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Weeknotes 2021-12-19 Twas The Week Before Christmas

Christmas is less than a week away, which means 2021 has less than two weeks left in it. Here's hoping 2022 is better for the world at large.

Also, a PSA: not everyone on the internet is lucky enough to be able to watch Spider-Man: No Way Home already (it's not showing in local cinemas here until Jan 8th! And I'd only consider going if the covid situation remains stable). All the reports I've seen would indicate it's a great theatre experience perhaps comparable to Avengers: Endgame, so please try to avoid spoiling it for those of us who are less fortunate!

A Quote

“If you think that peace and happiness are somewhere else and you run after them, you will never arrive.” -— Thich Nhat Hanh

The World

  • Supertyphoon Odette ravaged the Southern Philippines starting last Thursday, the devastation is palpable and recovery will take at least a few weeks. Here are some tweets about it: 1 2. The president says there is no money for relief. Here's a thread of relief initiatives you can contribute to if you have anything to spare.
  • The PH Covid situation continues to be stable; cases and positivity rate remain low. However, the country has detected the first 2 cases of Omicron this week. The travelers entered the country arrived more than two weeks ago, if Omicron starts to spread with the same aggressiveness it had in other countries, we might start to see cases trend up in the next week or so. (We hope it stays contained.)
  • This past week or so, the big problem in the tech world was a Log4j vulnerability. Haven't seriously used Java in a while, but I feel for anyone maintaining systems that suddenly have to check whether they're affected.
  • Here are a couple of articles about "Web3":
    • The Web3 Fraud
    • The Third Web
    • I've actually thought of writing something about blockchain and web3 stuff myself, but there's already so much material about it, you really should already know better than to be taken in.
  • Tom Whitwell writes about 52 things he learned in 2021

Visit the Links page for more links of interest.

My Stuff

  • Happy to report that everyone in the household has now gotten a booster shot; two of us had an AstraZeneca booster, and the elders had Moderna.
  • I am once again very behind on the daily sketching, I did some doodles last night to catch up. Here's one of a tree:
Sketching Tree
Sketching Tree
  • Gaming:
    • I finished Tales of Symphonia!
    • After that, I assumed I would take a break from single-player games for a bit until the end of the year maybe, but yesterday I decided to start with Blasphemous, a metroidvania I've been meaning to try out. I think I'm already a third of the way through the game.
    • Daily grinds still ongoing in the card games (Eternal and Magic Arena) and the fighting games (Guilty Gear Strive and Street Fighter V)
    • Saturday gaming group still playing Root and newcomer Fury of Dracula. I tried playing as Dracula during this weekend's session, was terrible at it and got cornered and lost. At least I won two games of Root!
  • Watching:
  • Reading: Still reading Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, should finish in a couple of days at most.
  • Trivia: Probably no more quiz nights until next year, so we are just having the occasional crossword coop sessions over discord. Also, if you play with my twitter triviabot, I've scheduled a score reset for year end.

This coming week:

  • Christmas!
  • Looking forward to the season finales for Hawkeye and Wheel of Time.
Sun, Dec. 19, 2021, 6 p.m. / / blog / #weeknotes #philippines #covid19 / Syndicated: mastodon twitter / 642 words

Last modified at: Dec. 19, 2021, 9:40 p.m. Source file