The World

• Our local covid cases continue to tick upwards, albeit a bit slowly, and the health care utilization rate still holds at low values. Positivity rates are climbing though, especially in NCR, so the "real" case counts are probably a bit higher. If I had to I would guess the current "surge" peaks in maybe 2-3 weeks.
• Tomorrow is president BBM's first state of the nation address. It's a big brouhaha I hope to ignore completely.
• Earlier today, there was a shooting incident at Ateneo de Manila. Three people died. It was a politically-motivated assassination attempt in broad daylight at a graduation ceremony at one of the most prestigious universities in the country. For me, this reflects the state of the nation more than anything the president might say tomorrow: impunity, violence, and politically divided.
• Our friends in the US and Europe experienced record-high temperatures during the past week. I learned that when places like UK have a "heat wave", the temperature literally spikes for a day or two at a time; it's not like over here where the temperature is just constantly high during summer, so they are less acclimatized to the heat. And a lot of their infra isn't built to handle the soaring temps; they even had some melting runways! It's gotten so bad lately that Steam and Nintendo had to put out advisories that the Steam Deck and the Switch might not be able to withstand the high temps!

Some Links of Interest

All I have for you today is this interesting Twitter thread about how Etsy's homepages worked back in the mid-2000s. (Well, interesting for software folk I guess!)

Visit the Links page for more links of interest.

My Week

• On the blog: I wrote about failing to finish a game jam and also my out of town trip from a couple of weeks ago.
• This week I mostly holed up at home, outside of my regular daily walks.
• Woke up early today to catch the details from Marvel's Hall H presentation at SDCC as they came out. Bunch of new stuff, plans for phases 5 and 6. New trailers for She-Hulk and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. A lot of people already have Marvel fatigue, but as a long-time comic book fan, I'm still very much invested! The weekend also gave us new trailers for Shazam: Fury of the Gods and Black Adam! Also: I know it's a long shot, but I'm hoping this panel from Secret Invasion # 5 (published almost 14 years ago) makes it in!
• Speaking of comic books, I've found myself reading more of the Marvel back catalog lately via the Marvel Unlimited app. I've been subscribed for a while, but haven't been using it too extensively before. This week I read a lot of old comics from the 60s and 70s (Iron Man, Avengers, Daredevil, etc) and it crossed my mind: what if I attempt to read EVERY MARVEL COMIC?!? This is of course not unheard of so it's definitely doable, but would probably take a while. Latest estimates have the total number of published issues at around 30,000. I figure if I read say 50 comics a week (in addition to whatever was published that week), that's around 2,500 per year, so I can clear the backlog in around 12 years, which doesn't sound too bad! In actuality, I've already read a decent chunk of that 30k backlog, so I would guess it would only be 8-9 years maybe for me. Fifty comics a week is maybe ten comics a day on weekdays, which is definitely manageable and won't take too much of my time. The real problem is I would be adding yet another backlog to my already extensive backlogs of games, books, side projects, and other things I really should get around to.
• Wrapped up my streaming of Alchemy Horizons: Baldur's Gate on Magic Arena this past week. I started strong but the finale was terrible. You can see all my drafts via the site tag or the youtube playlist
• This week I started playing Shin Megami Tensei V on Nintendo Switch. This game certainly has a vibe.

Media Diet

Not a lot this week.

• Se7en (1995)

  • Been meaning to watch this for a while, mostly so I can understand all the "What's in the box?" references. Excellent thriller film with a very young Brad Pitt and Gwyneth Paltrow. Morgan Freeman gives a great performance as the grizzled and tired veteran cop on the verge of retirement. Was surprised to see Kevin Spacey, who a friend of mine says was unfortunately "typecast into being an asshole". One of my trivia friends insists the movie should always be referred to by the stylized title "Se7en".

• The Flash season 8

  • I think I finished watching this a couple of weeks ago and forgot to write about it. I guess the season finale just didn't register with me. Not a fan of the season. It was just so bad, with a lot of handwaved sci-fi nonsense and way too much CW drama. (To be fair, the Flash comics also have a lot of handwaved sci-fi nonsense...). I really should just give up this show now that Legends is canned and Superman and Lois are confirmed non-Arrowverse, there's no more reason to be following it. But there's a very good chance the next season is the final one, so I might as well watch it since I've already come this far? (Sunk cost fallacy much?) Maybe I'll just wait til it's done then binge it lol.

This coming week:

• Trivia team is planning to attend another face to face quiz night this Thursday. I am still wary of the rising Covid cases, but will probably go.
• Next weekend will be a bit busy for my card games: Eternal and Arena both have limited opens I want to play in! New Explorer and Historic Anthologies are also scheduled to drop on Arena this week, but I probably won't get into those immediately.