The World

• PH: it has been a very rainy week over here, with the mornings typically hot and the afternoons and evenings with daily showers. Weather agency PAG-ASA has declared the official start of the rainy season, making my daily walks more challenging. At least we are hopefully going to suffer less of the summer heat.
• Covid isn't even over, but apparently there's a new disease to worry about: Monkeypox. I asked an infectious disease specialist I knew if we should be worried about it and she answered "At this point no. But that's we said about Covid too." So ¯\(ツ)/¯

Links of Interest

• missing concepts in link culture? | maya.land: Ruminations on how we link to other webpages/sites

• Dictator’s son uses TikTok to lead in Philippine election and rewrite his family’s past: > "TikTok remembers the good times... We don’t believe the history books anymore. We have social media now.”"

• You're not going to believe what I'm about to tell you (classroom-friendly version) - The Oatmeal: The Oatmeal on disinformation and the backfire effect

Visit the Links page for more links of interest.

My Week

• Monday: Spent the morning cleaning up my desk, taking everything off and dusting then putting everything back together again. Something I really should be doing. So much dust and detritus!

• The return of regular rains have made my daily walking more challenging. I find that more often I find the need to put on shoes and socks and carry an umbrella for the afternoon / evening walks. Despite that, I managed to hit decent step counts this past week.

• On the tech side however, my Fitbit's display has started to get wonky. Sometimes the content is displayed inverted and shifted to one side. Sometimes random white bars appear or the display scrolls around. I was able to reset it back to a good state once before, but now I can't even seem to reset it. The app is still getting data from the tracker though. This thread suggests this eventually happens to Charge 2 units. I suspect my time with this unit (almost 5 years now!) may be nearing it's end. If so, I'm not sure I will be getting another Fitbit. I've heard some good things about other wearables like Xiaomi ones, etc. Of course, I will keep trying to use this one as long as I can!

(Click photos to view full-size)

Weeknotes 2022-05-22 - fitbit.jpg

fitbit.jpg May 22, 2022, 4:08 p.m. Close

• Friday to Sunday was mostly spent with family; we met up with my brothers and their families at a family friend's resort with swimming pool out in Silang, Cavite. We've been there a few times before, but this is the first time we've gone anywhere together as a family since the pandemic began. It was a fun get-together where I was able to set aside my worries about world and country for a while.

• This trip also gave me occasion to take one of the Metro's public transit rail lines, another thing I haven't done since the pandemic began. I didn't go at rush hour of course, so the trip was pleasant and there weren't many people (although more and more got on with distance) and of course almost everyone was masked. This wasn't one of the lines I used very often, so I was pleasantly surprised that the 15-station trip only took around 30 minutes.

(Click photos to view full-size)

Weeknotes 2022-05-22 - lrt.jpg

lrt.jpg May 22, 2022, 4:08 p.m. Close

• Gaming:
  • Tales of Vesperia review published last Monday.
  • Middle of this week I started a new game: Triangle Strategy on Switch, which I had borrowed from my brother. Still a JRPG, but at least it's not an action-y one anymore! Initial impressions: Gameplay and battles are excellent; plot is ok, but I need to see where this is going; I'm a bit meh on the graphics because I'm not sure I like applying the pixelated look to 3d games, it's a bit weird.
  • Eternal: New set dropped this week; been playing mostly Throne, which is good because there's a Throne-format open this coming weekend.
  • Magic Arena: Continued drafting Streets of New Capenna this week. Did poorly at this weekend's sealed qualifier. You can follow along via the MTGSNC tag.
  • Street Fighter V: Still playing occasionally; dropped out of Super Silver and made my way back in.

Media Diet

No new movies or books started this week yet!

• Legends of Tomorrow

  • Legends of Tomorrow, the wacky Arrowverse family member that the other shows really only met up with once a year or so, has ended its run. The show didn't even get a proper sendoff, ending with a cliffhanger that introduced Donald Faison as Booster Gold. At least there was an episode near the end of this season where the Legends were shown personal "good endings", so that kind of works as a sendoff, I guess. This final season actually had some pretty good episodes and time travel shenanigans, although they spent much of it on the run. I especially liked the ones in the 20s where they helped a young singer escape from a bar and the next episode where they were running a speakeasy. The show started out a bit weak, but once it got into its groove and embraced the wacky side, it was almost always the highlight of each year of Arrowverse shows. Legends of Tomorrow deserved better.

• Ongoing TV Status:

  • Caught up: NCIS
  • Behind: The Simpsons, Superman and Lois, The Flash season 8, Young Justice
  • Yet to start: Cobra Kai season 4,

This coming week:

• Eternal Open (Throne) next weekend!