4 Busy Day(s)

And so concludes another 4-day long weekend that is completely of my own devising through strategic deployment of paid time off on a Friday and a Monday.

What did I do over these four days?

Frankly, nothing much, which is completely as intended.

Looking back, I...

• Finished the third and final volume of The Complete Calvin and Hobbes series;
• Caught up on Hololive/Holostars EN folks;
• Chat with Brian and Wangki for a bit;
• Restarted rehearsals for TGCO;
• Restocked my medication;
• Ate a nice unagi meal at 鰻満;
• Tried the new tater-tots at McDonald's;
• Had century egg lean meat porridge from Sin Heng Kee Porridge;
• Bought a 70 cL bottle of Nikka Black Clear Whisky from Don Don Donki;
• Started to get used to playing concert G-major on my alto saxophone;
• Took said saxophone to WindWorks to fix a cork bumper that fell off near the G♯-key;
• Wrote a PDF generator that combined the NKJV summaries that I typed out with the ESV text into a single easy-to-refer-to 2-column compendium using my favourite Atkinson Hyperlegible font all typeset with LaTeX;
• Started laying out the foundation of the central castle within the walls of my Minecraft single player world;
• Tried out the Silent in Slay the Spire; and
• Curated a small part of my reading list.

It's definitely not a lot, but it is fulfilling in many ways.

The realisation that Calvin and Hobbes had its run ended about 3 years before I first heard of it in secondary school came as a shock. But then again, it did have a great run since 1985, and the whole late 80s to mid 90s feel was very strong and nostalgic in it. It ended at roughly the time when the Internet (that's with the capital `I') was starting to become a big thing, and I suppose it was just about right. I cannot think of how Calvin and Hobbes might succeed with its original formula with an increasing base of children and young adults who never really understood what it meant to have a childhood that did not involve electronic devices more personalised than the family television.

In fact, I would say that Hobbes would probably be forgotten rather quickly when the Calvin-equivalent had his first net-enabled phone/tablet. The story would have gone a completely different way, and it may not even be good, for much of the fun of Calvin and Hobbes lies in the ironic observations of a smart but isolated six-year-old with his tiger who may or may not be a figment of his imagination (there had always been evidence that worked either way). I wonder if Watterson stopped when he did when he realised what I have now realised, more than twenty years on.

The new whisky (notice the lack of an `e'---this is deliberate because that's why Nikka calls it) is deceptively smooth. It lacked the rough edges of the Suntory that I grabbed from the nearly 7-eleven that demanded it drunk on the rocks. It reminded me much of a VSOP, or even XO. An interesting whisky indeed. While researching for the proper URL to reference the whisky, I learnt that many Japanese distilleries have discontinued some of their longer aged whiskeys because of too much demand---the new batches of the old stuff seem to be coming out only from 2030 onwards.

I suppose that is something to look forward to?

Anyway, that's all for the planned breaks for now. The next one is on Dec 30---not sure why I took it because I'm too lazy to pull up the calendar, but I suppose it is just to have another 4-day long weekend?

That's about it for now. Till the next update then.