Lol, Unity has walked back some of the stuff that pissed off its userbase. That was quick, though the damage may already have been done, trust-wise.
The past couple of days have been very smoggy/hazy here in the Metro. There were reports of vog (apparently that is a real term) coming out of nearby Taal volcano a couple of days ago, but apparently that's unrelated. The Metro haze was cause mostly by good old pollution compounded by a thermal inversion.
This week was much lazier, especially as compared to the week prior. Still some errands and some side project work and some other stuff, but much more relaxed and chill and I got a lot more sleep somehow.
The youngest pamangkin (less than a year old) had to be left in my care for about an hour and a half the other day. She was asleep for most of that, but for the 30 minutes she was awake, I must admit I did a bang-up job keeping her occupied and not wondering where her parents were.
On the blog: Not as much this week (see above), but I did manage to write about daily web games and similar things.
New keyboard and controller
My old Razer Blackwidow Ultimate 2016 was having some keys start to fail and I didn't feel like spending too much on a new one, so I bought a cheap Red Dragon K2 keyboard. It works, but I must say I am not too happy with how it "feels", if that makes sense; I liked my old keyboard much better.
I also bought a new controller, an 8Bitdo Ultimate Bluetooth controller. It works on both Windows and Switch and was super easy to use; was happy with this purchase. Honestly my old F710 Logitech controller was mostly still working fine, except that I often had to re-initialize the wireless connection if I hadn't used it for a few days. The new one avoids that problem, so yay. My main motivation for getting this new one was as a Switch controller, because (a) I could feel some of the joycon shoulder buttons start to become less responsive; and (b) I am hoping I can play multiplayer Super Mario Wonder with the pamangkins when that comes out, and for that we needmore controllers.
Gaming:
Reading: Feed reader backlog is at an unwieldy 37 items. Not a lot of reading this week, mostly just comics, though I have managed to clear the first 100 issues of Daredevil somehow.
Watching: I have watched The Italian Job (2003), but not much else.
Managed 70,691 steps this past week (Sunday through Saturday), according to Google Fit. It was a bit of a challenging and rainy week and the smog over the weekend made it so a mask was needed even when outdoors.
I'm a Spotless Giraffe. | Ben Myers:
"It is something of an amusing curiosity that some AI models were perplexed by a giraffe without spots. But it's these same tools and paradigms that enshrine normativity of all kinds, "sanding away the unusual." As tech continues to charge headfirst into AI hype, this is going to have far-reaching, yet largely invisible to the mainstream, consequences to anyone on the wrong side of that normativity. Better hope you have spots."
Eight marvelous and melancholy things I've learned about creativity - The Oatmeal
"A magnificent table flip (but the devil is in the details)."
Those details remind me how screwed up the whole copyright system currently is.
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masonry
layout in Firefox if you have enabled that toggle (I might write about this in the future, it's neat).Entropy and things falling apart, wanting things but being too lazy to put in the effort, the past being a foreign country, so many games upcoming that I want to play, not enough time/energy for all the things I want to do, where can I get a hyperbolic time chamber, future finance problems, etc.
There is a Ludum Dare scheduled for next weekend, but I don't know if I'm going to participate. It's not that I don't have time, but rather I don't really have the gamedev energy at the moment. I skipped the last LD and I haven't even touched Godot in months. I want to do more gamedev, but it's one of those things where I have to consider my approach and how to motivate myself to move forward - I'm not sure game jams are the way anymore.
I stopped playing Wordle early last year but since then I have still regularly encountered a type of online game I call "daily web games" characterized similarly to Wordle in that they are (a) web-based and (b) come out with a new game/puzzle/challenge every day. Here are some of the ones I've encountered.
Although this one is an NYT game, a subscription is NOT required so everyone can play. It's a simple word association/grouping game where you need to arrange a set of 16 terms into 4 connected groups. You migt have seen similar puzzles elsewhere, it's not an original concept. Having a new one every day is pretty nice. This is fairly new, about 3 and a half months in I believe.
This one has been a hit with the trivia team. We tried it first during one of our regular Discord sessions, but we quickly transitioned to everyone just doing it solo. We have a Discord thread for it and shortly after midnight, people start posting their results for the latest Connections.
Related: Someone made a custom Connections puzzle creator. Conveniently, this site also has an archive for all the official ones (convenient since the NYT doesn't provide it).
(This one is mildly confusing because the title has the "2" in the middle but the URL has it at the end!)
This one is mainly for movie buffs. They currently offer three types of puzzles:
I don't play this one daily, but the archives are always available, so every so often I binge through a bunch of the Original ones; they are fairly quick to do and it's easy to go down a rabbit hole and do a lot of them in one go. The Logical ones we only found about recently and the trivia team has been trying to solve them together.
These are mostly ones that I found but haven't been playing regularly. (This post is once again an excuse to dump a bunch of links I had saved up!)
I suspect I have more similar links saved somewhere, but these are the ones I have for now.
The trivia team gets together via Discord a few times a week to collectively do the NYT crossword and spelling bee and sometimes/often some puzzle games like the above. We have a Youtube channel where we share videos of our shenanigans if you like that sort of thing. Our discussions are often in mixed Tagalog/English though.
The NYT website used to feature twice-a-month Acrostic puzzles. The trivia team loved these and the archive went back as far as 1999! Unfortunately, earlier this year they decided to not only stop publishing new acrostics to the website, but even removed access to the archives completely! This meant we could not complete all the archives in time! Before that happened, I reverse-engineered and scraped all of the actual puzzles and archived them here on my own website: NYT Acrostics Archive. The puzzles here use the same JS as the originals and are fully-playable online on the client-side; the only lost functionality is that progress is not saved in any way so if you reload the page you have to start over. We were able to use this to play them all even after the NYT took them down, today I release this to the public. (Note to NYT: Don't sue me! You took them down!)
Unity saw how Musk pissed off Twitter's users and they were like "hold my beer"..
Whenever I watch the local news, it feels like it's 80% about price increases and 10% about abusive cops. (And also 10% showbiz, which is a bit silly, but I don't really have a problem with.)
This week was quite busy. Felt very productive actually. A lot of medical errands still (follow-up tests and checkups after last week's procedure), bank errands I should have gotten to a few weeks/months ago, some hardware purchases/replacements I'd been putting off, some changes to this site, a bunch of personal archival work, family visits, etc. This entry is coming in a bit late because today was quite busy as well.
On the blog: I wrote about moving on from Fitbit, how we used to watch movies, note-taking, and caught up with some pending reviews.
Gaming:
Reading: Feed reader backlog is at an unwieldy 41 items. Not a lot of reading this week, mostly just comics.
Watching: Caught up with Ahsoka and also the current season of Futurama, might look for something else to binge. Also apparently Iron Fist had a season 2 and I was completely unaware?!?
We are back to form with 70,961 steps total last week (Sunday through Saturday), according to Google Fit.
What Newton really meant | Daniel Hoek » IAI TV: This is interesting, but it also mostly just reminded me of the Newton spiel from Mass Efffect 2
Willingham Sends Fables Into the Public Domain: What a move, no notes. Other than to check out Fables if you haven't, it's pretty good.
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Errands, finances, investments, variance, sadness, moving on, the past, getting things done, multitasking.
Nothing specific this coming week, but hopefully I can get more stuff done and blog more!