Slade Watkins

Mini Christmas Tree, Colorful Lights, and Shakespeare

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** The Bulletin ** – December 9, 2023

Hey you:

Good news, I’m not sick anymore! Even greater news, I finally remembered to put up the Christmas tree I got from my aunts a few years back! It has been in the basement for some time now—and has been in desperate need of some TLC. I spent an hour just giving it some attention, and I think it looks great now! Haven’t had this up since high school. It’s nice to see it again after all this time… and have it still work perfectly. Seriously, all the lights and ornaments are the same, which is kind of impressive!

Speaking of Christmas lights, those are up, too! Though frankly, I leave them up year round. Finally replaced a broken strand. Should probably replace the other strand too next year. Eh, that’s future Slade’s problem.

This week has seen me doing more writing than I usually do. According to my stat tracking software, I wrote roughly 550,000 words. Which is absolutely insane. That doesn’t necessarily mean 550,000 words will ever see the light of day—but the stats themselves are insane. My busiest day was Tuesday, per usual, where I did around 240,000 of those. Everything else was pretty gradual, thankfully.

I do know that some of those words will be coming your way, though, so stay tuned! Fiona and I have a writer’s room meeting on Monday for the show, and we have a lot to go over and get situated before the new year. I’m also going to be writing another thing with someone I know from high school, and I’m excited to share more about with you all in the coming months. Oh, and I’m working on those blog posts I mentioned last week.

I have also been playing a LOT of Pokémon—and had a dentist appointment. Go figure. Okay, now with all that catch-up, I bring you the latest beyond my world in this week’s edition of The Bulletin!

This week’s soundtrack

I’m kind of a Spotify addict, so I happen to listen to a lot of music. Here’s what I’m currently listening to—usually on repeat. Here’s what I’ve got for you, for the week of December 9, 2023…

Thanks to Songlink for making all these streaming platform-agnostic!

Things I found across the net

Big, little things? Yeah, that sounds about right. (For the uninitiated, that was a hardware joke.)

  • Google details December Feature Drop for Pixel 5a 5G and later, rolling out now: Google is now rolling out a fairly sizeable Feature Drop for its Pixel lineup. Included are some enhancements to Pixel Tablet/Fold, the new Gemini Nano AI model on Pixel 8 Pro, as well as significant improvements to Photo Unblur (including it being available on Pixel 6 now? I saw it as an option and tried it earlier, it works well!) and the ability to use your Pixel device as a webcam for your computer!

  • Nintendo postpones Nintendo Live 2024 Tokyo & Splatoon World Championship due to safety concerns: In a statement spotted by Eurogamer, Nintendo has elected to cancel its Nintendo Live 2024 event in Tokyo due to threats directed towards the safety of its employees and visitors. It has also made the decision to postpone the Splatoon World Championship as well to a date that has yet to be announced, due to threats directed towards Nintendo’s employees and threats that have “spread to spectators.” (I’m quite glad to see they’re making this decision and prioritizing the safety of everyone involved.)

  • Those mad people finally did it, they brought iMessage to Android: Not Apple, of course—I’m actually talking about the folks at Beeper. Using an open source proof-of-concept from a literal high school student, these folks were able to reverse engineer Apple’s iMessage protocols and make the whole thing just work in a new app called ‘Beeper Mini’ that’s only a couple bucks a month. I’m oversimplifying it quite a bit, but Quinn of Snazzy Labs has a great video summing it all up. I’m absolutely blown away. Congrats, and bravo, to everyone involved in making this happen!!

  • Discord announces rollout of very heavily disliked redesign on mobile: The chat platform has officially rolled out an “improved” UI redesign for its mobile app, which has immediately been met with a LOT of dislike and backlash. The company has yet to comment directly on the negative reaction from users, but says in their blog post that they built this by listening to “sparks of feedback” from users. If that were true, this wouldn’t exist (given what I’ve seen online), but okay…

  • In the land of YouTube this week: Some interesting stuff in here! Here’s some of what I found…

    • The Second Doctor welcomes Victoria into his TARDIS for the first time, but in full colour! Apparently this was done with some fairly simple tools, and it looks pretty good!

    • Tom Scott does an excellent video on why subtitles don’t always match the dubs of a video in another language. This video also makes use of a new YouTube feature that allows multiple audio tracks to exist for that said feature, so that’s a nice touch!

    • Peter Capaldi gives some beautiful advice to Ncuti Gatwa, the Fifteenth Doctor, while accepting a Scottish BAFTA award for Outstanding Contribution. I’m pretty sure I saw Ncuti tearing up, too! He’s going to be a magnificent Doctor!!

    • And finally, something that made me laugh for way too long: Jesus Christ takes the escalator.

And that’s it from me this week! If you want to get in touch for whatever reason, you can definitely email me at [email protected]! Can’t guarantee you a reply—I get too many emails as it is—but that’s the best way to reach me on the internet these days.

The owner and operator of Catlantis,
Slade