Apologies for this week’s late Note. I was quite busy earlier in the week knocking out my last holiday chores, spent most of my energy on Thursday cooking, and was generally chilling out on Christmas day. Saturday was spent rejiggering the Fresh Comics data ingestion pipeline to accommodate DC Comics’ game of Distributor Musical Chairs, and a good part of today was spent watching The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King and its fourteen endings to cap off this last week’s dive back into cinematic Tolkien.

While I can’t complain too much about how I spent the four-day weekend, I am looking forward to getting back to the office tomorrow to take advantage of the one last quiet week to get some major projects finished, so I can start 2021 better than I started 2020.

While the overall mood is Mental Reset, I do think that this holiday season was a successful one. Folks received most of their gifts on-time, the Macys corporation should see a bump in their stock on account of the revenue spike from my Frango chocolate purchases, and I was able to use my holiday chores as good excuses to talk to friends and family I haven’t spoken to in some time. Cooking went well and this ended up being a good practice year should I ever get sucked into the Hallmark Channel Holiday Universe and need to prepare a last-minute feast to move the plot of a thin romantic television special along.

I did make an attempt to do some gaming over the break. I downloaded The Ancient Gods, Part I DLC for DOOM: Eternal and got to a point in the game where my atrophied run-and-gun skills wasn’t going to cut it in the presence of an Arch-Vile. I’ll return back to that after some practice. I’m still due for some Star Wars: Squadrons playtime, but just haven’t been in the mood to jump in quite yet. What I have been in the mood for has been watching movies - so many that I’ve already forgotten what I watched three days ago that aren’t Lord of the Rings films or entries in the Warlock series.

I’ll have some more solid thoughts to share in the next week, likely building on a piece that an old college acquaintance dredged up from the pits from memory in this week’s New Yorker as well as discussing why anyone would want to commit to reading a hundred books in odd-numbered years.

In the meantime, take my current rank of Space Cadet as evidence that my holiday detox process is well under way and things will be back to eleven-months-out-of-the-year normal in a couple of days.

Interesting reads & watches

You can now play Microsoft’s Flight Simulator in VR (The Verge)

The Military Would Not Participate in a Coup. Trump Can’t Understand Why. (The Bulwark)

Justin Amash Introduces Bill To End Forever National Emergencies (Reason)

Giving Billions Fast, MacKenzie Scott Upends Philanthropy (New York Times)

How Domino’s Pizza Drove a 90x Increase in Stock Value by Acting Like a Tech Startup (Product Habits)

Happy holidays, CMDRs!