It seems like there’s always something wrong, and I feel like it’s one problem after another these days. The same night as my near-death experience (previously on…), I came home to find that our bedroom’s air-conditioning had died instead. It would put out only semi-cool air, then just regular air, in a cycle that lasted all night. The next day, I dragged a standing fan into the room to make things a little more livable. A few nights later, when Kim returned from Australia, we started to sleep in the living room where the air-conditioning still works.
What followed was a series of visits by different servicemen, each finding something legitimately “wrong” but none ultimately solving the problem. There was the simple fact that the unit was clogged and dirty — despite another company just having “cleaned” it two months ago. They did a regular wash (S$66), but had to return on Wednesday for a deep chemical overhaul (S$150), and a washing of the outdoor compressors ($50). When that didn’t solve it, it was discovered that the outdoor compressor was flashing an error message, and the entire power PCB (printed circuit board) needed replacement ($711.50). FWIW it’s a Mitsubishi Starmex system; future buyers beware.
One week later, and the problem still hasn’t been addressed, and we’re still sleeping in the living room.
I need to mention how this has lived in my head as a much bigger problem than it objectively is. After getting home from the hospital, I just wanted to lie in bed and have everything be absolutely NORMAL. To have no outstanding problems in the world — just being in a state of calm to mentally recover. But immediately, something was wrong in the home, a psychological intrusion in my metaphorical safest space. This has just made me an anxious freak all week, feeling low and spiraling into worst-case scenarios. Like, what if they find there’s a problem with the piping in the walls and need to hack them out in our bedroom? What if this is going to cost even more money than what’s already been spent? I do believe this is all likely in the coming week.
Another source of anxiety is the actual repair visits themselves: not only is there cleaning up to do after (which I couldn’t really with a foot injury), but our compressor units are installed outside the bedroom window, over a fragile “roof” that probably can’t take a person’s full weight. To work on them, a technician has to climb out (one even did it without safety gear) and stand precariously on a tiny parapet, dangerously close to either tumbling into our living room or down several storeys. At work, seeing all the things that can go wrong is my superpower, but it’s not a useful one to have right now.
On the bright side, my foot is much better already, and I’m able to walk normally enough to go out for short periods. I expect I’ll be back to normal in another week. Whenever the feelings of doom reach a critical point, I remember that I’m actually alive and uninjured, and a lack of air-conditioning rarely (but not never) kills anyone, and then I get a spiritual HP reset. I just need to think like that all the time and take it easy.
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Once I was able to hobble well enough, we went to see Trap (2024), which lived up to my expectations of a fun little outing. As of right now, Shyamalan’s second wind as a maker of tight little B-films based on killer elevator pitches is looking pretty sustainable, and I’m hoping for many more. Next, I’m gonna finish watching the final season of Servant, his series on Apple TV+.
We also had time for a quick lunch with Uma of Goggler Malaysia, a media criticism outlet after my own heart that I encourage checking out even if you, like me, have nothing to do with Malaysia on a regular basis. They do a fun podcast and publish spot-on film and television reviews. We talked about his new Apple Vision Pro and I outed myself as someone who’s never seen any of the Godfather films. But I’ve taken the first step: buying the entire trilogy on the US iTunes Store at the current sale price of US$9.99. I’m planning to watch it in the AVP’s Cinema environment someday soon.
Finally, we visited the Olafur Eliasson exhibition at the Singapore Art Museum (Tanjong Pagar Distripark) with Cien, Peishan, and James. I say finally because this visit has been postponed three times on account of our various illnesses and accidents. Unfortunately I was not moved by anything, and it felt like a series of science experiments crammed into a small soulless space that lends no gravitas or beauty to an artist’s work.
I remember the original SAM fondly, and hope the museum will move back into its former space off Orchard Road although that’s looking more unlikely. The news can sugarcoat it all they like, but calling a remote concrete slab beside a container port ’eminently suited for contemporary arts purposes’ is a stretch. I’d love to see the so-called ‘positive feedback from visitors’ they’re receiving. Art doesn’t belong out somewhere you need shuttle buses for people to encounter it. The museum’s rightful place is wherever ordinary people are already going.
Olafur Eliasson’s ‘Your curious journey’ at SAMThese were from an Indonesian pop art collection at Gajah Gallery
The last update almost became my final one, because I nearly died this week!
We got the tragic news that a good friend’s dad had passed away (there have been so many cases of this lately), and as Kim is out of town, I was about to go down to the funeral wake for the both of us. I booked a Grab (local Uber-like) ride around a quarter-to-six, and headed down to meet him when it looked like he was close enough.
As I approached the pick-up point, I saw the car approaching and waved at him, walking continuously down the stairs to the road as I watched him do a three-point turnaround to come at me from the right direction. But suddenly, instead of slowing down for me to get in, the car suddenly lurched forward at full speed. At this point, I was maybe at the very last step down, and the car was coming directly towards me instead of parallel, like you would when picking a passenger up.
In that moment, my first thought was “is he trying to scare me, as some sort of joke?” This was followed by alarm as he was clearly not slowing down, and then a last-minute instinct to back away. The next thing I saw was the car slamming into the short wall beside the step I was just on, as I fell back on my ass. And then I was covered in debris, missing both shoes, and feeling pain beginning to spread through my legs as shock began setting in.
I’m quite sure I was hit in the right knee at some point — there’s silver car paint on my jeans to prove it. I recall feeling my left foot being squeezed inside my shoe for just a fraction of a second before it slipped out, as my weight shifted backwards as I fell. Both shoes were later recovered underneath either side of the car. I was there at the point of impact, and then I wasn’t.
Afterwards, an alternate memory emerged: the car may have hit the wall on the other side first, changing its trajectory towards me, but this initial impact would have dampened its speed. Perhaps my knee was only clipped by a part that was already damaged, explaining how I got a paint transfer without a broken kneecap.
I remember people nearby running over after hearing the crash, yelling for an ambulance and the police to be called, telling me to stop trying to get up (I backed away from the car on my hands and tried to see if my legs were still unbroken), and to wait for help to arrive. A very kind man took off and came back with a cold can of Pocari Sweat for me; a neighbor I know came and kept me calm by talking things through; and the driver called for help.
After trying unsuccessfully to call Kim, I took some photos and figured out that my legs were still attached, although moving my left ankle and right knee hurt. The police and paramedics arrived in about 10 minutes and checked me out. I was still shaking from the adrenaline and giving them too much detail, like apologizing that my feet were very sweaty right now as they peeled my socks off. They decided that I might have some fractures and would need to go to the hospital for scans as this was going to be in a police accident report.
Side note: I don’t really know what happened yet. The driver claims he was trying to brake but the car didn’t respond. I overheard the police interviewing him and asking if there was any chance he mistook the pedals and accelerated instead. I suppose there will be an investigation.
As I was being loaded into the ambulance, I heard the ominous approach of cars and imagined them crashing into us, and realized that this episode might end with a lasting, debilitating fear of going outside after I’d recovered. I anticipated PTSD, nightmares, and other new items to put in my therapy cart.
What followed was a couple of hours waiting in the A&E/ER department of a general hospital, trying to joke with the orderlies, and getting x-rayed by about five young people at once who might have never done it before? But no complaints for me, everyone was incredibly nice and got me through it. The verdict, no major fractures (time will tell if there are hairline fractures, specifically two weeks of observation time), and I was lucky to get away with bruises and sprained ligaments.
A tale of two ankles
Amusingly, this care even extended to a small nick on my right ankle that was noted by the doctors. Although the pain was concentrated elsewhere, they promised they’d clean that “wound” and dress it for me before leaving. They did so fastidiously, washing it in antiseptic fluid and applying an antibiotic gel and bandage. Then I was also given a supply of said antiseptics and antibiotics to care for it at home. The bandage fell off after my shower and, despite being a delicate hypochondriac, I was happy to just slap a band-aid on it.
Forty-eight hours later, the reality that I almost didn’t make it still feels surreal. I joked around a bit on Instagram and repeated the story to people who asked, but I don’t know what it means yet. The only nightmare I’ve had was about my malfunctioning air-conditioning unit at home—a small-potato problem in comparison. Part of me expected to emerge like Jeff Bridges in Fearless (1993), recklessly putting myself in risky situations with a newfound sense of invincibility. But then I remembered Final Destination (2000), where death stalks its survivors, biding its time for another strike. That thought put me off from celebrating my good fortune, and I’ve just been sitting on these thoughts since.
I know that if I had arrived downstairs just a couple of seconds earlier, I would have made it down to the road level and been directly in the car’s path, with no wall beside me to stop it. All I had to do was take another step forward, and both legs and my pelvis would have been crushed between the car and the wall (which stands unscathed today). Bones would have shattered beyond repair, blood would be everywhere, everyone nearby would have passed out from the gore. If I survived that at all, the next few years would still be passed in immeasurable pain and I doubt I’d have the strength or will to keep going.
What does it really mean to miss that outcome by half a meter? Probably nothing, right? Because we’re surrounded by chaos and death is always just a coin toss away? So I guess it might be back to normal life for me, sans new epiphanies. At least I hope, but when my foot feels better and I finally leave the house, I might find myself paralyzed with fear just trying to cross the street. I guess we’ll see.
But I have come out of this with some practical advice, which I will now share with you.
Always carry a power bank: When they said I’d have to go to the hospital and might only be discharged the next day, I wasn’t worried because I had my phone and enough power to get through a whole day. I used my phone for so much during this time: updating people, notifying Grab about the accident (1 star), paying the bill. You don’t want to worry about battery life. Bring a power bank with you everywhere. This tiny Anker one has an integrated USB-C port, supports fast charging, and a 5,000mAh capacity.
Wear your shoes loose: It might not help if you’re hanging upside down by your sneakers, but my loose laces might have saved at least one foot from being crushed in the moment. I hope to one day see the dash cam footage of the crash, because how I ended up jumping back and leaving both shoes behind is a bit of a mystery.
Play more video games: Let your kids play them too, because everyone should train their reflexes. When the moment comes, you don’t want to be the person who freezes up. You want jumping, running, dodging, and picking up gold coins to be second nature. Somebody asked me, “Why not sports instead of video games?” Hey, I’m trying to be inclusive here. Not everyone likes sports!
Take more photos: Another thing you want to come naturally at moments like these is taking photos. As evidence, for later reference, or just for sharing a story. You can’t tell yourself to remember this only when something big happens. Just train the muscle so you’re always capturing.
Don’t assume anything about cars: I really got complacent around cars, and you don’t appreciate how heavy and powerful and dangerous they are until one comes at you fast. I’m never jaywalking again with a car “safely in the distance”. Be alert more. You don’t need music in your ears all the time, either.
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I had some other stuff I wanted to talk about before this happened, but they seem small now so I’ll just mention two things.
The Halide iPhone camera app got an update that shoots photos without any AI-ish processing. They call it “Process Zero“. The resulting aesthetic is much more in line with regular cameras, and how iPhone photos used to look years ago. We’ve flown too close to the sun now, and everything is too bright, so this nostalgic return to the limits of physical lenses and sensors comes with a welcome, natural look. The above and this post’s Featured Image at the top were taken with this mode, plus editing of the underlying RAW file.
Our home internet speed was suffering, so I did some troubleshooting and discovered the thin fiber optic cable between modem and wall access point had been coiled too tightly, and was even bent in one spot. After straightening it out, speed tests jumped noticeably. I even got a full gigabit up and down to my iPhone on WiFi 6, not even 6E.
Stay safe out there. With any luck, I’ll see you next week!
It was Kim’s birthday and to celebrate, we went out for some great yakiniku at a place called Yakiniquest (the name gets points for trying, I guess) where the service was great but the food was incredible. It was probably one of my Top 3 wagyu experiences, along with Matsusaka beef in Kyoto (we walked into an acclaimed, booked-out restaurant and were given a table that had just no-showed), and of course, Kobe beef in the delightful, jazz-adopting city of the same name.
As an extra surprise, I orchestrated Cameo shoutouts from celebrities on two of the reality shows we unapologetically enjoy bingeing together: Below Deck Down Under, and Gogglebox. I put them on our media server and turned the TV on in the morning, telling her new special episodes had just dropped overnight. She bought it, and it was a fun moment.
The rest of the week was spent in the tight embrace of the Apple Vision Pro’s dual loop band. One of the things I hoped to get out of being an early adopter of the AVP (both the product and the platform) was a closeness to this new spatial computing form as it germinates, to have a sense of “spatial nativeness” develop in my brain. A sense of its conventions and limits that would help me intuit how to navigate and create new experiences for it, should I ever want to. Which means always being on the lookout for new apps (both programs and applications) and trying them out.
This week I spent time in a social app called inSpaze, built exclusively for the Vision Pro. As a result of that positioning, and the lack of current competition on the App Store, it’s become the de facto place to hang out and meet other Vision Pro owners to swap stories and recommendations. Try to imagine a cuter, visual Clubhouse, where you spend time in virtual living rooms you can decorate and personalize. In addition to chatting, you can look at photos and 3D models together, listen to music, and play card/board games.
It’s worth pointing out that you don’t get a normal webcam view of each person, because you’re all wearing Vision Pros. So like all videoconferencing apps on the system, it uses Apple’s Personas: photorealistic avatars based on face scans you do when setting up your Vision Pro, that use its many sensors and cameras to mirror what your real eyes and face are doing.
If joining a roomful of random strangers from around the world and jumping into whatever conversations they’ve got going on sounds like an introvert’s worst nightmare, that’s because it probably is. I did it anyway, and found it slightly thrilling but also chiller than expected. For one, the use of Personas creates psychological distance; it’s you, but it’s also more a puppet that looks like you. I commented on this and others agreed it made them feel safer.
What struck me most, though, was how nice and welcoming the community feels, because we’re all early adopter nerds enthused to be sharing this novel experience. It reminds me of the internet when I was a teenager, where the thrill of meeting someone from across the world was pure and untainted by the danger and cynicism that later crept into online spaces. And of course, there’s the fact that a community gated behind a S$5,299 purchase is more likely to be well behaved.
One nice touch that allows truly cross-border communications is the real-time translation that puts subtitles under each person speaking. In the daytime here, I’ve met a lot of Chinese speakers, and this feature has helped me to follow some conversations I otherwise wouldn’t have.
It was during one of these afternoon sessions that I met one of the key people behind the app, and we got to talking about their opportunity, business model, and product that got me thinking more about the challenges that smaller developers are facing with this new platform. It’s a well-reported fact by now that AVP sales are low by Apple’s standards. While that’s easily explained by the steep entry price and the challenge of defining a new product category, it still poses a chicken/egg dilemma for creators.
Solo developers and very small teams doing this on the side can probably justify toying with small apps and selling them for a few dollars, but anyone building something ambitious on the level of a social network or massively multiplayer game, for a total addressable market in the low six-figures — AND having to bankroll it for the next couple of years while Apple works on the cheaper model and second generation Pro — is being asked to take on more risk.
I have no doubt that Apple will persevere and iterate until this category succeeds, like they always do, so it’s not a question of whether Apple Vision has a future. It just needs to convince developers and their investors to stay faithful, and seed the demand. It’s going to be tricky, and I’d like to see Apple advertising hard for the next 18 months to keep spatial computing visible and galvanize the ecosystem. Even if people can’t find the means to buy the product, they should want to.
As further proof of the magical, early-internet vibe, I logged into inSpaze early one morning and met a varied group of American users, including a hospital administrator and VR-obsessed truck driver. After many in the room logged off, I found myself speaking with a Canadian man who casually mentioned working with tech podcasting luminary Leo Laporte over a decade ago. As he continued, it dawned on me that he was Ray Maxwell, an 80-year-old polymath whose name I would often hear on Leo’s This Week in Tech (TWiT) network, where he once had his own podcast about aviation and various science topics.
As a one-time avid listener of TWiT, I can’t overstate how starstruck I felt as Ray told me stories from his expansive career: time spent at McDonnell Aircraft in the 60s, adjacent to where the Gemini space capsules were being built; color science engineering at a company later acquired by Kodak, recommending SF stories by his friend (two-time Hugo award-winning author!?!?) Spider Robinson; and how he’s recently been into capturing spatial video for the Vision Pro.
I recognize that the early days of any new frontier, team, or relationship are a special thrill that can’t be expected to last, so it’s up to us to maximize and enjoy every moment. Feel free to reach out if you’re getting into spatial computing and want to swap notes!
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Music
It must be the peak of the summer release schedule, because so much new music has come out this week.
The new Glass Animals album is one of those that starts with a banger and keeps the energy going until you’re five songs in and picking up your phone to check the tracklist in disbelief. It’s called I Love You So F*ing Much and it’s soaked through with space beats, vocoders, and addictive melodies.
I knew they had a cult following before 2020’s Dreamland introduced them to everyone, but I foolishly never got deep into it because the phenomenally successful Heat Waves overshadowed every other song. On hindsight, that tune would have done the same on 99% of albums — it’s the longest charting song in the history of the Billboard Hot 100. Now I’m excited to soon experience their two older albums for the first time, ZABA and How to Be a Human Being.
ROLE MODEL is back and he’s shed his hipster-emo guise for a cowboy hat after breaking up with Emma Chamberlain (I just found out). Kansas Anymore is filled with the same lite and lovable pop earworms that I enjoyed on his last album, just a lil’ bit twangier.
beabadoobee’s This Is How Tomorrow Moves is finally out, and I’ll admit that while I’ve liked all her past releases, none of them have ever made it into heavy rotation for me. I think this will be the one that does it. Early singles Ever Seen and Take A Bite were strong songs in her usual nostalgic 90s alt-rock style (with charming videos by her boyfriend, Jake Erland), but the newest one Beaches is perfect! In any of the last three decades, Beaches would have been an instant classic. She made it while working with Rick Rubin at his ‘Shangri-La’ studio in Malibu.
Rick Rubin continues to fascinate me as a kind of guru or shaman of the music industry, somehow wielding enormous influence without any formal musical ability himself. He’s somehow able to hypnotize or imbue artists with the confidence to create their best work, just by sitting with them and giving feedback. He wrote a book about his creative process that some reviews call an essential bible, while others say it’s a collection of trite cliches. I suppose I’ll have to read it for myself soon.
I also found myself enthusiastically nodding along to Killer Mike’s new album, entitled Songs For Sinners And Saints by “Michael & The Mighty Midnight Revival”. It’s loaded with funky beats, soulful playing, gospel choirs, and some very sharp rapping.
Blxst’s “debut album” I’ll Always Come Find You made me realize that 2020’s No Love Lost was only a “mixtape”, and that the term is now essentially meaningless.
Also, Ai Monolith, a new album by The Internet. Nevermind, I don’t recommend it.
Check out BADBADNOTGOOD’s Mid Spiral instead! Although a fundamentally different song, Weird and Wonderful (Track 3) has a melodic bit that sounds like a riff on the refrain from To Forgive by The Smashing Pumpkins. Speaking of…
It’s safe to come out now. The Smashing Pumpkins have finished releasing their three-part concept rock opera, whatever it was called. They’re now back with a proper album that promises the good old guitar-driven songs they were loved for back in the day. It’s called… er, Aghori Mhori Mei, a title that doesn’t inspire any confidence that Billy Corgan is back on his meds. My god, the edgelordism is only accelerating with age! Here are some lyrics chosen at random: “Milk such blood / To fare thee lost from all but way / And awaken the sea I light / Our slumbers save the sleep / Wherefore we climb…”Kerrang has given it 4/5, at least. I kinda enjoyed it on a musical level but wasn’t listening closely. I’ll keep trying.
Vultures 2 came out and I didn’t even know. I think I tapped through to Kanye’s artist page in Apple Music just on a whim and was surprised to see it at the top. Nobody wants to support him anymore with all the shit he pulls, but he’s probably better off with no one knowing about this album, if my two playthroughs so far are any indication. It’s a shoddy mess, with some songs having the seeds of greatness in them, but just withered and stunted on the vine. North West features on one song again: the awful “Bomb”, which has her repeating level 1 Duolingo Japanese phrases like “ohaiyo gozaimasu, konnichiwa” over a truly busted beat. According to one recent IG post, he’s still ‘updating it daily’ on streaming platforms so maybe check back in a few months to hear the album’s final form. Or don’t.
It’s been about three months since I embarked on a break from full-time employment, but my subconscious seems determined to remind me of what I left behind. I’ve had about a half-dozen dreams about work: either I’m being called back to help fix something “for just a few days” and finding I can’t leave, or I’m being given some “urgent” problem that is really a big overreaction — I must stress none of them were actually based on real situations or people, which is the weirdest part. Each time, I wake up and realize it’s not just that the problems aren’t real, but I haven’t got ANY problems like them at all, and it makes the whole thing worth it despite opportunity costs.
With Kim’s leg injury improving, my focus shifted from caregiver to caretaker of my own neglected digital life. The first task was reviewing my digital security practices: passwords were reset, new tools deployed, and unlikely edge cases considered and guarded against. Take this as your reminder to please sort this stuff out for yourself! You must get a password manager. Use 2FA and unique passwords for every website, no exceptions. Protect yourself with a Recovery Key for your iCloud account, and add some trusted people as Account Recovery contacts and Legacy Contacts so you/they can access your data in the event of a hack or your demise.
Next: email migration! Whoo!
Four years ago, I switched from Gmail to Hey.com, a $99/yr email service that offered an opinionated user experience which meant leaving behind nearly two decades of history for a fresh start. They don’t support you bringing your email archives along. They don’t even let you use your own choice of email app; their web app and hybrid apps are all you get. I wrote twoposts about it back then, saying I would probably not continue with my free trial. But I ended up doing it anyway, and for the most part I’ve really enjoyed trying a new approach to such an ancient, core component of online life.
For one thing, I never got spam in my inbox. Hey unfortunately lets a lot of spam through, but they land in a separate zone called “The Screener”, along with any mail from an unknown address mailing you for the first time. From here, you can either let them in or block them. It’s a small difference, reviewing a bunch of possible spam on a separate page versus seeing them mixed in with all your legit mail, but feels huge because your inbox becomes a serene, protected space. Admittedly, taking care of “The Screener” has become daily work because spam always gets in.
From what I’ve seen of Gmail in the past four years whenever I log in for a peek, it’s a post-spam apocalyptic wasteland. It looks like Google has just given up on detecting and filtering spam because some data-driven PM decided it won’t hurt their bottom line.
Since my current Hey subscription ends in September, I looked into whether it might be time to switch again. Three key reasons: Apple Intelligence, performance, and $99/yr is money I don’t need to spend on email right now.
Apple Intelligence: I’ve never liked the Apple Mail app on iOS. It felt a little underdeveloped for handling the different needs of modern email — without the tagging and search filters of Gmail, or the segregation of personal mail, newsletters, and receipts that Hey.com built their UX around.
But the new AI-powered Mail app in iOS 18 looks exactly like what I want, and I’ve decided to embrace the power of defaults. I’m bearish on some aspects of generative AI, but this stuff is where it shines. Because Apple Intelligence will be able to understand what emails are about, it can summarize and prioritize messages while sorting them into categories like “Updates” and “Invoices”, so you can tackle them with different mental modes. I’m hoping that AI will also bring spam filtering that really works. Sadly, because Hey.com intentionally won’t support IMAP and SMTP, I can’t use them with Apple’s new app and have no choice but to leave. The Hey manifesto also contains strong wording that suggests they won’t be adding any AI features soon.
Hey.com’s performance: It was never blazing fast to use their apps because they’re hybrids with seemingly little caching, and it annoyed me to death every time I ‘backed out’ of a link to find that the whole thread of newsletters I was reading had refreshed and I was back at the top again, but lately things have gotten even worse. About a year ago, the Basecamp/Hey founders went on a crusade against cloud hosting services and decided that they could self-host their services and save millions. I have to assume their infrastructure is extremely Western world or US-centric, because speeds have become terrible for me here in Singapore. I’m talking about noticeably slow performance waiting for EMAILS TO LOAD. I got even more confirmation of this when I tried downloading my 1.6GB .mbox archive to move elsewhere: it was capped at 100kb/s and took me over five hours. I can normally download a file of that size in maybe a minute?
Ninety Nine United States Dollars A Year: Yeah, I can’t justify paying this much to have my email load slowly AND miss out on exciting AI features. I’m already paying for iCloud+ with tons of storage, so it seems logical to just use iCloud Mail as well. Bless Hey though, they let you keep your @hey.com email address for life even if you leave, so I’ll continue using mine and forward everything to my Apple address.
A note about concentration risk: I’m aware there are risks in letting one company handle your entire digital life. All it takes is one successful hack locking you out of your iCloud account and it’s game over. For that reason, I would recommend NOT using the new Apple Passwords app coming in iOS 18 if you know how to select and use a third-party one. It’s a great default for people who wouldn’t use a password manager otherwise, but if you can have another basket for that egg, do it. Email is particularly important to keep separate, as most of your account passwords can be reset in the event of a hack if you still control your email address.
But like I said about the Vision Pro and its integration with Apple Services like Arcade and TV+, I’m finding myself getting even deeper into their ecosystem and liking it fine. Where I once subscribed to differentiated, prosumer-serving alternatives to Apple’s ‘good enough’ apps, these days I prefer their simplicity and constraints.
I switched from Evernote to Apple Notes several years ago and haven’t looked back. Side note: I’ve been on an anti-Notion campaign ever since I saw an unsuccessful rollout in my last team; it’s another overpowered tool for fiddly people who like to overcomplicate their tasks. I’ve used iCloud Calendar since leaving Gmail. I’ve even ported a lot of ancient files from Google Drive and Dropbox to iCloud Drive. And now email, arguably the most crucial service of all.
“Hang on, Apple Intelligence in the Mail app isn’t out yet and might not be until the end of the year! How will you live until then?”
Thanks, little imaginary reader, I’m glad you asked! I’m using Spark Mail in the meantime, which I’ve dabbled with in the past using my Gmail account. It’s a mail client with a bunch of smart, AI features (for a price) that are pretty close to what Apple promises. For one, a smart inbox that works quite well at sorting your different mail types, and a feature called “Gatekeeper” that works just like Hey’s “The Screener”. Their asking price is less than Hey’s, but more than Apple’s (free, if you already pay for iCloud+).
Just a couple of days into using Spark with iCloud Mail, and two things stand out: One, it’s so nice to use a native email app, and two, I’m actually reading my newsletters again. In Hey, newsletters are collected on a a separate, infinite-scroll page called “The Feed” which suffers from an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ problem. In Spark, received newsletters sit inside the main inbox, just collapsed into a single line. This seems to make a difference. It’s a visible nudge to check them out, and because they load and react instantly, you can actively triage them and unsubscribe/block/delete if you find yourself asking why you ever signed up for one. Where Hey’s endless stream of newsletters can get overwhelming, Spark’s (and I assume Apple’s) approach is more like a physical magazine or newspaper with a finite amount of content, which most people prefer.
I should have taken my own advice in 2020 — it turns out Spark’s approach was always the better fit for me. I even made visual aids to explain it!
This diagram above is how HEY is laid out, if you think of each column as a screen. In the Imbox and Paper Trail, each email is a single line item, while they are larger previews in The Feed, which is designed to give a peek into newsletters so you can decide if you want to expand and read them. This doesn’t work for me because I don’t want to keep all of Graniph’s new product announcements, but I do want to see them.
And this is an illustration of how I’d prefer to handle my email. A single inbox view encompassing important emails and personal letters, newsletters, and updates/receipts/notifications from other services. Spark … is the closest thing I’ve found to this.
All in, it’s been a week of fiddling with things that seemed to work just fine, but hopefully I’ve simplified and improved them for the future and not introduced more things to maintain.
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Media Activity
Before I could move off Hey Email, I had to finish my backlog of favorite newsletters. One of them was Craig Mod’s “Return to Pachinko Road” series from earlier this year. Over 18 days, he walked 694,942 steps and wrote close to 50,000 words in daily email updates. I read them while waiting those five hours for my mail archives to download. He’s such a good writer, and I can’t recommend enough that you sign up for his newsletters and/or membership if you can spare the money (regretfully, I can’t right now as a member of the unemployed class).
MUBI’s collection of films by Abbas Kiarostami is leaving the service over the next couple of weeks, so I prioritized watching them, starting with the Palme d’Or-winning Taste of Cherry (1997). God, I was not prepared for it on a Monday afternoon and fell to pieces during the old man’s monologue in the final third. Fortunately, I watched it on the TV because I don’t think Vision Pros have an IP rating. 5 stars.
Next was Through the Olive Trees (1994) which was very charming — the Iranian actors’ performances are fantastic, and perfectly naturalistic in keeping with the cinematography. I initially score this a 4, but it’s now a 4.5-star film for me.
The Wind Will Carry Us (1999) shares some landscapes and in-car camera angles with Taste of Cherry, but where the latter is heavy with life’s troubles, this one centers hope and rebellion against the narratives we find ourselves in. One could even read it as an anti-work parable: forced on a business trip of indefinite length, neglecting his family’s pleas to return home for a funeral, summoned to give gravely inconvenient (hur hur) updates to his boss at all hours, a workaholic asshole learns to relax, enjoy the local milk, and finally give his assignment the finger. 4.5 stars.
Fresh off Presumed Innocent, we were looking for another legal thriller to watch and discovered neither of us had seen The Firm (1993) starring Tom Cruise. Welp, it turns out there are no courtroom scenes in the film at all, and he’s a tax lawyer. Still, a very enjoyable 3.5 stars.
The Paris Olympics are on, and despite not caring much for sports I’ve found myself unable to resist watching competition on a global scale. Mostly tennis, but also archery, shooting, diving, gymnastics, and some athletics.
sangsara.net 