Long Breaks == Sick Days 😩

I think that I'm this close to just simply hating taking leave to make long weekends longer.

Only because each time that I take an extra day off, I end up ``wasting it'' by actually falling ill and having to spend that time just sleeping in just so that my body can recover from whatever the hell it was that took me out.

It is, to put it mildly, getting annoying.

And now, that aside, time to put other things into perspective.

I talked recently about how Gawr Gura of hololive English Myth has decided to call it quits, and mentioned about how it was really not something that was unexpected, considering the duration in which she had worked, comparing the nearly five years that she had with that of a software engineer making senior level by then.

I stand by that. Five years is a long time, particularly if one's under thirty. It is, to put it really stupidly, more than 16% of one's life span at that point in time, and if one were fifty, it would be barely 10% only, and only after another twenty years of perspective. Put that way, things seem to make much more sense, and perhaps even the tourists can accept it at face value without stirring more unnecessary drama.

Speaking of tourists, 4chan was finally hacked pretty thoroughly after being around for nearly twenty years. The relevance here is that it usually is the containment zone for the kind of doom-posting of the naysayers of hololive under the /vt/ board, and with 4chan down as the English-speaking world's largest VTuber resigning, it just means that the spill over becomes more troublesome than usual.

I think that Gura's feelings on the matter can be surmised in the ``last'' music video that she just released on her channel:

It's angsty, it's raw, it's not what one would expect from the cutesy avatar that Gura is known for.

As I mentioned, I know of Gura, but I don't follow her as closely as say Ina or even Reine. Take it for all it is worth.

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Neither Civil Nor Servant was a book that I had been wanting to read for quite a while now, and it was only recently that I had managed to borrow it from a colleague who happened to have it. For those who are not in the know, it is a biography of Philip Yeo, a rather polarising person who is/was well-known within the public sector of SIN city.

In many ways, it does read as a hagiography than a biography---all actions that the subject took had their rationalisations and justifications spelt out, with many of their ``allowedness'' (not legality!) coming from a mix of ``it was the right thing to do'' or that a powerful political patron ``understood and required the job be done''.

I am a bit torn. I think that the actions that were taken, together with their justifications/rationalisations/effectiveness were a product of their times, and should not be seen as something to be emulated in the modern era. SIN city between the 1960s and 1980s was in a literal existential crisis, where there were no real rules other than the singular word of ``Survive!''. In that sense, the kinds of sketchy behaviours could be tolerated, though not necessarily officially condoned. It was also well that there was only ``one'' (that we know of) person who was running around doing such sketchy things, and as such, with a powerful enough patron, the evils of precedence-setting can be culled almost totally through a political whitewashing of a mandarin.

Yet I find that with the modern day SIN city, where the rules are there precisely because the wild days are over, makes the kind of sleights of hand that were pulled by the subject before unconscionable today. We are now a much diverse population, where the fate of the city-state is no longer just in the hands of the dynastic family like back then. No thanks to the large influx of immigrants, the nature of the population now has changed too, with no group of people being ``safe enough'' to have the assumption of unquestioned loyalty as compared to the very first generations of SIN city citizens.

Thus, the ``trust me, Bro'' method of operating is no longer viable---it is too easy to be corrupted, and with the population make-up we have now, the temptation to corrupt/be corrupted is much higher than before.

I see the work not as a recipe to combat against the plague of yes-men that all bureaucracies eventually face, but as a fable of how one man avoided death of groupthink through applying his own way of looking at the world, and managing to have the support of someone strong enough to shield him so that he can get on with solving the problems that were easy to be kept in stasis by bureaucratic processes because no one dared to take the calculated risk.

The heart of the subject is what we should learn, though the manner of execution needs to be sought out by ourselves that befits the times and environment that we currently face.

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In between sleep to rest up, I had to take mandatory ``stay awake'' moments, and in those moments, I had been grinding out some of the achievements of HoloCure---Save the Fans!. It's been fun, and as it is both good and free, I highly recommend folks to play it.

That's about it for now.