Roy Tang

Programmer, engineer, scientist, critic, gamer, dreamer, and kid-at-heart.

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Notes: Microblog-like status updates. You can subscribe to an RSS feed of this list.

May 2020

  • Covid19 thoughts and updates:

    • I heard mass again via the Quiapo church website
    • ECQ in Metro Manila officially ended last Friday, and we are now on the supposedly slightly-less-strict “Modified ECQ”, where selected industries are now allowed to open, etc. But yesterday, the first day of MECQ, reports came in about traffic on the highways and lots of people flocking to the malls. I guess people got tired of being cooped up, which is not unexpected. The government messaging has not been very tight about the reopening, they should have made much clearer that despite the loosening of restrictions we should still take precautions and not go out unless absolutely essential. I guess it’s an indicator that many people were not staying in because they wanted to avoid spreading the virus, but rather because they had nowhere to go. I jokingly told some friends that maybe we should require something like a P1000 entrance fee to the malls. This would be terribly elitist, but honestly I’m not sure I’d say no at this point. Fully expecting chaos tomorrow, the first Monday of MECQ. Nobody knows for sure what’s going to happen, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we get our second wave and possible tightened lockdown again in maybe a month?
    • The Philippines now has the highest COVID-19 fatality rate and lowest recovery rate in ASEAN
    • Stayed in the whole week, although I’ve started doing short walks just outside our house for around 30 mins, never leaving the subdivision. I’m doing it in the early mornings, when there are fewer people around. (There’s very few people around during the day too!). A sort of prelude to getting back in the habit I guess?
    • As of today, we are at 12513 cases (+208 from yesterday, +1720 from last week), 824 deaths (+7 from yesterday, +105 from last week), 2635 recoveries (+74 from yesterday, +711 last week). Gain in active cases slightly higher from last week. Reference.
    • Worldwide, we are at 4.7 million cases and 313,000 deaths.
    Posted by under notes at #covid19
    / 0
  • Repost from Delafina777:

    I guess it’s time to repeat the main thing I learned from reading a fuckton of Holocaust memoirs again:

    propaganda does not need to be persuasive, only pervasive

    its secondary purpose is to convince

    its primary purpose is to exhaust

    Posted by under notes at
    Also on: twitter / 0
  • Repost from geekygirlsarah:

    I’ve been using NoScript, a browser extension that disables all JavaScript and lets you enable them on a server-by-server basis. Let me tell you about what I’ve learned and how broken the internet experience has been since doing this a few weeks ago.

    (1/11)

    I’ve been using NoScript, a browser extension that disables all JavaScript and lets you enable them on a server-by-server basis. Let me tell you about what I’ve learned and how broken the internet experience has been since doing this a few weeks ago. (1/11)
    Posted by under notes at
    Also on: twitter / 0
  • Repost from GrahamSig:

    I’ve been playing Persona 2 and using a 9 year old Gamefaqs guide. Today the guide was updated to include this message because the author is now a born against christian

    I’ve been playing Persona 2 and using a 9 year old Gamefaqs guide. Today the guide was updated to include this message because the author is now a born against christian
    Posted by under notes at
    Also on: twitter / 0
  • Repost from dumidyeypee:

    These people tried to spam and mass report a certain DDS Confessions page without realizing that DDS is a school in India (Daisy Dales Senior Secondary School) and the page is ran by its alumni.

    Now they researched about our President and hence this post.

    Yikes.

    These people tried to spam and mass report a certain DDS Confessions page without realizing that DDS is a school in India (Daisy Dales Senior Secondary School) and the page is ran by its alumni. Now they researched about our President and hence this post. Yikes.
    These people tried to spam and mass report a certain DDS Confessions page without realizing that DDS is a school in India (Daisy Dales Senior Secondary School) and the page is ran by its alumni. Now they researched about our President and hence this post. Yikes.
    These people tried to spam and mass report a certain DDS Confessions page without realizing that DDS is a school in India (Daisy Dales Senior Secondary School) and the page is ran by its alumni. Now they researched about our President and hence this post. Yikes.
    Posted by under notes at
    Also on: twitter / 0

  • Sometimes I think about posting (on the blog) more often about the fuckups of the ph govt, but every day there are new fuckups, and I just don’t think I can keep up. Hats off to all the journalists with the energy to report on such things day in and day out

    Posted by under notes at
    Also on: twitter / 0

  • Covid19 thoughts and updates:

    • Previously: COVID19 Diary
    • Since the government decided to shut down ABS CBN, me and my Tita heard Sunday mass today via GMA at 5:30am
    • I went out once this week for a grocery run. Should be enough to last us for 2 weeksish. The grocery actually seemed less chaotic than usual.
    • Early this morning (after the mass) I took a walk outside for the first time since the lockdown started. Previously I had only gone out for groceries and meds. Only for less than 30 mins, and only in our subdivision, walking up and down the street. It’s good to be walking again, although this short and limited route is quite boring and full of neighbor’s dogs barking at me, so I’m not too fond of it, but it’s better to get the habit started again since I’ve been feeling the fatness piling on due to the quarantine and the lack of exercise.
    • Still no word on what happens to Metro Manila after the ECQ “ends” on the 15th. The mayors gave a bunch of options to the IATF that basically amounted to “whatever, we can’t decide”.
    • there’s this great site showing the progress of different countries in battling the pandemic: End Coronavirus .org. While some of our leadership are claiming we have already flattened the curve, comparing our data to other countries shows we still clearly need improvement.
    • The government is already preparing guidelines for when we shift to GCQ like only 150 passengers per MRT train (good luck with that!) and so on. This implies that they are leaning towards shifting from ECQ to the more lenient GCQ already.
    • We really have no data to indicate that the pandemic is under control in NCR, so lifting the ECQ would probably be dangerous, if not outright foolish. That being said, another question is how much longer people can take being under ECQ at all.
    • Social distancing in some barangays in QC went out the window today, as it’s the last day for distributing the social assistance funds to those in need. The QC government has had a lot of trouble distributing aid to their residents, which might be explained away by the sheer size of the city (and the fact that administrative support for a population does not scale linearly). I wonder what the statistics are re: number of government employees vs number of citizens per city in Metro Manila? In any case, large-scale logistics has never been the strong point of the Philippine government, at any level. This kind of chaos really holds us back as a society.
    • Word has it that there were a lot of cars outside today, presumably people buying food to celebrate Mother’s Day? For us, we just held a zoom call with the grandkids as usual.
    • As of today, we are at 10793 cases (+184 from yesterday), 719 deaths (+15 from yesterday), 1924 recoveries (+82 from yesterday). We’re still gaining more than 1,500 active cases a week, although a lot of those are now in the provinces. I’m not sure if there’s a data source I can use that shows the trends for NCR only? Reference.
    • Worldwide, we are at 4 million cases and 280,000 deaths. A full 1/3rd of all worldwide cases and 2/7ths of all deaths are in the US, which is still raring to reopen for the sake of the economy. We might be watching a tragedy unfold slowly in real-time over there.
    Posted by under notes at #covid19
    / 0
  • Repost from Arlieth:

    We might think our servers and black boxes run on some weird fucking magic shit but we got nothing on Taiwanese Kuai Kuai (乖乖) reliability engineering rituals.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuai_Kuai_culture

    We might think our servers and black boxes run on some weird fucking magic shit but we got nothing on Taiwanese Kuai Kuai (乖乖) reliability engineering rituals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuai_Kuai_culture
    We might think our servers and black boxes run on some weird fucking magic shit but we got nothing on Taiwanese Kuai Kuai (乖乖) reliability engineering rituals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuai_Kuai_culture
    We might think our servers and black boxes run on some weird fucking magic shit but we got nothing on Taiwanese Kuai Kuai (乖乖) reliability engineering rituals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuai_Kuai_culture
    Posted by under notes at
    Also on: twitter / 0

  • I found it!

    Quoted roytang's tweet:
    Looking for something I saw here on Twitter yesterday: a four panel tagalog webcomic where a certain notorious local politican kept adding GO to the end of someone else’s speech bubbles. Anyone else remember it?
    I found it! Quoted roytang's tweet: Looking for something I saw here on Twitter yesterday: a four panel tagalog webcomic where a certain notorious local politican kept adding GO to the end of someone else’s speech bubbles. Anyone else remember it?
    Posted by under notes at
    Also on: twitter / 0

  • Looking for something I saw here on Twitter yesterday: a four panel tagalog webcomic where a certain notorious local politican kept adding GO to the end of someone else’s speech bubbles. Anyone else remember it?

    Posted by under notes at
    Also on: twitter / 0

  • Posted on r/psych: Questions about S7/S8 Shawn and Juliet

    So I binged the entire series recently. I had only seen a few episodes on and off before, so I hadn’t really followed the whole Shawn and Juliet relationship before too closely. My question is about Jules and Shawn taking a break after Jules learns The Truth (TM) during Lassiter’s wedding.

    Basically, the show made a big deal of how Jules couldn’t trust Shawn and even after Jules stops Shawn from confessing to the chief, she still says there’s an issue of trust. Yet the very next episode, Shawn is sleeping at Jules’ place again, and a couple of episodes later he just randomly tells Gus at the end of the episode that he and Jules are officially back together again, without giving us any indication of what happened in between for Shawn to earn back that trust.

    It just feels totally unearned compared to the big deal Juliet made about it after the wedding. Did they just run out of episodes to resolve things (the season ends the episode after Shawn says they are back together). I was just wondering if it was just me, or did the community feel this way about it at the time?

    I was also wondering if it had something to do with Roday and Lawson splitting up as a couple IRL sometime in 2013? It’s noticeable that from that point onwards, the show places much less emphasis on them as a couple, did they decide to just quickly wrap up the focus on Shawn/Juliet because of their IRL status?

    Am I overthinking this? Lol.

    Posted by under notes at #psych #reddit_submission
    Also on: reddit / 0

Apr 2020

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