-
Another exhausting, errand-filled week for me. For some reason being human means limited amounts of time and energy to do all the things I want to do.
-
Covid19 cases are starting to go up again in these parts, which is threatening some end-of-month plans I had. I think most people aren't paying the rise in cases any heed, but I have to be extra cautious given that I live with a couple of seniors. We'll see how it goes.
-
Markets are crashing, crypto is crashing, no safe place to put your investments at the moment. Cash is king.
-
Support for Microsoft's Internet Explorer has ended. I was surprised it was actually still supported in Windows 10 before this week. I spent most of my early professional web development years exclusively in IE (See: Tales from the Old Web (Development)), so it's a bit of a bittersweet moment. Most of those early years were spent working on bespoke web applications used internally by large organizations and government departments, and I have no doubt that no small number of such users are now worried that all of their legacy "compatible-only-with-IE" backend systems are about to become obsolete.
-
I spent an inordinate amount of time waiting around in hospital corridors this past week, and I noticed the following warning posted in several places:
... which seems ridiculous on its face, given that in theory "cyberlibel" as a crime should only be applicable to things that are proven to be maliciously false. I mean, recording other patients is obviously problematic for medical privacy reasons, and it would be fine if the warning just said it was against hospital policy, but to threaten "cyberlibel"? I think there was some sort of scandal a while back about a video captured of nurses/doctors making fun of a patient or something like that? So I suspect these warnings are a bit of an overreaction to that.
Links of Interest
I am in an ongoing struggle with my feed reader backlogs, but here are some interesting links I've managed to wrangle so far:
-
The Human Kaleidoscope and the Unwritten Story of the World: The Marginalian on Jad Abumrad’s superb Caltech Commencement Address
-
I Should Be Able to Mute America: Not particularly serious, but kind of has a point.
-
Twitter invented a Clippy for cyberbullying: Garbage Day breaks down the effects of Twitter's "you are being mean" warning
-
Just Put Stuff Out There · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer:
-
Budget Culture and the Dave Ramseyfication of Money: Personal finance writer Dana Miranda on the problems with "budget culture"
-
Conservatism and Who the Law Protects: > Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
Visit the Links page for more links of interest.
My Week
- My only other blog post this past week was my Streets of New Capenna limited recap.
- Gaming: Triangle Strategy NG+ run is about 40% done. Close to finishing Bloodstained as well. (Streamed a bit of it even.) Regular Eternal and Arena daily grinding continues. Also recently bought the Jaws of the Lion DLC for Gloomhaven, a coop game I have been enjoying with my Saturday gaming group.
- Someone has been uploading regular videos of our crossword sessions again to the trivia group's Youtube channel, if you like that kind of thing. Like, subscribe, all that jazz.
Media Diet
Unlocked by John Scalzi
A few weeks back, the Tor eBook club gave for free a trio of sci-fi novellas, combined into one eBook. The first one was Psalm for the Wild-Built, which I wrote about last week. This was the second one, with the full title Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden's Syndrome. I didn't know anything about going in, and only read it because I was stuck for a while in a hospital waiting room with poor cell signal so I needed offline entertainment, and I already had that some eBook file open on the iBooks app, so why not? It's about a mysterious disease that appeared suddenly and without warning and quickly spread all over the world; this sounded familiar! So I wondered whether Scalzi had written before or after 2020, and it turns out it was actually released in 2014 as a sort of prequel novella to a book he had called Lock-In. This novella describes how the status quo of that book came to be, and it's written as a series of interview transcripts with different people involved in the pandemic response and the development of the eventual solution. This is my first Scalzi book (though I think I've actually been following him on social media for a while), and I did find it reasonably good and it was short enough for me to finish during the two-hour wait. Though I suppose the format means I won't necessarily enjoy his more normal works. Still, it has made me a bit more interested!
Young Justice: Phantoms
Season four of Young Justice was okay, but I felt like maybe had one or two too many subplots to follow. I might have been confused because I probably missed an episode or two somewhere in the middle, but I did enjoy how everything was resolved and looking forward to Kara Zor-El in the next season!
Ongoing TV Status (all caught up!)
The Flash season 8, The Boys season 3, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, The Orville season 3, Superman and Lois, Obi-wan Kenobi, Ms Marvel
This coming week:
Yet another bunch of errands to do, such is life. Then there's an Eternal open next weekend, but it's Expedition format, and I don't have a deck for that yet, so IDK if I'm playing. I think Obiwan is ending next week. Hoping the Covid cases don't go up too quickly or maybe even start trending down?!? I want to write more on this blog! (There are a lot of things I want to do more of!)
Reviews in this post