2022 August
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The year is almost two thirds done! Switching up the format a bit this week. Bits and Pieces The week was a bit rainy as we had a tropical storm pass by during the second half. Always makes my daily walks more challenging. Sleep was also irregular, which is sadly quite regular for me. Had to go out a few times for family errands. At least the hospital no longer requires us to fill up a form or get an antigen test just to walk in. Managed to get some work in on some side projects. PH/Covid: Cases continue to -
Better Call Saul Went through seasons 5 and 6 of Better Call Saul the past few weeks. Spoilers below I guess. There is a little bit of tension lost in this series because you know that characters like Saul, Gus, and Mike survive through to Breaking Bad. That means the tension primarily revolves around the fates of the newer characters, particularly Kim Wexler and to a lesser extent Howard Hamlin, Lalo Salamanca, and Nacho Varga. The last two seasons solidifies Jimmy's transformation into Saul and his involvement with Lalo and the drug cartel and the stakes escalate quickly for those
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According to Steam achievements, I've been playing the same Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings game on and off since 2018. Finally decided to power through the remainder of the game this year to get it off my backlog. The game is okay, considering it came out in 2011. Graphics are from that era of course, but I'm not one to complain. The combat is challenging and can be a bit clunky. There are multiple boss battles that I had to redo countless times and most of the time you have to prep ahead of time by drinking potions and applying -
Previously About a month ago, I had the insane idea to try to read EVERY MARVEL COMIC EVER PUBLISHED. This is less insane than it sounds because the Marvel Unlimited service now exists, making it easier to access the really old ones, though it's still not complete. It's kind of mind-boggling because there are an estimated 30,000 Marvel comics already published, with roughly an additional 1,000 new ones every year. I estimate that before this year, I've read maybe 5-6k individual comics. So I have maybe 25k to go. I think the whole effort could take around 5 years. This -
Thirty-nine years ago Ninoy Aquino was assassinated on an airport tarmac. He famously said "The Filipino is worth dying for." Not sure if he'd still consider that to be true today, as a lot of online trolls try to tear down his legacy. The World PH/Covid: Hey, our cases have started declining, with most of the days this week under 4k! It's good news, and hopefully the downtrend continues. I guess other things happened elsewhere in the world also? IDK, not really paying attention I guess. Some Links of Interest Tecnicos y Rudos, wrestling and politics - Austin Kleon: I -
Via Kev Quirk: this great article by Florens Verschelde about SSGs (Aside: I already shared this via the links page, but I had more to say, so now there's a blog post about it too.) I agree with a lot of things mentioned in this article, but what really hit home for me was the complaint about limitations in how content hierarchies and partial content are handled in SSGs. "...But the nail in the coffin was always that it’s either impossible or way too hard to build a single page from several pieces of content." This relates to something that
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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