Getting tired of having to type the date all the time. Maybe starting next year's weeknotes I'll just number them from #1 to whatever like some other people do.

The World

It has certainly been a week, especially in tech.

• Musk's Twitter reorg continues, with all the accompanying chaos. I don't really want to recap everything, there are far better explainers out there. Hashtags like "#RIPTwitter" trended for a while following a wave of mass resignations after many refused his ultimatum to "go hardcore".
• Mastodon influx continues, and a lot of servers are having trouble keeping up. I have a lot more follows and followers there now (still less than Twitter though), and I am a bit worried that the character of the network may already have been forever changed.
• I don't like to talk too much about crypto because I'm not a fan, but the big tech news the past week or so has been the spectacular crash of FTX crypto exchange, which wiped out billions in value, likely with a lot of fraud involved.
• Speaking of fraud, Theranos CEO Holmes was sentenced to 11 years and change in prison
• Sometime last week, the world population crossed the 8 billion threshold. For some reason, a newborn girl from Tondo was chosen as the symbolic "8 billionth baby".

My Week

• This week was ok. Spent some time with family. Got some alone time. Got some side project work in.

• Tuesday: Had to change the light bulb in my bathroom. I'm always worried that I'll get shocked if I try to do this while the light switch is on, and it didn't help that I didn't know if the switch was on or off when I started (apparently the switches in this house do NOT follow a standard!). The new bulb turned on as I was putting it in, but luckily I was not electrocuted.

• Still Tuesday: Two of my nieces hung out at our place in the afternoon. The younger one kept trying to sit on me or push down on my chest while I was lying down (she said it was CPR) and she was heavy/strong enough that my chest felt a bit sore the next morning.

• Thursday and Friday: Had the run of the house because the seniors had an out of town excursion. Ordered in some pizza because I wanted to try Pizza Hut's cheesedog pops stuffed crust (was ok, a bit overpriced), and watched a bunch of movies.

• Over the past week or so, my desktop PC has been experiencing some hiccups: namely, it occasionally shuts down without warning, leaving only one of the CPU fans and the mouse with power (which is weird, because the mouse is plugged in via the keyboard). The first three incidents happened while I had been away from the desk for a while so I thought it had something to do with how long I was keeping it up, but incidents #4 and #5 happened early this morning right in front of my eyes, shortly after booting up! I suspect it's some kind of issue with the PSU. I opened up the case earlier and poked around a bit but could not find any obvious problems. It's been stable since then, so I'm kind of hoping my poking around maybe accidentally fixed whatever the issue was? If not, my options are to try to save this 7-year old unit by buying a replacement PSU or moving forward my plans to buy a completely new desktop, which I was planning to do early next year anyway. Kind of lucky this didn't happen last year at the height of crazy vidcard prices.

• Over the weekend, as I worried over Twitter potentially crashing, I decided to look into archiving a bunch of tweets. Not my own (those are already auto-archived to this site), but others that I had liked or replied to, and also the tweets of a friend that has passed away. I discovered a couple of helpful tools: snscrape is a Python CLI tool that lets you export all tweet content for a user (among other things); doesn't include attached media though. The second discovery was that archive.org has a tool for batch import of URLs from Google Sheets! Basically you list urls you want them to archive and point them to the spreadsheet and they'll process it in the background. I started one with like 7k rows last Saturday evening and it is not even halfway done though.

• I also may have been playing around with making my likes archived and accessible on this site and may have accidentally pushed some to the RSS feed, oops! Sorry to any subs who caught it! (Waves at RSS folk)

• Gaming:

  • Still playing some card games on the regular:
    • Eternal: Last Saturday, I qualified for day 2 of an Eternal Open for the first time! I was looking forward to playing the single-elimination finals, which unfortunately were scheduled at 2AM Monday for me. Sadly around an hour and a half before the event, our home internet went down D: I was hoping it would come back immediately, but when there were 15 minutes remaining and internet was still down, I belatedly decided to boot up my laptop to try to play via mobile hotspot. Sadly, game updates took forever and I missed my chance. Internet came back a couple of hours later, well after it had cost me the chance to become the Eternal World Champion! (I will forever pretend that I would have won the whole thing and the succeeding Worlds event if only fate hadn't intervened.)
    • Magic Arena: Started drafting and streaming Brothers War Limited, you can follow along on the MTGBRO tag or via Twitch if you like
    • Marvel Snap. Griiindy!!
  • Still trying to power through SMT5, such a long game.
  • Recently Discord has released some playable group games, available on Nitro. One of us has a Nitro sub, so the trivia team has been playing some of them, they are pretty fun. Here are some videos: SketchHeads (drawing game), Bobble League (turn-based soccer), Blazing 8s (UNO at home).

Media Diet

• Finished reading: Bands of Mourning. Right after finishing it I found out the next book The Lost Metal had just released and went ahead and got a Kindle copy off Amazon, already halfway through it!

• Enola Holmes 2 (2022): Was a lot like the first film, maybe slightly better? Not really a bad thing. No Mycroft this time, and I think a bit more help from Sherlock.

• The Accountant (2016): Tried this out because I wanted random action film from Netflix. Surprised that it was about a person with autism. All I knew going in was that it had Afflect, so was pleasantly surprised to also see people like Simmons, Kendrick, Lithgow, Bernthal, etc. The twist at the end you could see coming a mile away.

• The Adjustment Bureau (2011): Watched mostly for Emily Blunt, but her character had very little agency here other than to be Damon's love interest. The time jumps in the story made the pace a bit weird. Not too happy with the ending either, kinda lame.

• Ingrid Goes West (2017): I think I picked this up based on a recommendation from r/Movies. I'm easy to convince if there's Elizabeth Olsen, but this one turned out to be a difficult watch for me. Not the movie's fault, I'm just not a big fan of stories like this where the main character is doing everything wrong noone is keeping her in check and you just know everything is going to come crashing down. To top it off she has obvious mental health issues, and I just found all of her actions so cringe-inducing. Took me 4 sittings to finish the film. Aside from the fact that people need mental health, the film also had some things to say about the insincerity and vapidness of influencer culture and how that can affect people.

Some Links of Interest

Not a lot today:

• James Acaster Became a Stand-Up Comedian to Infiltrate a Gang of Drug Dealers - YouTube: One of my favorite British comedians

• Magic on Deck | The Nib: A comic article about entering the world of MTG

Visit the Links page for more links of interest.

This coming week:

• I have a passport renewal appointment this week, hopefully it goes well.
• Oh, and we have another quiz night this week as well!
• Arena Open next weekend I think, not yet sure if I'll be playing. Might cause my internet to die again.
• Surprisingly, Civ6 is still receiving updates, and is getting new leaders this week! Not sure if I'll have time to try them though.