sangsara.net

Month: September 2024

  • Week 39.24

    Week 39.24

    Two visits to Maji Curry in 9 days. Think I’d better cut back for awhile…

    I blame a medical appointment for our being in the area. Remember how Kim took a fall a couple of months ago and hurt her leg? She’s been feeling mostly back to normal but was advised to get an MRI just to be sure. Late last week we met the doctor for his interpretation, and it was worse than expected. The tendon that normally runs down her entire leg has become completely detached from its anchor point at the top of the thigh. In other words, she’s currently missing a crucial muscle involved in leg movement. In practice she can still move it, but with less strength than normal.

    So the weekend was spent worrying about what this meant, until our follow up appointment this Monday with another doctor who was called to advise on surgical options. Yes, it can be fixed: they’d slice the thigh open, dig around for the loose tendon, stretch it back up, then attach it to the pelvis or wherever it’s meant to be. This would then be followed by six weeks of recovery and then indefinite physiotherapy. It also carries the risk of nicking a large nerve that happens to reside in that area.

    Fortunately, this doctor’s disposition was entirely the opposite of worried. He reckoned that as long as she wasn’t an athlete concerned with peak performance, one could get by without addressing this; other muscles compensate and exercise with physiotherapy will see her through it. He said many patients just leave it, and continue to have normal lives. It was exceedingly refreshing to finally get some good news.

    But in not so good news, my neighbor’s long-dreaded renovations are finally beginning next week. That means a handful of days where I absolutely can’t be home during the day (or I’d probably go deaf from the hacking of walls and tearing up of floors); a few weeks where I probably wouldn’t want to be home (noisy enough that one wouldn’t be able to read, think in peace, or get on a call); and a couple more months after that where the noise should only be a mild annoyance.

    I’ve already made plans for that first phase next week, which happily coincides with Singapore Design Week. That will give me a few things to see and attend around town from mornings to evenings. And then for the rest of the month, I’ve decided to sign up for a membership with a co-working space company (a la WeWork), and spend my days hot-desking like a digital nomad or startup serf. It sounds ideal: air conditioning, power, WiFi, free coffee, and a change of scenery. I might even meet interesting people?! Although I’m more likely to be watching movies or gaming on my Switch rather than doing any real work (unless some new side project idea hits me).

    This is way better than my original plan, which was to hang out at public libraries the whole time. Fewer amenities there, and a lot more competition for desks because our libraries are very popular hangouts for senior citizens these days.

    Anticipating being in libraries where plugging into wall sockets might be frowned upon, I made a premature purchase that arrived this week: the most powerful power bank I’ve ever had. My requirement was that it had to comfortably get me through a whole day or more of using everything from my phone to a MacBook to a Vision Pro.

    And so I did some research on what a modern power bank looks like, and decided Ugreen’s Nexode lineup offers the best value. Anker has some competitive ones in their Prime series, but they’re twice the price and (as I discussed with Michael) they’re not even that reliable or safe these days.

    If you haven’t bought a power bank in recent times, you might be surprised by what they can do now. For starters, the one I got has a 20,000mah capacity with a maximum total output of 130W over 2 USB-C PD ports and a USB-A one for legacy devices. That’s enough bandwidth to fast charge two MacBook Pros at the same time. There’s also a digital display that shows you real-time power draw stats, and estimates of how long you’ve got before the battery is depleted (or fully recharged). Ugreen claims that it uses EV-grade batteries that can stay above 80% capacity for 1,000 charge cycles (Apple’s guidance on their batteries is only 500 cycles, for comparison). Given that coworking spaces provide lots of power points, I don’t really need one now but it’s good to have around?

    For the record, I’m still undecided if I actually would whip out the Vision Pro in a coworking space. But I can’t imagine not using it for an entire month. This week, I wandered into a conversation in inSpaze (an immersive social network I wrote about here) and found myself invited to a ‘live’ test of a new feature. It essentially lets you upload a large video file (say, a home movie or film that you absolutely have the distribution rights for), and invite others to watch it with you in real time.

    The final release will include a special 3D environment suited for watching videos, but for this test we were just in the usual “living room” environment. Spontaneously watching a film with strangers was more fun than it sounds. Everyone was well behaved and went on mute, chatting over text instead. In that way it was better than watching a film in a real theater with inconsiderate whisperers. We gave our feedback and suggestions afterwards, and I said that a visual/spatial way to express emotions like surprise or amusement would be nice to have, better to subtly feel a sense of community with everyone else in the theater.

    ===

    I also tried a bunch of new camera apps. Halide really started a trend with their Process Zero mode, and now I’m seeing new and existing apps tout a “no AI” approach. I won’t link the more blatant copycats, but will quickly mention a few that go beyond just adding a RAW capture feature.

    Fig Camera is currently in beta and offers a novel minimal camera UI, along with the ability to create your own camera-capture-to-file processing pipeline with LUT files. It also has a couple of options for taking more natural photos with less “AI” and Smart HDR, etc.

    Mood.Camera is more of a traditional retro camera app with a selection of film-inspired filters, but it also lets you select from different levels of dynamic range enhancements: from zero (expect harsh, blown highlights) to an ‘Extended’ setting that’s even more artificial than Apple’s defaults. I really liked how the dev has modeled certain aspects of lo-fi film photography that are very hard to achieve with pure HSL sliders and presets (like the ones I’m fond of making in Darkroom). Stuff like different grain sizes, halation, and textures. I impulse bought the lifetime unlock for S$20 and now slightly regret it because the color shifts are quite strong and there’s no way to turn them down at this time.

    Lampa also captures pure sensor data before Apple’s process gets a chance to stack and merge and overdo the brightness. It then puts your photos through their own RAW development profiles (the app description says they’re not “just filters”). There’s no option to shoot with Apple’s processing, unlike Fig and Mood. Surprisingly, Lampa only offers four distinct and pleasantly subtle looks, unlike the plethora of filters standard in Mood.Camera and most others. I’m a fan of this minimal approach but unfortunately the pricing model is maximalist and they want S$40/yr.

    Bonus: if you’ve been shooting RAW files with Halide’s Process Zero (or any other app’s single-capture RAW — not to be confused with ProRAW), you might appreciate this Darkroom preset I made that emulates the high contrast monochrome look that the Ricoh GR cameras are famous for. I repeat, they are tuned for the brightness profile of iPhone RAW files.

    Add P0-GRBW to your library here.

    ===

    I’ve been watching this streamer on YouTube named Pim who runs a channel called 4AM Laundry. Every weekend, he sets off with a backpack full of batteries and modems, and livestreams his adventures going around Japan to find retro gaming gems in secondhand stores like Book-Off and Hard-Off. They are soothing and educational, and great to have on in the background as he literally does this for 9 hours at a stretch.

    This week he was invited to visit the Tokyo Game Show with a press pass, so I tuned in for that. It’s an event I’ve always wanted to experience in person, even though I know it’s probably hellish and more fun in theory than practice. This was a nice way to get a glimpse of its atmosphere.

  • Week 38.24

    Week 38.24

    I didn’t fall ill after all, but Kim’s flu evolved into what looks like a chest infection, leading to coughs all night and poor sleep for both of us. I bought a pair of Loop Quiet 2 earplugs in anticipation of a neighbor’s renovation, and they were somewhat useful under these circumstances too. She finally saw a doctor after several days of nagging, and is now on antibiotics and there’s been some improvement in the last day.

    On Tuesday, I opened the front door to discover a swarm of mosquitoes hovering over my black sneakers — later on I discovered they love hiding on black objects, as a form of camouflage — and took to them with an insecticide spray. In the process, quite a few made it into the apartment. I clapped a dozen to death and confirmed from their squashed bodies that they were Aedes mosquitoes: the species that spreads malaria and dengue fever.

    The red light came on in my head: a new crisis just dropped! Why were there so many? How the heck was I supposed to hunt down all the ones that came in? Fortunately, a neighbor happened by, and when I mentioned them to him, he assured me that they were infertile male mosquitoes (males don’t bite or spread diseases) intentionally released as part of a national anti-dengue campaign called “Project Wolbachia”. They’re meant to breed with females and decrease mosquito numbers by wasting their time, because the eggs don’t ever hatch.

    I’d heard of this program over the years, but didn’t share his confidence that MY mosquitoes could be explained by this. He said “oh yeah, they (the government) release them here all the time”, which led me to check the official website in disbelief. It was true. According to a published schedule, officers of the National Environment Agency release these genetically engineered mosquitoes twice a week, probably by the thousands, around public housing blocks in my district. I waited to see if I would be bitten, and sure enough, I never was. The males only live about a week, but it’s still insane to me that someone is deliberately releasing a ton of insects that look exactly like the ones we know can be dangerous. What am I supposed to do, ask their pronouns before trying to kill them?

    ===

    My new old iPhone arrived, and I ran into some issues during the phone-to-phone transfer process. It failed a couple of times, and I finally gave up and went the ‘restore from iCloud backup’ route. It took several hours, and then I had to check every app to see if I’d gotten logged out. It was the same frustrating dance I do every year I upgrade iPhones, but without the reward of actually upgrading.

    Happily, iOS 18 looks visually fresh and brings a bunch of welcome features. It’s the first OS update in awhile that actually makes your phone feel new. I’m using the new Home Screen mode that lets you have big icons without text labels, and there’s a new dynamic background that shifts colors throughout the day. You can also use a dynamic rainbow gradient on the Lock Screen’s clock, which looks great against black when the always-on display is set to sleep without showing your wallpaper.

    The customization that’s possible with the new Control Center shortcuts and resizable widgets is pretty deep, and something I would not have expected Apple to provide if you’d asked me a couple of years ago. I’ve mapped the Lock Screen camera shortcut to launch Halide, and my Action Button to launch a Google shortcut that does a visual lookup of whatever is showing on your screen. I’ve also put a new button in Control Center that starts my personal radio station on Apple Music.

    Apple Music has also received a significant, if not immediately apparent, change in iOS 18. The “Browse” page has been renamed “New”, and where every user would previously see the same curated selection of new releases, popular songs, and recommended playlists, this content is now personalized based on your listening behavior. The initial impression is positive: I’m no longer being pushed Thai music, or Mandopop, or the local bands I don’t care about. But longer term, I’m worried about the lack of serendipity that might result from this. I discovered some of my favorite music through accidents and unexpected tangents, as I’m sure is the same for anyone reading this.

    <Smooth segue into Media Activity>

    I don’t recall when I first heard the qawwali music of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, for example, but boy did it make an impact on me some 30 years ago. I never understood a single word, but you don’t have to in order to feel touched by something divine in his voice. So I was super pleased this week to see in the New York Times that an unreleased album had been discovered in the vaults of Peter Gabriel’s record label. They even produced a making-of video to tell the story of its discovery and restoration.

    The new old album, Chain of Light, is more in the traditional style so each of the four songs runs about 10 minutes. It may not be an ideal starting point for most; so I still recommend beginning with Mustt Mustt or Night Song, two ‘Westernized’ albums he made with Michael Brook to be more globally accessible.

    The Jesse Malin tribute album, Silver Patron Saints, is now out too, with covers by Bruce Springsteen, Counting Crows, The Wallflowers, Elvis Costello, and many more greats. Back when you had to buy CDs on faith in a physical store, I liked getting these tribute albums and would decide based on the artists doing the covers, even if I didn’t know the musician being celebrated. If some of my favorite artists were involved, then the odds were pretty good that I was about to discover someone fantastic. Sweet Relief II: Gravity of the Situation — The Songs of Vic Chesnutt was one such album (unfortunately the album is incomplete on Apple Music for me, maybe a regional licensing thing).

    Will algorithms ever be smart enough to replicate that sort of discovery?

    This week in reading, I hit my Goodreads challenge of 12 books by finishing Kyla Scanlon’s In This Economy? How Money & Markets Really Work. It was an admittedly low target, so I’m confident I’ll be able to finish a few more before the year ends.

    We watched Sam Mendes’s 1917 (2019) and it was riveting, beautiful cinema. The single-take gimmick was probably unnecessary but made the action immediate and every movement of the camera threatened to reveal a hidden threat suddenly behind our heroes, which I thought effectively mimicked the tension of real conflict. A deliberately edited film shows you danger on its own schedule, but real time action is real time dread. Someone I follow on Letterboxd also observed that this felt like watching cutscenes in games like Call of Duty, a cinematic style that I think emerged because devs were showing off what their game engines could easily do that Hollywood could not. But the battlefield is pretty flat now, and movies are essentially made with the tools of game development, so we can’t stop these two mediums converging.

    [I didn’t take any shots for the Featured Photo this week, so I’m relying on WordPress’s ability to automatically generate some AI slop based on the post’s content.]

  • Week 37.24

    Week 37.24

    Kim got back from her trip with a flu, thankfully it doesn’t seem like Covid and should pass in a couple of days. Jet lag and illness are terrible partners: she spent about two whole days in bed sleeping it off and missing meals. I’m hoping to avoid it, but you shouldn’t place any bets on my famously weak immune system (putting aside the fact that it can fight off chickenpox).

    It was iPhone launch week again — where did the last year go? As usual, many key details had already leaked thanks to Mark Gurman’s sources. The Pro phones are slightly larger, the 5x zoom length is now across both models, and there’s a new “camera control” area along the right side; both a button and a ‘Touch Bar’. The regular iPhones 16 get all the great colors, while the Pro ones only get dull metallics. One of these years, we’ll get to have some fun too.

    The only things on my wishlist that hit were improved battery life and performance, which aren’t surprising — the real question is how significant are they? Apple says the CPU is 15% faster, the GPU is 20% faster, ray-tracing is 2x faster (though I can’t name a single game dying for it), and the 16 Pro Max gets 4 hours more video playback for a total of 33 hours. That’s a 14% increase over the iPhone 15 Pro Max.

    So to summarize, it’s a 15% better iPhone than the one I have, the AI features will release slowly over the next year, and there’s a camera button that I do want (but only serves to do things you can already do on the touchscreen). Given the fact that I already got a Vision Pro and could use some financial prudence during this sabbatical, pre-order Friday came and went without me buying a new iPhone for the first time in 16 consecutive years. Nobody believed I could do it!

    >> For future reference, my battery health is at 88% and 310+ cycles after a year. Coming off the regular Pro size for my iPhones 12 through 14, moving back up to the Pro Max form factor felt perfectly fine, and I think the lightness of titanium was a big factor. I never felt like I’d chosen the wrong size. Caveat: I did change out all my jeans to have roomier pockets.

    I decided to go caseless for this next year, and was quickly reminded that my iPhone came with an annoying defect: a slight misalignment of back cover glass and titanium frame, leaving a rough, kinda sharp edge that you can feel pressing into your palm. I wanted to get a replacement as soon as I took it out of the box because all the marketing talked about ‘comfortable rounded edges’ on the new design, and I was missing out. But replacement units are hard to come by the first few weeks after a launch, so I decided to wait and just popped it into a case and never got back to it.

    This week, nearly a full year later, I called up Apple Support and tried to explain this admittedly minor issue. They suggested I visit an authorized repair partner who could assess it in person, which gave me a good excuse to get Shake Shack for lunch (after Michael’s recent quest for “hot chips” — just French fries for us outside the UK and Australia — I had a craving that wouldn’t go away).

    All in, I had to sheepishly explain my problem to three different support people, two on the phone and one in person, but everyone was very nice about it? I think acknowledging upfront that you are about to sound like a crazy person (in a friendly, non-crazy way) is generally a good strategy for these situations. I’ve now got a replacement phone on the way, and think I’m happily set up for the harrowing year ahead of Not Having The Best iPhone.

    ===

    My friend and ex-colleague Bert was back in town for a visit, and a bunch of us from the old team met up with him in a configuration that hasn’t been together for maybe six years. It was great to see everyone looking no worse for wear, and arguably with more hair, muscles, and iron (from medical implants and drinking too much Guinness) than ever before.

    One thing he mentioned was how warm it is here these days, and how he’s lost all acclimatization. I’ve personally never felt acclimatized to the heat, and am always looking for solutions — see this recent post where I got the Sony Reon Pocket 5. That gadget has been plenty helpful, and I still use it whenever I’m heading outdoors for any meaningful length of time, but it’s not enough on its own. So now I’ve gone and got myself a portable handheld fan after seeing bts videos of K-pop idols holding them all the time. Edit: on second thought, I might have seen them in an episode of Irma Vep.

    This brand, JisuLife, claims to be the world’s number 1 portable fan manufacturer. Who knows if they are? But they had a bunch of products on sale during the recent 9.9 event on Shopee, so I got one of these clever folding designs that collapses into a cylinder much smaller than the umbrella I carry around in my bag. It even doubles as a flashlight.

    A couple of days later, whilst browsing the shelves at a Harvey Norman, I came upon a shelf of JisuLife products and got instant fomo when I tried another model out. The Life9 is even smaller, and eschews big visible blades for an internal turbine design that works like a hairdryer. The result is a much stronger, albeit narrowly focused and noisier stream of air. So now I have er… two fans.

    Both charge via USB-C, but the former model (Life8) uses some non-standard spec and won’t work with my usual cables, only the USB-A to USB-C one it came with. The Life9 charges normally as expected. They’re both cheaper on Shopee than on the official site, and you might catch them for lower on occasional flash or live sales.

    ===

    Media activity

    • Two current streaming movies over the weekend: The Instigators on Apple TV+ and Rebel Ridge on Netflix. The former is o-k with some amusing moments, a heist movie that subverts the usual joys of a heist: the brilliant plan coming together, the thwarting of smug antagonists. No, these guys are morons, but sorta lovable. Matt Damon is often lovable. 3 stars.
    • The latter film is more entertaining fodder, a Reacher-esque tale of small town corruption and sadism meeting a particularly skilled outsider. They messed with the wrong guy, etc. It drags a little long, however, and doesn’t quite strike the comeuppance note as satisfyingly as a Lee Child joint. 3.5 stars.
    • I know, because I read two of them this week. I finished The Midnight Line (Reacher #22) in a day or two. It’s a pretty chill story as the series goes, with a slight mystery that won’t keep you dying of suspense or anything. Almost no danger for our hero. 3 stars.
    • I immediately went onto Past Tense (Reacher #23) and found that much more entertaining because there are actual stakes involved. Part of the problem with Jack Reacher is that he’s Superman, and you never worry that he’ll make it out okay. This book introduces a few vulnerable characters that you can actually worry about. 4 stars.
    • After that, I read Rebecca F. Kuang’s Yellowface, a book that everyone was raving about a little while ago. I preferred Babel, but this is a fine little bit of meta narrative about the publishing industry, being Asian, and being Asian in the publishing industry, or just pretending to be!
    • Listened to a lot of Waxahatchee for the first time since discovering her back in May. Her latest album Tigers Blood, and 2021’s Saint Cloud, in particular. There’s something I just love about the Alabamian accent.
  • Week 36.24

    Week 36.24

    I was able to visit my parents for dinner for the first time in over a month. The long delay was on account of my dad developing a painful case of shingles, which, if you don’t know much about (like me), is a reemergence of a dormant chickenpox virus in one’s body, often after the age of 50. In other words, if you’ve had chickenpox before, you’re at risk of shingles — a nastier, localized version of the same virus.

    Unlike the regular childhood version, it doesn’t usually take over your entire body, just specific areas. In my dad’s case, it affected his back and one side of his torso, leaving the skin painfully sensitive for weeks — nerve pain that, for some, can linger for years. Thankfully, he’s making a quicker recovery.

    I had to stay away because I have never gotten chickenpox, and you can catch it from someone with shingles. I was urged to get the vaccine, because adult cpox is reportedly awful (like shingles, maybe worse), but my doctor suggested doing some blood work first to test for immunity — mostly because he didn’t believe I could make it this far in life without getting chickenpox. But it’s true! My mother swears it, and I have two traits: pretty good memory of my childhood years, and an outsized tendency to complain of ailments. There is no way that I could have gotten chickenpox as a child and everyone just forgot.

    The test results came back, and apparently I’m immune. The only theory I have traces back to this one time in kindergarten, when the boy sitting next to me in class developed cpox and had to leave school early. I recall living in fear that I would be next, and pus-filled bubbles would soon show. I remember checking myself fastidiously for a week or more, but it never came. Perhaps the glancing exposure was just enough to let my immune system prepare itself, but not enough to result in an infection? Or maybe, as my recent run-in with a car suggests, I’m actually Unbreakable like Bruce Willis in that M. Night Shyamalan movie.

    ===

    Kim is away again for work (13,600km away to be precise), and my having to deal with our pest situation alone has been a whole saga too boring to recount in detail. Tl;dr I’ve deployed a fleet of poison/bait traps, struggled with anxious insomnia, taped up a bunch of possible entry points, cleaned up a lot of lizard poop, sprayed insecticide down drains…

    More happily, the morning she left for the airport, I was up early and decided around 7:30 AM that I might go for a walk before it got too warm. This was inspired by Cien’s recent revelation that she’s been taking hour-long morning walks nearly every day. Just to get it out of the way: that’s a bit much for me, but I might go once a week. Spontaneously, this particular morning’s resolution ended in Peishan and me ‘virtually’ joining her for a walk at the same time, in our respective neighborhoods, sending photos along the way. This is actually a pretty fun thing to do!

    It was, however, warm despite the early hour. And it’s been hot and humid all week out here. I had to walk 10 minutes from an MRT station to a restaurant yesterday evening in very still air, and I could feel the sweat on my back not evaporating at all, merely pooling. Even my Sony Reon Pocket 5 brought little relief; I barely perceived that the metal contact point was cooler, or it can’t do much to dispel the mugginess of high humidity.

    ===

    I couldn’t take the wait any longer and upgraded to the visionOS 2 beta. I won’t upgrade any other devices, but I wanted any improvements in eye/hand tracking that I could get. So far, it’s been perfectly stable. I could talk about the new gestures and features, but the single most impressive thing has been the ability to view old 2D photos as 3D spatial scenes.

    What this looks like is simply layers of depth. You obviously can’t look around corners, and it’s not doing anything crazy like building 3D models you can move around in. But it’s like going from looking at a scene with one eye to two eyes. They suddenly have a liveliness to them because your brain can not only see that one object is in front of another, but perceive it too. Sadly, this is not something that can be demonstrated with a photo or video. The only way is to see it for yourself.

    The AI-powered segmentation of objects is somehow flawless, even better than on Portrait Mode (blurred background) photos taken with an iPhone. In one shot I had of a vineyard, every individual plant and leaf stretching to the horizon line was distinctly separated in space from the others. You can also blow them up to life-size with an “immersive” viewing mode, which puts you right in the space.

    Going through photos from the past two decades, of people who’ve passed on, and places I may never see again, has been profoundly moving. Documenting your experiences in photos has always been like building a time capsule, but this approaches time travel. It makes me so glad for every moment I thought to capture at the time, and the fact that the Vision Pro can do this retroactively for normal photos feels like the most unexpected gift I never knew I wanted. That’s what Apple does best, I suppose.

    Before the annual fall event tomorrow night, I’ll go on record again that I don’t think I’ll be upgrading my iPhone or anything else this year (but this time I really mean it!). So far I’ve had 16 iPhones and lost this bet with myself every year, but I can’t justify an incremental tech purchase in the same year as the AVP.

    Things that are unlikely to be announced but might make me reconsider my ‘no upgrade’ vow:

    For iPhone 16 Pro (Max):

    • No camera bump
    • New image processing pipeline that walks back the aggressive AI/HDR look and brings back natural looking photos à la Halide’s Process Zero (but with 24–48mp HEIC/JPEG XL files)
    • Bold, saturated colors like on the old iPod nanos
    • Untextured, grippy back glass
    • Significantly faster or exclusive Apple Intelligence features compared to iPhone 15 Pro
    • Completely new battery chemistry that means I won’t be sub-90% battery health in under a year

    For Apple Watch Series 10:

    • 2x battery life
    • Blood glucose monitoring
    • New body design that shames the old ones so bad you can’t wear them out in public anymore

    For AirPods Max:

    • Redesigned headband that either replaces the mesh or improves its comfort and durability
    • Significant weight reduction and/or new materials (comfort and durability)
    • A great protective case
    • Addition of a power button

    ===

    Media activity

    Recent reading momentum led me to finish reading Neal Stephenson’s Interface after two months. It’s a highly entertaining sci-fi story about contemporary American politics, media culture, and using brain implants to reverse a presidential candidate’s stroke damage. Nearly the entire time I was reading it, I visualized the main character as Robert F. Kennedy, and his VP pick as Kamala Harris.

    For my next book, I’m taking it easy with Jack Reacher #22, The Midnight Line.

    A few years ago, Nintendo remade two classic ‘80s visual novel-style adventure games under the “Famicom Detective Club” banner. This week, they released a wholly new third entry in the series, Emio: The Smiling Man, which got greenlit because of the warm reception that the remakes received. The history of these games is pretty interesting, and I watched this whole video essay on them.

    I bought and played the first remake, The Missing Heir, back around 2022, and found its authentically ancient gameplay archaic and frustrating. For example, in most such games, when questioning someone about a topic, you will reach a point where their answer starts to repeat itself — a sign that you’ve heard all you’re going to hear. In the first two Famicom Detective Club games, this is not the case (pun unintended).

    You: [Ask about the car]
    Suspect: There was a car seen at the time, I heard.
    You: [Ask about the car]
    Suspect: Hmm, that’s about all I remember.
    You: [Ask about the car]
    Suspect: Hmm, that’s about all I remember.
    You: [Ask about the car]
    Suspect: Hmm, that’s about all I remember.
    You: [Ask about the car]
    Suspect: Oh! I just remembered something. It was a black sedan.

    This is such incredibly bad game design, because someone repeating themselves like that is unnatural in the real world, so it appears as a limitation of the game (not having AI to generate different versions of “I dunno”). So of course a player isn’t going to keep pressing, because the suspect’s response isn’t an invitation to keep trying. It’s the equivalent of a brick wall in the game’s interaction model. But no, you’re meant to kick every solid object multiple times in case it comes loose.

    I ended up finishing the game using a walkthrough, and declined to buy the second game, The Girl Who Stands Behind. I’m guessing that Emio, being a new game, will be an improvement in this regard and so I intend to play it someday. But it doesn’t feel right doing that unless I also play the second game (there is no real need, they are not connected).

    Rather than pay $30 USD to frustrate myself, I watched a 7-hour video of someone else playing through the entire game — at 1.5x speed, of course. The first video I found was actually 10 hours long because the player was blundering through some of the aforementioned game design quirks, so I gave up on him and found this better one instead.

    Oh, and there’s another kinda new game that concludes something that started in my childhood, and I finished it this week. That game is of course Return to Monkey Island, which I played on the Switch. If you subscribe to Apple Arcade, you can also play it there. I don’t know how I feel about it; the original two games were the pinnacle of LucasArts’ point-and-click adventures and I probably remember them most fondly of all. The new sequel brings the story to a close, but with a new art style and an acknowledgment that a long time has passed (both in story terms and the authors’ perspectives). There was no way the ending could have satisfied every question and loose end, so they just went for something that felt true enough to its roots, but kinda comes out of nowhere. I was honestly surprised when the credits rolled. But that’s life!

  • Week 35.24

    Week 35.24

    First, an update on last week’s air conditioning saga. During another service visit, the professionals confirmed what my online research had suggested: a malfunctioning thermistor was the reason for inconsistent cooling. To test it out, they swapped sensors between two indoor units, and now that the cause has been confirmed after a couple of days, they have to come back yet again to replace the broken one (S$161).

    Shortly after, I was coincidentally served this cocky tweet about how “reasonably smart” people with internet access can now challenge an expert about their specific problems, because 1) the information is out there, and 2) the customer has more invested in the outcome than the vendor. For the record I tried hard not to preemptively suggest it to the experts, but when they diagnosed a ‘thermistor problem,’ I wasn’t the least bit surprised.

    New house problem: We found a dead cockroach and it’s been bugging me. I made a poll on Instagram Stories and asked how many people have seen a roach in their homes in the past year, and was surprised the results were pretty much 50-50 (n=29). It might be down to how many people have apartments with integrated rubbish chutes or face open-air corridors. In any case, there’s always something wrong and I need the universe to give me a break or better mental health.

    ===

    I joined my first-ever book club after hearing about it from some folks I met in inSpaze. They meet in the app for an hour every week, and have what I assume is a typical book club discussion if not for the fact that (nearly) everyone is in a Vision Pro.

    They’ve just started on a new book, Guy Immega’s Super-Earth Mother, which I couldn’t find in the library’s catalog and had to buy off the Kobo store. The title is my least favorite part, as it could turn some readers off. I didn’t expect to enjoy it as much as I did, but I ended up finishing it in just a couple of days. I was later chastised for this, as we’re supposed to be reading it together over three weeks.

    It’s about a billionaire’s mission to send an ark of human DNA across the universe in the care of an AI (Mother-9), and how its efforts to colonize other planets goes. That premise immediately reminded me of the back-half of Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves, but this is a very different effort. I think I described it in my Goodreads review as “a compact and accessible space epic”.

    What’s making this extra special is that one participant is a friend of the author’s, and they’ve been filling us in on little Easter eggs and references to real-life experiences. There’s also a chance that Mr. Immega might join us for a short Q&A in a later session.

    This external push to read broke my summer reading block. I had stalled on Neal Stephenson’s Interface for months, but after finishing Super-Earth Mother, I breezed through another hundred pages and am enjoying it immensely.

    Kim’s pretty old Kindle Paperwhite finally died, and I got her a new Kobo Clara BW (she declined the Color model, which I still think was an extra $30 worth spending), which is a very nice and slender reader in person. I am now envious of its USB-C charging and Dark Mode support, and am trying to stop myself from buying a Libra Color to replace my first-gen Libra. At over S$300 dollars, even if I’ve read 100 free books on mine so far (I haven’t), I’d still have paid $3/book for the sheer utility of an e-ink screen, which seems silly to me because one can read perfectly well on an iPhone. Or a Vision Pro, even.

    I tried that, btw. Having giant floating pages in front of you is actually not terrible. And in doing so I hit upon another realization about the Vision Pro. Photographers are always saying that you should print your photos to appreciate them, at as large a size as you can, but how many of us really do? Most photos end up being seen on phones, and maybe laptop-sized screens. But now there’s a way to view our favorite shots at wall size and have a gallery-scale experience at home. And, I suspect, discover more flaws and limitations that will push us towards buying better gear. It’s tragic how much of the last decade we documented in piddly 12mp photos because iPhones were more convenient than dedicated cameras. Ugh!

    ===

    Media activity

    • We caught up on Sunny. This is a show that, on paper, seemed designed to light up my neurons. Robotics, AI, a Japanese setting, a “darkly comedic” mystery, a story about clashing cultures, an A24 production. But it’s not for me at all. I came across the above clip on how causality, consequence, and coherence (my terms) are essential in telling a story people can care about, and sadly Sunny fails to adhere to those rules.
    • But also on Apple TV+ is Pachinko, which has just returned for its second season, and I thoroughly enjoyed the first two episodes out now. I understand that it’s one of the most popular shows on the service, and I hope it finds an even wider audience.
    • The consensus online seems to be that Apple TV+ is full of great shows that people just aren’t discovering, and Bad Monkey is one of them. Again, I think the show’s title is the weakest link here, and you should be giving it a chance. Vince Vaughn does his thing, the dialogue crackles, and things move with causality, consequence, and coherence. It also kicks off with the discovery of a severed body part.
    • We rewatched Twister (1996) and then saw Twisters (2024). The original is an actual classic, directed by Jan de Bont (who also did Speed), and features a team of tornado chasers with actual, palpable camaraderie. You feel like you’re going along on an adventure with them, and part of that happens because the script bakes in ample downtime where they strategize, tell war stories while eating steak and eggs, and hang out in motels overnight. The sequel is almost embarrassing in how it tries to check a series of “mirror the original” boxes — there’s the in-over-their-head outsider whose terror is played for comedy, the traumatic past weighing on the female lead’s motivations, her magical gut feel that can predict weather better than the science-dependent nerds. But despite all that, it can’t reproduce the magic. Still, as a standalone movie, Twisters is not all bad, and Glen Powell is definitely becoming one of the most likable and bankable men in Hollywood. 4 and 3.5 stars respectively.
    • We also watched Office Space (1999), which I realize I’ve never really seen properly at all. It’s an anti-work masterpiece, with many themes and grievances that seem to be reemerging today. Sure, it came out around the time of The Matrix, when rebellion against cubicle offices was at its peak, but I can’t recall many films in the past ten years that have so strongly espoused quitting your dumb job, burning your workplace to the ground, and finding purpose somewhere else. 4 stars.
    • Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin (2004) was leaving MUBI, so I decided I’d better see it. Boy, what a downer. I looked at reviews on Letterboxd and here are some excerpts from the positive ones: “This is a flawless film, but don’t watch it.” “This is not a movie I should’ve watched.” “I will never recover from this.” “What if I just walked into oncoming traffic”. 4 stars from me, but I tried not to think about it too hard. It might be a 4.5.
    • Also leaving MUBI was the French film Summer Hours by Olivier Assayas. It’s a quiet and beautiful story about the familial unraveling that happens when a parent dies and there is ‘bric-a-brac’ to be split up and hard discussions to be had. Sad subject matter, but nowhere approaching the rock buttom of Mysterious Skin’s tragedy. Also 4 stars.
    • I tried again to start watching Assayas’s Irma Vep TV series, but various interruptions have stopped me from finishing the first episode. I know it’s not a straightforward remake of the original film, but Alicia Vikander’s character is so different from Maggie Cheung’s that I’m intrigued to see what he’s trying to say about her/them/filmmaking with this new take.

    Featured photo (top): A superb dinner we had at Beyond The Dough on Arab Street. It’s one of those places that brings obsessive Japanese craft to traditional pizza. They are amusingly two doors down from a Domino’s outlet.