The World

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.

My Week

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.

Some Recent Purchases

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.

Media Diet

• Gaming:

  • Single player: Managed to get Baldur's Gate 3 past Act 2, so yay progress? Xenoblade Chronicles 3 and Sea of Stars are both still inching forward as well.
  • Online:
    • Magic Arena: Only did two Wilds of Eldraine drafts this week, slowing down a bit.
    • Marvel Snap regular grinding still going on.
    • Eternal still only roughly once a week.

• 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.

Walking

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.

Some Links of Interest

• 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

• Pluralistic: Bill Willingham puts his graphic novel series “Fables” into the public domain (15 Sept 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow:

  "A magnificent table flip (but the devil is in the details)."

  Those details remind me how screwed up the whole copyright system currently is.

Check out the linkblog for past links!

Site Changes

• minor fixes to how images are rendered on the site. Previously the aspect ratio on thumbnails was wrong if the display resolution was too low. Image galleries now support masonry layout in Firefox if you have enabled that toggle (I might write about this in the future, it's neat).

Things I've been thinking about

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.

Things I'm looking forward to

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.

Connections (New York Times)

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).

Cine2Nerdle

(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:

• Original: You are given a 4x4 grid of terms (usually actor names or movie plot elements) and have to arrange them such that some number of rows and columns (usually 5) are each associated with a specific movie. The movies involved are only revealed once you have completed their row/column.
• Reversal: Haven't tried this one yet, but the concept is you are given a 4x4 grid of movies and have to arrange them accordng to specific concepts/themes, basically a reversal of "Original"
• Logical: These are weekly puzzles instead of daily and they are super-challenging. You are given a 4x4 grid of movie-related terms AND a set of rules and have to find a way to arrange the grid such that they satisfy all the rules. The rules might be something like "all film in this row must be in release order" or "Leonardo diCaprio must be adjacent to all his costars" or "All actors who have appeared in Christopher Nolan films are on the same row". Basically a wide range of movie knowledge is required.

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.

Others

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!)

• framed.wtf: Guess the movie based on the screenshots/stills. These are super challenging and probably the reason I never stuck with it.
• Diffle: This is a word-guessing game like Wordle, but a bit more complicated and there is no set word size.
• NYT Flashback: This is a weekly history quiz similar to above where you have to arrange the events in chronological order. Kind of like the Wiki History game the trivia team likes. Fairly challenging because I am bad at history, but not great because (a) requires an NYT account (I think a free one works); and (b) there doesn't seem to be a set URL for a hub for the puzzles, each week has a different URL (the linked one is for this week's puzzle).
• New Word Order: Another "rearrange in chronological order" game, this time for when new words/phrases came into use. Can be even more challenging than sorting historical events. This one is NOT a daily, seems you can play as many times as you like.
• Globle: A country-guessing game. You name a country and you are told how close (geographically) you are to the actual country. Geography is another subject I am poor at.
• Squaredle: This is something like the old Boggle word-finding game. The wordlists include "bonus words" that are not required for completion and are slang or obscure/archaic or not part of American English
• Identifive: This is a very simple word-finding game where every day you have to find exactly one five-letter word in a grid. I didn't find it very exciting.
• Digits (defunct) / Additional: NYT had a short-lived arithmetic game called "Digits" where you had a set of 6 numbers (usually between 1-25 I think), and had to combine them using arithmetic to hit a target number. Each day had five rounds with increasing difficulty. I believe Digits ended last August, but Additional is heavily based on it and is basically the same thing.

I suspect I have more similar links saved somewhere, but these are the ones I have for now.

Like and Subscribe

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.

Acrostics

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!)

The World

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.)

My Week

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.

Media Diet

• Gaming:

  • Single player: It's still a bit insane that I am playing (or trying to play) 3 different RPGs (with different play styles!) concurrently. Baldur's Gate 3, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 and Sea of Stars are all in progress, albeit very slowly because I'm splitting my time between them. Hopefully I can clear at least one of these before the new Mario game comes out in October!
  • Online:
    • Magic Arena: Did a lot of Wilds of Eldraine drafting this week and even streamed a bunch over on Twitch. You can follow along using the MTGWOE tag. I also played the Arena Open this weekend, but didn't do well =/
    • Marvel Snap regular grinding still going on. Eternal has a new set coming out soonish I think, but I still don't play it very often these days.

• 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?!?

Walking

We are back to form with 70,961 steps total last week (Sunday through Saturday), according to Google Fit.

Some Links of Interest

• 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.

• 100 things I know - by Mari Andrew - Out of the Blue

• Rediscovering the Old Internet Vibe — Noisy Deadlines

• Does anyone think Twitter gets better from here?

Check out the linkblog for past links!

Site Changes

• various fixes to the backend importing jobs
• I found out that markdown has it's own footnotes syntax and updatedolder posts and the backend to use that so I can discard my own implementation
• also, this isn't deployed yet, but I'm generally unhappy with how photos/videos are rendered in various pages and listings so I'm trying to find a good approach and playing around with some options. Might take a while though
• adding this site changes section to the weeknotes because I saw someone else doing it in their weeknotes lol

Things I've been thinking about

Errands, finances, investments, variance, sadness, moving on, the past, getting things done, multitasking.

Things I'm looking forward to

Nothing specific this coming week, but hopefully I can get more stuff done and blog more!