April is already halfway over, and I once again find myself overcome by the feeling that time is passing by way, way too quickly. Easter passed by for me without fanfare.

My Week

Twitter emailed me to tell me one of my quote bots would get suspended, but somehow it kept happily posting along so :shrug:

I wrote about my recent project of scanning old photographs.

Trivia team headed out to GeekFight last Wednesday, but we fell short and finished first loser.

NYT added a new "Digits" puzzle which reminds me a lot of Countdown from British TV, except with infinite time and tries so it's not especially challenging.

There was this PH Travel Map thing going around that just serves to reminds me that I haven't travelled around the country too much.

Media Diet

• Gaming:

  • Single player: Finished the main quest of Witcher 3, looking forward to digging in to the DLC soon since that's all new to me. Will also probably start playing a new small game this week.
  • Online: Magic Arena, Eternal and Marvel Snap daily grinding continue as usual. Despite getting to infinite last season with Snap I am making no progress this season. Spent some gold on a few Explorer Metagame challenge runs on Magic Arena.
  • I have preordered Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom!

• Reading: Still mostly just comics. I have finished the first volume of Thor! Will probably write the next Complete Marvel Run update later this week. Really should start reading a new book as well. Feed reader backlog: 107 items.

• Watching: Ongoing: The Blacklist S9, Star Trek Picard S3. Watched Extraction (2020) and Surrogates (2009) at home via streaming. Went to the cinemas with some friends to watch the excellent Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023).

Walking

This past week (Sunday thru Saturday), Fitbit says I walked a total of 70,712 steps and burned 25,730 calories. Despite the generally hot weather, we had a couple of rainy days last week which always makes walking a challenge, but we got there somehow.

Some Links of Interest

• Rank Things: This is a weirdly entertaining exercise in ranking random things.

• in a way, this is how it should be - by Brian Feldman:

  "The way the web works now is: You have to compile your Node.js bundles into the dockerized Kubernetes, and once the Redis caches are asynchronously flooberized into your AWS Red Hat instances with optimized SQL queries, you can start distributing JWTs, interpolating string literals, and distributing content over CDNs with performative grombulations at 10x, assuming you've A/B tested correctly and the user doesn't have AdBlock enabled. This ever-growing heap is why software engineers are paid $1,000,000 per annum and get 180 days of vacation (with rollover)."

• Kottke.org Is 25 Years Old Today and I’m Going to Write About It: I always enjoy reading retrospective posts from long-running blogs

• Why do websites have so many pop-ups? - The Verge

• (Youtube) Marvels Teaser Trailer - I am a bit hyped for this and I feel like Iman Vellani is really gonna steal the show here.

Check out the linkblog for more links!

This coming week (and beyond)

March of the Machine releases on Arena this week! Hopefully will be able to stream drafts a couple of times this week.

Also looking forward to the Star Trek Picard finale this week. I have been enjoying this season and looking forward to writing the review.

The next couple of months are actually looking pretty lit, a bunch of things I'm hyped for.

• movies-wise: Mario movie, Guardians 3, Spider-Verse 2 and The Flash are all coming up.
• games-wise, upcoming launches: Zelda BOTW 2, Street Fighter 6, Final Fantasy XVI (probably won't get on launch since I don't have a PS5 yet, hoping for the eventual PC port)
• Ludum Dare on the last weekend of April. Coincidentally also an Arena Open on the same weekend.