Bit of a strange week for postal mail. As we head towards the local council elections in May, I’ve been bombarded with letters from candidates. I’m sure the independent candidate tried to call the other day, but I was in the middle of a Teams work call. He left a leaflet. Then there were handwritten letters addressed to either me personally or “the resident” from the Lib Dems and the Conservatives, and a leaflet from Reform, which was torn up and thrown away immediately.
What amused me was a handwritten letter from a religious group – possibly THAT group that usually calls around when you least expect it (no, not the Spanish Inquisition – they’d be 192 years too late). I only knew it was some religious thing from an enclosed pamphlet about Jesus and God and things of that nature. The letter itself was indecipherable. The handwriting was so illegible I suspect it might have been written in ancient Aramaic (as opposed to aromatic, which conjures the images of delicious duck in hoi sin sauce).
On the electronic mail front, I had to sigh when the latest news of Directive 8020 from Supermassive Games, for whom I worked up until September of last year, had ended up in my Google Workspace spam folder. Given that I had set up the infrastructure for the marketing department to ensure maximum delivery (ensuring DKIM, SPF, and DMARC were all correct, etc.) for this sort of thing, it was hugely frustrating to find that Gmail decided to throw it in the junk because other people had been reporting those kinds of emails as spam. You can do everything in your power, technically, to get mail delivered, but you’re still at the mercy of a mail provider’s anti-spam/anti-phishing/anti-malware heuristics as to whether it will get seen by anybody. I signed up for the mailing list. It’s double opt-in (e.g. you get an email to confirm that you want to subscribe), but Google knows best. Anyhow, I’ve had to mess up my contacts list by whitelisting a no-reply email address because of Gmail’s design….
Anyway, Directive 8020 is due for release on the 12th May. I’m still undecided whether I’m going for the PC version (RTX 5070 Ti with 12Gb VRAM with Ultra 9 275Hx CPU) or the PS5 Pro (which apparently the game is optimised for).