Big, 1988 - ★★★
Watched on Sunday July 10, 2022.
Console Games are Fun; Mobile Ones Aren't
Matt Birchler writing on his blog makes a succinct point.
Mobile games are a shit industry with shit companies making shit games that don’t exist to entertain, they exist to extract as much money as possible from a few whales who will spend hundreds, if not thousands of dollars.
Fun is not the point.
Matt nails it. This is why I enjoy playing games on Xbox and Switch, and get nothing from mobile gaming.
I hate knee bursitis or whatever worse thing is going on with my ageing joints. One small jump today led to immediate chronic pain after suffering underlying soreness for months prior.
Me in 1 Chart
After listening to myself interviewed by Martin Feld on Really Specific Stories I started thinking about the strange mixture of interests I have.
For fun, I thought I’d grab the main categories and represent them in graphical form.
Basketball is predominantly represented by NBL and NBL1 - not NBA.
Podcasting incorporates listening, and producing NBL Pocket Podcast and Hemispheric Views.
Productivity and IT & Tech almost bleed into one another to an extent. Productivity is about finding optimal ways of working, creating time and space through efficiency and clever use of technology where appropriate. This can be applied at a personal level or a corporate level. Application of effective productive measures is how I can often add value with companies I support as part of my day job. The IT & Tech portion has shrunk over the years, as this area has become commoditised and it becomes harder to tinker. Nowadays my focus is mainly on using Apple platforms to build nice workflows to support my own productivity improvements. I will let IT & Tech also capture the small amount of computer gaming I do.
Finally, politics encapsulates mainly Australian Federal politics and Western Australian State politics. I used to work in State politics; my wife is a State Parliamentarian, so I guess this checks out.
I wonder if there are any other people out there with a similar cross-section of interests?
I’ve built my own Hello page riffing on Alastair Johnson’s idea.
Finished reading: The Profit Paradox by Jan Eeckhout 📚 It took me a long time to finish because I put it down halfway through and left it for a while. Great insights, but did tend to get a little bogged down in the last third. Very US-centric, of course.
I’m seriously addicted to Halo Infinite on Xbox. I love the open world approach to the game.
Look at that - a new episode has dropped! Hemispheric Views 061: Bullet Point Out Of Context!
This is a quick post using Quill which I vaguely remember seeing before, but which I was reminded about by @gabz at What is my process or workflow?. Quill is an online form for entering new blog posts.
I bought a discounted year of Agenda.app. I owned it a couple of years ago, but moved onto Craft. I still think Craft is better, but I can’t resist a note-taking app!
Stopped to make sure old mate wasn’t about to crash into my car in the parking lot as he was having a rough time steering into a bay. He missed my car, then we had a nice old chat about the weather and footy walking in to the shops together.
For all the things my country gets wrong - and we get a lot wrong - today I’m even more appreciative of being an Australian. Our governance systems remain robust and to date have corrected against efforts made by extremist political advances.
I can’t believe Roe v Wade has been overturned. What is going on in the USA? I don’t understand extremist conservative thinking.
Finished Obi Wan Kenobi. It does a really great job bringing insight to the characters we know and love, while maintaining the feeling of something at stake.
Palmer, 2021 - ★★★★★
A tender and touching story of parenting and caring.
Great Writing About a Not Great President
Maureen Dowd: Donald Trump, American Monster
Shelley’s monster, unlike ours, has self-awareness and a reason to wreak havoc. He knows how to feel guilty and when to leave the stage. Our monster’s malignity stems from pure narcissistic psychopathy — and he refuses to leave the stage or cease his vile mendacity.
Maureen Dowd truly is a great writer. I would love to be able to craft words in such a way.
— Link to this article found via Rob Fahrni
COVID Day 4
Day 4 of COVID has seen me sleep for 14 hours and wake with a sore throat, aches and a pounding head.
During the night I had the experience that I sometimes feel with bad flus. It is as if the electrical wiring in my body has been incorrectly rerouted and partly disconnected. So I will get a pinging, almost zapping feel in my hip for instance, when I twist my shoulder. Or in my foot when I move my torso. It’s quite disconcerting and I would be fascinated to know the scientific explanation for it. I guess it’s probably inflammatory symptoms?
If I were to describe how COVID feels, I would say: “Imagine if your body - inside and out - were made up of jigsaw puzzle pieces. Then take away about 35% of those pieces and imagine how unstructurally sound you would feel. That’s COVID.”
I Care a Lot, 2020 - ★★½
Started off great. I would have preferred a different ending.
COVID has finally found me. Now let’s see what sort of defence this triple-vax has delivered me.