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.
2023 January
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Citizen Sleeper is a narrative-focused RPG set in a distant cyberpunk future, set around the themes of poverty and evil corporations and such. Here's me playing through the first part of the game: Gameplay consists primarily of rolling dice at the start of each day, and using those dice to perform actions. It's primarily a menu-based narrative game more than anything else. It's kind of like one of those old choose-your-old-aventure-style books that also made you track stats and roll dice. Your cybernetic body is constantly decaying, and as it decays you have access to less and less dice. Obviously -
New set is coming up in a couple of weeks, I figured I should do the Brothers War limited recap already to get it out of the way. It isn't even two months since I published the Dominaria United one! Events Win Loss Total Winrate Total 18 59 51 110 0.5364 With splash 7 18 18 36 0.5 By Main Colors WU 2 11 5 16 0.6875 WB 7 27 19 46 0.587 WR 2 3 6 9 0.3333 UB 1 3 3 6 0.5 UR 1 1 3 4 0.25 BR 3 7 9 16 0.4375 BG 2 7
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Another week?!? They just keep coming! At least this past week had more pleasant weather, a lot less rain, which made my daily walks a lot easier. My medical errands failed and got delayed this week, mostly because they had trouble drawing blood from me for my regular blood tests. The person doing the draws at the nearby clinic always has trouble with my veins, but it was so bad this time that they gave up. Will try again when I accompany my mom to a bigger clinic this coming week. I have been poked with a needle so many
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The jam An interesting way to start the year: For 2023, Ludum Dare decided to add a 3rd game jam to the year (they used to only have two a year), so this past weekend was the the 52nd LUDUM DARE game jam. This is my 4th time participating in the Ludum Dare game jams! Previously: Ludum Dare 48, Ludum Dare 50, Ludum Dare 51 This jam started 4am (!!) local time on Saturday January 7th. 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 -
(Click photos to view full-size) First weeknotes of the year! (With some change.) I have not yet decided what the format for this year's weeknotes will be, so we'll be making things up as we go along. It was a cold and rainy first week of the year making it challenging for me to maintain my daily walking habit this past week. It's not so much the rain (since I have an umbrella) but rather the weather makes me a lot lazier and more inclined to just lounge around in bed. I was therefore surprised that I still managed to -
Vampire Survivors isn't the kind of game I usually play, but it got some buzz a while back and it was available on PC Game Pass, so I thought I'd try it out right after Christmas: If you're not familiar with Vampire Survivors, it's a pixel-art action roguelike where you walk around a stage and your weapons automatically fire and you are swarmed by enemies and you have to try to survive. Killing enemies drops gems which you pickup to gain experience, which lets you get new weapons, passives, or upgrades. Each run starts off a bit slow but towards -
Today is the twentieth anniversary of my first day at my first job, which means I have officially been a software developer for twenty years. Feels like it should be the kind of momentous occasion about which I'd have some words I'd like to say, but this one kind of snuck up on me so I don't have anything right now. Maybe at the 25th year?
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Something I've gotten used to as the New Year rolls in: make a checklist of things to do and things I'm looking forward to for the new year. This one is coming in a bit late due to some business. This is my personal list, but maybe you'll enjoy going through it too. I generally copy stuff over, but the list changes a bit every year. Check out the new-years-checklist tag for previous years. New year reminders These are general reminders that I think anyone would find useful Count your blessings for the past year and be grateful Change your
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This is a personal year in review. You can check the yearnotes tag for previous years-in-review. Last year's review is here. Essay-writing section In many ways, 2022 felt like an extension of 2021 for me personally. I think I was mostly doing the same things and not really expanding my horizons too much. For the world, it was a challenging year. Russia's invasion of Ukraine caused ripples that not only threaten world stability but also affected the global economy. The PH elections had a not-unexpected but still sad outcome. In the tech world, Musk's acquisition of Twitter threatens to accelerate
2022 December
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It's the final weeknotes of the year! At first I thought I'd do this one tomorrow (the first of January) but I also plan to publish my year-in-review thingy, so I figured I'll just get this one out right before midnight, and next year's weeknotes can start fresh as a new series with maybe a different format. The World Kind of slow final news week actually. The best thing was Greta Thunberg owning some far-right guy so hard he got arrested for sex trafficking. (May or may not really be causally related). My Week I always enjoy the lull week
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A game I picked up late in 2022 is Marvel Snap, because of course I need yet another card game that I'll be playing daily! It helped that I'm a big Marvel fan, of course. Marvel Snap isn't like the other card games I usually play though. Instead of trying to kill the other player, you're vying for control of three lanes, each of which has a location card with a special ability. Each turn you get an increasing amount of energy (like Hearthstone!) to play your cards into whichever lanes you like, and after a set number of turns -
Some Blogs You Might Like Back in April, I wrote a post titled "Follow Friday #1" with the intent of being a regular feature where I highlight blogs I follow. But I never got to do a second one! With the impending collapse of our traditional social media platforms and more people than ever blogging, I figured it might be a good idea to try to cram in a second such post before the year ends, so here are some interesting new blogs I've been following this year and have added to my blogroll: Rubenerd.com by Ruben Schade. I forget
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This is only the second game I'm playing in the main Shin Megami Tensei series (the first one being SMT IV on the 3DS). If you're not familiar with the series, it's basically Pokemon except instead of adorable little monsters that magically fit in a small ball, you carry around a party of demons that fit in your... soul I guess? They aren't "demonic" demons, at least not all of them. They are mostly figures from various legends and mythologies; you got your Zeus and your Thor and your Vishnu, etc. And instead of going out to collect things or -
Over the past couple of years, I've been regularly playing digital boardgames online on Steam with one of my friend groups, I thought I'd do reviews of them. Today's review is for Gloomhaven, the one we most played in 2022. Previously: Root, Blood Rage, Scythe, Sentinels of the Multiverse. Gloomhaven is a coop game for up to 4 players. It's an RPG where you form a party and tackle turn-based dungeons (with some lore/story tacked on). I can only imagine how much effort playing the physical version of this game takes, because there's a lot of stuff. There are many -
I almost flat out quit Twitter last week when they surprised everyone with a policy forbidding linking to other social media platforms. They rolled it back before I could do anything, but that was just ridiculous. The whole web is built on linking to other websites, I have no interest in being stuck in a walled garden. At some point I said I'd stick around Twitter until the end, but since Elon took over I've had a couple of other "red lines" in mind that would probably make me quit Twitter: if they kill Tweetdeck. Now that the mobile app
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Hey, it's Christmas day! Waves at all who celebrate. And this will be my final weeknotes entry for the year! The World Eh, let's not think about the world for a bit and enjoy the season, no matter what shenanigans Elon Musk has gotten into this time. My Week The first few weeks of December were still a bit hot, but the last week or so has thankfully brought us the much-awaited hanging amihan (Northeast monsoon) which means our weather is a lot better and nippier even. Should last until late January or early Feb, this is my favorite weather -
Tunic is a cute little Zelda-like with a unique twist: The game barely tells you anything and most text is written in an unknown runic script/language, but you can collect these pages that turn out to be from an in-game instruction manual (also mostly written in the unknown language), and as you find more pages, you figure out more stuff about the world and the game and how to do stuff in the game. The game was incredibly fun and I spent some late nights because I couldn't put the controller down. The exploration part was excellent, and the game -
One week before Christmas and the second-to-last weeknotes for the year! The World Science: The US announced a fusion energy breakthrough, supposedly a big step towards clean energy. Crypto: Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX has been arrested, weeks after the collapse of his crypto exchange. Twitter: Twitter dissolved their trust and safety council, then Musk banned elonjet, a bunch of critical journalists, and even links to Mastodon. Some intrepid reporter thought that the banned @joinmastodon Twitter account to Mastodon's "founder" John Mastodon, which quickly became a meme on the platform. PH: The much-criticized SIM registration law is set to take effect
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Trying to force weeknotes back into Sundays, at least for the last few entries of the year. The year ends on a Saturday though, so I'm still wondering if the Jan 1 weeknotes should be "Weeknotes 2023-01-01" or "2023 Weeknotes #1". How about "2023 Weeknotes #0", since it won't really cover the year 2023 yet? The World Still not paying too much attention to the world. It might be better overall for my mental health. Elon's Twitter seems to be going further into the right-wing conspiracy deep end based on these nonsense Twitter files exposes. The US exchanged an athlete
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A few weeks ago, I finally hit achievement completion in Street Fighter V! Quick review: Despite the game getting some poor reviews at the start, I think it has grown into a pretty good entry in the franchise. It's been a long and challenging road, mainly because despite my love of fighting games, I am so so bad at them, so I never thought I would be able to overcome the achievements that required me to rank up online, but somehow through perseverence I got there! A timeline! 2015: Played the SFV demo at EGX 2016: Played in open beta