This week's header image was generated using DALL-E with the prompt a ultradetailed beautiful panting of a stylish woman sitting on a chair looking over a peaceful bay during sunset, by conrad roset, greg rutkowski and makoto shinkai.

Bits and Pieces

• The big news this past week is the passing of Queen Elizabeth II, Britain's longest reigning monarch. She is succeeded by Charles III. And I think a lot of Brits discovered how many people on the internet weren't too fond of either their beloved monarch or their history of colonialism.

• PH/Covid: Cases seem to have plateaued, instead of continuing to go down as I'd hoped. In fact, there is even a slight uptick in the NCR positivity rate, possibly due to the reopening of face to face classes a couple of weeks ago. Hopefully we don't get into a big surge.

• Last night I stayed up late to get updates on the Marvel/LucasArts announcements at D23. Some new trailers for upcoming D+ series were released. Nothing too exciting; most of the juicy stuff was kept as exclusive footage for on-site attendees. A lot of people were disappointed with the lack of FF casting news or new film announcements.

• This weekend I also worked a bit on some updates to the site's backend processing, but I made a deployment mistake and left some batch jobs processing while resetting the indexes which resulted in a flood of tweets and toots from me on Twitter and Mastodon. Took me a while to clean up the mess!

• Gaming: I think I'm around halfway through SMT5 (on Switch). Also still playing Paradise Killer (via PC Game Pass), but I have no idea if I'm doing well. Just normal grinding in Eternal Card Game. Been drafting Dominaria United on Magic Arena, here's a Youtube playlist. The week started out well for DMU drafts and Street Fighter V in terms of winning, but that quickly soured and the second half of the week was terrible; hopefully I can turn things around this coming week.

• Speaking of streaming, some friends convinced me to try streaming Words on Stream on Twitch. It was fun, but we couldn't get too far, probably because I don't have that many viewers!

• Media Diet: Last week I finished reading Maskerade (a Discworld book ) and also managed to watch 3 movies.

Some Links of Interest

• Short stories: How much do you make? How do you sell one? How long does it take to write?:

• Why Does a Librarian Own a Social Media Site That's Been Around for Longer Than Facebook?: I've been reading MeFi without an account on and off for more than 10 years, maybe I should sign up

• After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel. The oligopoly has won:

Visit the Links page for more links of interest.

And some interesting stuff from Twitter:

• A thread about ADHD hyperfocus.
• A thread about how Hollywood is crumbling for profit.
• A wholesome and joyful video of bros just having fun.
• Last week I mentioned not being able to find something I read about people not reading their own website/blog contents. I found out it was actually a Twitter thing! (via Winnie Lim).

This coming week:

• I think Tokyo Game Show is next week, but I'm not looking forward to anything specific there I think. Maybe expect some new SF6 news?