A Quote

"Let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile."

-- Bertrand Russell (via the Marginalian)

My Week

The first week of March was a bit boring for me. Some additional medical errands, mostly just to accompany other people for routine procedures. Lots of walking; kind of exhausting actually.

For some reason, I've been getting random sporadic HTTP access errors the past few months. For a long time I suspected it was my ISP's DNS being problematic, so this week I decided to finally try alternate DNS servers, ended up settling for Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 service. I think I was actually using them already before; I forget why I ever switched back to the ISP default. It's only been a few days, but it looks like the situation is much improved.

A while back Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, decided to shit himself and be openly racist on the internet, getting himself instantly cancelled. I've read a lot of Dilbert over the years and I've found many of the strips relatable (even though a lot of people consider him unfunny) and even read one of his non-Dlibert books a long time ago. It's always a bummer when someone whose work you've enjoyed turns out to be an asshole. I've been aware of how aggressively right-wing he was for a while, so it doesn't really come as a surprise anymore.

Despite my vigorous protests, the NYT went ahead and dropped the acrostics from their Games archive. Trivia team dashed through about two years worth of acrostics in a week before the deadline. We do have an archive so we can still keep playing the remainder, but it's still an annoying loss - I haven't found any other alternative online acrostic implementation that was as good as the NYT one.

Anyway, here's a picture of some ducks:

I think we've had these ducks around the house for at least two decades now, no idea where they came from.

ducks.jpg March 6, 2023, 4:58 p.m. Close

Media Diet

• Playing:

  • Single player: Still playing Witcher 3 (doing quests, solving crimes).
  • Online: Still doing a lot of All Will Be One drafting on Magic Arena, a lot of it off-stream even. Also threw away some gems on the Arena Open this past weekend, it did not go well. Eternal, Marvel Snap still ongoing.

• Reading: Started reading Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkman. Also, short update on my Complete Marvel Run: Still proceeding, but not at the pace I'd hoped. I was hoping to finish Thor v1 by March, but it seems likely that we're going to spill into April, which is fine I guess? It's not like this insane project has a deadline.

• Watching: I am already into S6 of The Blacklist! I did however, take a short break after S5 to watch things like Nightcrawler (2014) and Abbott Elementary S1.

Some Links

• Pluralistic: Solving the Moderator’s Trilemma with Federation (04 Mar 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow:

  Rozenshtein proposes a solution (of sorts) to the Moderator's Trilemma: federation. De-siloing social media, breaking it out of centralized walled gardens and recomposing it as a bunch of small servers run by a diversity of operators with a diversity of content moderation approaches. The Fediverse, in other words.

• Godot 4.0 sets sail: All aboard for new horizons: So many new features in this release! Given that I've only ever used Godot for Game Jams, I feel like there's still so much more for me to learn

• The Bitter End of "Content" - Freddie deBoer:

  "The marketplace of attention was supposed to solve this problem; we were told that the good channels would be elevated by the platforms and that people would stop watching the bad channels. But the marketplace of attention cares only about attention."

  Frankly we should have known this kind of content spam due to engagement incentives was going to be a problem when the whole industry of SEO sprang up

Check out the linkblog for more links!

This coming week

Nothing of note, although there's some family and friends flying in from overseas, so I expect I'll be going out to meet people a couple of times this week.