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COVID-19 ⚛️

  • Since Melbourne has entered Stage 4 quarantine, I am at home every day 🏡; I have discovered that I am perfectly happy squirrelled away like this. 🐿️
  • This has led me to do a lot of the following…

Website 🌐

  • Finally changed the name and tagline of my site – the previous one was always supposed to be temporary
  • I got a logo designed for the website (I discovered Fiverr via YouTuber/Muralist, Ten Hundred). If you're willing to shell out for a domain and a server, a logo isn't that much of a stretch.
  • Changed my theme to GuCherry Blog; it's not an officially IndieWeb-supported theme, but it seems to work fine.
  • Considering how long this Now entry is, I'm setting a reminder to update this monthly, so I don't have such a huge backlog.

Podcast 🎙️

  • "Trigger Point FM" is on hiatus for much longer than expected as my co-host absolutely refuses to record remotely

I am playing a lot more games 🎲:

  • The original Vampire: The Masquerade game I was playing moved from face-to-face to being played via video chat, to not being played at all. Instead, I've replaced that with a play-by-post VtM game hosted on the Seattle by Night Discord Server. Instead of writing up session summaries, I am now sharing my posts from the Discord game.
  • Pathfinder is still happening once a week – we are now facing a world-ending event that requires us to do some tomb-diving, and my character spends 1/3 of the time as Chaotic Evil, and no one notices…
  • I spent two weeks playing No Man's Sky again, but that resulted in some serious sleep deprivation, so I decided to shelve that for now.
  • I am playing Thousand Year Old Vampire – too early to share my thoughts on this…
  • I've rediscovered Nile Online, a browser-based worker/resource management game. I forget how much I enjoy these games – especially when there's no warfare involved – This led to me discovering GreaseMonkey/Tampermonkey

Analogue stuff ✍️

iOS 👩🏻‍💻

  • I've created a Shortcut that keeps track of the web-series I'm reading (webcomics, web novels etc.), and which chapter I'm up to – I just need to write it up

I am watching 📺

  • All fourteen seasons of Supernatural – currently onto season 12
  • Recently finished:
    • Suits
    • Nashville
    • Nirvana in Fire (again)
    • Mystic Pop-Up Bar
    • Lucifer – Season 5

This page is inspired by Derek Sivers.

Bookmarked Journal Writing Workshop - Diving For Pearls by Ingrid Jane Jones (ingridjanejones.com)

I did this class on Monday (or at least the Laneway Learning version of it – it’s hosted by the same teacher, just a shorter session) and I have to say, if you ever have trouble working through stress, or want to work on your journaling skills, this class was pretty helpful.

Her online journaling community – where a group of people get together twice a week to journal – is a good way to keep you accountable.

Bookmarked

Someone sent me a link to this solo RPG, “Thousand Year Old Vampire” and it looks interesting. Currently, it’s on sale for $9USD. Below are reviews that rave about this game.

One Thousand Years of Solitude – Space Biff

Review video:

Here’s a play-through video:

I am thinking of recording the game journal either here or in my Vampire the Masquerade site (where I’m recording my game sessions for two VtM games I’m playing). We’ll see how I feel when I start playing the game.

Does anyone remember Jubeat?
At one time I was tempted to buy the arcade machine when our local arcades with the machine closed down.

Last night, Andrew found out you can get the game on iOS through the Japan App Store.

I’m so rusty on this game.

New rabbit hole, here I go.

I’ve been reading a lot of fans-translated Chinese webnovels recently.
Think “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” but in book form.
Some of the translation can be hit or miss, but the footnotes can be quite enlightening on ancient Chinese culture/customs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KPbJ0-DxTc

To lighten the mood…

I know this sounds weird after the previous post, but while some people (justifiably) need the severity of this situation drilled into their heads, others need to chill out and focus less on the bad shit in the world.
Because there’s a lot of that out there, and if you spend the whole day scouring the internet looking for posts to justify your, “The End is Nigh” rant, you’ll just make yourself, and everyone around you, miserable.

So have common sense and show general decency: stay at home (if you can), maintain physical distancing (you can still be social online), and have a (respectful) chuckle at all the memes.

Quoted COVID-19 Diary - Lily pads and exponential thinking by David Walsh (Owner of the Museum of Old and New Art - MONA) (blog.mona.net.au)
Here's a problem: a lily pad grows in an otherwise empty pond. The lily pad produces a new pad every day, the same size as the original. They both reproduce the next day, so that on the first day there is one lily pad; the second day, two; the third day, four; and so on. The pond is completely covered with lily pads by the thirtieth day. On what day did lily pads cover half the pond? If you don't immediately realise it was the twenty-ninth day, you are not equipped to deal with the exponential growth of COVID-19.

It’s not a long read, and it’s worth reading. The first few paragraphs might not interest many people – especially those outside of Australia, but 1/3 in is where the interesting things happen.