Writing this post in the early morning, because of course my sleep cycle is broken still.

This past week was a bit relaxed, a bit productive. I managed to dig into some side projects.

One of the programming things I did this week was in response to one of last week's stupid internet things. Since the NYT is killing their online archive of acrostics, I reverse-engineered how their acrostic page worked and wrote a Python script to export all the acrostic puzzles. Even if I had access to the NYT paper (I am not an American so I do not), the web interface has value in and of itself since it's much easier to do the acrostics with the automatic copying of letters across sections. This work is already done, and I am satisfied that the trivia team can continue enjoying the acrostics archive even after the NYT pulls them. I am wary of putting them up online for public consumption, as I guess that might be of questionable legality and I don't want Will Shortz to come after me.

I'm still amazed at how my daily walking discipline is holding. I currently target to walk 9-10k steps every day of the week except Saturdays, and I always aim for my weekly step count total to exceed the previous week's. It's an infinite-growth "line goes up" kind of thing, except I don't mind when I fail it. I follow someone else whose weeknotes consist entirely of things they encounter during their daily walks and I wonder if I could do that in this space? I feel like I walk a lot of the same routes though, so it could get repetitive quickly.

Another side project I started this week was scanning old family photos. I've had a scanner since 2015 but only recently have I started using it to scan old stuff. There are a ton of old photo albums in the closets downstairs, ranging back over 40-50 years ago, and for the longest time I've wanted to get started on scanning them for distribution and digital backup purposes. It's going to take a while, and organizing them will be a challenge (many of the albums don't have dates for example), but I am confident I'll get there in the end. Still thinking about how I am going to share these scanned photos with the family (FB is a no-no for me now, and I'm certainly not making them public!)

I wrote about my new progressive eyeglasses.

Media Diet

• Gaming:

  • Single player: Still playing Witcher 3 (running around solving crimes, playing Gwent, hunting monsters), but also decided to throw a shorter game into the mix. Started playing Ori and the Will of the Wisps (via PC game pass) last Monday, and it proceeded to a good part of my week. I finished the game last Saturday and am still considering whether I want to do the rest of these ridiculous achievements or just move on.
  • Online: Played my first couple of drafts of Phyrexia All Will Be One on Magic Arena last Thursday, got off to a good start! Eternal, Marvel Snap still ongoing.

• Books: Haven't started any new ones yet.

• Movies: Watched a couple of movies this week: Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007) and Lost Bullet (2020).

• TV: For some reason decided to start watching The Blacklist again (via NF), a series I dropped early on in 2014. I always enjoy James Spader's performances, let's see how far I get this time.

Photos I Have Taken

I'm no photographer, but I really like the lights and shadows on this one. (This one is more than a week old though!)

A statue of Mary at the nearby Santuario at night

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A photo of a shirt I'm not wearing:

It amazes me that this Grand Prix Manila 2008 shirt is still alive after almost 15 years! The GP shirts were always a bit too small for me, so my dad is the one who has been wearing mine all this time. #mtg #gpmanila

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Some Links

• Things I Do Not Like Hearing - by John Paul Brammer: This is just the kind of puerile post that makes me want to check out the rest of a blog. (Substacks are blogs!)

• The Last Man Without a Cell Phone - by Anne Kadet

• ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web | The New Yorker: ChatGPT is a lossy text compression format

• The Market for Lemons - Infrequently Noted: Longish post on the problems with modern frontend development using JS frameworks

  "These technologies were initially pitched on the back of "better user experiences", but have utterly failed to deliver on that promise outside of the high-management-maturity organisations in which they were born. Transplanted into the wider web, these new stacks have proven to be expensive duds."

• (Twitter) The Grammy's awarded their first ever video game Grammy, and the presenter flubbed the winner's pronunciation

• (Twitter) The SNL Mario Kart trailer was pretty great.

Check out the linkblog for more links!

This coming week

Kind of short notice, but we found out there is a F2F quiz night we can attend this coming Wednesday!

Also, third Ant-Man film drops this week! Looking forward to this one, will probably be watching on the weekend.