All's well here at The Dispatch. The snails have started trying to create their own language. They got very into the idea that as snails they should have their own culture. And a snail language would be the best way to spread their culture around the world and ingrain it into society as a whole. They said that language knows no borders and isn't limited by the physical. We think they might be getting out ahead of their skis though, because the only snail-language words they've taught us so far are "slime", "snail", and "trail", which are all English words.

Game Boy 👾

• Magic: The Gathering
  • Spent a lot of time and mental energy this week on the new Lost Caverns of Ixalan set that came out on Friday
  • Studied the spoilers for the cards and made my own tier list on 17lands as an experiment to see how I was evaluating cards, and then listened to a lot of podcast content to get their takes
  • Went to a prerelease event with some friends and went 3 and 0 which felt great (although I got lucky with my packs)
  • Made me more excited to try and design my own set someday and gave me an idea to make an Obsidian plugin for MTG cards
• Alan Wake II
  • Direct reference to Lost and some cool Shining vibes

Links 🔗

• A Video Game that Pays: Lessons Learned from Working Remotely
  • Not really about videos games sadly, but some good thoughts and suggestions for working remotely
  • Broad stroke are: work asynchronously, trust is the currency of remote work, "slow is smooth and smooth is fast", and less meetings
• I Skipped to the Ending
  • Someone's experience working a Google
  • Big tech jobs can pay a lot, but bureaucracy at scale can be soul-sucking
• Browser Debugging Tricks
  • Very cool list of tricks to use when debugging code in the browser
  • Referenced this article by Darek Kay
• Space Invaders Map of Paris
  • Cool map of all the space invader mural art in Paris

Albums 🎧

• "Javelin" by Sufjan Stevens
  • three times this week
  • starting to become routine, but that's nice
• "The Age of Adz" by Sufjan Stevens
• "boygenius" by boygenius
• "songs" by Adrianne Lenker
• "Halcyon Digest" by Deerhunter - sleeper pillar album
• "Trick" by Alex G
• "God Save the Animals" by Alex G - "Right now baby, I'm struggling. We'll see"
• "Now Here's My Plan" by Bonnie 'Prince' Billy

Podcasts 🎙️

• Not Another DnD Podcast
  • Continuing to be a good source of background talking
• Lords of Limited
  • Listened to their take on the new set
• Limited Level Ups
  • Listened to the full set review for the new set and compared against my own tier list