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 November
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Yesterday was the first Sunday of Advent. A bit more than one month to go in a year! The World Protests have erupted in China, even in big cities like Beijing and Shanghai, in what might be the biggest political challenge to the CCP since Tiananmen. Hopefully it doesn't end that way again though! The controversial Qatar World Cup kicked off this past week. Yesterday, some friends chastised me when I asked "Isn't the World Cup thing done yet?" Go sports! My Week Had a busy week. Lots of walking. Still feel really tired actually. I went in for a -
The Lost Metal is the sixth book in the Mistborn series and the fourth and final book in the Wax and Wayne subseries, the so-called "Era Two". Previously: The Allow of Law, Shadows of Self, The Bands of Mourning I tore through this one quickly, finishing it in about a week. It has a bit more of a sci-fi action thriller feel than just pure fantasy, which is fine; one of the themes in Era Two is apparently the technological advancement of Scadrial and that directly affects how they are viewed by other entities in the Cosmere. Speaking of Sanderson's
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Alexis Madrigal writes on Twitter: Something I’ve been thinking about Twitter: for those of us who are word people, this was once our place. “Words with Friends” as @kathrynschulz once put it. TikTok may be exciting and engaging, but it’s not about words. The whole thread is pretty good, go read it. Local backup here in case birdsite goes kaput. Only somewhat related, Meg Hourihan wrote (in the year 2000!!) about web persons: And I realized there are dot-com people and there are web people. Dot-com people work for start-ups injected with large Silicon Valley coin, they have options, they
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Getting tired of having to type the date all the time. Maybe starting next year's weeknotes I'll just number them from #1 to whatever like some other people do. The World It has certainly been a week, especially in tech. Musk's Twitter reorg continues, with all the accompanying chaos. I don't really want to recap everything, there are far better explainers out there. Hashtags like "#RIPTwitter" trended for a while following a wave of mass resignations after many refused his ultimatum to "go hardcore". Mastodon influx continues, and a lot of servers are having trouble keeping up. I have a
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The Bands of Mourning is the sixth book in the Mistborn series and the third book in the Wax and Wayne subseries, the so-called "Era Two". Finished reading this one yesterday. Previously: The Allow of Law, Shadows of Self Sanderson continues to knock it out of the park with this series. After the last book's traumatic ending, this time Wax and company finally face the Set: the mysterious bad guys that have been set up by the first two books. This time the conflict expands to a great area as our heroes must investigate rumors of a lost artifact and
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The World Twitter chaos continues. Devs fired then re-hired. Features rolled out then rolled back. Mastodon userbase has grown at least 300% in the interim. US midterm elections last Tuesday, and surprisingly, Democrats managed to hold the Senate, and the House is still in play. The prophesied "red wave" did not come to pass. My Week Had a fairly good week! A bit productive even. Got to do some work on side projects. Went out for a movie. Not really a sporty guy, but on Saturday my brothers invited me to go play badminton with them. It was nice, not
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Wakanda Forever is the final MCU phase 4 film I think? No spoiler-free reviews for this one. This post will have a lot of unmarked spoilers. The big question was how they were going to address Chadwick's passing. I thought the treatment was both very respectful and the worst they could do given the terrible circumstances. I mean, I was kind of worried they would have him cameo via CGI or such (like Tarkin or Leia in Star Wars), which would have felt cheap and disrespectful. Most of the movie was pretty good. Some great fight scenes especially early on
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Today I finished Paradise Killer, which is the first game I finished on PC Game Pass, which I subscribed to three months ago. That's not a great rate, but my first three months were free due to some promo, so whatever. Paradise Killer wasn't my first choice of game to play on Game Pass though, I had a few other games I had wanted to play first, but it turns out the XBox app needed to play PC Game Pass games is super wonky and gave me a lot of problems. As I mentioned in a previous weeknotes, I had -
Recently: Elon Musk bought Twitter and seems intent on running it into the ground in record time. This has sent many people seeking alternatives, and one of the beneficiaries of that is Mastodon, which has seen record growth over the past week or so. I've been on Mastodon since 2018, currently at @roytang@indieweb.social, feel free to give me a follow! What follows is a rambling stream of thoughts about the platform. Mastodon has a completely different vibe compared to Twitter, a much more small-town, homespun vibe. The signal to noise ratio is definitely higher, and there are very few "influencers"
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A Quote ‘Wherever you go, there you are.’ The World Elon Musk's first week at Twitter has not gone well. He appears to be trying to speedrun the platform into the ground. He has haggled with celebrities over his proposed price for verification, fired half of the staff, and then complained that advertising revenue has dropped due to activists. Unlike other people, I am not yet convinced that Twitter is about to implode, but the odds are definitely not zero. My Week After the challenges of the previous week, I kind of took it easy this last week, in a
2022 October
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Monday weeknotes are here to stay apparently. A Quote On Oct. 29, 2022, 6:33 p.m. I wrote: To be an artist, you don’t have to compose music or paint or be in the movies or write books. It’s just a way of living. It has to do with paying attention, remembering, filtering what you see and answering back, participating in life. – Viggo Mortensen The World Elon Musk has completed acquisition of Twitter (see links below for more discussion). He has immediately made a few controversial decisions. Brazil has rejected the re-election bid of the dictator Bolsonaro. A Halloween stampede
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Monday weeknotes again, very late this time because I was away most of Sunday and Monday. Was honestly tempted to just push it to tomorrow but hey, we gotta have some discipline. A Quote "We say in the grand scheme of things as if there were one. We say that's not how the world works* as if the world works." Maggie Smith, Goldenrod (via @rachelsteenblik) The World UK: Liz Truss has resigned after 44 days in office, setting a record for shortest ever term as UK PM. Rishi Sunak is taking over. PH: In a bit of schadenfreude, one of
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Shadows of Self is the second book in the Wax and Wayne subseries of the Mistborn series. Finished reading this one yesterday. Previously: The Allow of Law I like this entry much more than the first one, mostly because it dives deeper into the overall series' history and mythology as Wax and Wayne run afoul of what used to be a creature of myth. Another thing I enjoyed is it very much reminds me of an action-packed Batman story. A rich and privileged "lawman" with little regard for social niceties prowling through the night with the support of the city's
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Apparently these weeknotes just happen on Mondays now. The World I don't have a lot to say about the world this week; a lot of it feels like more of the same. Escalation in Ukraine. China being China. Covid just keeps trucking along. Famous people saying stupid things. Etc etc. My Week Life is short, random, unfair and dumb. My week was going fine, but then Saturday evening I received bad news (about a friend) and since then the week has felt tinged with sadness. Still waiting on the eventual outcome, but at this point it is difficult to be
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I recently published a long-ish blog plost about the Hulk and New Mutants comics. And also I haven't watched any new movies lately, so I took the opportunity to knock a couple of related items off my "poorly-reviewed comic book movies" list. Hulk (2003) I wonder [what] Ang Lee [was thinking when he made a] Hulk [film]. "Ah, yes. I, critically acclaimed serious director Ang Lee, have something to say about the Hulk." a friend Eric Bana and Ang Lee's Hulk film honestly wasn't even that bad, though there are certainly some poor choices made in the film. I think -
Previously This is the second post in my continuing insane effort to try to read EVERY MARVEL COMIC EVER PUBLISHED. You can see previous posts using the tag "complete-marvel-run". We are tackling the older/longer series first, and going in "MCU Order". (These posts of course, are often just excuses to post a bunch of comic screenshots/excerpts) Incredible Hulk (1962-1969) - 379 issues After Iron Man, the next big character (literally) in MCU order was the Hulk. But when I loaded up the oldest Incredible Hulk series on Marvel Unlimited, I was surprised to find that it started with numbers #1 -
These weeknotes are coming in late because as I told some friends yesterday "my tummy is being a dummy" and I was too uncomfortable to get anything done. The World William Shatner on his trip to space: "It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness. Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna . . . things that took
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The jam This past weekend I participated in the 51st LUDUM DARE game jam. This is my third time participating in Ludum Dare and 5rd game jam overall. I was looking forward to this one because I failed my last game jam attempt and was hoping to get back into the groove. Previously: LD50, LD48 The jam started 6am local time on Saturday April 2nd. Same as before, I chose to participate in the "Compo", the more challenging version, with a 48-hour time limit and restriction that you can only work solo and all assets must be created within the -
It is now Throw Short People month. Three months remain in the year. Time continues to be stretchy. Maybe that's why today's weeknotes are a day late, or maybe I was just busy? The World PH/Covid: Covid cases are still in a plateau or a slight rise. I must admit that I haven't been paying close attention the past week though. PH, surprisingly "controversial": This past weekend the PCSO lotto rolled an interesting number combination: 9-18-27-36-45-54. People were also surprised when the PCSO announced that 433 people had won and would be splitting the jackpot. A senator wants this "controversy"
2022 September
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Bits and Pieces It is a stormy Sunday afternoon right now. Supertyphoon Karding is barrelling towards Luzon and we are currently on signal no. 4 I think. (The highest level is signal no. 5). This is coming roughly a day before the same day that Typhoon Ondoy devastated Metro Manila 13 years ago. This is the third supertyphoon to hit the country in a month, yet another indication of how the climate problems are intensifying. PH/Covid: Covid cases continue to plateau and maybe even rise a bit here in NCR, and the positivity rate is climbing. Coincidentally, Biden declared that