roytang.net Posts Photos Archives About

2023 Week 05

It has been a week. A month actually! January went by so quickly. Trying to move some things around in these weeknotes, see what feels right.

This past week was a bit chill for me. Some leftover errands. Lots of walking. Being annoyed at stupid internet things (more on that below).

I got new glasses! Will maybe write about that later this week.

I wandered through Trinoma a couple of times this week. Wandering through a mall these days (mid-pandemic) is a lot less entertaining than it used to be. Part of it is that there's a lot fewer things I want to buy or browse that I can't just get digitally or online, and another part of it is that everything is so expensive nowadays. Like normal movie tickets these days are the price of what IMAX tickets were pre-pandemic. Food, books, toys, games, are all more expensive too. I sound like such an old man complaining about prices, but it feels like the jump has been quite high since the pre-COVID times.

After a few weeks of relatively good sleep discipline, I broke my sleep cycle again for a couple of nights this week and am probably once again out of sync with the world.

Things I learned

  • There is a Solaire casino being built near Vertis North, I guess a north-side counterpart to the existing Solaire on the far side. I wonder how bad traffic will get when the North triangle gets all these new businesses?

  • There is a bash utility tree that I can use to easily generate HTML index files for a folder. Via stackoverflow

  • Jupiter is now at 92 moons, WTH. I think it had < 20 back when I was in school. Also, apparently Saturn led the solar system moon count before this latest discovery.

Media Diet

  • Gaming: I guess "gaming" counts as media, so I'll start listing it under this section. Still playing Witcher 3 (running around solving crimes, playing Gwent, hunting monsters), even streamed a bit!. Arena, Eternal, Marvel Snap still ongoing.

  • Books: Finished reading The Truth last night!

  • Movies: Watched a couple of kinda old movies this week: Training Day (2001) and Daredevil (2003).

  • TV: Binged Superstore S6. Also watched the 2023 Royal Rumble.

January 2023 Photo Dump

Some January photos I took that didn't fit anywhere else:

(Click photos to view full-size)

20230102_181104.jpg
20230102_181104.jpg
20230110_154631.jpg
20230110_154631.jpg
20230126_110412.jpg
20230126_110412.jpg
20230130_174654.jpg
20230130_174654.jpg

Stupid Internet Things

  • Twitter announced that they are shutting down free API access with one week's notice (!!), which is of course BS and just further walls up Twitter's garden, taking it away from the open web. Might just be done with it after that. This spurred me to write the blog post officially announcing my trivia bot's migration to Mastodon. I was originally waiting to deploy some changes that I had worked on that would merge the code between the Twitter and Mastodon bots, but given the free API shutdown, that seemed useless, so git revert!! Musk later added some caveats that some free accounts might still work, but who would still want to work with the platform after this BS?

  • The New York Times has announced that they are no longer going to publish Acrostic and Variety crosswords on their website. Even worse, the archives are going away as well, which makes no sense! I can understand saving on the effort to encode new acrostics, but the archive is already there and they say that few people are using it, that means the costs associated with leaving the archive up are minimal. This is once again BS. But at least they gave a month's notice instead of Elon's one week to cut off the free Twitter API. That gives me time to try to archive the acrostics and put them up myself...

  • Netflix accidentally leaked some terrible rules to crack down on password-sharing. My brother messaged me worried that he might have to stop accessing my account but I told him that was probably a mistake and sure enough NF rolled it back a few days later.

Check out the linkblog for more links!

From the Archives

I've written 20+ years worth of blog posts, I thought I'd try to resurface some of them every so often. Here are some I found because I was wondering if I've ever written about the old horror game Waxworks:

This coming week

Nothing specific queued up this week. It's a free week! Will try to work on some of my side projects.

Oh, Phyrexia All Will Be One drops on Magic Arena this week, so there's that. Will probably stream some drafts starting on Thursday.

Mon, Feb. 6, 2023, 1:08 p.m. / / blog / #weeknotes / Syndicated: mastodon twitter / 901 words

Last modified at: Feb. 6, 2023, 2:52 p.m. Source file