- The week passed without much direction, pockets of time invested in various pursuits without any idea of their worth or contribution to a larger whole, psychologically enjoyable but with an undercurrent of guilt and worry. In other words, I’ve been a lousy bum.
- The existence of a Gossip Girl reboot for today’s teens would make any Millennial feel old, but it… feels like it’s written by one of us? That’s not really a compliment. So while it’s trashy fun with scenes that would have been shocking on TV 20 years ago, the way it tries to incorporate current social media and cultural trends, and how it sounds while doing it, feels inauthentic. Haha, here I am complaining that Gossip Girl doesn’t feel real like it used to. I mostly spend every episode trying to figure out who each actor resembles most.
- On Monday evening we took a walk in the neighborhood. By Tuesday afternoon, many of the homes we passed would have been flooded up their driveways. It was the single heaviest day of rainfall in any August ever, I believe the news said. It was a normal August’s entire month of rain in a single day. As apartment dwellers we were unaffected, but watched online videos of overflowing canals and mall basements in borderline horror. (It’s now the following Monday morning and we’ve got reports of flooding around the island once again.)
- For much of the week, I was looking forward to Friday for the (re)release of Asphalt 8 on Apple Arcade, with all its in-app purchases removed and replaced with a more traditional “premium” progression model. The game is 8 years old now, but it looks just fine and is still being played and refined regularly — the free-to-play edition was updated last week, so it must be doing good numbers. As I said in a review I left on the App Store, this is a welcome return to Asphalt’s roots, as anyone who played its original incarnation back on the Nintendo DS (Wikipedia) would know. I paid $60 for it then, which was roughly a dollar per polygon.
- It’s a testament to Gameloft Barcelona’s work (or my degeneracy as a gamer) that I can be literally sitting in front of a PS4 and Switch but spend hours playing a mobile racing game on my iPad instead.
- The next Apple Arcade release I’m looking forward to is yet another Nintendo DS revival: Zookeeper World. If you haven’t had the pleasure of playing Zookeeper, it’s essentially an animal-themed Bejeweled with a sort of blocky pixel art aesthetic, cheap but lovably annoying tunes, and a multiplayer mode where you mess with your opponent’s vision. This was also a $60 game back in the day, and I remember playing it to death in university on my DS Phat. It was such a blast that several of my non-gamer housemates ended up buying DSes just to play Zookeeper!
- At the week’s end, I hung out with some friends at a cafe all afternoon and discovered with the help of my HiCoffee app how it feels to exceed the recommended amount of caffeine in a day: pretty fucking awful. I had what felt like a coffee hangover the next morning and had to cut down to a single shot for the day.
- Tech-wise, I spent time looking at NFTs and being tempted to do something stupid (pretty sure I won’t) and getting my feet wet in the Terra ecosystem. In particular the Anchor and Orion projects, which enable high interest rates for savings, of around 19.5% and 13.5% pa respectively. To use Anchor, you’ll have to set up a Terra wallet and deposit UST (their USD stablecoin), but Orion makes it easier by bridging your Ethereum stablecoins like DAI/USDT/USDC over to Anchor while still returning higher rates than anywhere else. I think they’re incredibly interesting and worth looking into if you’d like to experience something that sounds too good to be true but actually seems to work. This is not financial advice, of course.
- Now if you’ll excuse me, Donda (Apple Music) just came out and needs listening to.
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