Happy Pride Month, everyone! It's the time of the year when the LGBT community is at its most powerful, so beware of our bending skills until the end of the month.
In totally "surprising" news, the President has ordered that the "rehabilitation" of Edsa will be delayed by a month. This feels like an odd stay of execution that is really just a pause to save face more than anything else. It did feel very inconsiderate for the DOTr to formally announce the start of the rehabilitation in about 2 weeks, while all their plans to mitigate its impact sounded very half-baked. They stated they were planning on adding trains to the MRT3 and additional buses, but why haven't they done that already? They were promising that toll fees for part of the Skyway would be waived...but had only an "in principle" agreement with the toll operator. They've recently made public statements about maybe private villages along Edsa should allow other people to pass through, but it sounds like they haven't even begun discussions to that effect.
But that's the sort of general disregard (and frankly disrespect) we've all come to expect from the government, especially recent administrations. Everyone has to adjust to their lack of foresight, planning, and just common sense when it comes to big projects like these. They'll argue that it's for the greater good...but repaving EDSA doesn't exactly sound like a revolutionary upgrade for Metro Manila's main thoroughfare. There are supposedly other aspects of this rehabilitation effort...but the full details haven't been clearly explained just yet.
So I don't know what they're going to pull together over the next 30-45 days...I'm not holding my breath just yet.
In much better news, a friend managed to come over yesterday, and we had a good game night. To make the most of our limited time, we focused on games that we already knew how to play (despite our looming backlog of unplayed games), so our game roster included the likes of Ra, Apiary, Wyrmspan, and Lost Ruins of Arnak.
Our game night ended a little earlier than we normally stay up for game nights, so Tobie and I considered what else we could do. As 02:00am was too late for a massage, we ended up finally getting started on Mother of Frankenstein, a daunting 3-volume narrative puzzle game based on the life of Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. As much as we play a lot of puzzle games and escape room games, each designer and publisher takes a different route with their take on the game genre. And we had no idea how immersive this particular game would be.
It turns out that we didn't have to be too worried, although it still took us time to understand the general flow of the game and how everyone is supposed to work. Other games tend to have very detailed instructions or even app-controlled gating mechanisms. This one sort of throws you into the deep end and basically just says, "read what's in the box and see where it takes you. This is why Tobie and I tend to play these games on our own or with at most 2 other players, just to keep things more focused.
The first box includes three sealed envelopes that sort of define the puzzles to solve, and a final over-arching puzzle involving elements from the three envelopes. There was a lot more math than I had expected, but it wasn't anything overly crazy. We managed to get through two envelopes before bed (albeit we struggled with the second one as our sleepiness fully kicked in at this point) and solved the final envelope and the big puzzle in the afternoon. We'll see when we have time to solve the other two volumes, and I'm looking forward to the literal puzzle promises for volume 2.
Hope you all had a good weekend, folks.
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