Second week of April, more or less. Today (Monday Apr 10) is a holiday over here. Celebrating the Day of Valor (i.e. the only instance worldwide of a nation commemorating a military defeat). The holiday was originally supposed to be on Apr 9, but that landed on Easter Sunday this year, so the holiday was moved up to Monday in the name of "holiday economics".

Popular 2000s Pinoy online forum PinoyExchange is shutting down! Quite a bit of local early internet history will go away with it when it does. Some people are already trying to preserve the contents.

My Week

Holy Week is as usual a bit chill. Had some errands to do and some religious obligations but otherwise nothing much of note.

We had yet another small father's-side family get-together here at the house last Friday. This felt a bit blasphemous to me as growing up my lola always emphasized that Holy Week was supposed to be a time of quiet reflection and not you know, raucous celebration of any kind. Still, all good.

Complained a bit about Twitter (or what remains of it). That post title was supposed to be just a placeholder while I wrote it out, then I published it without changing it. Seems fine lol.

Had a bit of a scare a few days ago when some image rendering artifacts (small black boxes distorting text) suddenly appeared on my display. I was worried that either my recently-purchased monitor or recently-purchased video card were dying. After some fiddling around, opening various windows and config dialogs to check things, not even restarting or anything like that, the problem just magically vanished? I suspect I triggered some background process that made Windows realize a graphics driver was being wonky and it automatically updated somehow? A bit of a mystery, hopefully something that doesn't happen again.

Media Diet

• Gaming:

  • Single player: Just the Witcher 3 this week, now that I've finished RTMI. Will look into starting a new "small game" soon.
  • Wrote the Return to Monkey Island review.
  • Online: Magic Arena, Eternal and Marvel Snap daily grinding continue as usual, not much of note. I did write my Phyrexia All Will Be One limited recap already, in anticipation of the new set coming out about a week from now.
  • Played an online drawing game called Gartic Phone with the trivia team.

• Reading: Still mostly just comics. I am actually quite close to finishing the first volume of Thor! I am excitedly looking forward to another Complete Marvel Run update. Should start digging into an actual book again soon.

• Watching: Actually managed to watch quite a bit this past week. Season 9 of The Blacklist still ongoing, albeit a bit slowly. Got started with Star Trek Picard season 3. Watched Wrestlemania with some friends. Rewatched Thor (2011) and new-watched Moneyball (2011) and Murder Mystery (2023).

Walking

This past week (Sunday thru Saturday), Fitbit says I walked a total of 70,277 steps and burned 24,979 calories. These are no longer record highs, but the important thing is I am able to maintain the 70k steps per week, despite the ever-increasing summer heat making it infeasible to go out walking too late in the morning or too early in the evening.

I ran across a procession (rare these days in my area) while I was out walking on Good Friday.

Some Links of Interest

• Software Multiverse | brillient: > "But we are holding ourselves back from all of these possibilities. Because we are under pressure, from the reigning socio-economic tyranny, to do only things that are likely to earn a profit within some fixed limit of financial periods or product cycles"

• The age of average — Alex Murrell: I think that convergence upon a "average" global norms in various industries is an inevitable outcome of a global communications network that emphasizes trends and lowest-common-denominator marketing

• GRID WORLD by Alexander Miller: Nice essay about grids and also some nice graphics on this page

• (Youtube) The Assassin's Teapot

• (Youtube) Jurassic Park, but with a cat

Check out the linkblog for more links!

This coming week

Trivia team will be attending at least one quiz night this week, possibly two!