The World

• Despite dire warnings from Beijing, US Speaker of the House Pelosi went ahead and visited Taiwan. In response, China has suspended international cooperation in several areas like climate change, and has conducted military exercises around Taiwan, even firing missiles over Taipei. It could be really bad for the world if all of this escalates while the whole Russian invasion of Ukraine is still ongoing.
• As of today, we are at 4k+ covid cases per day for four days in a row. We are inching up ever closer to 5k covid cases per week. I am hoping that this coming week will see the last round of increases before we start to see plateauing or even cases going down, but the still-rising positivity rates seem to make that unlikely. At least the health care utilization rates seem to be holding, I think?

Some Links of Interest

• Rubenerd: Thinking aloud about web engagement

• The Terror of Everything Everywhere All At Once: An excellent video essay about an excellent film, relating it to our modern hyperconnected and always online world

• Adactio: Journal—Directory enquiries: Search engines vs directories

• This is what you're nostalgic for - The History of the Web

Visit the Links page for more links of interest.

Also, some amusing stuff recently from Twitter:

• French physicist apologizes for claiming picture of chorizo was a photo of a star from the James Webb telescope
• Weatherman discovers his monitor has a touch screen…… immediately turns into a kid
• "I’ve spent hours on tik tok a day for the past month and I’m here to tell you now: this is the coolest dude I’ve seen on there yet.". The dude in question is @ReadByTed.

My Week

• This week felt a bit more productive than the last, as I managed to get some things done. Not much I'd like to talk about publicly though. I will say that for the past couple of years, I've found that Monday through Wednesday seem to be my productive days, with Thursdays and Fridays often turning into days with a "eh, I'll just do that next week" kind of feel.
• On the blog: Twenty Years of Blogging, a post I've been putting off for a while.
• A couple of weeks ago, I was contacted by Yuvraj Singh about how he was enjoying the blog and he asked whether I'd like to participate in this series of interviews and I gladly said yes. The interview is here: An Interview with Roy Tang. I mostly talk about this blog! I love these kinds of random internet stranger interactions that come from having an online presence!
• Not much happening on the CCGs (Eternal Card Game and Magic Arena) this week, though I did manage to spike this weekend's Historic Metagame Challenge on Magic Arena.
• Still playing: Shin Megami Tensei V and Witcher 2. Sometimes Street Fighter V. Had to shift SMT5 down to Normal difficulty from Hard because it was way harder than I was comfortable with! I'm also thinking of starting yet another single-player game in addition to the two RPGs I'm already playing which sounds insane given the limitations imposed by time and space and physics.

Media Diet

• The Orville season 3

  • (I originally had this review in the last weeknotes, but found out this week there was one more episode left in the season, so I moved it here!)
  • The Orville continues to be a pretty good Star Trek show despite not being Star Trek. This season focuses less on humor and tackles more serious challenges and expands the interstellar political situation of their universe. It's actually nice that we are essentially getting a second and new Star Trek-like universe without all the baggage of the first. And despite the episodic nature of the show, they manage to weave the ongoing plots into a relevant finale.

• Seinfeld

  • I never got too much into this back in the 90s but started watching it on Netflix last year and watched the first four seasons before stopping. I started watching again from season 5 a couple of months ago and finished the series finale last Firday. I watch it mostly as background activity while I'm doing something else, the show is perfect for that. A friend who had also recently started watching the show mentioned that it aged a lot better compared to Friends which was around the same era, and I think it's because the show's main characters are unapologetically idiots. They approach heavy topics like racism or sexism with an open admittance that they are being terrible people and that gets them into further hijinx. Fast forward to 2022 and most of those terrible behaviors that get them in trouble still turn out to be relatively amusing. And I thought it was great that the series finale really drove home the point about how terrible these four characters really are! I was slightly concerned that binging this season might be making me dumber lol.

• Nice Guys (2016)

  • I actually hadn't heard of this one before but I saw a thread hyping it up on r/Movies and it was on Prime Video, so I gave it a shot. Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling play unlikely "buddy cop" PIs investigating a series of porn-industry adjacent murders in the late 70s. It's pretty good and has some absurdly funny scenes, mostly played straight. Best performance probably goes to Angourie Rice (Betty Brant in the MCU Spider-man films) as Gosling's no-nonsense 13-year old daughter, who probably does most of the heavy lifting in the investigation.

This coming week:

• A certain upcoming anniversary notwithstanding, I don't think there's anything in particular I'm looking forward to next week. The week after looks stacked though!