Sauvik Biswas

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Day 2: Ha Noi is full of good food and good surprises. A failed attempt at being a tourist in Ha Noi # We left Winter Hostel in Ha Noi because the room was very dark and depressing. A decent suggestion by Tripadvisor was Aurora Hotel on Ma May street. En route, I came across hawkers which reminded me more of Kolkata suburbs. Hawkers sit with fruits, veggies, meat. etc. in the morning on roads of Old Quarter. Day 1: Getting to Ha Noi Like Tom Hanks in The Terminal # I ended up taking three flights just to get from Bangalore to Ha Noi. The first of them dropped us at Singapore Changi airport. The transit areas are the only places where one can obtain some good sleep. We had about five hours to spend before our second flight. I spent about three of them sleeping. These benches at transit lounges of Changi airport are perfect for a quick nap. Day 0: Leaving Bangalore on a weekday evening requires patience Minimalist packing # Tigerair allows a carry-on allowance of max 2 pieces with a combined weight not exceeding 10 kg. Or so the tag says. I made sure that I pack the lightest stuff, eg. tracksuits that weigh no more than 100-200 g each. Quechua for the win! 22 l Forclaz and a 5 l Arpaez strapped to it. The entire assembly weighs less than 7 kgs. Bunny Hop and a rip in the fabric of spacetime... or just the fabric I recently learned how to do a bunny hop on a borrowed GT hybrid (GT traffic 2.0). It’s a hardtail and the leap isn’t that great. But still it’s an exciting thing for me. While the fellow motorcyclists and the car drivers slow down at a bumper, I can increase my speed and get airborne and still maintain that speed after touching down. A roadside canine mistook me for the bunny in bunny hop and tried grabbing my leg between his teeth while I was airborne. He came out of nowhere and attacked me. Thankfully, I was faster than his jaws and got away. Still he was able to grab my jeans and ripped it with his teeth. Kick and Snare processing using side-chained noise gates I was working on mixing our (I don’t know what this new project will be named) new song. This time around, I wanted a very open palette - very much like a well ventilated soundfield where instrument separation was of prime importance. This meant that I couldn’t use much of my go-to reverb designs. That would hamper the purity of tomes and lead to clutter. One of the problems I faced was to get a thick Kick sound without the boom and a sharp snare without making it nasal. Review of Batman Black and White: Volume 1 About the collection # “The title is simple. The talent is spectacular.” - that’s what the blurb on the volume’s back cover says. Someone couldn’t have come up with a more apt description of the book. Batman Black & White (now retrofitted with a ‘Volume 1’ tag along its spine) is an anthology. It contains many short stories that are 6-10 pages long. In the foreword of the collected edition, Mark Chiarello, one of the editors of the series, recollects how apprehensive he was about pitching an anthology in Black & White. Luckily he got Scott Peterson on board and approached the project with a singular mindset - to get the best writers and artists. As a reviewer, who got hold of this book 20 years after it was originally published, I can only take the information Chiarello has presented in the book. The anthology collects the original four single issues. Reading through Jeff Smith's Bone: Volumes 1 & 2 Bone promises to be an epic fantasy comic in the veins of Lord of the Rings. So does the blurb say. Whether the comparison holds or not, I can only justify when I have gone through all the nine volumes. I will be commenting on the first two volumes in this post. The rest shall be procured and commented upon in due time. Plot covered in the first two volumes # Time travel through some music videos I liked Since YouTube had kept a tab of all the videos I have liked, I decided to revisit some of the music videos that I had given a thumbs up. GreatJobZwei (real name unknown) - Integral Birth (Cynic Cover) with acoustic guitar and banjo One of the oldest videos I liked was a weird arrangement of a Cynic song. I think Masvidal would himself give a triple thumbs up. To understand what they had done, you might be interested in the original. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uT6QlYQg5o0[/embed] Land of Black Gold: A Tintin book that was not meant to be A sketchy album # Of all the albums of Tintin, Land of Black Gold remains the sketchiest book in my opinion. When I was a kid, I read this in Bengali and never got my head around many things that were happening in the story. I enjoyed the parts where the Thompsons were lost in the desert and the most of the second half where Tintin invades Dr. Muller’s stronghold and confronts the gang. It was not until my early 20s that I found out why the story is so scratchy in the first place. Day 7: The other half of Munnar And you thought we couldn’t combine two experiences together # Kolukkumalai Tea Estate is the highest organic tea garden in the world. It is also the highest tea estate in South India. In order to reach there, one must drive for about 30 kms from Munnar and then take a 4x4 vehicle and drive for another one and half hours at a speed not more than 15 kmph. We were (un)fortunate to get a vehicle that had probably donated its parts to the making of Jeep of Thesius. The three hour long ride also gave us a nice body massage that Kerala is probably famous for. It did not help that while descending, one of the plates of the rear suspension broke!