escalating size

31 Dec, 2025

We bought tools and plywood to make a small workbench for Kirby. He went to work as soon as everything was set up, and realised: cutting wood isn't as easy as it seems. He has plans to build a living room for his action figures.
On the way, we picked up the first volume of Dogman, which he read half of over the course of the afternoon.
He told me about a Turtles tv show with the designs from Mutant Mayhem. Didn't know anything about it, and we found out it's called Tales of the TMNT. We watched the first four episodes—because each of the first four episodes deals with one of the brothers. There's a great joke about an internal monologue in the first episode¹.
We let him stay up later than his usual bedtime.

The Wife watched Wicked: for good while i read through comics; what i saw and heard of the movie reinforced my idea of Wicked being the Star Wars prequels for musical enthusiasts. It looks beautiful—Ariana Grande needs to eat…—must have been a blast to work on, at least at the beginning, guess after a few days you get tired of the sets and costumes.
Despite my initial concerns, Marvel's latest Ultimate series is good, except for Wolverine, i don't read X-Men on principle at the moment and am missing a few Black Panther issues, the rest is great, and now Ultimate Endgame started, which seems to herald the end—and the Vision showed up, which is always a trick to get me to read a comic.
The second volume of Happy!²—the Manga by Naoki Urasawa—was stressful to read. It's about a young woman, who had to abandon her career as a tennis player after her brother left the family, which she had to take care of. He Yakuza show up because of the money her brother owes them, which she of course doesn't have, and tries to earn by playing tennis again. The Yakuza want to force her into prostitution, while her handler—a former soccer player—tries to postpone that as long as possible. And there are the people in the tennis business, that throw every wrench—of escalating size as the story progresses—at their disposal into the works. And there are still 21 volumes left, i'll probably need anxiety meds to get through the rest.

The fireworks didn't last as long as we anticipated, and weren't as loud as last year.

Happy new year! I wish you all the luck, skill, and health needed to make it good.