such a preface is unnecessary. All presidents have their pros and cons, their accomplishments and faults, but Noynoy was unquestionably better overall than his murderous successor, and arguably over his probably corrupt predecessor as well. I didn’t vote for him in 2010, and I had my fair share of criticisms especially over his transport policies, but the man deserved better. (Maybe the political opponents are worried about prophecy?)
Hong Kong’s pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily prints its final issue after arrests and funds frozen from a government crackdown due to “national security” issues, furthur cementing China’s control over their wayward territory and taking away HK’s democratic freedoms
YouTube taking down videos documenting Xinjiang human rights violations?
Microsoft announces Windows 11, which includes the ability to run Android apps. It’s a free upgrade from Windows 10, but some PCs might not be able to run it.
Youtube: Conan O’Brien says goodbye to late night

Links of interest:

The demise of amateur content is mostly giving tips for content marketers (yuk!) but I found it interesting to read about Google’s algorithm updates. It just reinforces my view that chasing SEO is a ridiculous thing to be doing.
How do you know what’s true?: a short video about the Rashomon effect
Chapter 9: Community - this is part of a series on the history of the web and covers some of the early pre-social media online communities: Geocities, Neopets, Wikipedia, Fanfiction.net, etc.
CSS responsive table with fixed column and row headers and scroll snap, no JavaScript! This is amazing if you’re a web dev.
YouTube: FooFighters hold the first in person concert in New York after reopening, to a fully vaccinated audience, with guest Dave Chapelle singing Radiohead’s Creep
Reddit: AITA for calling my SIL a racist after she compared my cooking to “making kung pao chicken”?
Twitter: TIL about Dark Fish
Twitter: Italian fiance on pineapple on pizza. “I cannot continue to live here”

Visit the Links page for more links of interest.

From the archives, this week in history:

2019: MagicFest Seattle, my last big Magic tournament
2017: Quite possibly the best MTG shitpost of all time: The M10 Rules Changes Never Happened
2015: Grand Prix Singapore, my first Modern GP
2008: I bought my first laptop! I still have this laptop somewhere in the house, but the keyboard and battery are pretty unusable already

My stuff:

Still sketching; this week, I really liked my rendition of The Human Torch:

The Human Torch #sketchdaily 174/365 (Click to view full-size)

Watching:
- Movies: Actually managed to watch three movies this week: the just-released-on-Netflix Rurouni Kenshin: The Final (2021), final Moore Bond film A View To A Kill (1985); and the very poorly reviewed Transformers: The Last Knight: 2017.
- I also managed to finish binge-watching the award-winning comedy Schitt’s Creek and also catch up on Boku No Hero Academia season 5. This week’s Loki was still meh for me, I need more exciting MCU stuff! Rick and Morty first episode for the season was ok, but it led to some discussions with friends about how it’s a very mean-spirited show lol.
Gaming:
- Finally finished the main game of Horizon Zero Dawn on PS4! I was thinking of taking a break from the game afterwards, since I’ve been playing it for like 2 months now, but a friend insisted I do the Frozen Wilds DLC (I assume because it’s good?!?) so I might do that and maybe also attempt a Platinum run?
- Still playing Guilty Gear Strive during weeknights and generally being a scrub online. At least I’m using a second character now!
- Regular Saturday group played some Root and Blood Rage this weekend.
- Steam Sale is ongoing right now, but my discipline is holding and no damage so far, though I am considering Hades and some other small games
Reading: Still reading: Linchpin by Seth Godin.
Trivia team got third place in this week’s comedy-themed About Quiz and third place overall for the current season. Could be better!

This coming week:

New Loki, Rick and Morty, etc episodes.
Had a few more family errands and escort missions to do this week, and probably a few more in the weeks to come. Kind of disruptive to the daily rhythms, but it is what it is.

Schitt's Creek

hello@roytang.net (Roy Tang) — Sat, 26 Jun 2021 06:05:37 +0000

“Our lives are like little baby crows carried upon a curious wind and all we can wish, for our families, for those we love, is that that wind would eventually place us on solid ground.” – Moira Rose

I started watching Schitt’s Creek during my last game jam weekend. I decided to try it out mostly because I remembered it getting a lot of buzz for its last season back in 2020 and getting a lot of Emmy Awards for that season. I ended up binge-watching all six seasons of the series in around two weeks.

The accolades are quite well-deserved, as it’s a very good sitcom. The series follows the rich and famous Rose family who lose their fortune to an embezzling business manager. They are left with one asset: a small, backwoods town they once purchased as a joke: the titular Schitt’s Creek. They end up having to stay at a run-down motel in Schitt’s Creek and having to find their way forward in the world after losing everything.

The series starts off with the predictable fish-out-of-water scenarios one would expect, with the Roses initially experiencing friction with the residents of their new home town. Through the course of the series, they eventually learn to adapt to their situation and to get along with the small-town residents.

I think the best thing about the series is that it’s very positive; there is very little malice, drama or conflict among the main cast, and most of their comedic situations are due to things like miscommunications, poor expectations, or plain bad luck. One of their major long-running story arcs is about David, the son of the family David, who is pansexual, meeting and falling in love with another guy and eventually marrying him, and this story arc is executed over four seasons without a hint of homophobia from the other characters (there is a minor plot point where the guy is worried about how his parents will take his coming out, but they face no issues there.) They don’t even really use the “shit” pun in the town name in more than one episode!

It’s one of those shows that’s more absurd situation than absurd comedy. It’s not the ridiculous, laugh-out-loud, greatly memeable kind of show like some of my favorites like Brooklyn Nine Nine or Parks and Recreation and focuses more on the absurd situations the Rose family find themselves in. It’s relatively short (each of the six seasons I have only around 13 episodes) and the run was ended by their choice (and not by a network cancellation or such), so they were able to wrap up most of their story arcs and give each of the characters satisfying endings. (Except maybe Ted. Poor Ted!)

Breaking Prod

hello@roytang.net (Roy Tang) — Wed, 23 Jun 2021 13:18:54 +0000

HBO Max caused a bit of a stir among its subscribers last week when they accidentally sent out an email titled “Integration Test Email #1” to some large number of their subscribers, which spawned a lot of clever commentary and snarky remarks on Twitter. A few days later HBO Max sent out an apology blaming an unnamed intern for the boo-boo, which spawned a lot of “Dear Intern” tweets with many commiserating with the unnamed intern by sharing their own stories of mishaps from their younger days.

There was also a thread of other developers and their stories of how they broke production too. One of my favorite stories has to be from Patrick McKenzie about his worst production bug while he was the one-man engineering team for his startup.

There’s a bit of an adage among programmers on the internet: There are two kinds of developers. Those who have broken production and those who are about to.

In my long career, I’ve either been lucky enough to have never caused any big production issues (either that or I’ve blocked out their memory somehow.) Part of it was probably because when I was a junior developer they almost never gave me access to production (like a sensible company!) Not to mention there’s always been several layers of reviews, testing and QA between me and production. And by the time I was senior enough to be handling production myself, I knew enough to be super careful with everything. Not that I didn’t work with production problems of course, I was just lucky enough to never be the direct cause of them myself. I think. But if the adage above is in any way true, should I be worried that eventually the law of averages will catch up to me, and maybe I should quite while I’m ahead?

Rurouni Kenshin: The Final

hello@roytang.net (Roy Tang) — Mon, 21 Jun 2021 15:26:52 +0000

Earlier today I watched Rurouni Kenshin: The Final (2021), now out on Netflix (PH, not sure about elsewhere). I don’t normally do full blog posts for movies anymore, but I’m a big Rurouni Kenshin fan, and I didn’t have much commentary on record for the first three live action films, so I figured I would write some words mostly about this new film, but maybe also a bit about the first three as well. The film is based on a manga story arc from more than 20 years ago, so I’m not really going to be avoiding spoilers here.

So this film covers the Revenge / Jinchuu arc, the third and final arc of the Rurouni Kenshin manga, most of which was never adapted to anime. This kind of works in the film’s favor, as I don’t have any anime to compare it to.

I was a bit disappointed in the original trilogy’s handling of the fight scenes, since in my head I was comparing them to the epic anime battles, which is silly since an anime series and a live-action film are fundamentally different media, and some things simply wouldn’t translate well. Like, in the manga and anime, Kenshin’s learning the succession art of the Hiten Mitsurugi school and later using it to overcome Shishio was a big plot point, but was completely glossed over in the films. (And in the revenge arc, it’s also a plot point that Enishi is able to defeat that same succession art.) I guess I’m more forgiving these days of not strictly adhering to the source material (countless comic book movies will do that I guess), so I’m learning more to enjoy them as swashbuckling samurai adventures rather than only as anime adaptations.

The thing about the Jinchuu arc is that it was quite long, so I wasn’t sure how they were going to fit it all in a single movie, even taking liberties with the plot points. I found out before that they had actually made two new films, with The Final only being the first, so I kind of assumed this one would end with a cliffhanger, assuming they follow the general plot of the manga. Well, it turns out that while the first half of the film largely follows the plot of the manga arc and the first part of Enishi’s revenge plan, they scrapped the second half of the manga arc in favor of an all-out battle / assault for the film’s final act, pulling in appearances from characters that never appeared in the manga arc (some of them obviously appearing as fan service!).

While this divergence from the manga is fine and understandable given the limitations of the medium, it does significantly weaken the impact of Enishi’s revenge plan; early on in the film he states that death is insufficient for Kenshin to atone, but in the third arc he just ends up attempting to kill him or to get him to kill himself. The manga arc had a stronger punishment for Kenshin in the form of faking Kaoru’s death, sending Kenshin into a downward spiral that takes him a while to recover from, a character arc that speaks more strongly towards the series’ general message of atonement and redemption.

I’m also disappointed because cutting out the second half of the revenge arc means we never get to see Yahiko in a one-on-one battle against one of Enishi’s minions. That was one of the most memorable parts of the manga arc for me because it represented a big growth in strength and capability for Yahiko to be able to hold his own using Kamiya Kasshin techniques. But again, I guess that’s not a thing that would have translated well to the big screen.

There’s an English rock / R&B track that plays over the end credits, it’s Renegades by One OK Rock. It felt slightly jarring and out of place since I watched the film with Japanese voices and English dubs, but I’m told even the first trilogy had English tracks over the end credits.

After finishing the movie, I wondered what the fifth film would actually be about, and it turns out it’s actually going to expand more on the Tomoe / Kenshin backstory that was only covered briefly in this film. While that would be a reasonable way to split up the revenge arc into two movies, it feels like it would have made more sense to release the prequel film first (and more appropriate since it’s titled The Beginning), especially since this film already covers the major plot points that they would show in the prequel. Still as a big series fan (despite the author becoming controversial later on), I’m looking forward to the prequel’s eventual release on Netflix; we’ll see what surprises await us there.

Weeknotes 2021-06-20

hello@roytang.net (Roy Tang) — Sun, 20 Jun 2021 09:53:52 +0000

Today is father’s day. If you’re lucky enough to have a good father in your life, be sure to show your appreciation. Today’s weeknotes are shorter than usual for some reason.

A quote

“My goal is to build a life I don’t need a vacation from.” - Rob Hill Sr.

The world:

The International Criminal Court is proceeding with a probe into Duterte’s drug war. The admin is all like “ha ha we don’t care, you have no basis, we won’t cooperate, etc etc”, but despite the posturing, it kind of feels like they’re a bit scared.
On the pandemic front, NCR is now on GCQ “with less restrictions” mode or whatever it is they’re calling it this week. NCR cases are going down (but still a lot), but cases in Visayas and Mindanao are on the rise. Davao in particular is a hotspot, and coincidentally, it looks the bulk of what little Pfizer we had is going there too. Luckily, just today the government announced they’ve sealed a deal for 40M more Pfizer doses; hopefully they arrive in a timely manner as that should greatly help with vaccine hesitancy.
In comic book news, Batman got into a bit of controversy this week when DC apparently claims there are certain things he just can’t do. Zack Snyder tried to get in on the fun but nobody knows where he got that image.

Links of interest:

I don’t have anything for this section today. Visit the Links page for older links of interest.

From the archives, this week in history:

2015: Took my first Uber ride
2013: Man of Steel
2011: Jace the Mindsculptor and Stoneforge Mystic banned in MTG
2005: Batman Begins

My stuff:

Seems like I had a relatively chill / relaxed week, which is good because last week was a bit stressful. I did have a bunch of family errands and escort missions to do, but nothing too major.
Still sketching; this week, I had fun drawing Spider-man villain Sandman playing around in a sandcastle:

Sand castle #sketchdaily 165/365 (Click to view full-size)

Watching:
- Movies: Only one movie again this week, continuing the James Bond run: Octopussy (1983). Only one more Moore to go! I also wanted to watch Rurouni Kenshin: The Final, which came out on PH Netflix last Friday, but haven’t found the time yet.
- My regular background watching this week was seasons 2 and 3 of Schitt’s Creek, and I’m already halfway through season 4 now.
- This week’s episode of Loki felt a bit meh and mostly setup, but I must admit I am enjoying Owen Wilson’s performance and his back-and-forth with Tom Hiddleston.
Gaming:
- Spent the week clearing up all the pending non-main quest stuff in Horizon Zero Dawn on PS4, including the hunting trials and all the collectibles. I believe only main quest and ancient armory remain. Still have yet to do any Frozen Wilds content though.
- Regular Saturday group played some Root and Blood Rage this weekend.
- Been playing Guilty Gear Strive on a regular basis during weeknights. I’m trying to get through all the missions since GGS is fairly complicated with a lot of systems and mechanics, and the missions are very good as a tutorial. I typically do a few missions per night then play around 9 games online (3 sets vs 3 different opponents). I am not very good at the game, but I am having fun, and I really like how it’s much easier to find matches compared to SFV.
Reading: Still reading: Linchpin by Seth Godin.
Trivia team got second place in this week’s comedy-themed About Quiz.
Got some positive feedback this week on some stuff I’ve done, in a couple of different realms. Positive feedback is always great, tell people if you enjoy their work!

This coming week:

New Loki episode this wednesday!
New Rick and Morty season beings this week
Two quiz nights this coming week!

Life Philosophy: Wandering through life finding interesting things

hello@roytang.net (Roy Tang) — Sat, 19 Jun 2021 03:57:04 +0000

Tagging this “life philosophy” because I think people should have a declared life philosophy and it’s something that should be reviewed and possibly revised on a regular basis so the tag will help me look back on this further down the line.

Anyway, TLDR the new declared life philosophy is based on a tweet I retweeted a while back. So the new life philosophy is:

I just want to wander through life finding interesting things

(Cutting out the “until you die” part because I don’t plan to die. Somehow.)

Having a defined life philosophy is helpful because then you can evaluate any problematic situation that comes your way against that philosophy, and if it’s not something that aligns, you can drop it and move on without guilt.

Some history: When I was younger (like college / early working years), I was all into the purpose / grand ambition part. I was ambitious, or it might be more accurate to say I had delusions of grandeur. I would often visualize myself doing some great things, whether that was something like writing a great novel, creating some superviral software platform, making the next great game franchise, winning the Magic pro tour or such. The problem was all of this ambition never came up with the discipline or hard work that would have been necessary for the accomplishment. A man’s reach exceeds his grasp, et cetera.

As I grew older, I found myself engulfed in the drudgery of everyday working life, and focus shifted from ambition to just getting by in the day to day treadmill. When I got tired of feeding the capitalist machine, I formed the first version of this life philosophy, informally, in my head: “From now on, I will only do things that I want to do." (I violated that fairly quickly!)

And now I feel like I’m in a stage in my life where I don’t feel strongly enough about any one thing that I think it’s a good time to formally declare this as a life philosophy. Basically I’m in an exploratory, “try things out and see where they go” mode. An example of this in practice is how I’ve been doing game jams recently, and while getting into gamedev has been a longtime dream of mine, I hold no long-term ambitions about it. Maybe something comes out it, maybe not, but no matter what I’ll just enjoy the game jams as they happen.

This kind of feels like abdicating responsibility in some way, as if I’m turning my back on an obligation to the world to be the best that I can be, but I’m just past the age where I want to worry about that kind of thing. I just want to enjoy life, be entertained, be challenged, and not have to worrry too much about where that trajectory takes me.

(I recognize that this is absolutely a form of privilege that I have, that I can afford to just explore and try out different things and not worry too much about surivival, that’s not a path everyone can take. If this path is open to you, I suggest taking it if you can.)

Deleting Old Content

hello@roytang.net (Roy Tang) — Thu, 17 Jun 2021 14:52:03 +0000

Kev Quirk writes about why he deletes old content:

This blog is intended to provide a semi-permanent, point in time snapshot of the various thoughts running around my brain. As such, any thoughts and opinions expressed within my previous posts may not be the same, or even similar, to those I may hold today.

I like keeping around my content for a similar reason as above: they may reflect thoughts or opinions that are not the same as those I hold today. They reflect a past version of me and my thoughts and I like that past me lives on in some way on this site, even if present-day me may already be a different person. I make sure that every post on this

I feel exactly the same about my Twitter and Fosstodon accounts. Everything I Tweet/Toot on those platform is an ephemeral thought that’s popped into my brain. So in 6 months time, they’re very unlikely to be relevant or useful.

That being said, I can appreciate the above thought, since I’m sure I’ve tweeted a lot of nonsense over the years that’s not really useful to retain. During the recent weeks, I’ve started slowly going through the old Twitter posts archived here on this site and deleting some old stuff that for sure I have no interest in retaining. Examples of what I’m deleting: tweets for joining giveaways, tweets promoting sales, test tweets, etc. Basically anything not related to something I was actually doing or a thought or opinion I’m expressing.

Related: Ephemeral.

GMTK Game Jam 2021: Manananggal

hello@roytang.net (Roy Tang) — Tue, 15 Jun 2021 16:30:14 +0000

The jam

A thing I did last weekend was to participate in the 2021 GMTK Game Jam. This is my second game jam, after my Ludum Dare 48 entry back in April. I was a lot more anxious about this one, especially after rewatching the video of the winners from the last year.

This post is mostly about how the game jam unfolded for me. If you just want to view the game I made here’s the link.

The theme for the jam was “JOINED TOGETHER”. The theme was announced 2am Saturday my time here, but I had stuff to do up to lunch time so I couldn’t start on any actual jam work until after then. I did spend try to brainstorm game ideas before then, but I really struggled with this theme.

I went through some number of ideas, though many of them were variants of “tandem side-scrolling platformer where you have to bring two characters to the end”, but most of them felt pretty meh theme-wise. I also thought about things like, a guy with a ball and chain that limited his movements, but I didn’t think I knew enough about Godot physics to implement the linked bodies correctly.

I finally decided to do a game based on the local Manananggal myth, since the whole detaching half of the body and rejoining fit the theme really well. I was imagining a puzzle platformer, but I was worried that mechanically I might not have enough for anything more than a couple of levels. I had a few ideas, but I was pretty sure I wouldn’t have something close the 10 levels I had for Diver. The initial discussion from my support group suggested I play into the lore that manananggals ate babies, but I didn’t want to make a baby-eating game!

(Click to view full-size)

The tools

I’m basically using the same tech stack as last time: Godot Engine for the all the coding, Piskel for the pixel art and so on. I also decided to reuse a tileset I got from an online platformer tutorial I was playing around with the previous week (with some modifications). I still had to do the character sprites and animation myself though.

Saturday

Saturday was challenging, since I only had half the day to work with. I used up most of the time just doing spritework and implementing the basic detach / rejoin mechanic, implementing switches and gates. All of this was only good enough for an introductory level by the end of the day so I didn’t feel like I had much progress done, especially compared to my progress with Diver at around the same mark. I was tired so I just went to sleep and hoped for a better Sunday.

One thing that helped me was being on the Discord for the jam, which was super active, and full of a lot of other people also having trouble with ideas and levels and coding. Ludum Dare had posts from the devs on their page, but that was nowhere near as active or interactive as this one. I found myself going through the Discord chat when I felt stressed or tired, reassured by the presence of my fellow game jammers.

Sunday

Managed to start early Sunday. I started out by implementing a simple framework for easily transitioning between stages, which would allow me to easily add stages and change the order (great for debugging!).

Then I needed to do the second stage. I implemented an enemy that I would need, a human villager out on patrol for monsters (which meant more sprite work). Basically adds a stealth component to the game - you could walk past the humans while joined together, but you can’t let them catch you while detached. I also added a Pick Up / Drop mechanic where you can pick up items while flying in detached mode and drop them for different effects. In the second stage I made, one of the obstacles was you needed to drop a rock on a human in order to stun and get past him.

After the second stage, I worked on the last stage. I had decided early on to have an ending that subverts some elements of the manananggal myth, so I already knew what the last stage needed to be. And that included a bit more sprite work.

At this point, I had around half a day remaining, and I wanted to submit early to avoid any possible rush on itch.io during the submission time, so time was short. Aside from the actual stages, I still had a bunch of polish stuff to do. I originally had an idea for a third stage that involved a new dog enemy that could detect you even while merged. I didn’t have time to do more sprite work though, so I decided to reuse some sprites and movement patterns from Diver to make a challenging spike level instead. (I would later get a lot of complaints about my playtester friends about how difficult the spike level was lol.)

After that, I needed to do all the polish stuff I was planning. Luckily my friend Jaime told me he had time to help me with BGM and SFX, so I asked him to provide some tracks and help me source some sound effects. This freed me up to do things like intro and ending dialogs, splash screen, add decorations and polish to the stages, add key input hints, etc. For the splash screen, same as for Diver, I used up one of my sketchdaily slots to draw the cover art / splash screen art for the game:

Manananggal #sketchdaily 162/365 (Click to view full-size)

Submission and aftermath

I made my submission around 4 hours before the deadline (since I also had other stuff to do). The game is here on itch.io: https://hungryroy.itch.io/manananggal.

In the end, I was happy I was able to finish and submit, despite all my doubts along the way. The game actually ended up more polished than I thought it would, though it is still very short (only 4 playable levels), but that’s fine, as I was practically new to platformers anyway. Most importantly, I learned a lot of things along the way; among them: how to structure stages and transitions in Godot, making objects interact with a linked object, patrolling mobs with ledge/wall detection and sight radius, etc. This game is my documentation of those things I learned, although I’m thinking maybe I should log some of those lessons here on the blog so I have a set of notes online for Godot. We’ll see!

After the submission time, there’s a one week period for the games to be rated. I believe you only need an itch.io account to rate the games, but if you aren’t a participant, you need to rate 25 randomly-selected games before you can rate specific games. You can rate my submission here.

Not that I’m expecting to make the top 20 or even the top 100 mind you, as the game is very short and I feel very basic. My explanations are low and really I should just be satisfied with having finished. I have already received some encouraging comments on itch.io though, so that’s a nice boost.

I actually haven’t touched the game itself or looked at the code or anything like that since submitting. All I’ve done was look at comments and get some feedback from friends. At that point I had played through it so many times I was kind of sick of it, so I stayed away from it since then. I really should rate some games though, just as a way to give back to the community. I’ll try to get some reviews and ratings and comments in over the week.

This makes 2 out of 2 game jams where I’ve successfully been able to finish and submit. The discussions on the Discord chat seem to be implying it’s not uncommon to fail to complete your game. I will happily take this as a testament to my ability to manage scope and keep it small. Although, it might also be an indication of playing it safe and not being willing to push the envelope - I might consider to be more aggressive in future jams.

OTOH, I’m a lot older than many of the participants, so I need a lot more sleep. Some of them were talking about working on their submission for like 20-30 hours straight, and I’m like I can’t even sit in my chair for more than two hours without needing to lie down for an hour afterwards. So I gotta work smarter to keep up with the young’uns.

For future jams, I’ll probably also try to do some other genres instead of side-scrollers which I did for the first 2 jams. Maybe some kind of shooter thingy? Or a match 3? Or maybe I’ll study how to do some of the ideas I passed over this time? We’ll see! Looking forward to doing more game jams! I think the major one is the next Ludum Dare in October, though I’ll also be looking out for other game jam opportunities before then.

[2021-06-23] The GMTK game jam results are out; my Manananggal game ended up ranked 717 overall out of 5800+ entries. Looks like my programmer art pulled me down in the presentation criteria lol

Weeknotes 2021-06-13

hello@roytang.net (Roy Tang) — Mon, 14 Jun 2021 04:28:16 +0000

These weeknotes are being published a day late, for reasons that will be discussed later.

A quote

“The price of being a sheep is boredom. The price of being a wolf is loneliness. Choose one or the other with great care.” - Hugh MacLeod

The world:

Early last week, a slew of big websites went offline due to some problems at a CDN, which is some kind of testament to the problems with centralization, but my favorite part of that story was that tech news site The Verge did their reporting from a Google doc during the outage but they accidentally tweeted the edit link instead so for a short while everyone was reporting for them.
Kim Jong-Un called K-Pop a “vicious cancer”. Not saying I agree or disagree (hey, let K-Pop fans have their fun!), but it would be so amusing if K-Pop really does bring down the North Korean regime.
Apple is introducing a new “privacy relay” feature which for some reason related to regulations they can’t apply to the Philippines
a local newborn was named HTML, as in HyperText Markup Language. This got some people digging out that time there was one family named Macaroni 85, Spaghetti 88 and Sincerely Yours 98.
Last Saturday was Philippine Independence Day. On the same day, opposition coalition 1Sambayan nominated 6 people to run for president or vice president in the elections next year. Many have expressed misgivings about some of their choices. While I think it’s way too early for this kind of positioning, I think I would seriously consider any of these people should they decide to run, except for Villanueva lol.

Links of interest:

Chris Coyier writes 40 for 40
Camille Fournier writes An incomplete list of skills senior engineers need, beyond coding (Trigger Warning: Medium)
Paul Graham writes about intrinsic motiviation in A Project Of One’s Own
How Tom’s Diner Tuned the MP3
The Shortcut. I can’t explain it, but it’s strangely mesmerizing and eventually satisfying.
Youtube: First teaser trailer for Kevin Smith’s Masters of the Universe reboot

Visit the Links page for more links of interest.

From the archives, this week in history:

2019: We went to Disneyland!. This was the last time I was out of the country.
2018: We went to Kuala Lumpur to play in an RPTQ!
2017: I finished Persona 5! Wow, it’s already 4 years ago. I haven’t played Royal yet.
2014: I got an Instagram account because someone else used my email to sign up
2010: I scrubbed out of Grand Prix Manila 2010. Apparently this is the one Grand Prix I didn’t have a blog post for.
2009: Magic introduces the M10 rules changes, damage no longer uses the stack!

My stuff:

Okay, so the reason this post is delayed is because I did another game jam this weekend and only made the submission around 10pm last night so that kind of used up most of my weekend time. I’ll do a separate post about the game jam sometime this week!
Still sketching, though I had to skip the past two days because of the game jam thingy, so I’m behind again, which isn’t unusual. I did use up the free draw friday slot to draw the splash screen art for the game jam entry:

Manananggal #sketchdaily 162/365 (Click to view full-size)

Watching:
- Movies: Managed another James Bond film this week: For Your Eyes Only (1981). I think we’re only a couple of films away from the end of Moore’s tenure, then it’s two Daltons, and finally the modern era (i.e. the ones where I actually caught some of them on film) of Pierce Brosnan
- For my background watching during the game jam weekend, I watched the first season of Schitt’s Creek, which I’ve heard good things about. The first season was ok, so I went ahead and queued up the next two season too.
- Last Wednesday was the first episode of Loki! I enjoy this slow drip of MCU content, and the Timekeepers/TVA add a new aspect to the MCU’s universe/multiverse. One can’t help but think the multiversal status quo will be upset at the end of this series though, especially given some of the rumors about future films.
- Last week I shared a video of Bo Burnham’s “Welcome to the Internet” and this week I decided to watch his special “Inside” on Netflix, from where the song came from. It’s pretty good, and probably took him forever to do.
Gaming:
- I think I’m close to the end game in the main quest of Horizon Zero Dawn on PS4, but I’m spending some time cleaning up quests and collecting collectibles and such. Still playing Root with the regular Saturday group.
- Last Friday I went ahead and purchased Guilty Gear Strive on Steam. Was only able to play a few games online before I had to do the game jam stuff, but at least I managed to win my first ranked match! I’m hoping to have this replace the daily Street Fighter games I used to do, except hopefully it’s much easier to find matches since it’s a new release. And of course, I’m hoping I actually get good at it.
Reading: I started reading Linchpin by Seth Godin which is a book from like 2008, and I’ve had a copy of it since forever.
Trivia team only got sixth place in last weekend’s About Quiz, because we always do poorly when it’s horror themed.

This coming week:

New Loki episode this wednesday!
It’s E3 this past weekend and this week, I think, so there should be a lot of gaming news. Although given my massive gaming backlogs, I’m not often excited by new game announcements.

Weeknotes 2021-06-06 Anything and Everything All Of The Time

hello@roytang.net (Roy Tang) — Sun, 06 Jun 2021 06:15:30 +0000

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:

The Orb #sketchdaily for May 29 (I am so behind) 148/365 (Correction: 149/365) (Click to view full-size)

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!

Book Review: And Then There Were None by Agatha Chrstie

hello@roytang.net (Roy Tang) — Thu, 03 Jun 2021 17:41:03 +0000

After reading a couple of Hercule Poirot mysteries, I decided to try an Agatha Christie book from outside that series. I found that And Then There Were None was one of those commonly appearing on lists of her best works, and the concept intrigued me: Ten people are invited to an island and get trapped there and then murders start to happen.

Kind of hard to talk about it without spoiling too much (and what I’ve said might already have been spoilers!).

It’s one of those things where the whole setup seems super contrived and way too clever for it to ever happen in real life, but the explanation / solution at the end mostly works out and actually makes sense. It was maybe something you could have predicted if you had paid attention to all the little details about the people and their personalities and the actual deaths.

It’s not a long book. I finished the book in 4 sittings, with the last sitting covering the last half of the book; this is a typical speed for me once a book really gets going, I’ll have a hard time putting it down until I’m done.

I’m enjoying these mysteries, and I find that it’s a bit weird that I haven’t really read these kinds of mystery novels before. I’ve read stuff when I was younger like the Encyclopedia Brown stuff where you’re challenged to solve the mystery, etc, but no real mystery novels like this I think. I guess I’ve kind of expanded my reading horizons now? That’s a good thing!

Weeknotes 2021-05-30

hello@roytang.net (Roy Tang) — Sun, 30 May 2021 04:17:39 +0000

June is almost upon us, hopefully bringing some respite from the scorching summer heat.

This year feels like it’s passing by very quickly.

A quote

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. – Martha Graham, quoted by Agnes DeMille

The world:

Belarus earned the ire of non-authoritarian states anywhere when they diverted a plane to arrest an opposition journalist. Belarus is ruled by president Lukashenko, who has held the office since it was created in 1994 (!), and critics have said he is turning Belarus into the North Korea of Europe. My only experience with Belarus before was that I used to work with a company that had a remote dev team in Minsk, during which I was surprised by how third-world their consulting rates were, compared to the rest of Europe. Now that I know they’re ruled by a tin-pot dictator, I’m no longer surprised.
Tech: Google is going to remove unlimited photo storage by June 1. After reading this, I decided to also clean up some large files from my Google Drive, since the disk quota is now going to be shared across Photos, Drive and GMail.
I don’t have any covid19 updates today. Cases are starting to tick up again though now that restrictions have been loosened.

Links of interest:

Ursula K. LeGuin rants about technology
Pretty sure already read this when it came out last year, but I don’t think I’ve shared it yet: The Guardian article about quizzing subculture
99 bits of unsolicited advice
Blake Emal has compiled a thread of women to follow on Twitter. A lot of these seem to be marketing people, which isn’t really my cup of tea, but I’ll go through the list when I have time, maybe there’ll be some nice surprises.
Native English speakers are the world’s worst communicators.

From the archives, this week in history:

2017: Donald Trump plays with a weird orb
2013: Overly sensitive PH officials call out Dan Brown for calling Manila ‘gates of hell’
2012: Philippine Chief Justice Corona impeached
2011: Modern format introduced to MTG
2010: I started using DuckDuckGo!
2006: X-Men III: The Last Stand
2005: Revenge of the Sith

My stuff:

The DIY fix for my fitbit strap didn’t even last an entire week! I ordered a new one as soon as it broke last Friday. The package arrived today! And… I accidentally ordered a small size when I needed a large lol. I can still use it by pairing with the unbroken half of my old strap, but still, pretty dumb of me. =/
Still sketching, although I’m starting to have trouble keeping up, I was a couple of days behind for most of the week yesterday. I liked this one I did of a kid on a giant chessboard, but playing around with the perspective guide on Procreate really made the final sketch weird:

May 23, 2021 #sketchdaily 142/365 (Correction: 143/365) (Click to view full-size)

Watching:
- Movies: None this week sadly. Need to watch more movies this coming week.
Gaming:
- Still playing a bunch of Horizon Zero Dawn on PS4 (probably only halfway through the main game content) and Root with the regular Saturday group.
- Been losing a bunch on Street Fighter V so I’m taking a break. Been thinking of getting into a different fighting game, preferably one with a more active playerbase so I don’t have to spend an hour trying to find more than one opponent. Coincidentally, Guilty Gear Strive comes out in June! We’ll see.
Reading: I finished a couple of Hercule Poirot books recently. Not yet sure what I’m reading next.
If you’re following my twitter triviabot, I’m planning to reset the scores and start a new season at the end of month (i.e. tomorrow)

This coming week:

my parents are getting their second vaccine dose this week!

Edit: Oops, originally published this post with some links pointing to localhost. Maybe I should have some post-processing to automatically remove those!

Book Reviews: Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile by Agatha Chrstie

hello@roytang.net (Roy Tang) — Wed, 26 May 2021 07:39:47 +0000

I’ve not read any Agatha Chrstie, so I thought I’d rectify that by getting into the Hercule Poirot series of books. To start off I chose Murder on the Orient Express because I watched the 2017 movie a couple of years ago and Death on the Nile because it has a movie coming out next year. I figure it would be a good contrast of movie-first vs book first.

Took me a bit under a week of leisurely reading to finish Murder on the Orient Express. I wasn’t in a rush since I already knew how the mystery turns out. The book wasn’t very long, but it was very well structured. A couple of chapters of setup before the crime itself happened, then a chapter each for Poirot to interrogate each of the suspects and then a few more chapters to piece everything together. The book pretty much followed the movie closely, though I think they changed some of the character details for the movie.

Death on the Nile had a much different pace, although it’s about as short as the first one. It feels like the author spent longer on setup, introducing the different characters even before they met Poirot on the trip to the titular Nile. (As opposed to Orient Express where the entire book narrated only scenes where Poirot was present.) I finished the book in three days; the last day I binged through the last 2/3 of the book once the crime finally happened. It helped that I didn’t know the eventual solution (though I had a hunch on who the culprit(s) might be, and the hunch eventually turned out correct), so I was eager to get to the end. I feel like this book gave a better preview of Poriot’s investigative abilities.

I find myself enjoying the author’s writing; the books aren’t overly long, and each chapter is usually straightforward, with scenes depicting things that are either red herrings or eventually leading up to the final mystery solution. The books seem like light, leisurely reading, unlike the sci-fi / fantasy epics I’m used to. The best comparison I have is to the Hardy Boys series although this series is of course way less juvenile. I can easily send myself reading through a few more of these Poirot books throughout the year. (I didn’t follow any recommended reading order, but the books are largely self-contained anyway… though I know Nile happens after Orient Express because Poirot references the prior case.) I should also probably try out some of the author’s non-Poirot books as well.

Anticipation and Anxiety

hello@roytang.net (Roy Tang) — Tue, 25 May 2021 04:09:39 +0000

Peter Rukavina quotes the New York Tribune about how Anticipation is the real thief of joy (as opposed to comparison):

Anticipation is, in truth, the real thief of joy. The best times are always the unexpected ones. It is not the parties that you plan for weeks and look forward to that come off. There must be surprise and novelty and freshness to yield the last word in happiness and thrill. That we had on Thursday afternoon. The real thrill has passed, never to return.

While the piece is a musing on the pleasures of serendipity and random wandering, I’m reminded instead of anticipation’s opposite, something I feel often as well: anxiety. Whereas anticipation is looking to the future awaiting something you are excited to happen, anxiety is looking to the future awaiting something you dread. And it robs you of joy as well, albeit in a different manner, consuming you with worry. The phrase “real thief of joy” implies that there can only be one such thief, but truthfully, there can be many, and among them, comparison, anticipation, and anxiety are probably the worst offenders.

It is of course human nature, and often prudent to look to the future, but it is best not to let either anticipation or anxiety overwhelm us. One should always remember to live in the present and not let the future overshadow what we have right in front of us.

Thoughts on Vue.js

hello@roytang.net (Roy Tang) — Sun, 23 May 2021 23:27:00 +0000

I’m not big on modern frontend JavaScript frameworks (mostly because I think web pages should use as little JS as possible), but when I do find the need to use one, my weapon of choice is Vue.js. I dislike React, but mostly because (a) my first experience with React was with mobile development using React Native for mobile app development, which I generally don’t like; and (b) I don’t like Facebook, which backs React. I have no opinion on Angular.

Despite being my frontend framework of choice, I don’t actually have that much experience with Vue beyond a few small projects each with a minimal number of screens / pages. That being said, I do have some thoughts, coming mostly from the POV of a developer more used to the old-school ways of Javascript and web development in general.

The entry point of course, is the getting started guide on the Vue website itself, which walks you through most of the framework features. I have no concern about most of these; the features are explained well and I find most of the documentation quite good.

My issue is with how the site recommends to beginners to set up their Vue projects: via a script include from a CDN. When I first saw this guide, I assumed this was the standard, recommended way to build a Vue project, so this was how I did it for my first small project, a small demo site I needed to produce in a few days. Due to the short timeframe, I had decided to learn as I go. The component registration section of the guide also gives no guidance or recommendation on how to structure your components or projects, so I ended up with most of the components set up in a single JS file. (Admittedly, as a person with more than a decade of web dev experience, I should have at least split it up into several files, but time was short.) A technical person reviewing the code commented that I had implemented the frontend “in a very strange manner”.

It gets worse when you try to install third-party components, which is a big feature of the ecosystem of these frontend frameworks. In my experience, most third-party components will only give instructions for installation via npm and a JS module system, neither of which are covered nor recommended by the beginner sections of the guide.

A few projects later, and I now know that I vastly prefer developing Vue projects as Node projects built using the scaffolding provided by Vue CLI, with the components implemented as standalone .vue files. The usage of these tools and methods are covered in the Installation section of the guide (which the “Get Started” link skips over) and the Single File Components section under the Tooling section (which seemed like an advanced section a beginner is not likely to get into.) This method also makes installing third-party components much more straightforward. It’s not even necessary to cover what tools like Webpack or Babel are doing, since those are largely abstracted away by the scaffolding.

Basically my main complaint is that the guide doesn’t do a good job of transitioning from the introducing the beginner to the language specifics to introducing a recommended approach and tools for organizing more intermediate or complex projects. The method of using a script include seems suitable for little more than a single-page todo list webapp. I suppose the perceived shortcoming might be attributed to my background at least partially - I still tend to think like a developer using jQuery, and I don’t default to thinking about Node applications when doing webapps.

That being said, I am overall happy with Vue.js and it’s still my choice of frontend framework moving forward (should a frontend framework even be needed!) Although, maybe I should at least consider trying out / evaluating Angular so I can pretend to make a fair comparison?

Weeknotes 2021-05-23

hello@roytang.net (Roy Tang) — Sun, 23 May 2021 04:53:08 +0000

It’s the last week of May (more or less), and I’m mostly looking forward to a new month because I’m tired of ridiculous summer heat and I’m hoping the sun tones it down a bit in June. The one aircon we have in the house has been busted all summer, so we have been suffering through the heat and surviving mostly through stacking multiple fans and also an excessive number of showers.

A quote

“We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” ― Joseph Campbell #

The world:

Israel finally agreed to a ceasefire in the Gaza strip. Shortly afterwards, the Israeli police stormed the Al-Aqsa mosque, claiming “there were riots”.” Hamas claimed victory. As an example of how the pro-Israeli slant towards these issues is starting to shift, John Oliver condemned the Israeli attacks. All in all, still a very complicated situation; if you’re interested in further reading, Andy Baio put together a list of stuff to read on the topic. One can only hope the ceasefire holds.
Local pandemic stuff: After people mobbed a vaccination site distributing Pfizer jabs, the DOH declared that LGUs should not announce ahead of time the brand of vaccine to be used at vax sites, a directive that is problematic at best. Not everyone can get every vaccine, and this seems like it would just waste people’s time if they go to a site only to find out what’s there won’t work for them. I understand trying to reduce vaccine hesitancy, but that can be solved by more transparency and explanations of efficacy and vaccine safety, not less. I did get sinovac myself, but I do understand the sentiment of prefering the Western brands due to the supposed higher efficacy and effectiveness in preventing transmission. Personally, I just want as many people as possible to get vaccinated, using any brands that are available.
The vaccination drive (and overall pandemic response) still feels pretty tepid, but at least the vaccination rate is starting to tick up. Actually hitting the wall of vaccine hesitancy might be a good problem to have soon.
This weekend was Eurovision, something I don’t really “get”, but it got me thinking: why don’t we have some kind of Asian equivalent, an “Asia-vision” if you will. I suspect the authoritarian states won’t like it though, as the venue might be used to publicize their nefarious deeds.

Links of interest:

Baldur Bjarnason writes about the open source and blogging bubbles.
Meg Elison writes about being poor in tech. I can’t personally relate, but it’s a stark reminder that not everyone we work with is as privileged as we are.
Fascinating story about a late 80s extortionist criminal who went by the name “Dagobert”, named after the German name of Scrooge McDuck.
Alan Ralph writes about Google getting back into RSS
Patrick McCormick writes about The Great Online Game. Not a new discovery. After all, online is just a new minigame in the overall game of life.
Making the rounds on Twitter this week: The Linda Lindas, a band of young girls, performs “Racist, Sexist Boy” (in a library of some kind). Here’s the whole set.
Was recently reminded of this story from a couple of months back: A new hire joined a software company, fix a bug that’s been bugging him from before the job, then promptly filed his two week’s notice. There is a bit of romantic adventurism here, as I imagine retiring to become a legendary wandering software developer, travelling from company to company, smiting bugs and vanishing just as quickly.
Netflix released the official trailer for Trese, an upcmong anime based on a Filipino comic. I’m not particularly looking forward to it and I haven’t read the source material, but a lot of my friends are hyped about it.
Were microwaves invented to heat hamsters humanely in the 1950s? by Tom Scott

From the archives, this week in history:

2020: The miracle sudoku
2019: The Big Bang Theory and Game of Thrones series finales
2016: Duterte elected as PH president
2009: MTG: I played Finest Hour to the top 8 of PH Regionals, probably one of my all-time favorite decks
2005: I was first diagnosed as hypertensive

My stuff:

My Fitbit strap broke off yesterday morning. I immediately ordered a new one on Lazada before thinking “wait, I’ve only had this one for around half a year, that seems ridiculous”. So I cancelled the order, and instead asked someone to help me apply a DIY fix. (I couldn’t do it myself due to poor manual dexterity.)
Speaking of Fitbit, now that I’m fully vaccinated and the NCR case rates are going down again, I’ve resumed taking at least some of my walks outside our subdivision.
Still sketching, once again falling behind on the weekends. Briefly considered just breaking the streak and living with it, but no! The 365 counter is a commitment to doing at least a year of these! As today’s sample, here’s Batman getting vaccinated:

Vaccination #sketchdaily 135/365 (Correction: 136/365) (Click to view full-size)

Watching:
- Movies: This week I watched The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and Mortal Kombat (2021). My James Bond run is now officially crossing over into the “movies released after I born” territory. I’m hoping I can somehow get through the rest of them before the latest one (No Time To Die) comes out.
Gaming:
- Still playing a bunch of Horizon Zero Dawn on PS4 and Street Fighter V on Steam and Root with the regular Saturday group.
- Still looking for a single-player game to play and stream on twitch when Arena limited is off season, so that I’m not only doing Arena streams for a while.
Reading: I finished What Matters Now, compiled by Seth Godin, a quick and easy read. After that, I decided to delve into some Agatha Christie.
Had quiz night last night, but we didn’t do particularly well, about the same as the previous week. There is another online quiz night announced and scheduled for next week, by a different group, with topics that we like, but we are hesitant because they have an increased entry fee which is supposed to contribute to a prize pool. Doing online trivia for charity or just for fun has been okay, but I’m not really comfortable competing for cash prizes, given that it’s all done online and it’s not easy to police whether the participants are googling or have a whole army sitting behind them or such. That’s also true even if there weren’t a prize, but having the prize just gives a lot more incentive for it.
Speaking of trivia for fun, this past week I migrated the triviastorm site back-end code in order to merge it with this site’s backend. The motivation for this was to resolve some memory issues on my cheap DigitalOcean droplet; basically running two Django instances meant I was using twice as much memory as necessary. After merging the backends, I replaced the front end of the triviastorm site with a new VueJS-based static site. I’ve been meaning to write a blog post about VueJS as well, and dipping my toes into it again helped me solidify some thoughts, will probably do sometimes this coming week.

This coming week:

Modern Horizons 2 spoilers (not that I expect to be playing Modern any time soon)

Weeknotes 2021-05-16

hello@roytang.net (Roy Tang) — Sun, 16 May 2021 05:37:30 +0000

A quote

“Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep. And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and the loss is too empty to share.” – Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

The world:

Violence escalated in the Israel-occupied Gaza strip over the past week, as the IDF bombarded Palestinian-occupied civilian areas and buildings (including a building housing the Associated Press and al-Jazeera) supposedly in retaliation for missile strikes from Hamas. I won’t pretend to be knowledgable in the history and complexities of the Israel-Palestine conflicts. We kind of grew up in a world where the international media narrative has almost always had a pro-Israel slant (especially since the US government tends to support them), so our opinions are often biased in that direction. But this time feels different, this time feels like the state of Israel is losing control of the narrative and more and more people are supporting the Palestinians. I would suggest anyone who has grown up exposed to the pro-Israel narrative to start following some sources espousing the POV from the Palestinian/Arab world. I personally follow Rami Ismail, an indie gamedev who happens to be Muslim, his coverage of the current crisis over the past few days has been insightful.
Meanwhile, in the US a gas pipeline fell victim to a ransomware attack, causing people to worry about a gas shortage and apparently start pumping gas into plastic bags. Eh, what?
The US CDC has issued guidance that vaccinated people are no longer required to wear masks indoors, but apparently this relies on some sort of honesty system. Not sure this is going to end well.
Lockdown restrictions are being lowered in the NCR+ bubble, and the powers-that-be have decided to define an entirely new classification level “GCQ with heightened restrictions”. Meanwhile, Singapore and Taiwan are increasing their lockdown levels because they got a few dozen cases. The contrast is stark.

Links of interest:

Cory Doctorow writes about The Memex Method (warning: Medium), basically reflections on 20+ years of blogging and how it has affected his thinking and note taking and such.
- I’m a big of Doctorow as a blogger and have been basically following him since his days at Boing-Boing. It feels like we’ve been blogging for around the same time, but he’s gone a lot further with the practice. I wish I had the energy and capacity he has for the regular, daily blogging and linksharing that he does.
Speaking of Doctorow, I like his recent discussion of how copyright filters lead to wage theft. Excerpt:
- The impossibility of automating copyright judgments didn’t stop Google from trying to perfect its filter, adding layers of complexity until Content ID’s appeal process turned into a cod-legal system whose flowchart looks like a bowl of spaghetti. … The resulting mess firmly favors attackers (wage stealers, fraudsters, censors, bullies) over defenders (creators, critics). Attackers don’t need to waste their time making art, which leaves them with the surplus capacity to master the counterintuitive “legal” framework.
Chris McCormick writes about how a million people saw his dumbest tweet, yet another reflection on withdrawing from social media.
Scott Berkun writes about how Bad CEOs Fear Remote Work, a mindset that will hopefully become rarer as we move towards the pandemic-ushered future.
StumbledUpon used to be a thing, and there’s a new site that kind of aims to be a spiritual successor I guess? I haven’t found anything interesting yet in my few rolls though.
Pottery barn is selling bilaos as “round wall art”

From the archives, this week in history:

2018: Google demoed their new AI assistant Duplex
2017: Neil Gaiman on impostor syndrome
2014: My longtime friend David Ramirez published his first sci-fi novel

My stuff:

I spent most of my afternoon yesterday putting together this One Piece ship model kit I got in Japan back in 2017.
Still sketching, although I am once again behind by a day or so, something that seems to typically happen on the weekend. My favorite sketch this past week may have been this one I did of ramen noodles:

Noodles #sketchdaily 127/365 (Correction: 128/365) (Click to view full-size)

Watching:
- Movies: This week I watched The Man With The Golden Gun (1974) and The Mitchells vs The Machines (2021)
Gaming:
- Still playing a bunch of Horizon Zero Dawn on PS4 and Street Fighter V on Steam. Kind of stuck in a rut with Balrog (Boxer), need to leve up!
- Currently looking for a single-player game to play and stream on twitch when Arena limited is off season, so that I’m not only doing Arena streams for a while.
Had quiz night last night, but we didn’t do particularly well.
Did some more work on the triviastorm back-end code.

This coming week:

Huh, nothing in particular I’m looking forward to this week. Anything I missed?

Saturday Afternoon Activity: Assembling a One Piece ship!

hello@roytang.net (Roy Tang) — Sat, 15 May 2021 06:44:11 +0000

(This was originally a twitter thread, I promoted it to a blog post.)

Gonna attempt this today. I have poor manual dexterity so I expect it to be terrible #onepiece

(Click to view full-size)

Most challenging part for me and my shaky fingers are the tiny tiny stickers. I apologize in advance to anyone offended by my poor sticker application.

(Click to view full-size)

Starting to come together. I’ve already lost one tiny sticker

(Click to view full-size)

I did poorly applying the jolly roger sticker to the sail, and the rear deck is a bit loose, but I guess I can live with those. Low standards!

(Click to view full-size)

I realized I didnt have a place to display it, so I had to clear out a hole. Anyway, it’s done!

(Click to view full-size)

This was Going Merry from the One Piece Grand Ship collection. I actually got this kit waaay back in 2017 from the now-defunct One Piece exhibit at the Tokyo Tower in Japan, took me forever to decide to put it together (because I knew I would be terrible at it lol)

I will admit the actual ship turned out a bit smaller than I thought it would be. And a number of the parts are a bit loose and don’t snap on super tightly, so the final figure can be a bit fragile (one of Merry’s horns fell off while I was positioning it on the shelf!) Might eventually decide to glue some of the pieces in.

Weeknotes 2021-05-09

hello@roytang.net (Roy Tang) — Mon, 10 May 2021 02:24:26 +0000

This post is being published a day late. Things happen okay? Sometimes you get busy and things need to be pushed back.

The world:

like the thug that he is, our dear president claimed that the arbitral award ruling in the PH’s favor was nothing more than a sheet of paper he could easily discard. He also challenged former justice Antonio Carpio to a debate over the West Philippine Sea issue, a challenge the latter quickly accepted. As basically everyone expected, Duterte later chickened out, and offered his spokesman Roque as a distraction, er, proxy for the debate.
debris from a Chinese rocket was expected to crash back into Earth sometime this weekend, but no one could predict when or where. Some of my chat groups remarked that if it hits the PH, we are well and truly cursed. It finally landed in the Indian Ocean yesterday.
Controversial billionaire Elon Musk hosted SNL this weekend and for some reason, this caused Dogecoin to crash.
Bill and Melinda Gates announced they are divorcing. The timing is suspicious.

Links of interest:

In the tech world, enterprise software maker Basecamp got into a bit of brouhaha this past week after a policy announcement of “no politics discussion at work” eventually led to around a third of their workforce choosing to resign. Casey Newton has a great writeup about it. It’s a big disappointment because the founders of Basecamp have always had a reputation of promoting positive workplace practices, including a book titled “It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy At Work”.
From Money Stuff a while back:
- “On the other hand, if you send out those cars to drive themselves everywhere and they all crash and kill a bunch of people, that will be bad! You will be in bad trouble. “It’s better to ask forgiveness than to ask permission,” you will say, but this is not quite right; maybe it is better to announce success and then smugly add “sorry we didn’t tell you first,” but it is strictly worse to fail catastrophically and apologize. If you are going to fail it is better to ask permission, because forgiveness will not be forthcoming. If you are going to succeed, sure, it is better to ask forgiveness. “There’s nothing to forgive, you’re perfect, you little scamp,” everyone will reply.
  
  If you are doing some bold novel thing, you probably do not know, ex ante, if you will succeed or fail. Therefore you do not know, ex ante, if you should ask permission or forgiveness, if you should follow the law or not. But if you are the founder and chief executive officer of a company whose goal is to do some bold novel thing, you have been selected and encouraged precisely for your borderline-crazy optimism and self-confidence. You can’t do impossible things unless you first believe that you can, etc.
  
  If you are certain that you will succeed brilliantly in all your endeavors, then often the optimal strategy will sometimes be to ignore the law, or at least the parts of the law that stand in the way of your vision. Not, like, the objectively optimal strategy, but the strategy that you consider optimal given your subjective certainty that everything will work out for you”
Signal tried to release instagram ads that highlighted how targetted advertising works but their account conveniently got disabled for what Facebook claims was “an unrelated payments issue”.
From a recent Garbage Day, about Spotify’s algorithm:
- We’ve seen how Facebook’s algorithmic recommendation of content, based on an algorithm that’s maximized for engagement, has started to distort reality. It has started to undermine democracy and amplified really harmful ideologies like white supremacy and white nationalism. And you can already kind of start to see this.
  
  Bands have kind of started to figure out like, “oh, all of our songs that sound kind of like this do super well with the Spotify algorithm, let’s just make more songs like that.” And you can’t fault the band for doing that. There’s so few opportunities for bands to make a living from their art at this point. But it terrifies me to think about a future where music is created to please some cold-blooded algorithm. And there’s just like something uniquely gross about that to me, when I think about how music is something that humans have been making for literally 1000s of years. It’s something that’s sacred, and, you know, not to pretend that it hasn’t been commodified in a variety of different ways for decades, or maybe even centuries. But this feels like a new frontier. That type of automated commodification of something that should be about humans and not robots.
Marvel released what is basically a sizzle reel for the MCU’s next 3 years worth of movies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdpxoFcdORI. I’m such a fanboy, I will gleefully admit that I got goosebumps when the video continued past the Shang-chi preview.
Rolling Stone lists the best TV sitcoms of all time. The comments are full of complaints about notable omissions.

My stuff:

I got my second dose of the Sinovac vaccine yesterday! Supposedly it’s fully effective about two weeks after the second dose, although studies show the efficacy is rather low. But some protection is better than none. Some better vaccines are starting to come in, we are supposedly due to get (a small amount of) Pfizer soon. I reckon since I’m hunkered down at home most of the time anyway, I’m okay with the weaker Chinese vaccine and don’t mind if the more effective vaccines go to the masses that have to go out and mingle for work.
Still sketching, although I’m a couple of days behind due to the aforementioned alleged busyness. Should catch up soon.
Watching:
- Movies: Didn’t watch any last week, should correct that soon. I’m not even a third of the way through my James Bond run!
- Nothing too notable, now that Invincible is done and we don’t have any running MCU series at the moment. Well, I did enjoy the recent two-part story on Supergirl where two characters travelled back to the past to meet young Kara and Alex in school. The rest of the season has bit a bit meh, so this was the highlight for me so far. The young versions were so perfectly cast!
Gaming:
- Drafted a bit more Strixhaven on Arena, and finally ran the Sealed Open yesterday!
- Still playing a bunch of Horizon Zero Dawn on PS4 and Street Fighter V on Steam. Hey, I got Balrog (Boxer) to bronze!
- I finally finished the second run of Fire Emblem: Three Houses! There’s one more branch to explore (well, technically two, but I’m not too interested in the other one), but I might put the game aside for a while and find something else to play.
Books: Finished reading Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, still looking around for what to read next.
We didn’t have any quiz nights this week! Instead, I started digging a bit into the triviastorm back-end code and added some improvements I’ve been meaning to do for a while. When I’m done, I hope the answer checking becomes a bit more robust. Will also probably add a new batch of questions to the bot sometime this month.

This coming week:

Huh, nothing in particular I’m looking forward to this week. Anything I missed?

Book Review: Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

hello@roytang.net (Roy Tang) — Tue, 04 May 2021 02:31:24 +0000

I finished reading Snow Crash in around three weeks, slightly faster than the other comparable work I’ve read this year, which was Neuromancer. Comparable of course only in the sense that they both have some kind of worldwide internet-like network as a central plot point. Otherwise, they are not really that similiar, though the review is made easier by having a base for comparison. Snow Crash is much less cyberpunk than Neuromancer, and maybe takes itself a little less seriously too? I mean, the main character’s name is “Hiro Protagonist”, so that ought to tell you something immediately.

Snow Crash was published in 1992, while Neuromancer came out in 1984, so definitely the latter book does take a bit of inspiration from the older one, in terms of cyberspace. The version here in Snow Crash is called “Metaverse”, and it is actually more akin to a shared virtual reality, much like you were plugged in to a MMORPG such as World of Warcraft. Users of the Metaverse even use goggles to participate, something that only became possible in reality during the last 5 years or so. Hiro in this case is one of the premiere hackers of the metaverse, having contributed a lot to the functionality of the virtual world.

This is only the second Stephenson book I’ve read, after Cryptonomicon waaaay back in 2004. I was worried that I would encounter the same issues I had with Cryptonomicon here - the general wordiness and the slow pace. Thankfully, Snow Crash turned out to be faster paced and easier to follow than the other book. The plot moves along at a reasonable clip, and revolves almost exclusively around the actions of Hiro and his partner, the Kourier who calls herself Y.T. (for “Yours Truly”) as they navigate this strange world where the United States has suffered from a severe economic collapse and had to cede parts of California to what are now a bunch of autonomous and sovereign microterritories, many of them belonging to private franchises with colorful names such as “Mr Lee’s Greater Hong Kong” or “The Mafia”.

The core of the plot revolves around linguistics, history, archaeology, computer science, and such (unsurprising given the subject matter of Cryptonomicon). It uses this idea that an ancient civilization was able to use language can be used to propagate a “virus” throughout society by hacking the human brain, in the same way that code can propagate a virus through a computer network. The bad guy in this story is trying to use this concept of a virus derived from an ancient language to control people and create an all-powerful religion with him at the helm.

The book’s title “Snow Crash” is the name of a digital “drug” that the bad guy distributes throughout the Metaverse to target hackers. The drug is actually a digital image of random black and white bits (a bit like what a TV/monitor looks like when it loses a signal in those days, literally a crash that looks like snow) that affects hackers’ brains in a certain way. I guess I shouldn’t spoil any more.

My one complaint would be the ending felt abrupt, although everything was wrapped up neatly, it all happened mostly outside the purview of our protagonists. I do like it more than Cryptonomicon, which was a later book of his (published in 1999). This one felt easier to grok.

Digital Boardgames Review: Root

hello@roytang.net (Roy Tang) — Mon, 03 May 2021 07:19:50 +0000

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. This is my fourth such review, and this time I’m gonna talk about Root. This is a IRL boardgame by Leder Games with the Steam version published by Dire Wolf Digital.

Root is a competitive game themed about multiple factions vying for supremacy in a forest area. Each faction vies for control of clearings, draws cards that provide special abilities or items, and generally tries to stop the others from winning the game, which is done via points. The base game has four different factions to choose from (with the Vagabond faction having three different variants) and each faction plays very differently and scores points differently. So there is a bit of a learning curve to familiarize yourself with all the different factions.

For example:

The cats (Marquis) faction are the like the dominant empire in the area, and they gain points primarily by establishing more buildings, but among the factions they get the fewest actions per turn.
The birds (Eyrie) represent an old empire trying to make a comeback; they score points primarily by establishing roosts but they follow a strict set of decrees that govern what they must do each turn. If they fail to obey the decrees, their government goes into turmoil, loses some points and has to start over with a new leader.
The Woodland Alliance represent plucky rebels aiming to establish their own government. They earn points by spreading sympathizers across the map. Whenever other factions attack them or move troops through sympathizer clearings, they earn more supporters, which can be used to establish bases (which let you recruit warriors) and gain even more supporters.
Finally, the Vagabond is a freelance adventurer, wandering around the land digging up treasure for ruins and trading for items. He gets stronger the more items he has, can score points by crafting new items, completing quests, or fighting other factions. He can lend his support or even ally with one of the factions for a coalition victory. The Vagabond has several variants that start with different item sets and each have a unique special action.

The recently released (on Steam anyway) Riverfolk expansion adds two more factions and three more Vagabond variants to the game, adding replay value and more variation to an already very varied game. Each game lasts around an hour or so, which is totally reasonable.

Root is without question the one my regular gaming group has spent the most time playing among the digital boardgames. Not only because it’s fun (and we love interfering with whatever the others are planning), but it mostly because it has a feature none of the other games we’ve tried have: asynchronous multiplayer games. That means we can start a game and take our turns even while the others are offline, and people can just come and take their turn as they please (within the limit of minimum one turn every three days).

That means at the end of our weekly gaming sessions, no matter what we’ve played, we usually end with starting a new Root game, that we play throughout the following week. Sometimes we can get two or three games done during the duration of the week, finishing the last game when we start our next weekly gaming session. We’ve been playing the game almost continuously since the Steam release in September 2020 and the physical boardgame has at least two other expansions lined up that aren’t on Steam yet, so it’s very likely that we’ll continue to play it for many more months and perhaps years to come.

Weeknotes 2021-05-02

hello@roytang.net (Roy Tang) — Sun, 02 May 2021 04:21:37 +0000

It’s already May? April felt like it came and went so quickly. But then again, time has little meaning in this accursed pandemic.

The world:

The brouhaha over community pantries (as described last week), seems to have calmed down and they are now generally coordinating with LGUs for assistance in maintaining health protocols
Meanwhile, the government has embarked on a propaganda campaign to assert that we aren’t the worst in terms of pandemic response in the world
Certain congress people continue to promote the usage of the drug Ivermectin, which has no known effect on Covid-19, as a Covid-19 cure or something. The DOH/FDA keep saying there’s no sufficient evidence, but that has no effect when the people promoting it aren’t motivated by evidence.
Looks like the Office of the Solicitor General of the Philippines accidentally leaked a bunch of sensitive legal documents due to a misconfigured public directory on their web server.
Apparently last weekend was the Oscars, which just goes to show how irrelevant they are now that I didn’t even know until I saw the tweets about it happening live. They tried to re-arrange the awards with Best Actor last, apparently with the hope of ending with a posthumous award to Chadwick Boseman, but the award went to Anthony Hopkins instead, who wasn’t even at the ceremony. Awkward.

Links of interest:

How to have better arguments online
- “I have this mentor. And one of the best pieces of advice that he gave me is ‘always give someone the golden gate of retreat’, which is: give someone enough compassion, enough opportunity in a conversation for them to look good changing their mind. And it’s a really important thing to be able to do, because if you’re just like, ‘Oh you said this thing! You’re racist!’, you’re forcing that person to say, ‘No I’m not’. Et cetera. There’s no golden gate of retreat there. The only retreat there is to just barrel right through the opposing opinion.”
Why Lichess will always be free. I sometimes use their site (lichess.org) to play some quick rounds of chess, so this is good to know.
How to live in wonder
- Make a constant practice of getting curious about all of the aspects of your experience. Not with the intention of receiving any adult-mind narrative answers, but with the curiosity of a talking monkey who has no ability to understand the universe. … By continually introducing the immediate experience of not-knowing to your operating system, you will undo the stale old perceptual and cognitive habits of the adult-mind that thinks it knows, that thinks it has seen it all, that it has seen any of this before. It’s a skill like any other, and as you improve with practice you will get better at meeting everything for the first time.
Yahoo the Destroyer, on the once-great internet company not being great at preserving the content under its purview. I’m still bitter over not being able to recover my Yahoo Messenger convos.
Drew DeVault writes about how cryptocurrency is an abject disaster. I was tempted to write about my own experiences working with crypto, but I worry that not enough time has passed for me to talk perhaps a bit unkindly about some of the companies I’ve worked with.
Manuel Matuzovic writes about his current HTML boilerplate, which at the very least is a good look at how many different tags and other things one needs to put in by default to support various modern web things including social media previews and such.
Someone shared to me this version of Never Gonna Give You Up with Japanese lyrics that I enjoyed for some reason.
Extremely satisfying: Belgian man parks his car in a super narrow garage
I found this Philippines inflation calculator online. Prices have almost doubled from when I started working back in 2003!

My stuff:

For some reason all the sketches for the past week were done with pen and paper on this tiny pad I keep near my desk. Much quicker to do, but the sketches are also much simpler than anything I do in Procreate.
Watching:
- Movies: Caught Green Hornet (2011) on cable, a movie I didn’t even know existed. I should resume my James Bond run soonish.
- Watched the second season of Jack Ryan and finished up season 1 of Invincible, both on Prime Video
Gaming:
- Been drafting a bit more Strixhaven on Arena. I thought the Sealed Open was this weekend, but turns out it was actually next week. I’ll probably shift to Quick Drafts next week.
- Played a bunch of Horizon Zero Dawn on PS4 already after it dropped for free last week. Wasn’t a big fan of the intro sequence, but I’ve warmed up to it as the story and the world gradually opened up. I can tell this will take a while to finish though.
- Played a bit of Street Fighter V again this week, though I’m still languishing in the Bronze ranks again. Have tried shifting to Balrog (Boxer) as my main, though I’m not super familiar with the combos and matchups. We’ll see how that goes.
- My regular Saturday gaming group immediately picked up the new Riverfolk expansion for Root when it dropped last week and we had a lot of fun with some of the creepy new additions last night. And I really should get on with that Root review!
Books: I am close to finishing Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, should be done this week, hopefully have time to write the review as well.
Trivia: Didn’t do too well in this week’s About Quiz, so we ended up in a distant finish in the league overall. No trivia next week!

This coming week:

No new One Piece, BNHA, etc, I assume due to Golden Week. Boo!
Strixhaven Sealed Open on Arena next week, for real this time!
Getting my second shot of Sinovac next Sunday!

This post was a bit rushed, so typos etc are a feature, not a bug.

Math and Privilege

hello@roytang.net (Roy Tang) — Wed, 28 Apr 2021 06:09:57 +0000

In a recent STEM-focused newsletter, Noahpinion talked a bit about the myth of math being an inborn ability:

Again and again, we have seen the following pattern repeat itself:

Different kids with different levels of preparation come into a math class. Some of these kids have parents who have drilled them on math from a young age, while others never had that kind of parental input.

On the first few tests, the well-prepared kids get perfect scores, while the unprepared kids get only what they could figure out by winging it—maybe 80 or 85%, a solid B.

The unprepared kids, not realizing that the top scorers were well-prepared, assume that genetic ability was what determined the performance differences. Deciding that they “just aren’t math people,” they don’t try hard in future classes, and fall further behind.

The well-prepared kids, not realizing that the B students were simply unprepared, assume that they are “math people,” and work hard in the future, cementing their advantage.

Thus, people’s belief that math ability can’t change becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I touched upon this in passing in a post last week about programming being hard:

Some people may make it look easy, because they may have a bit more aptitude than others (due to background or whatever), in the same way that some people find math easy and others find it nearly impossible.

I was thinking about this after a convo with some friends where they mentioned they were teaching their kids to play Magic at a young age, since it helps them practice simple arithmetic. It seems like a simple thing, but that kind of thing contributes towards the kids being “prepared” for a better math education.

My dad also made a comment last week about how when we were young they (our parents) would often be bringing home activity books for us. Basically books with number puzzles, crossword puzzles, logic puzzles, that kind of thing. I loved those activity books! Among other things, I’m sure that contributed to my love of math and problem solving, which often appears as “natural aptitude” to others.

It’s a form of privilege: parents having the time and energy and know-how to instill additional knowledge in their kid from a young age. I can’t expect poor to lower-class people who work hard all day and are tired at night to be able to do that. So less privileged kids tend to grow up thinking they are bad at math, and they have trouble teaching their kids, and the vicious cycle perpetuates itself and inequality grows in succeeding generations.

During lunchtime on weekdays, I often find myself watching reruns of a certain local quiz show shown on cable TV, and I find myself alternating between laughter and frustration whenever one of the contestants fail a simple math question. Things like “what’s the decimal equivalent of 3 and a half percent” or “what’s 75% of 200” - questions I’d expect any elementary school graduate should be able to do. It’s easy to shake your head and blame the poor education system in this country - which is certainly a factor, but I can’t help but consider how this kind of inequality, compounding across generations, also contributes.

What do you do? Adults who grew up without this privilege often think their case is hopeless. “Mahina lang talaga ako sa math” (“I’m just really bad at math”), people often lament, as if it were some innate ability that they were not fortunate enough to acquire at character creation. And even if they wanted to get better at math, most will not have the time or energy to do so, due to daily life struggles. I would guess at some level it’s also a bit harder for such adults to re-learn math as their brains have already been wired not to think that way. It’s probably not an insurmountable handicap like a physical injury, but it can be challenging nonetheless.

I’m just rambling. I don’t have a point, nor a solution. I don’t know where this post was going.

Ludum Dare 48: Diver

hello@roytang.net (Roy Tang) — Tue, 27 Apr 2021 05:49:23 +0000

The jam

A thing I did last weekend was to participate in the 48th LUDUM DARE game jam. Doing gamedev has been a long-time elusive dream of mine, all the way back to my college years. I’ve had a number of failed attempts to get into gamedev, both solo and with other people.I’ve also played around with things like PyGame, Unity, DragonRuby, etc.

I read about the LD48 game jam this April and signed up to participate. My expectations weren’t very high and I was anxious going on; I was pretty sure I was not going to do well and doubted I could even put things together. I had never done a Ludum Dare or a game jam before, heck I haven’t even made anything I consider a “real game” before!

The game jam has two modes you can choose to submit to. The 72-hour version (called the “Jam”) was easier, as you could have a team of people working together, and you could use any assets you had legal access to. The 48-hour version, called the “Compo” (which I guess is short for competitive?), is much more challenging. You can only work solo, and all assets must be created within the 48 hour period (with a few exceptions like fonts etc).

I had no intention of working with a team; in fact I didn’t tell anyone I planned to participate until after the jam started last Saturday at 9AM local time. I figured I would try my best and if I finished within 48h, I would submit for the jam. If I didn’t, I had an extra 24h to try for the compo, and I could even ask for help!

That meant I would be working alone, which meant I would have to do things like art and sounds and music! I didn’t have any experience doing pixel art for games or anything like that, so I figured I could get by on “programmer art”. For sound effects, I knew there were online generators I could use, I’ve tried some before. Background music was the real challenge: I have no musical talent at all, so even if I could find tools to do it, I wouldn’t know how to put anything together. These were problems for me 48h into the future though. When the jam started, I just dove in to code.

Okay, not really. I woke up late and had to do some errands so I missed the start time by a couple of hours. Still, I dove right in as soon as I was free!

The tools

For the gamedev/programming part, I decided to use the Godot Engine game development framework. I had been trying it out since earlier this year, and I was pretty happy with it compared to Unity. The IDE was a lot lighter, the APIs felt more intuitive, and basically it made it easier for me to get into the guts of a game. Unity is great, but it always seemed geared towards 3D gamedev. Godot makes 2D gamedev feel like a first class citizen. I prefer working on 2D because I feel like that’s something more achieveable for me as an indie. Doing sprites and such is more in my wheelhouse than 3D models.

For the art, I’ve never tried any pixel art creation tools before, so I just searched online. I settled on Piskel which had the advantages of (a) being free; and (b) running entirely in-browser, without needing me to create an account. Very low friction! I haven’t tried such tools before so I was impressed with how mature they were. There were functions similar to what you’d find in paint, plus support for layers and export to various formats, including into spritesheets. It was perfect for what I needed.

For sound effects, I used another free online site JSFXR. Basically just kept rolling one of the settings until I got a sound I like. Godot’s AudioStreamPlayer didn’t seem like it accepted WAVs, so I used convert.io to convert the files to OGG.

For background music, a friend suggested I tried Online Sequencer. I tried it out for a while, banging out random notes since I knew nothing about how to compose music. I looked at a few interesting ones created by other people and tried to adjust the random notes I was banging out to better follow the patterns I saw. I still don’t understand, but I was able to create a couple of tracks I was fairly happy with (they sounded like music!) which I used as BGM in the game.

I also used one of my sketchdaily attempts to generate some splash screen/cover art for the game. The final game used a slightly cleaned up and modified version of that one.

I also needed a Dynamic font, since using Godot’s built-in fonts didn’t allow me to resize text. The Compo rules allow you to use fonts you didn’t make during the jam, so I just used Xolonium-Regular from one of the Godot tutorials.

The game

The theme of the jam was DEEPER and DEEPER, so I figured I’d go the easy route and do something with digging or undersea exploration. I felt like digging would be the more common approach, so I went the other way, since I’m a contrarian. I decided to do something inspired by things like the underwater level in TMNT (NES) or the underwater level in Earthworm Jim (SNES). These were the frustrating underwater levels I grew up with, so I wanted to replicate that experience a bit. Basically moving around underwater, with a time limit and trying to avoid obstacles.

So the idea was to have a deep-sea diver exploring underwater. But for some reason the ocean is full of spikes, so he has to keep moving and swimming to avoid them. All the while trying to go deeper and deeper. I added in a few enemies like jellyfish that acted as moving obstacles, and seeker fish that actively tried to chase you.

I also added an oxygen tank mechanic to serve as the timer. The tank would be getting depleted constantly as you kept breathing and you had to avoid running out. There would be little things that generate air bubbles you can pick up to increase your oxygen level (this part was inspired by the 3d mario games). Initially the bubble generator was just a jar, but later I changed the sprite to a clam.

I also decided to add a collectible in the form of gems that you can pick up on your way down. Basically to add more things to do in each stage. And it added a bit of risk-reward mechanics: should I waste time trying to get this gem, when I might run out of air or get hit by enemies? When I added it I wasn’t sure how the gems would be relevant in the game. I eventually decided to have the player earn extra lives whenever he collects 5 gems. The initial gem sprite was a diamond but later changed to a pearl.

That’s the basic gameplay: Avoid obstacles, collect gems, avoid running out of air, try to get as deep as possible.

The controls were simple:

your diver is constantly sinking
you can move left or right using arrow keys
you can swim up (or bounce, in my internal terms) by pressing space bar.

The bounce was kind of a flappy bird bounce: you hit spacebar and you go up by a fixed amount after which you begin sinking again. I wanted the controls to be not too smooth so that you needed to know the bounce distance really well to navigate tighter corridors.

Once I had something basic working, I showed it to some friends to get some feedback, and got some good ideas and bug reports from them. (I figured showing it to other people and getting suggestions was fine within the compo rules, as long as I did all the actual creation work myself!)

By the end of Saturday (around 16h after jam start, 32h before compo deadline), I was mostly done with all the mechanics and gameplay and such. But content was lacking: I only had five screens (“stages”) for the player to navigate through, which I felt was too short. Creating levels was fairly straightforward though once I had all the components ready. The feedback from my friends was also pretty good. By this point I was fairly confident I could finish in time, and probably wouldn’t lose too much sleep.

I spent Sunday working more on the game, in between a bunch of family errands. I added another five levels, and fixed a lot of bugs. By the end of day Sunday (around 9h before compo deadline), I was ready to submit. Godot lets me export both to web and to Windows binaries. I could have also exported to other OSes, but I didn’t have time to test them. I was originally planning to host the game here on this site, but I couldn’t decide how / where to put them in the site structure. Instead I went ahead and deployed the game to itch.io, as I already had an account there. This was a relatively easy and straightforward process (though I did have to answer some tax-related questions).

So the game is here on itch.io: https://hungryroy.itch.io/diver

Ludum Dare requires the source code be made available, I have it up here: https://github.com/roytang/diver

And finally, the page for my entry on the Ludum Dare site itself: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/diver

Aftermath

After submitting your game, you’re supposed to review and rate other people’s games, and you want to earn at least 20 ratings to get a “final score”. Coming in, I didn’t really aim to “win” the compo or anything like that, I just wanted to finish a game. But after submitting and checking out a few of the other submissions, I felt a bit more confident about my chances and am hoping for a decent finish. The “play, review, and rate” period lasts for 21 days after the jam ends, so it’ll be a while before I know the outcome of that! I am doing my part by playing through some of the entries and rating them and leaving helpful comments where I can.

Overall, very impressed with how Ludum Dare works. The more ratings and quality feedback you give, the higher your game appears in the listings. This makes it more likely for you to receive ratings and feedback yourself, thus incentivizing the same and creating a positive feedback loop!

My biggest takeaway is that I learned how to build something with as small a scope as possible. In many of my past attempts, scope creep was always one of the bigger problems. I was used to playing big, epic games like grand strategy or long RPGs or open world games, so I often wanted to make games like those. The 48h limit helped me narrow my focus and reject stuff that would endanger that deadline. I had to discard some other ideas for enemies and stage elements because they would make things more complicated.

I did enjoy the experience, no matter the outcome, I’ve already exceeded my own expectations. I expect to try my hand at game jams again moving forward. Building experience by making a series of small games might be a better way for me to find a path into “real” gamedev. That is, as opposed to “hobbyist” gamedev, which is the new level I consider myself at now that I’ve completed a Ludum Dare!

Some screenshots of the game attached below!

May 20th: The results from the Ludum Dare came out yesterday! Unfortunately, I didn’t even crack the top 10 lol. Still, pretty decent finish (out of like 800+ participants) considering it was my first game jam and I had very little experience. Looking forward to the next one!

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier Review

hello@roytang.net (Roy Tang) — Mon, 26 Apr 2021 16:30:00 +0000

Falcon and Winter Soldier review (with some spoilers):

more action-packed and straightforward compared to Wandavision, jumping straight into the action from the get go
some great performances here, especially from Sebastian Stan (Bucky), Wyatt Russell (John Walker), and Daniel Bruhl (Zemo)
Bucky and Sam have great chemistry, even though they start out annoyed at each other
pacing is a bit odd at times; feels more like an extended movie than a weekly episodic series (especially compared to Wandavision, which took advantage of the weekly format really well)
although a complete story by itself, this one felt more of a setup for future MCU storylines (again compared to Wandavision)
while overall the season was good, I find Wandavision was the clearly better watch for me, though I suppose your mileage may vary if your preference is for action sequences

Ending spoilers follow:

(Spoilers)

I felt like so much of the finale was rushed.

Final confrontation and resolution with the Flag Smashers felt flat.

Wyatt Russell sudden redemption felt undeserved - we go from stripped of position to fighting buddies with Bucky very quickly; would have liked to see him publicly address Sam as Cap.

Power Broker reveal was underwhelming; would have preferred it was done via a post-credits scene, possibly via Sharon telling someone about how she had to kill Batroc because he was threatening to expose her (presumably the earlier confrontation would have been cut to omit the reveal). Overall, I would have hidden the secret more (it was really obvious), so that the reveal at the end would have had a better impact.

I wish Bucky’s redemption arc had played a stronger part in the finale, but I don’t know how.

Felt like they could have extended an episode or two to at least make some of these things more impactful.

Next: Loki in June!

Weeknotes 2021-04-25: Game Jammin'

hello@roytang.net (Roy Tang) — Sun, 25 Apr 2021 14:11:48 +0000

I’ve been a bit busy this weekend (see below), so this post is running a bit late.

The world:

An ongoing saga right here in the Philippines:
- Last weekend, community pantries for the needy started sprouting up in Metro Manila and all over the country, largely inspired by one started in Maginhawa here in Quezon City. The central idea was “give what you can, take what you need.” Stories spread of heartwarming stories like a poor old man donating some food even though he had very little and an ice cream vendor giving away the remnants of his cart for the day to those in the queue.
- Government critics pointed out the need for these pantries was largely a result of the lack of support from the government. (They’re not wrong.)
- Predictably, it didn’t take long for the government to butt in, with the police reportedly investigating the people behind the pantries for communist links. Some other national government people even said they might require permits. For what, giving food away?
- The backlash was predictably quick, with netizens and even local government offcials and senators castigating the critics. Mayors started chiming in that the community pantries were welcome in their cities and that there was no permit required to help each other.
- However, notable spokespersons of the NTF-ELCAC still insisted on insinuating communist links to the pantries. There were also the usual critics who decried people getting stuff for free, speaking from the privilege of their safe houses and expensive cars. Critics also raised whether these pantries were spreading covid because of how people spend a lot of time queued up.
- Some women in Pasig went viral for a bit after they were caught on video raiding a community pantry and getting much more than could be reasonably expected, one of them even carting off a trayful of eggs. They supposedly claimed they were going to give away to their neighbors. They later apologized, but supposedly they were planning to file charges against the person who took a video of them. My take: the thing about decentralized movements like this is that they tend to easily self-correct through the vigilance of the participants as seen here. There have been no other reports of similar incidents after this one went viral, so at the very least they served as an example of what not to do.
- Last Friday, a community pantry started by actress Angel Locsin ended in disaster when an old man died while in the queue. Blowback from the pantry critics and the DDS was fierce. Locsin quickly issued an apology and accepted the blame, drawing contrasts with how the national government never apologizes or admits to mistakes.
- Recently, news broke that the National Security Adviser had imposed a gag order on the notorious NTF-ELCAC spokespersons re: community pantries.
- Probably one of the reasons we can’t have nice things: people can’t be generous without some other people becoming suspicious and assigning nefarious motives. We’ll see what happens with these pantries moving forward.
Speaking of covid, India’s experiencing the worst surge of the pandemic so far. Twitter has been accused of censoring tweets critical of the Indian government’s covid response. The US is facing calls to loosen export bans and lighten up on vaccine patents to help out India (and the rest of us in the global south, really).
Some lighter news: One year ago in Apr 24 2020, an epic battle among a ton of people named Josh was scheduled a year in advance, to fight for the name. It happened yesterday! They had a pool noodle battle and named a 5 year old “King Josh” or some such. Lots of fun!

Links of interest:

Messaging app Signal, famous for its encryption protections, raised concerns about vulnerabilities in software often used by authoritarian regimes to bypass the security of such apps: Exploiting vulnerabilities in Cellebrite UFED and Physical Analyzer from an app’s perspective. The great thing is how the report does a hilarious “wink wink nudge nudge” implying the users of such apps might not want to target Signal in the future.
Some stuff about blogging and personal websites:
- No wrong notes.
- The conversation has never been wider.
- Why blog? Blogs are great.. (I mostly disagree with “have a topic focus” though. I’ll write what I want to write, damnit!)
How fit can you get from just walking? One of the tragedies of the pandemic is that I’ve had to reduce my general walking output, since I can’t just wander around as far as I want anymore.
Mads Mikkelsen: “Make everything important."
There’s a page / app you can check to see how many people have blocked you on Twitter.

Did you know:

In the Spanish dub of Terminator 2, instead of “Hasta la vista, baby”, the Terminator says “Sayonara, baby!” via reddit.
Jack Black’s parents were satellite engineers. (This entry spoils the ending of that entry, sorry!)
Local liturgical song Tanging Yaman, often attributed to Carol Banawa, was actually first recorded by now-Senator Risa Hontiveros

My stuff:

The big thing for me this week (that I hinted at in the previous weeknotes) is that I decided to give LUDUM DARE 48 a shot! It’s a game jam, where you make a game in 48 hours (well, that’s the mode I’m participating in). Tt’s the first time I’m doing one, despite a lifetime of flirting with the idea of gamedev. Initial build is already available, even though there’s still 9ish hours to go. (I need to sleep!) I’ll probably (should) write more about this experience in a future post.
Around the middle of this week, I got the first ever email that actually complied with the contact protocol I had specified here in the site and on LinkedIn, namely putting a certain keyword in the subject line. I’ve had that condition for years, so I was really amazed someone actually read it!
I’m still sketching, though I’ve fallen a couple of days behind due to the game jam. I tried to do one on paper like a comic but my handwriting was so terrible I had to edit it digitally!
Watching:
- Movies: Watched Rocky (1976), and I meant to watch the next Bond flick too, but ran out of time. New Mortal Kombat movie also came out this past week, I might watch that.
- Falcon and Winter Soldier season finale ran last Friday. A lot of people are happy with it (and the season overall), but I felt like some parts were too rushed and the finale suffered as a result. Will probably post more thoughts on it this week. After this, we won’t have MCU content until Loki kicks off next month I think.
- This week’s Invincible is getting to the good part!
Gaming:
- Still drafting a bunch of Strixhaven on Arena (though I had to stop for the weekend due to the game jam). Most of my drafts went well, though the last 2 I did this week were terrible. I ended up listening to the Limited Resources podcast for the first time and got some good tips, hopefully that improves my drafts moving forward. I’ll probably play in the Sealed Open next weekend! Follow along via the MTGStrixhaven tag!
- Fire Emblem: Three Houses actually had some progress this week. I really should finish this run soon.
- Downloaded Horizon Zero Dawn on PS4 because it’s temporarily free! I’ve been wanting to play this for a while, hopefully I have time for it this coming week.
- Played some Street Fighter V again this week; I figured since a new character dropped, it might be easy to find matches again. I did manage to fight quite a few, but I also did quite poorly, dropping back to Ultra Bronze. Thinking about switching to a different character since everyone seems to know how to fight Ryu, so I unlocked Honda! We’ll see who I actually end up using.
Books: Currently about halfway through Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson.
Trivia: Pop Quiz is back (albeit monthly now, not weekly), so the trivia team was able to join two quizzes this past week. We didn’t win either though.
Had a couple of birthdays in the family this weekend, so my game jamming was interspersed with zoom / messenger calls and food deliveries and such.

This coming week:

new Invincible, One Piece, BNHA, etc
new expansion dropping for Root, one of the digital boardgames we’ve been playing (and the one I have yet to write a review for… sounds like a perfect opportunity!)
Strixhaven Sealed Open on Arena next week!

This post was a bit rushed, so typos etc are a feature, not a bug.