Week 27.23

I’ve thus far neglected to mention that I’ve become slightly obsessed with Korean instant noodles, which they specifically call ramyeon/ramyun, and have been buying and eating too many of them in recent weeks. I never went to ramyeon town before because I have a low tolerance for spicy food, but watching Jinny’s Kitchen might have set me off, and I’ve found that there are mild versions and that even the hot ones are sometimes worth suffering through.

A few notes:

• Nongshim’s Shin Ramyun is the original, the classic, the Nissin chikin ramen of Korea. The company’s English website says it’s always been a pork-based broth, but the export versions I’ve seen here in Singapore and Australia seem to be based on soy and mushrooms. There’s a new shrimp flavored version that was previously only available in China, but I have no interest in trying that.
• I was able to find a pack of Shin Black imported from Korea, a premium version that adds beef to the pork base, and it’s certainly tastier and unexpectedly less spicy.
• The Samyang company’s Buldak range of noodles are of course the notorious super spicy “fire chicken” ones you see in those YouTube challenge videos. I can’t eat more than a bite or two of the original (there’s also a 2x spicier one in red), but there are milder versions like jjajangmyeon and “carbonara”. Still, not for me.
• I learnt in a video that people don’t think you should add eggs to Nongshim’s Neoguri spicy seafood noodles, which I have been doing, along with sliced cheese, kimchi, and sometimes a sausage. Oops.
• Yeah I was not keen on this adding of sliced cheese to soup noodles, but now I don’t even think about it.
• Of all the “Korean style” (basically red chilli and soy sauce?) noodles so far, I think my favorite might actually be Ottogi’s Jin series, which comes in Mild and Spicy versions. The Spicy one is about as spicy as regular Shin Ramyun (export), nowhere as crazy as Buldak.

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It’s not all sunshine and noodles; my increased consumption is partly due to a demanding work schedule filled with late nights and skipped meals. In general, I don’t believe these circumstances get the best out of anyone, but I’m told it’s the norm in China these days. I’d heard of 9-9-6 (working from 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week), but apparently people joke 0-0-7 is more accurate. If nothing else, you’ve now learnt a lame new way to say 24/7 today.

I keep thinking it’ll get better soon, but it hasn’t yet. Around the same time, I tried asking ChatGPT to write some funny posts that could go viral on a new social network called Threads, but it only returned some reheated tweets. One of them hit the mark though: “Is being an adult just perpetually saying ‘after this week things will slow down’ until you die?”

So, Threads!

Facebook/Meta/Instagram’s Twitter clone was rumored for awhile but I guess I wasn’t expecting a global launch of this scale — normally they roll stuff out haphazardly? But I think we’re now at over 70 million sign ups in two days, for a separate app that you need to download! It seems they rushed this out to take advantage of Twitter’s shambolic state, and even then, everything has been running smoothly.

They made the choice to go algorithmic feed only, and to populate yours at the start with suggested content. Maybe it’s because I’ve been using adblocking tools for the past few years (who am I kidding), but my recommendations have been terrible.

It’s been giving me Singaporeans influencers, sports, beauty and fashion, and positive lifecoachy shit. I’ve since found and followed many of my sort of people, and muted over a hundred accounts I do not want. That should be enough data for it to start improving, so I’ll just have to wait until they do something with it.

But of course, we don’t have to be on Threads. And maybe we shouldn’t, given Facebook’s reputation and past actions. Much has been made of how Elon has managed to make Mark look like the good guy here; a sizeble feat. I’m still getting a lot of specific tech and financial content on Twitter, and I enjoy the quality on Mastodon, which comes from strictly following only accounts that don’t annoy me given the lack of an algorithmic feed.

I suspect the majority of people on Threads so far aren’t posting, just lurking and figuring out what it’s for. I’ve been followed by a few people but I don’t follow back if they have zero posts or want to have private accounts. Meanwhile, successful IG content creators are either using it exactly like they do on IG (posting memes, photos, and videos) or writing inane things to try and get engagement.

I don’t want any of these things on a text-centric platform. It’ll take awhile to settle, and maybe it’ll just become a lame sort of normie place like Facebook.

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I’ve also been utterly captivated by George Harrison’s My Sweet Lord out of nowhere, and have probably listened to it a hundred times and sung it to myself a hundred times more this week.

It must have come up on my Apple Music at some point and resonated in the midst of my terrible week — the intentional, sutra chanting-like repetition is brilliant, hypnotic, soothing. How can you not be crazy for a song that goes from Hallelujah to Hare Krishna and back again? That declares such pure desire to know an unknowable god, that acknowledges how life is simultaneously too long and too short, that love is all you need?

So I made a playlist collecting all the different versions and covers I’ve been listening to: My Sweet Lords. It has 23 tracks so far, and I hope you like it and join me in this obsession.

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We started watching season 2 of The Bear and it’s truly excellent so far, as was season 1. Episode 6 is something else. It’s the television equivalent of Uncut Gems and Kendrick Lamar’s We Cry Together on the Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers album: extremely chaotic and uncomfortable, and not something you’ll rush to re-experience soon.

We also saw Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part 1 and it feels a little off. Still a good time, but some of the writing feels stilted and theatrical, and overall it doesn’t feel consistent with the others (okay, one can argue MI:2 felt nothing like the rest too, but that was when we were cycling through different directors; Christopher McQuarrie has no excuse). The challenge the team faces here is like nothing they’ve been up against before, but that veil of otherworldliness is distracting, and I didn’t get to appreciate it as much during the film. 4/5, I think.

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But we can’t end the week without some AI experiments, so I went back to my GPT-4 poetrybot and gave it my thoughts on the themes in My Sweet Lord, and it returned a pretty good poem, albeit several stanzas too long and not quite right in places. A bit of snipping and human co-creation later, we have this:

Life is long,
Life is brief,
In joy, a song,
In pain, grief.

Love is low,
Love is high,
In knowing, grows,
In doubting, dies.

God in the small,
In the leaf, the bird’s call,
In the rise, the fall,
In all the all.

Seek the divine,
In the day, the night,
In the yours, the mine,
In the dark, the light.