Weekly notes 07/2023

What’s been happening #

• This week apparently has been a week of watching TV series/movies featuring a person’s immortality as theme. Jo was watching Forever - a show where a character, Dr Henry Morgan who works as a medical examiner is immortal and has been around for 200+ years. If Henry dies, he gets “resurrected” in a nearby body of water. The TV show was quite interesting - procedural crime drama appeals to me and the added twist of Henry trying to keep his immortality a secret is an additional twist. Ioan Gruffudd as Henry does a great job. Give it a watch - it’s only 22 episodes since the show was cancelled after one season.
  • On the related theme we watched The Man From Earth - a movie about John Oldman, a university professor, who claims to be a caveman having lived for over 14,000 years. What’s fascinating about the movie is that it is entirely set in/around John Oldman’s house and is entirely driven around dialogue with John describing his life experiences as answers to questions put forward by his colleagues. I can’t imagine being engrossed in a movie that is set primarily in a single scene, with no action and purely driven by dialogue, but here we are. At 89 minutes of runtime it’s not too long - I’d highly recommend giving it a watch.
• The PTR (Public test realm) of Diablo 3’s next season, Season 28 has wrapped up and the season will start next week. The Altar is an interesting change to this season’s unique power, and many expect this season to be the “last big” season as it is expected that the season will continue till Diablo IV’s launch in June. Whether that will be true remains to be seen, I’m happy to have another season where I can start again from scratch and put in tens of hours in mindless cathartic grind.
• I still haven’t properly phased out my brain fog. This week’s most egregious case was when I was filling in my Singapore Arrival card I entered my passport number wrong (last two digits offset by a key on the keyboard), despite knowing and clearing thinking I wrote the right number. I realized I got it wrong when I saw the acknowledgement email and saw the masked passport number - the digits that were unmasked were wrong! Wonder what would have happened if I had got the masked digits wrong. I had to re-apply for an arrival card because even though you can update the arrival card details, the passport number is essentially considered as primary key and cannot be changed.
• I fly out to Singapore this Sunday for The Trade Desk’s annual weeklong conference, called Palooza. I hope to meet some new folks, talk to awesome people and explore a little bit of Singapore.

Link of the week #

I really miss the racing games that were launched early to mid 2000s. Most of the new ones have been pretty poor. I reinstalled Forza Horizon 3 to replay/finish of the things I didn’t finish because I can’t be bothered with any of the newer ones. Check this video to see what I mean about the Decline of Racing Games.

Till next week.