sangsara.net

Month: February 2022

  • Week 9.22

    In William Gibson’s book, The Peripheral (soon to be an Amazon Prime Video series!), there are references to an epoch-making event that turned everything to shit, and it’s all quite vague so you don’t know at first whether it was a nuclear war or some natural catastrophe. Everyone calls it “The Jackpot”, and you soon figure out that it wasn’t one thing, but several bad situations improbably lining up and landing at the same time. Not necessarily on a single day but a longer period of months or years maybe — still short when zoomed out on the timeline. We might already be living in a Jackpot of our own, but if not… it sure felt like the final “7” rolled into view this week.

    All the updates and gory details of the Ukrainian invasion shared in real time now seems completely expected, but the invasion itself wasn’t, and so probably airdropped several tokens of ANX(iety) to everyone’s wallets. Coincidentally, I started reading Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing, a series of essays about how to resist social media and its effects. She prescribes exposure to nature quite a few times, which just isn’t going to work for me in this climate. Back to Twitter, I guess.

    Locally, our Covid numbers hit a new high with 26,000 cases in a single day. Medical services are stretched, and the government has taken the step of telling employers to just believe employees when they say they’ve got Covid and can’t come in, no medical certificates needed. Unsurprisingly, this was followed by reports of companies still insisting on them.

    Perhaps stupidly, I went out more this week than I have in a long while. I know because the number of socks in my laundry load went back to pre-pandemic levels. First was to see a couple of friends who moved to Japan just before Covid and are only now able to leave for a visit back here. There was also a night out with too much expensive tequila that I don’t need to remember, but I got a cat photo out of it.

    I also saw Rob a couple more times before he left, and we took his kids out to eat “the best chicken rice in Singapore” (it’s not Tian Tian at Maxwell — don’t get me started). I asked his eldest what he thought of being back, and “it’s hot” was inevitably said, but he also observed that “everyone likes to say ‘it’s freezing’ when it’s like 30º”.

    Media activity:

    • Rob turned me onto Jonathan Richman’s song That Summer Feeling, during a conversation about songs that induce nostalgia. Pulp’s Disco 2000 was my pick for a song that made even young people overcome with the regrets of growing old.
    • We started on the new season of Young Wallander on Netflix, a title I will never tire of saying out loud. I remember almost nothing of the first season, but this is going well.
    • As an antidote to all the murdering and double-crossing in our weekly TV diet, we’ve also started on season 3 of Love Island Australia, which is exactly what you’d expect. Some highlights include a girl who doesn’t know anything about Western Australia because she’s not good at “geometry”, and a guy who tried to say something wasn’t in his wheelhouse, but used the word “jurisdiction”, which he tried to pronounce several times before giving up and going with “it’s not in my area”.
    • On the Switch, I’ve started playing Ace Attorney Chronicles, which takes two previously Japan-only installments for the 3DS and translates, remasters, and packages them as a single purchase for USD$40 (often on sale for USD$30).
  • Week 8.22

    Week 8.22

    1.
    After posting about the 0xmusic project (NFTs that infinitely generate rule-based but non-repeating music) in last week’s post, I thought I’d start recording some of the output to concretize it for future reference. As Rob put it, the music is kinda “plonky”, but not half bad as BGM. So I recorded two ugly, short screen recordings of “DJ Drip” on its webpage onto YouTube, one of which was appended to the last post.

    After that, what’s a guy with free time to do but take it to the next level? I recorded a 60-minute length of “DJ Syn City” and set out to make one of those YouTube music videos, you know the kind, usually lofi or cafe jazz compilations with an illustrated scene on loop. How is it we don’t have a specific word for that sort of thing?

    I wasn’t in the mood to find videos in my library that could loop well, so I used a photo I took in Akihabara back in 2018 and dumped a bunch of overlays on it with a bit of motion*, mixed it all together in iMovie, and voila! If I find a way to create more/better music, I’ll probably make a bunch of these.

    *How? You’d be amazed what one can do with an iPhone and free apps these days.

    2.
    Covid hit closer to home this week with two cases in the family. All are vaccinated and coping okay with only flu-like symptoms so far. Anecdotally, it’s everywhere. Multiple colleagues and friends have already had it this the past month. The relaxed policies at present haven’t helped: even if you or someone in your household is infected, you can go out as soon as you test negative via ART self testing. And you don’t have to document or prove the result in any way; it’s an honor system. To make things worse, the tests don’t seem consistent. Some test negative at home and then positive at a clinic, and vice versa.

    I was feeling fatigued/achey and worried that I’d gotten it after being briefly exposed, but three home tests this week said no, so I wondered if it was just my usual psychosomatic, hypochondriac imagination filling in the blanks. Just to be safe, I canceled every meeting during the week.

    3.
    When it was safe (7 days after contact), I made one exception to join Rob for a yakitori and beer hangout with old work buds who haven’t all been together in years. The food was quality, but damn if yakitori isn’t criminally overpriced in Singapore. It was probably triple what a comparable meal would cost in Japan.

    It was afterwards while we were watching YouTube that I learnt from Jose that the extreme longboarder Josh Neuman passed away this month at the age of 22. You can’t help but imagine the worst… losing control and flying off a cliff, crashing headfirst into oncoming traffic… but no, he died in a plane crash.

    Media activity:

    • Finished the 18th Jack Reacher book, Never Go Back. It’s definitely one of the better ones, with a cast of supporting characters and good momentum. I can see why they picked it for the second film with Tom Cruise in the role. They chopped a lot out though, and I didn’t recognize much of the plot in this. Which just makes it clearer to me how much better suited the Reacher novels are for TV: one book, one season.
    • We’ve been watching Apple TV+’s Suspicion and The Afterparty on a weekly basis. The former is a British production with Uma Thurman in a supporting role. It’s quite a slow burn, but I do want to know the answer to the central mystery of how these unconnected people could be connected to the crime they’re accused of. Hmm, that seems to be quite a common set-up, also seen in one of the other shows mentioned below.
    • Regrettably, a lot of bad TV this week. I half-watched all of Love Is Blind Brazil S1, and we are now caught up on both new seasons of the USA and Japanese editions, both slated to conclude by the end of this month. The episode template and overall season arc gets old; they’re essentially the same across all the shows. But the shows couldn’t be more different from a cultural standpoint. There’s no ass-grabbing on the Japanese one, for starters.
    • We’ve also started One Of Us Is Lying on Netflix, based on a YA novel that I’ve heard about but never got around to looking at. A handful of teens in high school are suspected of murder and everyone has motive. Every actor in it is at least a decade older than their character is supposed to be. They also wear t-shirts with generic slogans and designs that are hilariously meant to broadcast their wearers’ archetypes: cool geek, arty girl, anti-establishment outcast.
    • Best line so far: “If he hadn’t shown up, I’d be taking selfies with Jesus right now!”
    • Much better is the Kanye West documentary jeen-yuhs. It’s obviously a Kanye-approved version of history, but it’s hard to overstate the value of such a behind-the-scenes document. I mean, it was shot over 20 years, an entire career. You see him when he no one would take him seriously as a rapper. He’s out there taking meetings and kinda embarrassing himself trying to get heard. Everyone fronts in hip-hop, saying they’re going to be the greatest, the biggest, but there’s something about young Kanye’s hustle and confidence that suggests he really believed he would be where he is today.
    • Side note: Donda 2 is meant to launch tomorrow. When he announced he wasn’t going to release his album on streaming or digital, and only on his own $200 Stem Player device, I wrote it off. I said that I wouldn’t buy it, and the album was dead to me. It’s tremendously wasteful to create a dedicated piece of expensive plastic junk to play one album. I saw it as disrespectful to the fans, and egotistical even by Kanye’s standards. Since then I’ve learnt that the device can be updated with additional music, like an MP3 player (whether it will be is a different story). It’s still too costly and excludes many people, but perhaps it’s a novel experiment worth checking out. I’ve bought FM3 Buddha Machines before. I can feel my hold slipping.

  • Week 7.22

    Just three things this time.

    1.
    My friend Rob is back in town for a visit. We worked together at the last place and shared moments absurd and amusing. He went home for reasons, and didn’t have a chance to get back here until now. We had a drink or seven on Saturday and it was like seeing your friends at school after the holidays; seamless and yet we’ve gone through so much change. I could hardly believe it’s been five years.

    2.
    Our bedroom TV watching got a big upgrade from propped up iPad to projector. It’s not a best-in-class 4K one or anything, just a mini Anker Nebula Apollo the size of a UE Boom Bluetooth speaker. Its first task was Amazon Prime Video’s new Jack Reacher series, simply titled Reacher. As a reader of the pulpy action series (on my 18th book now), I was happy from the moment I saw the key art featuring a massive giant and not someone like Tom Cruise. I joked that casting is 80% of making a Reacher show, but they really did a good job with it. May many seasons follow.

    3.
    My first NFT purchase was from the Fang Gang collection back in September. Was it logical? Fair value? Probably not, but it was an interesting space and having some entry point is better than none. After some reflection, I’m now much less interested in randomized PFPs made from a handful of mix-and-match traits, so I’ve traded off my “Fangster” for a “DJ” from the 0xmusic project. Far more interesting, it’s a bit of code that composes an infinite stream of generative music, playable in a browser. Unlike most visual NFTs, it’s stored entirely on-chain and will persist as long as the network itself. Listening to a song that no one else will ever hear again, playing from a dynamic and eternal station woven into the internet, is one of the cooler art+tech experiences I’ve had.

  • Week 6.22

    A happy Lunar New Year (previously called Chinese New Year but LNY is more inclusive) was had, as much as was possible under the circumstances. Where once we could have a reunion dinner with 30–40 of my closest relatives (some still unknown), thanks to still burning pandemic fires — we recently hit 13,000 cases in a day — now just immediate family members around one table. Instead of large and raucous household gatherings on Day 1, now intimate sit-togethers. Still, having a spectrum of different LNY experiences in one lifetime is not a terrible thing. Never thought I’d miss those reunion dinners though.

    I got some more samples of Misery Men merch in and made tweaks to improve print and product quality. The recycled cotton “eco tote bags” in particular were not very sturdy, so they’re gone in favor of regular ones with denim handles that can apparently hold 20kg of stuff. Take a look.

    My shirt was clinging to me in the pre-rain humidity as we trudged out onto the field. I would later find that I’d stepped in literal horseshit. The people running the place wore masks and dark sunglasses under hats and visors, so you really couldn’t see them at all as they looked you over. Were they wondering if I had any prior experience? Why I was so sweaty? No, they’d overlooked our booking and had forgotten we were coming.

    We were bringing our nephew out for an introductory archery experience as part of his Christmas gift. He was running around and excited for it. Kids seem to be impervious to environmental discomfort when they’re having fun. I shot a few arrows. It’s a disturbingly easy weapon to operate. After about half an hour and 20 tries we were markedly better than when we began, hitting the middle of the target often enough. Thanks to our strict gun laws, I never worry about encountering an armed lunatic in everyday life but now I may have to start worrying about bows and arrows in the wild. There were little Korean children, no more than eight years old, practicing beside us and consistently hitting targets maybe 30 meters away. Frightening.

    Media activity:

    • We saw Simon Kinberg’s latest disaster, The 355. I don’t know how the script got approved, or why the actors agreed to be in it. An utter waste of about two hours.
    • Unfortunately, Mamoru Hosoda’s new animated film Belle did not live up to expectations either. In direct contrast to Summer Wars, it spends too much time and exposition establishing the world and not enough on the characters, so I didn’t care at all for the story, which was sadly a mess.
    • I finally finished Plum Rains by Andromeda Romano-Lax, which mashes up elements of Pachinko and I, Robot with a heartbreakingly dry core about the migrant worker experience.
    • As a palate cleanser, I’m now reading Jack Reacher #18: Never Go Back. I’ve been waiting for this one a long time, because a couple of books back, Jack started flirting with an army major over the phone (she’s currently occupying his old job at his old unit), and he’s been making his way across the country to see her, interrupted by several books’ worth of coincidentally encountered wrongdoing that needed setting right along the way. Of course, as soon as he arrives on the army base, she’s missing and he’s being framed. Good times!
    • Still playing Hades, but have started a new visual novel on the Switch: Worldend Syndrome. It was on sale for USD$10 and reviewed well. Positives include nicely animated backgrounds and fully voiced dialogue, while the main negative would be a supernatural horror element that I hope is just misdirection and it’s only a regular ol’ psychotic, murdering schoolgirl that we’re dealing with.