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2023 June

  • πŸ”— Some blogging myths via web
  • A fantastic follow-up to the original 2018 movie, further developing Miles and expanding on Gwen's back story as well. Fantastic use of animation not only to portray the different universes, but as also as a storytelling tool to convey emotion, tone and depth. Also I must commend the marketing for preparing trailers that while they showed a lot of the fun stuff in the films, never spoiled any of the deeper plot moments or the cause of the ultimate conflict that arises between Miles and the other Spiders. Looking forward to Beyond the Spider-verse next year!

  • The first week of June was a little bit rainy, though not as much as a supertyphoon would have brought. I think PAGASA already declared an official start to the rainy season? A Quote On June 1, 2023, 8:41 p.m. I wrote: "Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes β€” including you." Anne Lamott My Week The week was a bit busy. Last week's weeknotes came late because I was busy through Monday. Tuesday had to get some errands done and had to help my parents prep for a long trip to the province.

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  • When I told my friends I'd never seen this film before they told me it's fun so I watched it. It was indeed fun, but not as fun as I'd hoped and I feel like my expectations were set too high. I think I was expecting more Indiana Jones type hijinx and instead got body horror and cheesy 90s CGI.

    That being said, still very entertaining; Fraser and Weiss gave good performances that prevented the movie from being too cheesy. I like how the protag starts out rough and a bit belligerent but comes around to show he really cares about the girl.

    I was thinking about also watching the Tom Cruise remake, but I read that Fraser said it was "less fun" than the original so maybe not.

  • Met up with some friends for boardgames TWICE this week! One of our playgroup is flying back to the US next week so we won't be able to play together in person for a while so we took the opportunity to play as much as we can.

    Earlier in the week, we finally managed to finish the Path to Carcosa campaign of Arkham Horror card game. We just barely made it out scenario 7 alive, but scenario 8 was a bit easier. Overall the game is fun and interesting and challenging, but you really need a regular playgroup to go through a campaign. I think the game was designed to be played one scenario per day with your group meeting regularly once or twice a week, instead of our two-scenarios-per-day over four meetings.

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    Saturday we got to try out the Conan board game. I didn't get to take a picture of the box, but I believe this was Conan The Conqueror board game. We had time for 3 scenarios, and I chose to play the Overlord all 3 times, but I lost twice and won once, probably because I was a bit too aggro. It was good fun and the scenarios took much less than time I expected given how complicated the initial explanations of turns and actions were. However, I think Conan himself is a bit too OP! (When I complained about it, my friends simply pointed out the game is named after him!) Also, I really like that big snake figurine.

    After we got tired of Conan, we played a bit more of Scout and Maskman (we last played them more than a month ago!), and we found out we had actually been playing Scout wrong last time and the actual rules were much more challenging. (I did so poorly)!

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    (The day also had a fair amount of Street Fighter VI!)

  • "Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes β€” including you."

    • Anne Lamott
  • I was thinking about how recently (other than the weeknotes), my blog posts have been mostly reviews of stuff I've been watching/playing/reading/etc and I haven't made any posts about blogging or tech stuff or that sort of thing that I used to write about a decent amount. I was wondering if this was a problem, but then realized this was silly. It's my site and my blog and I can publish any kind of content that I want! A common question when you suggest someone start blogging is "What would I even write about?" and the answer is simply "You

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2023 May

  • These weeknotes are coming in very late, because I was quite busy Saturday through Monday. June is coming up this year, and June coming around always makes me feel like the year is passing by so quickly since that's almost the halfway point. All the years pass by so quickly these days. A supertyphoon was supposed to hit the country over the weekend, but the weather so far over the past few days has been quite pleasant (aside from some habagat rainshowers here and there). I think it's more of the northern side of the country being affected, but I

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  • πŸ”— Linear feeds are a dark pattern via web

    "Dark pattern" might be a bit too strong here. I think sometimes you do want a linear feed, but sometimes you might want something like what the OP describes. I think one issue is that anything more complicated than a linear feed might turn off most people who aren't terminally online, which is why most socmed platforms just default to a linear feed. The grouping OP describes is a common feature of RSS feed readers! Though they typically don't have the "per day" grouping thing, that sounds like an option feed readers could implement.

    I just found out the feed reader I use (Inoreader) actually has options for grouping by date! I really should be more familiar with my own tools!

  • Nice visualization of the breaches you were involved in. I was in 18 breaches!

  • I forget why I added this to my list but wow such a good film with magnificent performances. Sean Penn and Tim Robbins were great in this, and even a lot of the supporting cast were great. A dark and tragic tale of loss and trauma and vengeance and endless cycles of violence

  • So apprently the Twitter API keys my site uses for automated syndication/cross-posting to twitter have stopped working sometime over the past 24h. No warning or anything. Unsurprising given everything else happening over there I guess. Will give it a few days before I just completely disable the crossposting

  • Intense and action-packed, great fight scenes

  • As May streaks to the end, the rains start coming more often, though mostly in the early mornings for now. Hopefully we start to get less of this really intense heat. My Week The week wasn't especially busy, but also not very productive, mostly because of Zelda (see below) Some remnant errands this week, mostly involving waiting around in doctor's offices. Trivia team attended another quiz night last Thursday. It was a challenging set and a low-scoring game and we thought we were doing terribly, but actually ended up 1pt away from first place! Media Diet Gaming: Saturday: Hung out

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  • Finally unboxing this Breath of the Wild amiibo I bought six years ago so I could use it with Tears of the Kingdom. Looks great!

    #zelda #amiibo #gaming

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    NRFB since 2017!
    With his hero buddies
  • I'm not streaming March of the Machine drafts anymore, but I did do some drafting online this past week, in prep for potentially playing in this weekend's Arena Open. (Spoiler: I did not end up playing the open.)

    First up, I actually tried drafting on MTGO! It has been a long while - in fact I have no idea when I last played a game on MTGO, though I do login to check the account occasionally.

    When I checked my account, I saw that I actually had enough play points to enter a draft league, which I had never done before so I gave it a try. I think I put together a decent deck; I drafted Glissa for the first time! It's such a bomb, but never got a chance during the games and I only managed a 1-2.

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    Next up, I tried doing a traditional (BO3) draft on Magic Arena, once I had the 10k gold needed for entry. This actually went much better, and the deck felt a lot more solid all-around. A decent amount of fliers and removal and Anafenza was kinda nice.

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    I didn't trophy, only going 2-1, but the loss was super close and decided in game 3.

    Both of the above runs were best-of-3 of course, instead of my usual BO1 drafting. Playing in BO3 again after a long while is interesting, and probably better in a bomb-heavy format like MOM, since it gives me some space to compensate for the opponent's bombs and you get to spend more time with each deck. Am considering making this my default for drafts moving forward. The only downside is that each draft takes a bit longer.

  • This was a difficult and low-scoring quiz night at one of the usual haunts. Despite a couple of terrible rounds and a poor choice of joker, we actually managed to finish 1pt away from tying for first! Scores for this game were super close, as is typical with difficult, wide-open nights.

    Rounds were:

    1. Hot Food - 2pts
    2. Hot Places - 5pts (x2 for powerup)*
    3. Hot People (reality/dating shows) - 4pts
    4. Heated Arguments (feuds and rivalries) - 2pts
    5. Billboard Hot 100 (bad google translated song lyrics) - 7pts (x2 for successful Ace!)
    6. Steamy Scenes - 5pts
    7. (Hail Mary) OG Viva Hot Babes - 4pts

    8. We had 4 correct here on our tracker, but scorekeeper said he had 5, so we just went with that

    The "Hail Mary" mechanic returned and we were eligible, so round 7 above replaced our lowest scoring round. (They would not agree to replace both 2s!)

    Event Page

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    Reserved!
    Close fight! Names of other teams redacted
  • πŸ”— Well-maintained Software | Henrik Warne's blog via web