A blog is a website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries, typically displayed in reverse chronlogical order. A single entry is called a blog post.
2022 August
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Not a lot today. It's been kind of a boring week. The World PH/Covid: We have happily managed to avoid hitting 5k daily cases this week; the weekly total is still slightly above the previous week, but the positivity rate has declined for the first time since May and there are some indications that NCR might start trending down. Hopefully we are past the worst of this mini-surge and maybe that will calm my going-out anxiety. Some Links of Interest People who read live longer than those who don’t, Yale researchers say - Big Think: '...The readers who read over
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Here's the second set of reviews for movies I watched this week. Previously. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005) Watched this one because the r/movies Nice Guys thread mentioned it as one of Shane Black's earlier films that was closest to Nice Guys. That's kind of true because half of the movie is also a black comedy about two guys trying to solve a murder. The two guys: a young pre-Iron Man RDJ playing a petty thief mistakenly thrust into the Los Angeles showbiz scene and Val Kilmer playing a gay PI who isn't shy about talking about his sexuality all
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This week I decided to be unproductive and just watch a bunch of movies. To avoid flooding the weeknotes, I'm writing the reviews as separate posts again! Predator (1987) I heard good buzz about the new Prey film, but I've never seen the original Predator films so I thought I'd watch the first two films first. This one is pretty good: the action, the setting, the setup, all great. It's one of those old-school action films where the plot isn't super important and the action is all-important. Everything is tense: The way the Predator stalks them continuously and takes them -
Once again I was unsure what to write about for this year's post, so I took the opportunity to once again crawl back through the archive of birthday posts. It's one of the big benefits of twenty years of blogging, it's easy to take a dive back into the past for insights. I missed a few years here and there (especially during the lean blogging years), but have been quite consistent recently. Notably, I've managed to keep a streak of these posts going since number 36 way back in 2014. I look at that number: forty-four. And it feels impossible!
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The World Despite dire warnings from Beijing, US Speaker of the House Pelosi went ahead and visited Taiwan. In response, China has suspended international cooperation in several areas like climate change, and has conducted military exercises around Taiwan, even firing missiles over Taipei. It could be really bad for the world if all of this escalates while the whole Russian invasion of Ukraine is still ongoing. As of today, we are at 4k+ covid cases per day for four days in a row. We are inching up ever closer to 5k covid cases per week. I am hoping that this
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As of this year, I have been blogging for twenty years! This post is going to be full of links isn't it? I also decided against putting any images in here because blogging is a primarily text format damnit! Site History The oldest post on the blog is dated on the first of January 2002, a full year before I even started working. It didn't occur to me to celebrate that date as an anniversary (that's my excuse for this post coming some seven months late), mostly because at that time the website wasn't really a blog, more of a
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The weekend kind of got away from me, so I'm doing this on a Monday instead. My weekends often seem to be busy, maybe I should consider just scheduling these on Mondays? The World Last Wednesday a magnitude 7 quake struck Luzon's Northern region. I am told it was felt all the way here, but I was asleep and of course felt nothing. I awoke to an annoying NDRRMC message though. Former PH president Fidel V. Ramos has passed away. There is a pattern. We broke 4k daily covid cases last week, though the counts really feel like they are
2022 July
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The World Our local covid cases continue to tick upwards, albeit a bit slowly, and the health care utilization rate still holds at low values. Positivity rates are climbing though, especially in NCR, so the "real" case counts are probably a bit higher. If I had to I would guess the current "surge" peaks in maybe 2-3 weeks. Tomorrow is president BBM's first state of the nation address. It's a big brouhaha I hope to ignore completely. Earlier today, there was a shooting incident at Ateneo de Manila. Three people died. It was a politically-motivated assassination attempt in broad daylight -
I signed up for this year's GMTK Game Jam, a 48-hour game jam which was held last weekend. I joined this game jam last year as well. My entry there finished in the top 800 overall (out of 5000+ entries), which I felt was pretty good for a solo dev with minimal gamedev experience. So I was hoping to be able to complete the same jam this year and maybe even rank a little higher? Unfortunately as you can tell by the title of this post, I failed to complete and/or submit an entry for this jam. It feels weird -
A week and a half ago, my parents and I took an out of town trip to Naga City in Bicol. We were last there in 2019, before the pandemic. Our trip was to attend a cousin's wedding; they'd been engaged since 2020 I think; I remember my dad and uncle were already joking about it back in 2019. The date kept being pushed back because of the pandemic of course. At the time that we went, covid cases were on a slight uptick, but the risk for travel seemed low, especially given all three of us were vaxxed and -
It has certainly been a week. The World Professional troll and part-time entrepreneur Elon Musk wants out of his Twitter buyout deal, and his social media platform of choice is taking him to court in response. No one is surprised by this. NASA published the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope. Comparisons to previous images we had are amazing. A massive leak of documents details how Uber broke laws, duped police, and lobbied governments in their early years. Looks like the files are mostly about their dealings in Europe, but it's not hard to imagine they did some
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Continuing the MCU phase 4 things. I don't have spoiler-free reviews for these ones. This post will have unmarked spoilers. Thor: Love and Thunder (2022) I watched this with my brother last Monday right after my long trip. IDK if it was the trip exhaustion, but I wasn't super impressed. My brother felt it was better than Ragnarok, I think it was maybe a bit worse. The movie felt a lot goofier than Ragnarok, but that doesn't necessarily mean it was funnier. Most of Korg's narration jokes were so-so, and I'm not a fan of Thor himself being exceptionally goofy
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I just came back from a pretty good 5-day out of town trip via a miserable 9-hour bus ride, so this past week's weeknotes are coming in late and will probably be a bit short. The World Former Japanese PM Shinzo Abe has been assassinated. Noahpinion has a pretty good writeup on how he changed Japan. Amid multiple crises, the people of Sri Lanka have ousted their prime minister via wide-scale protests. Hopefully they learn from certain other countries' mistakes manage to stop his children from coming back in 30 years to revise history. Speaking of mistakes, our president has -
I'm prepping for an out of town trip and making a list of things to bring. The trip involves a ten-hour bus ride (back and forth) and five days staying at a place where I am uncertain how good the internet will be and for most of the days of the trip we don't have any planned agenda. As such, my checklist always includes a decent amount of entertainment, including offline ones where possible. For this trip, I'm planning to bring: a Nintendo Switch, with at least two offline single-player games a tablet with ebooks/comics I can read an actual
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Dictator's son and habitual liar Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr officially took over as the president of this country last weekend, a living testament to the power of propaganda and short memories. I did not pay attention to the festivities. In fact, I try not to pay attention to news about him at all; though I am paying attention to cabinet appointees and I must note that we still don't have a health secretary! The pandemic is still a thing! Covid19 cases are still on a slight uptick over here, though the number of daily cases at the end of the
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Finished my second big RPG for the year! Triangle Strategy by Squaresoft is a new "spiritual successor" to one of all-time favorite games, Final Fantasy Tactics. This game was great! Although the name seriously lacked imagination. "Triangle" because there are three main factions and three conviction values in the game, and "Strategy" because it's a strategy game! I really liked the story, even though it was a "Oh we are a small group trapped between warring powers" plot that's typical for these kinds of games. There's decision points and branching paths along the way, and each of the major factions
2022 June
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The week has been a bit busy, and I don't have a lot of time today, so these weeknotes will be a bit short. The year nears it's midpoint, and it seems like the world continues to regress. A couple of the days ago, as prophesized by an earlier leak, the US Supreme Court struck down the 50-year old Roe vs Wade precedent, clearing the way for multiple states to almost immediately ban abortions. I am neither an American nor a woman, so I do not feel I have the standing to weigh in. In fact, as someone who grew
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Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is a pretty good metroidvania, heavily influenced by the classic Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. (I will confess that I have never played SOTN; I did play the successor games on GBA and NDS though.) The game is easy. It's not a hardcore platformer like Ori and the Blind Forest and it doesn't have the challenging combat of Hollow Knight. The lack of difficulty is mainly because there is no real limit on the number of restorative items you can bring into a boss fight. For this reason, the later boss fights (when you have -
A while back, I had to go pick up some lab test results (not mine) from the hospital. I went up to the window and gave my claim receipt and waited. And waited. For a long while. The guy behind the counter had processed some other people already, but he also kept getting up and going to the back to check on something. Eventually, he came over to me and told me there was some "technical problem" with the results I was waiting for and asked for my patience. Waited some more. After another while, another person came out, presumably
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Another exhausting, errand-filled week for me. For some reason being human means limited amounts of time and energy to do all the things I want to do. Covid19 cases are starting to go up again in these parts, which is threatening some end-of-month plans I had. I think most people aren't paying the rise in cases any heed, but I have to be extra cautious given that I live with a couple of seniors. We'll see how it goes. Markets are crashing, crypto is crashing, no safe place to put your investments at the moment. Cash is king. Support for