EyeSpark Weekly – April 3, 2026

Here's my fourth weekly update of the media I've interacted with this week, amongst other stuff! I am getting a better hang of the format now, and I also started writing this on Saturday, as opposed to the previous ones that I usually started around Wednesday.

SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers for Taskmaster Series 10.

Videos & Shows

I started getting pretty fixated with Half-Life again after watching a few videos.

• There are multiple videos by Archenlander I've watched, the first of them being about a lot of the details of HL2 which make the game much more immersive. I also watched his videos explaining his theories of what is the toxic goo of the original Half-Life 1, and the contaminated water of HL2. I've previously watched his video(s) on Portal's goo which I also really enjoyed. I recommend them all!
• Along with those I also watched this video by Zomboman about why City 17 specifically feels so real. He's previously made a video on how the first chapters of Half-Life 1 are like a secret tutorial that I watched when it came out, and I really liked both of them!
• On Wednesday, which just so happened to be April Fools, the finale of Last One Laughing UK Series 2 dropped, and it was very good! I don't want to spoil anything, and I might make a separate post about it, but I really enjoyed watching it, and it had a very unexpected ending.

Speaking of April Fools, I usually don't enjoy a lot of stuff that day, but there has been some pretty good stuff to come from it this year, and I specifically wanna share 2 videos that I really liked!

• Schaffrillas did a very funny video ranking all the sushi places he's been to. It was quite unexpected, and not the usual April Fools thing, but it's a video I really enjoyed, albeit with just a hint of irony.
• One of my favourite board game YouTube channels is No Rolls Barred, who I most know for their House Rules series where they play board games with silly rules added, but this time they did the opposite and played a "super-serious" game of Monopoly. It started of as expected, but then it got progressively sillier while they still played it completely serious, with fake adverts, the graphic designer quitting partway through (which changed the fonts to Comic Sans), them being given drinks and curry by an almost naked man, and it just kept going. The video also has highlights, which is just the entire video at 2x speed in the end. It is without a doubt my favourite jokey thing I saw that day, though I'll admit I did watch a lot of it in the background while doing other things.

Other Cool Stuff

• One more thing for April Fools, xkcd shared his yearly April Fools comic. He's always done silly stuff for it, and for this year's he added themes to the entire website, not just this comic. It is pretty fun, and it finally added the legendary Boat Mode, though I don't appreciate how Dark Mode makes Self-Description inaccurate.
• On Saturday I learned that Taskmaster champion Richard Herring has a pretty successful podcast, and I only found this out because I found that Jay Foreman was a guest in an episode! Specifically he appeared in a book club episode, where Richard has a guest over to talk about a book they wrote. I found the podcast super entertaining and a very worthwhile listen if you like both Richard's and Jay's stuff!
• I also saw the retro episode of his podcast with Fern Brady, which I really liked as it gave some perspective on her autism and talked about why Taskmaster was very good for her, which I found very nice as a neurodivergent person myself.
• Lastly, I don't know if this really fits this category or not, but I do wanna bring up that the Artemis II launch happened just 2 days ago on April 1st, and I watched the launch live via NASA's livestream. This is a very historic moment and I am very glad it all went well, so I feel like bringing it up!
• Within just a few hours Catherine Q on Bluesky shared this image, which I assume is a screenshot from the livestream, and it is absolutely beautiful. And just today the commander of Artemis II, Reid Wiseman, shared a picture of Earth he took from Artemis II, which I always love seeing.

Personal Stuff

• I do wanna share a quick drawing I made on Monday. For no apparent reason I just felt like drawing an Antlion from HL2, and I did! I did two drawings, using a reference for the first one, but for the second one I only used the first one for a reference, and it ended up quite well I'd say!

• There is also something else that I did on Sunday that I am not completely sure about if I want to share yet, but I might pretty soon depending on the circumstances.

And that's it for this week! I think this format is working super well, so I'm pretty certain I'll stick with it now.