Links and Notes - May 12th 2021
Fasting coming to an end
At the time of writing this, Eid festival has still not been announced. And with the rain it looks like Friday will be festival. Sigh. I remain frustrated with Sri Lanka's insistence on physically sighting the moon. We have all this modern technology but we deem it valid on very arbitrary line. For example, we see it as ok to say a person saw the moon on one corner of Sri Lanka and for that to be relayed across the island using WhatsApp. But a person seeing it somewhere else in the world can't be taken as valid for Sri Lanka despite the fact that they are relaying the information using the same technology. Some say that it should be based on distance. But then what's the right distance? No one knows.
And the end result of this archaic approach to deciding on the end of the month of fasting is just a ton of stress and anxiety. Maybe if more of the men who were responsible for sighting the moon were made more responsible for preparing for the festival the next day we'd have some pretty fast change
Meanwhile, Sri Lanka is doing another curfew run. It's lock down. But not really. It's tomorrow. But it's not tomorrow if your identity card ends with the right number. Schrodinger's lockdown.
Edit: Since writing this, my prediction came true. The rain came and festival has been pushed to Friday.
System of a down's music
Over the past few days I've been listening to system of a down a lot. Their music has not aged a bit. There's very little out there that's anything like it. Not back then. Not now. The sound is unique.
Even after all these years, Toxicity by System of a Down still raises hairs for me. The drumming. The vocals. The guitars. The arrangement. It's beautiful.
The memories I have around the music also help I suppose. The days spent jamming with friends after school as the drummer boy amongst us attempted to catch on to the incredibly complex patterns. The attempts to croon and scream at the same time. Ah. Good times.
Alpha beta gamer
I stumbled upon AlphaBetaGamer today. It's a review site for games that are in alpha/beta. Hence the name. At first glance it looks more weighted towards indie games. I discovered it via their youtube channel and I have to say I absolutely love the content there. Sadly it's too frequent for my feed reader so it's going to become one of those sites I poke my head into from time to time.
Separately, the reviews all drove me to install itch where I have access to a gajillion indie games. Not sure why I didn't install it all this while.
And on the note of game discovery, some exceptional games I found via ABG today:
And honestly just so many wild out of the ordinary games in there. Either check their YouTube or their spotlight. I guarantee, there's just good stuff in there through and through.
Today's a shorter post than usual. Not an issue. I just wish I had time to include an update about my mail organizer project. Made big strides today. Gotta do that update tomorrow.
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Posted on May 12 2021 by Adnan Issadeen