It has certainly been a week.
The World
- Professional troll and part-time entrepreneur Elon Musk wants out of his Twitter buyout deal, and his social media platform of choice is taking him to court in response. No one is surprised by this.
- NASA published the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope. Comparisons to previous images we had are amazing.
- A massive leak of documents details how Uber broke laws, duped police, and lobbied governments in their early years. Looks like the files are mostly about their dealings in Europe, but it's not hard to imagine they did some unsavory stuff with the less transparent government over here as well before they left SEA in 2018.
Some Links of Interest
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no hello: This reminds me of back in the day I would sometimes put "dont ask to ask, just ask!" in my jabber status at work because people would just message "Hi, can I ask a question?" and wait for me to respond before asking!
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1x Engineer: A healthier and more realistic stereotype compared to the mythical 10x engineer.
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The week the open web won – Hi, I'm Heather Burns: I have no idea about the law mentioned in the context of this essay, but despite that it does a pretty good job of describing the benefits of the open web
Visit the Links page for more links of interest.
As a bonus, here's some Twitter content I've enjoyed recently:
- "This Twitter thread, posted as a set of screen-capped text messages, is a finalist for the 2022 Hugo Award for Best Short Story. I enjoyed reading all of the finalists in this category. This is the only one that made me cry. It’s a quick read, please read it."
- Tips for writing about complex issues, with Star Wars examples
- You are not prepared for how the creator of Gravity Falls had to argue with Disney's standards department about what they could include
My Week
- Managed to get back into streaming Magic Arena by drafting the new Alchemy set Alchemy Horizons Baldur's Gate. The set seems fairly fun so far, though I don't expect to be drafting a lot of it. As usual, there is a site tag and a youtube playlist and I announce my streams on Twitter if you want to follow along.
- This weekend was the 2022 GMTK Game Jam. I joined this jam last year and managed to submit a game, but this year was more challenging for me and I tapped out early. Will probably write about it later this week.
- I haven't been playing any single-player games since I finished Triangle Strategy but this week I got into my old savegame of Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings which I've been playing on and off since 2018 yet was somehow still in Act I. Honestly it was Witcher 3 I wanted to play, but I felt guilty leaving this save game unfinished! W2 is so old and clunky though, there's about an even chance I just give up on it in frustration.
Media Diet
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RIPD (2013)
- I only watched this because I wanted something light and short and I figured Ryan Reynolds would fit the bill, except he's all sad and gloomy in this one! Jeff Bridges provides some light comedy and Kevin Bacon plays a decent villain, but the plot of this weird cross between Ghostbusters and MIB is mostly predictable and forgettable.
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Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 1
- Possibly the best of the current generation of Trek shows, mainly because it goes back to the episodic and optimistic nature of the original series. Revisits and reimagines and expounds on past Star Trek lore; looking forward to season 2.
(Click photos to view full-size)
This coming week:
- I believe Comic-con is this coming week, so I'm looking forward to new content for the comic fandom, especially new trailers for upcoming movies!
- Also, I have so, so many things I want to do, but not a lot of time and energy to do them; this isn't new and is utterly unsurprising.
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