I wasn't sure if I should continue this watching-lately series since I already set up a separate page for listing my 2020 movies watched. It might have been more consistent to have a list for the 2020 TV shows also? But then again, TV shows are a much different beast, since each show/season is broken into an episode and sometimes you watch them all in one go or sometimes over the span of a few months. So maybe let's keep this going for the while. So yeah, movies. From the list for January, I think the best one was Parasite.
2020 January
Hopefully managing to read at least one book at month this year, kicking it off with Atomic Habits by James Clear. I forget where I heard of this book, but it's highly recommended and an Amazon best-seller. I followed the author on Twitter for a while before deciding to buy the book. I read it sporadically through the month. It's not very long - less than 300 pages on the Kindle app. The book is fairly good and insightful, although I'm not sure if there are any ideas I haven't encountered elsewhere (especially if you read a lot of self-improvement- I rarely tell other people my dreams anymore because it feels kind of weird, but this one was too good to pass up. It involves pro streamers and the fighting game community.
- It feels like every week of 2020 so far has brought some sort of herald of doom. First week was potential War with Iran breaking out. Then there was the Taal Volcano erupting. And this past week we had the Corona virus outbreak originating in China. At least the Volcano eruption doesn't map directly to a horseman of the apocalypse, so that's something. What are we in for this week?? This past week has been quite productive with my personal projects. I managed to get a very very minimal version of one of my self-data tracking projects online (to replace
In a bid to reduce the number of webapps actually running on my server (for resource consumption reasons), I decided to migrate a small Flask app I had and merge into this larger Django app where I have a lot of my personal data tracking stuff. The Flask app was small enough, mostly containing backend support for this blog (like search and comment submissions) and some Twitter things. The migration was straightforward, taking around half a day, most of that was wrangling with Twitter API rate limits. It got me thinking, why did I build this using Flask in the- The big news here in the country over the past week was of course the big Taal Volcano eruption south of Metro Manila. Our house is far north enough of Metro Manila that we didn't really get any ashfall over here, although when I went out on a walk the day after the big eruption, the air felt thick, like on morning New Year's Day after all the fireworks. We do have friends and family who are affected and closer to the volcano though, so here's hoping things get better for them and everyone else, especially those that had to
- So the back half of the CW Arrowverse's epic Crisis on Infinite Earth's crossover finally aired this week, and I promised more words about the Arrowverse and the crossover last month, so here we are. Spoilers abound! On Jan. 15, 2020, 1:05 p.m. I wrote: #CrisisOnInfiniteEarths spoiler free review: low budget, pacing and writing issues, but idc because all the dc comics fan service kept making me smile First the bad: as noted above, writing and pacing and budget issues plague the crossover, but this is typical of the Arrowverse as a whole. TBH sometimes I question why I still
I am generally receptive to receiving emails from strangers, so I don't mind having a contact email publicly accessible on this site. But I don't know if it's a consequence of having a reasonably active blog or what, but in the past few years, I've sometimes gotten what I like to call "weird blog spam." Typically it starts out with an introductory email that often includes a compliment about a specific article on your blog, accompanied by an offer to increase your blog's visibility if you would just link to one of their articles: (This particular subject line pattern of- I've been thinking for a while about doing regular weeknotes. This is a type of post I've seen in some blogs where they recap the things that've happened to them during the past week. I've actually been doing these privately for a while, and now I'm going to try making them public. I think the advantages are obvious in terms of (a) having notes to recall what you were doing over a certain time period; and (b) guaranteeing regular writing output on the blog. One disadvantage over the private weeknotes is that in private I can usually include some more
- Apparently I'm not done looking back at the 2010s yet. I had some "top tens of 2010s" discussions with some friends recently, here are my personal lists, each in no particular order: My Top Ten Movies of the 2010s Avengers Endgame (2019).. I'm keeping only one slot per franchise, so I had to choose an MCU movies for this. Runner-ups for this slot were Guardians of the Galaxy and Captain America Winter Soldier, and individually either one of those movies might be around the same or better than Endgame, but Endgame is the culmination of a decade's worth of movies
- Well, it has certainly been another revolution around the sun. I added the tag yearnotes for these end-of-year recap and statistic things. 2019 Statistics: Work, Travel, Learning and Self Improvement: Hours worked: 180-200 hours (estimated) - down from 1163 hours last year I've been cutting back on my work commitments this year, preferring to spend more time on personal projects. Programming languages/frameworks learned: Only 1 really new thing, that's the Ionic mobile app framework. (Down from 4 last year). Some other stuff though: I did do a miniproject which let me try out a few new things. I also explored
- It's a new year! I don't have any clever jokes or deep wisdom or long, introspective essays to share at this time (I have those the rest of the year though!). Instead, here's a checklist for the new year. In no particular order: Greet your loved ones and friends and anyone else you hold dear. Maybe even those you disagree with Ponder why people give so much significance to the transition between an arbitrarily-chosen pair of 24 hour periods Take stock and reflect on the past year Think about what you'd like to learn this year or how you want
