Today is Palm Sunday, the first day of Holy Week. When I was growing up, Holy Week was traditionally a quiet time of prayer and reflection; my grandmother would chastise us if we were noisy, especially from Thursday through Saturday. The period feels a lot less sacrosanct in the modern world, either because I'm an adult now or because people usually just take this time to go on vacations or whatnot, or maybe some combination of both.
The World
- Putin's invasion of Ukraine is now in its 7th week. More and more Russian war atrocities are coming to light.
- PH/Politics: The Leni-Kiko campaign claims a crowd of 220,000 at yesterday's rally in Pampanga, which is an insane amount of people to be in one place (for reference: 78,000 people attended each day of Wrestlemania the previous weekend). The latest pre-election surveys came out last week, and while Marcos is still a clear frontrunner, Robredo is starting to move up. There's still quite a lot of ground to cover though, and time is short. If the Robredo campaign actually manages to catch up on election day, it will be a pleasant miracle.
- PH/Covid: Cases continue to remain low! The President refuses to lower alert level below 1. WHO warns we may see a surge in the next 2 months.
Links of Interest
Wtch This: Unravelling the Mystery Behind a Secret YouTube URL: An interesting mystery about URLs
A Better Way to Divide the Pie | Yale Insights: How to fairly divide stuff when there is a power imbalance
Morning Routine and Work Day, Spring 2022 – WARREN ELLIS LTD: (Self-explanatory) Warren Ellis writes about his morning routine. Mostly interested because he's one of the few "famous people" (for some definition of famous) I know who shuns social media and uses RSS/Newsletters to keep up with writings.
home sweet homepage: A comic about a young girl growing up online in the early days of the internet
does china have a culture of hypertext? | maya.land: This post (and the linked article) discuss the consequences of a mobile-focused internet (and I don't think it's a China-specific thing really)
Researchers Identify ‘Master Problem’ Underlying All Cryptography: A lot of this goes over my head, but still some interesting stuff.
Using Windows after 15 years on Linux · duncanlock.net: I'm mostly a Windows user (because gaming) so I'm used to all of this, but it's good to get an outsider perspective.
Visit the Links page for more links of interest.
(Something that will only ever be of interest to me: I'm super lazy, and I had a lot of links to add here today, so I went ahead and made a markdown version of the links page that I can just copy paste into these notes.)
My Week
On The Blog:
- I wrote about Untitled Shooty Game that I made for Ludum Dare 50 last weekend.
Someone sent us some green mangoes from Nueva Ecija. They're huge!
Late Wednesday afternoon: We suddenly lost power for some reason. With nothing to do, I went out for a short pre-dinner walk around the subdivision. There was a commotion a couple of streets over and everyone was out of their houses looking down a particular road. Apparently someone had tried to snatch some mangoes off a tree using some metal thing, and he had hit an electric thing and got electrocuted and there was a subsequent explosion, and that was why we lost power. I didn't get more details, but I think the guy survived. To Meralco's credit, they were able to restore service within around an hour and half later; I kind of expected to get power back late in the night already!
Gaming:
- Ongoing:
- Tales of Vesperia (Steam): Still deep into the second run. Gahd, Tales games take forever to complete!
- Metroid Dread (Nintendo Switch): I played a lot of this game this week and I believe I am just before the final boss, so now I am going back and collecting all the stuff I missed. (Even in non-RPGs I am a completionist!) Hopefully will finish it this coming week.
- Eternal: Been doing a bunch of drafting. My first few drafts were terrible, finishing 0-2 wins, but yesterday I finally managed to go 7 wins!
- Magic Arena: Been grinding some historic in prep for this weekend's open, but I still don't have a deck I'm confident in. If I can't settle on a deck by the weekend, I might just save my gold for drafting the next set instead.
- Street Fighter V: Only managed to play a single match last week! It was a good one, but I need to play more often since the game is probably on it's last year of good online population and I still want to make Gold rank somehow!
- I didn't stream any games this week, but I did manage to play and rate a bunch of Ludum Dare 50 games last Friday. I'm looking forward to the results in a couple of weeks!
- Ongoing:
Media Diet
I've been switching between doing "watching lately" posts to summarize my movie/TV consumption and individual posts/notes for each item. The first one felt like it took too long before I had enough for a decent-sized post and doing individual posts/notes can be awkward because sometimes I don't have a lot to say for a single item. So maybe I'll just try including my comments in the weeknotes then?
Death on the Nile (2022)
- Saw this last Mar 31 with my mom, which might have been a mistake, as I had to keep explaining things to her. She doesn't pay a lot of attention, so whodunnits might not be the best genre for her. I was looking forward to this since I love whodunnits and I did enjoy Orient Express. (And I've also already read the book!) It felt more visual extravagant than the first film (understandable since they're visiting all these tourist spots and not trapped on a train). I think Orient Express was the better whodunnit film though. They also changed a bunch of stuff from the book, though the plot largely follows the same lines.
The Other Guys (2010)
- Watched this one last Friday night. Was pleasantly surprised, it turned out to be a very good and clever buddy cop comedy. Wahlberg and Ferrell have great chemistry and the rest of the cast gave great performances too, especially Keaton.
![I saved this screenshot mostly so I could use it as a reaction image.]( "I saved this screenshot mostly so I could use it as a reaction image.")
I saved this screenshot mostly so I could use it as a reaction image.
Our Flag Means Death s1
- I started watching this mostly because some people I follow were talking it up, so I had no idea what to expect other than it was a show about pirates. And it is literally about a pirate ship. Real-life pirates in fact, though I would guess the show's interpretation of them doesn't align too closely with known history. The show went in totally unexpected directions, a pleasant surprise. I think it's better to go in knowing as little as possible, except perhaps that Taika Waititi plays a big role here, and comedians such as Fred Armisen and Will Arnett also make appearances.
Dr Stone (Manga)
- I started reading this manga back in 2019, and it ended a few weeks ago, a pleasantly short run. While I did enjoy the science theme of the run, I realized early on there was no way to resolve the show's central mystery without delving into the realm of science fiction. And sure enough, the ending was (Spoilers) Which is... okay actually.
Wrestlemania 38
- I don't really follow WWE religiously anymore (the peak of that was probably in the mid to late aughts), but I still try to watch two of their yearly PPVs whenever I can: The Royal Rumble and Wrestlemania. This time I watched Wrestlemania with some friends, and I found out that the past few years it has been a 2 night event, which seems insane to me. They need to have so many matches! This year's Wrestlemania ran for almost eight hours over the two nights, which is absurd. It took us a few days to get through the group watch. It's probably an ongoing problem that as their stable gets larger and larger, they need more and more time in the big events to accommodate as many superstars as possible. Best match of the night for me was probably Rhodes vs Rollins. Some good fan service throughout the show, and nice to see Undertaker finally in the HOF. Second night main event was way too short. Still entertaining and at least nice to watch with other people.
Ongoing TV Status:
- Caught up: Young Justice, Superman and Lois
- Behind: Legends of Tomorrow, Star Trek Picard season 2, NCIS, The Simpsons
- Yet to start: Cobra Kai season 4, Moon Knight
Currently Reading: Still not yet done with Wyrd Sisters by Terry Pratchett.
This coming week:
- Magic Arena: Historic Open next weekend
- It's Easter!