sangsara.net

Month: March 2025

  • Week 13.25

    Week 13.25

    A massive 7.7 quake hit Myanmar and Thailand on Friday, causing several hundred deaths so far. It was chilling to pull up the news and see reports of buildings swaying in Bangkok and having to be shut down for safety inspections, buildings that I had just been in a week ago. Thankfully, everyone we know is unhurt, but I’ve heard accounts of the traffic becoming even more unworkable (someone spent over 5 hours getting to the airport), and with some having to walk miles home instead.

    It was my Apple Watch that alerted me to this earthquake, via a notification from the environment ministry’s MyENV app, which usually likes to tell me about quakes in places so far away I don’t see what possible need there could be for an alert. I was in the middle of watching Jason Statham’s film, A Working Man (2025), in an almost empty theater with Peishan, and was about to swipe it away when I saw that it was actually kind of nearby. And then afterwards, the feeds were full of videos showing swimming pools at the tops of condominiums raining their contents down onto the streets below. Who decided we should start putting pools up there, anyway?

    The movie is terrible, by the way, and makes the mistake of trying to NOT be the predictable vengeance-by-numbers Statham vehicle that the trailer makes it out to be. It looks like our man Jason is just your regular ex-military deadly killer who’s decided to take on an unassuming identity and retire to a life of normalcy as a construction worker when one of his new friends falls afoul of the mob and needs rescuing. This is a setup rooted in at least a little realism, which is needed for the audience to suspend disbelief when the righteous murdering starts. However, this film is co-written by Sylvester Stallone, who is now at a stage in life where he writes really ridiculous scenes, silly and clichéd to the point of surrealism, as evidenced in the last installments of his Rambo and Expendables franchises.

    The latest season of Reacher, a series on freaking Amazon Prime Video, is more believable and enjoyable in almost every way, which is a hell of a red flag for whoever produced A Working Man. When reading any of Lee Child’s novels, Reacher comes across as a stoic avatar of justice, almost featureless in terms of personality. But as played on TV by Alan Ritchson, he’s endearingly a bit of an awkward and pedantic weirdo, as you would expect someone with his physicality to be after moving through a world that he doesn’t comfortably fit into. I like that change.

    We also watched the critically acclaimed show Adolescence on Netflix, and it’s an absolute marvel of filmmaking and acting. I’ve never seen a British TV production with this level of craft; it just leaves you wondering how they pulled it off — how they had the energy, even. Each episode is an hour-long performance that often involves moving between multiple locations, with the actors having to ramp up the emotions from anger to fear and the sorrow in between, and they did this how many times? For the final episode, they apparently used Take #16. It’s unfathomable talent. Stephen Graham and his co—stars deserve awards for this.

    ===

    This week will also be remembered for the wave of Studio Ghibli-styled images that washed up on social media after the release of ChatGPT’s new image generation capabilities in their 4o model. People turned personal photos, memes, and historic images alike into ripoffs of Miyazaki’s instantly recognizable style, and I have to say I enjoyed many of them whilst simultaneously feeling uneasy about what this means.

    The new model seems to be a milestone that’s arriving a little sooner than I expected. It can render text with good enough quality and aesthetic precision. It can process a multi-step prompt such as “create a print ad for the product in this picture”, and it will write some pretty workable ad copy, re-imagine the object you’ve given it, and merge them into a single image that looks right at a glance. There may be minor imperfections, or it may fail to nail a critical detail depending on your object. But the fact that it can be completely right some of the time is startling. I’d say it’s most of the way to fucking the creative industry over, but who knows if the last mile will take a quarter, a year, or a decade to close.

    While discussing the possible outcomes of this development with some people, specifically whether this would retard the growth and success of any new visual ideas — take for example the iconic look of Studio Ghibli, or Peanuts and Snoopy — why/how could any new artist launch and evolve their style if it can be snatched away from them early on and proliferated across the web in ways they haven’t even thought of yet — I wondered aloud if the only way forward left for them will be to use AI to scale their work, to generate more variations of it themselves, and to speed it to its logical conclusion (or demise) before anyone else does.

    At this point, I remembered an abandoned “art project” of mine (if it could be called that) from a few years ago, and got very excited about enlisting ChatGPT’s help with it.

    In late 2019, just before COVID hit, I had the idea to draw a series of cute animal characters and make some products. They would be called the Fluffy Hearts Club, and the story was that they were all research animals who were having horrible tests done on them, but who banded together and escaped from the lab. So they’d all have little scars and visible reminders of humanity’s awfulness on their bodies, but they’d be extremely happy and positive in their freedom eras.

    I drew the first one with great difficulty, a rabbit with a scar on his chest, printed him on something like 50 tote bags, and gave them away to friends that Christmas. I started to draw the next one, a cat, along with some other angles of the rabbit, but eventually shelved it… owing to COVID or lack of skill, I don’t know. As you can see they are pretty rough.

    But when I realized that I could use ChatGPT to “learn” this style and concept to help me finish the rest of it, I got excited enough to plonk down $30 and upgrade my account to Plus. Ethics check: Would I have paid a human artist to do this for me? Unlikely. I’m not made of money, and it’s just a silly side project. Should I have? I can’t see how; I want to explore this on my own without another human in the mix.

    I’ve spent a little time on it so far, and it’s grasped the core idea and even brainstormed other animals and their visual signatures with me — it felt eerily like collaborating with a person, as we discussed possibilities and complimented each other along the way. It has trouble following instructions about very minute details, which it explained as a shortcoming of the way its models were trained (it leans towards cartoon conventions, which one of my notes contradicts), which one can take as proof that this is all built on the back of awful copyright violations.

    But with its help, I’ve managed to produce more versions of the rabbit and even imagined the cat in various art styles, so I’d say this has been a half success. I might use it as a foundation for tracing/drawing new ones myself, or as inspiration for different scenarios.

    I only wish I was using this renewed subscription to explore how to stay relevant in my own job domain rather than in the lane of starving artists. Yuk yuk.

    Speaking of the design field, I went back to the same college I visited last November to help give feedback on the work from a class of students doing a design thinking course taught by my former boss and mentor, and was again struck by how much of what we do and prescribe as designers, the responsible way to move in the world, is naive and vulnerable to the at-odd incentives of everyone in the AI business. They’ll throw a synthetic persona at a problem for $10 in compute before they spend a dollar on asking a real person what they need to lead a better life.

    And that brings me to Careless People, the Facebook tell-all book by Sarah Wynn-Williams that I’ve just finished reading. The one that Zuckerberg and his lawyers tried to quash before it was published. I thought I knew enough about Facebook’s bad behavior, but I was still stunned by some of her anecdotes.

    I haven’t made many rules about what kind of work I’ll do, and when I used to smoke, I believed that I could consult on work for tobacco companies because to do otherwise would be hypocrisy (I’m wiser now), but “never work for Facebook” was a promise I made maybe a decade ago. I simply do not understand or respect anyone who chooses to, and this book should be required reading for those who think they might.

    ===

    I listened to Alessia Cara’s new album Love & Hyperbole a couple of times, hoping that something would finally click, because I did want to like it. But I was left without much of an impression. I’m probably coming off R&B in general because listening to SZA’s deluxe edition of SOS on the plane home last week was quite excruciating.

    But then I put on Jessie Reyez’s new album PAID IN MEMORIES and I loved the one playthrough I’ve heard. Maybe it’s the millennial in me but there are some samples for old people in here, including the Smashing Pumpkins’ 1979. She makes it work, and the melodies are strong.

  • Week 12.25

    Week 12.25

    • I found solutions to a couple of longstanding bugs and problems relating to date metadata saving on iPhone photos and battery drain on my Kobo, but published them as two separate posts so as not to clutter this update with nerdy troubleshooting.
    • Had a good couple of days in Bangkok. As others prepared me to expect, the shopping centers are a cut above anything in Singapore in terms of scale, brand availability, and features. And there are so many of them, from giant complexes full of small kiosks that feel like the old days of Sim Lim Square, where you have to stay alert or be taken for a ride (MBK Center), to luxe architectural marvels I can’t figure out the sustainable economics for.
    • Like in Tokyo, it was again nice to see so many bookstores thriving, sometimes two in a single mall, which is so not the case in Singapore.
    • I had some time to kill on my first afternoon so I went to the cineplex at Siam Paragon and saw Mickey 17 in a widescreen format called ScreenX that I’d never heard of before. It was also showing in 4DX (with chair motion and blasts of wind, etc.), and the other theaters supported IMAX and different 3D options. They sold popcorn in 8 flavors.
    • The fact that Singaporean cinemas are struggling to survive and haven’t invested in these new technologies/gimmicks was making me slightly jealous, until I read this MUBI Notebook article about how 4DX just distracts you from the film and is an uncomfortable seat to boot.
    • In this new issue of Notebook, they also look at the immersive content available on Apple Vision Pro and comment on these early explorations as being typical of a new form of cinema trying to find its place in the world. As novel as it was to watch Mickey 17 with ScreenX’s additional peripheral content, it obviously doesn’t compare at all to Vision Pro’s immersion, and probably isn’t necessary compared to watching the regular version of a 2D film. So I can’t blame our cinemas for not investing in these new formats to win people back.
    • Also at Siam Paragon, there was a large Nintendo store run by an authorized retailer that kinda gives real Nintendo stores a run for their money. Because they’re not bound by arbitrary brand rules, they can sell third-party products alongside the games and official merchandise, which has the effect of giving a fuller picture of the ecosystem and better celebrating Nintendo’s cultural impact.
    • Japanese culture has a large presence in Bangkok. I saw many brands and retailers that we don’t have here, like Loft, Matsumoto Kiyoshi, Hinoya Curry, and their Books Kinokuniya stores are massive and stocked with tons of manga and anime-related products. There were dedicated Gundam plastic model (Gunpla) stores, a Bandai Namco gachapon store, and even a major Jujutsu Kaisen exhibition in one mall with tickets costing about S$22 (I decided against it).
    • I ended up eating curry rice from Coco Ichibanya and Maji Curry instead of Thai food on a couple of occasions. Cocoichi is better there than it is here (not saying much), but isn’t quite the same as in Japan. Maji Curry, however, should be commended for their consistency. It’s just as good everywhere I’ve had it. That said, they offered me a choice between chicken and beef-based curry sauces, and that was definitely new.
    • The ICONSIAM mall was recommended by many people, but perhaps I was just all malled out by that point because I wasn’t feeling it. The Apple Store there is pretty cool, with very high ceilings and lots of natural light, but it had the effect of making the minimal product displays feel lacking. The Apple Store at CentralwOrld is much more interesting, with its circular design, spiral staircase, and two-story layout.
    • It might also be that minimalism is a rare creature in the Bangkok mall landscape. It can be seriously overstimulating, with hundreds of colorful decorative elements dangling from every surface, or crowded aisles like in the basement of ICONSIAM, which is a bewildering recreation of a chaotic street market, complete with roast crocodile meat on sale, and then you walk 50 meters and pop out next to a sleek Rimowa flagship store.
    • The traffic in Bangkok is a major drawback, pushing visitors to choose calling for a Grab motorbike instead of a car. That’s not a dice roll I’m ready for, so I spent several hours editing photos in the backseats of cars. For example, a 14km trip to the Museum of Contemporary Art took over an hour in the middle of the afternoon, instead of the 15–20 minutes you’d expect from looking at the map.
    MOCA Bangkok
    • MOCA, by the way, has the most breast-obsessed permanent collection I’ve ever seen anywhere in the world. Well over 50% of the work on display features topless women, and I regret not taking more photographic evidence to prove it to you. But here are some paintings I saw plus the current special exhibition, Mammals, which was said to feature 1:4 scale models of animals, except the artist couldn’t resist adding human mammaries to each one for comparison.

    • The National Museum was thankfully a lot tamer, featuring Buddhist statues and unearthed ceramics that tell the story of Thailand’s history over the past few thousand years. These insane carved ivory tusks, though, I thought were worth sharing. They’re fairly recent, made in the 20th century by artisans from Myanmar.
    • Man, that Severance finale, eh? Woof.
    • Wait, I mentioned the shopping scene in Bangkok, but what did I actually come back with? A pair of jeans (that I could have bought back home, really), a Snoopy “Scenery Box” blind box that I first saw in Japan and have regretted not buying, and a MagSafe PopSocket from the current Peanuts Cherry Blossom series that is being featured in select countries’ Apple Stores right now.

  • Fixing freezing and battery drain issues on modern Kobo readers such as the Clara Color

    How to solve a problem where a Kobo ereader will hang or freeze or completely drain to 0% battery life overnight

    I’m posting this in the hopes of helping anyone with the same issue.

    I own an older Kobo Libra H2O model and never had any problems like this, but it happened often with my new Kobo Clara Color. I would pick it up in the morning and find the battery flat. Or I’d be using it and it would lock up and require a hard reboot. It would also lose my reading position in a book when this happened.

    The reason (at least for me; your mileage may vary) can be traced back to ePub files that contain errors such as improper markup or missing font specifications. This can happen if you’re loading your Kobo with ePub files other than those sold through the Kobo e-store, such as privately authored files or converted documents.

    You can address these errors in the free open source book management app, Calibre. Select a book in the main list, then press “T” or choose the menu option to “Edit Book”. Then look in the toolbar for an icon that looks like a bug, which might be labeled “Run Check”. This will scan the ePub file for errors, and offer to fix them automatically. Most of the time, this will solve all problems. Occasionally, a file may have problems that can’t be fixed, in which case you may have to delete or edit some HTML elements yourself, if you know how. When you’re done, press the equivalent of ‘Cmd-S’ to save the changes, and close the window.

    Finally, you’ll want to use a special Kobo-optimized form of the ePub format called KePub (or Kobo ePub) when transferring the files to your Kobo. This format is apparently fully compatible with all ePub readers, but offers enhanced performance when used with Kobos, so you may notice page turns and searches are faster.

    In Calibre’s settings, go to the Plugins page and find the option to install external plugins. Search for KoboTouchExtended and install that, then configure it to automatically convert books before sending them to your device. You can refer to this Reddit thread and the links within it if you run into any trouble.

    If you don’t use Calibre, there are standalone tools for converting ePub files to KePub such as this web-based one which does everything in your browser — no uploading to servers involved.

    Ever since doing this a couple of weeks ago and transferring all my books over again, I haven’t run into this issue despite using it quite a bit.

    Summary

    Problem Cause: ePub files with errors, such as improper markup or missing font specifications, can cause freezing, battery drain, and reading position loss on Kobo Clara Color.

    Solution: Use Calibre to check and fix ePub file errors, then transfer the files to Kobo using KePub format for enhanced performance.

    Plugin Installation: Install the KoboTouchExtended plugin in Calibre and configure it to automatically convert books to KEPUB format before sending them to your Kobo device.

  • Fixing an iOS/iPhone issue where apps don’t save photos with the original date and time metadata

    How to solve an iOS/iPhone bug that prevents third-party editing apps (e.g. Lightroom, VSCO, AgBr) from retaining the date/time metadata from the original photos when saving new edited files

    I’ve tried to pack the right terms in the title and heading above in the hopes that you’ll find this page if you have the same problem that I did.

    For several years, edited photos saved from apps like VSCO wound up with the “current” date and time as the “capture time” on my iPhone, meaning that they don’t sort chronologically alongside the original photos when viewing the Photo Library. I noticed with one app that when I made edits on my iPad, it worked as expected, i.e. the original capture time was retained, but mistakenly believed it was a bug in that specific app that only surfaced in their iPhone version.

    Last week I discovered this behavior in the new AgBr app, and got to emailing with the developers. In that process, I realized it was a problem with my iPhone, and most likely down to a bug in iOS rather than the photo editing apps.

    Without further ado, the solution is to “Reset All Settings” in your iPhone’s Settings app (under General → Transfer or Reset iPhone). This will undo many of your longstanding settings, such as known WiFi networks and cards in your Apple Wallet. It’s a pain in the ass, but much better than wiping the entire phone and starting over from scratch, which is what I thought I would have to do.

    I have no idea when I picked up this problem, but it’s a deep-seated one that has followed me across several iPhones, resurfacing with each migration and “restore from iCloud backup”.

    Funnily enough, I chanced upon the solution while whining about this problem to Michael, and while I was celebrating with way too much joy than fixing a computer problem should give someone, he pointed out that just a few weeks earlier he had also solved a longstanding problem with Safari on his Mac while telling me about it. I think we’ve figured out a winning formula.

    Summary

    Issue Description: Edited photos saved from third-party editing apps on iOS/iPhone lose the original date/time metadata, resulting in incorrect chronological order in the Photo Library.

    Cause: Likely a bug in iOS.

    Solution: Reset All Settings in the iPhone’s Settings app (under General → Transfer or Reset iPhone), though it will reset some settings.

  • Week 11.25

    Week 11.25

    • On Saturday morning there was a circular rainbow across the sky, it’s a circle rainbow all the way, yeah, oh my god. Well officially it was a “sun halo”, and it seems everyone got a photo of it too.
    • It happened right as we were walking out of a new-ish brunch cafe, where I waited what must have been close to an hour for an expensive plate of scrambled eggs, some kale that was actually edible, plus sausage, mushrooms, tomatoes, and pork belly. I’ll take the heat; going for brunch was my idea, but I don’t know why everyone still does this on weekends. The place was packed and a line was still forming at 1pm.
    • I went out and met people several times this week, and on Thursday I managed to drop in on the new Maji Curry outlet at the Funan mall with Brian. I’ve mentioned them several times in the past, and they are probably the most authentic and interesting Japanese curry spot in all of Singapore, although (not to take anything away from Maji) there’s practically no competition. I hope they do so well that other brands have no choice but to enter the market or stop slouching (I’m looking at you, Coco Ichibanya).
    • As a group, I think us millennials have been brainwashed to perfection by advertising algorithms because the first thing Brian pointed out when we met was that we were both carrying the same Bellroy sling bag, albeit in different sizes and colors. I said I’d bought mine on a whim very recently because my mother-in-law was after some sort of small pouch, and for reasons I couldn’t explain, I’d recommended we take a look at Bellroy’s offerings. I couldn’t believe it when he said his in-laws were also in town and he’d bought his under the same circumstances. What the hell, man?
    • Studio Nuevo.Tokyo & Héliographe launched their long-awaited black & white film simulator app, AgBr, which stands for Silver Bromide, of course. It’s currently 50% off as a launch special (S$14.98, one-time purchase, no subscriptions), and I’d recommend it to any fan of black and white photography. The purchase gets you the app across iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and they’re promising a new film preset every month for the rest of the year. Funnily enough, I think the best way to use AgBr is to pair it with the similarly named Halide app, shooting RAW files in “Process Zero” mode. Sure, you can process a normal iPhone photo with a Fujifilm NEOPAN 400 preset, but the HDR exposure won’t look quite right.
    • I watched the new Metallica concert video that Apple TV+ put out for the Vision Pro. At 25 minutes, it’s the longest show they’ve put out so far, and I’m ready for more. Don’t make the same mistake as I did: watch it with AirPods. I used only the built-in audio pods, and while they sounded fine, I think the immersion will be even better if you turn things all the way up. They perform three songs, captured from 14 cameras, and it’s a truly new experience in this world to be right up next to each musician doing their thing on stage, in your own home. My main criticism: the crowd is quite low in the audio mix, so you don’t truly get the feeling of being there with all that energy (they could have offered two audio tracks to choose from, maybe).
    • With this, Apple has tried four immersive presentations of music on the Vision Pro: A traditional music video (The Weeknd), an intimate band rehearsal in the studio (Alicia Keys), a Concert For One where the artist is right there with you (Raye), and now a full-blown, live arena show. Next up is Bono’s full-length documentary on May 30, Stories of Surrender. I personally can’t stand the guy, but if this changes my mind, then that’s really saying something about this new format.
    • I spotted this familiar Mario statue (?) at the Courts/Nojima/Nittori electronics and homeware frankenstore on Orchard Road, in the old Heeren building. He pops up in the gaming sections of Japanese stores like Yodobashi Camera, and I saw him at least twice last month in Tokyo, so it was a surprise to see him here. It was mostly a sad reminder that our electronics retailers sell junkier crap and aren’t anywhere as fun to browse.
    • For the past couple of months, I’ve been writing these posts in Apple Notes, solely because of its integration with Apple Intelligence, which does a quick QA check at the end. However, rich text formatting in Apple Notes is quite laborious (having to select text and choose styles from a menu), and often I lose some of it anyway when pasting the text over into WordPress. It became more trouble than it was worth.
    • I’m now back to using iA Writer, my tried-and-trusted Markdown text editor of choice, where text formatting is simply done with in-line symbols so you can focus on writing. It makes much more sense on mobile devices. This is an excuse to mention Apple Intelligence, which has recently been in the news for falling behind schedule and possibly the rest of the industry. I’m not super reliant on AI to correct my writing, but it has definitely helped catch the odd typo and missing word. By right, I should be able to use it systemwide, in iA Writer and any other app on my iPhone, but the implementation is inconsistent and so the “Proofread” feature can’t walk me through the changes it makes; it just makes them and I can accept ALL the new text or not at all. This is what I would prefer we get in iOS 19: a rigorous cleaning up of bugs and rounding of corners so that what we already have works better than what’s on any other OS. If we have to wait a couple more years for truly agentic edge AI from Apple, that kinda sucks, but we’ve been here before. I remember the days of wanting a bigger screen and having to put up with the iPhone 5 and 5s for two years. 🤷‍♂️
    • TV: We finally started on the new season of Reacher now that enough episodes have come out. We also decided to pick up House on Amazon Prime Video from the beginning of season 5, since I’m pretty sure we finished four seasons back when the iPhone first came out or thereabouts. House uses a flip phone. It’s terribly formulaic but also fun, and the perfect kinda show for watching at the end of the night.
  • Week 10.25

    Week 10.25

    • I got busy with a little work for the first time in ages, helping Rob out with an interesting web project he’s taken on. Well, I say I’ve helped, but only he would know, and he’s too nice to tell me if I didn’t. It was a good experience in that I now know it’s not impossible to get going again quickly from zero; come to think of it, I did pretty much get thrown straight into it after my last sabbatical too. But I also know that sitting alone in my home office with nobody to collaborate with is not a lot of fun anymore.
    • Regular readers may recall that Michael (who, along with Yiwen, I sadly failed to meet up with in Tokyo despite having many weeks to do so) once told me that he’s probably never seen a cockroach in Japan. Well, they must follow me around or something, because I saw a dead one on the floor of the apartment building’s garbage sorting room just a few days into our trip. Now, after a few days back, I found a dead one at home. Measures have been taken, but my mental state is brittle glass. I got a quote for professional help (pest control, not psychiatry), and they want about S$900/year for peace of mind. I’m wavering. Maybe.
    • I thought I was done with travel for a while, but it looks like I’ll be going to Bangkok soon for (*small voice*) the first time in my life. Nobody can believe it when I say that because all Singaporeans are expected to love Thailand and to go shopping there several times a year or something. It suggests that I should be ashamed, like the time I went into a MOS Burger and declined chilli sauce with my fries, and the aunty (see, I am a local) asked incredulously, “No chilli? Are you a Singaporean?” Well ackshually! “I can’t tolerate proper spicy food, and I don’t see the point in flying to another hot and humid city!” — are reasons why I haven’t so far, but now I will, and I might love it. It’s just for a few days, and I’m under no obligation to deep-dive the city and make the most of it. There should be plenty of time for other visits if all goes well.
    • A couple of months ago, it was suggested that a couple of us friends should institute a regular dinner ritual because it’s too easy to withdraw and neglect relationships as you get old. I agree with this, and we’ve been doing it, but I still don’t know what fundamentally changes this with age. The easy explanation is more time being taken up by marriages and children and work and caregiving, coinciding with a decrease in overall social and physical energy. But there must be more to it. I used to think it was wild that my parents stopped going out to the movies, only visited the same few familiar restaurants and malls, and appeared to have a shrinking circle of concern. But now I’m here too. I used to know what was happening around town through some unconscious osmosis, but Orchard Road is an alien place whenever I pass through now. Perhaps it’s a decline in curiosity and, subsequently, neuroplasticity. We need to institute some rituals around that.

    Media activity

    • Still reading The Satanic Verses. It’s disorienting, like swimming in viscous psychedelics. I said to my book club that it sometimes feels like watching Quantum Leap the way you, the reader, keep surfacing into new stories and identities and viewpoints — you break above the water, gasping just long enough to get your bearings on some new threads, and then you’re pulled under again. What an incredible achievement.
    • Not related at all, but man is Conclave an amazing film! Such a shame it didn’t pick up more Oscars. I enjoyed it so much I was hoping it would go longer than it did.
    • I put Jennie’s debut album on during a long train journey and while it was better than Lisa’s album (agree with that 5.2/10 Pitchfork review, btw), it was still kind of like an imitation of interesting pop music. I didn’t get the sense that Jennie is anyone, and that these were just some beats she’d curated from producers’ submissions.
    • Queued up directly after Ruby was BANKS’s new album, Off With Her Head, and I honestly FELT that transition. “Okay, this is getting good” soon turned into “oh, this is actually another album”. I know they’re not really in the same category (except for both having features from Doechii), but BANKS’s work sounded so much sharper, from the control of her voice to the quality of the production. So the Blackpink solo effort ranking still stands at Rose > Jennie > Lisa > Jisoo for me (with a wide gulf right in the middle).
  • Week 9.25

    Week 9.25

    I made it home safely on an ANA flight. To be honest, I expected a lot from the Japanese carrier but their seats were noticeably narrower than SIA’s, and the food was also disappointing compared to other economy class meals in recent memory. The only area they clearly beat Singapore Air in was probably cabin crew service. They were either as genuinely earnest and eager to please as they looked, or at least well drilled in rigid protocols. For instance, I noticed them bowing deeply to no one in particular each time they passed through the curtains to enter and leave a cabin section. The ‘Singapore Girl’ is only a part-time persona, but omotenashi is a lifelong affliction. 

    In my last couple of days in Tokyo, I embarked on a Doctor X viewing marathon and managed to complete season 5. I downloaded seasons 6 and 7 offline on my iPad and hoped to watch them back home, only to discover later that those later seasons don’t have English subs at all. I guess they never got international distribution and so no one bothered. It turns out that this is actually one of the biggest shows on Japanese TV, with some episodes having up to 25% national viewership!

    So after binge-watching nearly 30 episodes of people collapsing from brain tumors and hidden afflictions, I became convinced that 1) I was probably very sick and should get a health exam soon, and 2) I couldn’t leave Japan without a Doctor X souvenir of some sort. That led to a hectic visit to the TV Asahi store at Tokyo Station on my last afternoon (is the Character Street ever not crowded?), where I picked up a ballpoint pen emblazoned with her catchphrase, and an extremely overpriced little figurine of the series mascot, an orange cat named Ben Casey.

    Coming back to the heat and humidity has not turned out to be as unpleasant as I feared. Actually, it’s been a slight relief — after a month in the dry winter’s air, and lacking the natural instincts to moisturize thoroughly and regularly, I’ve developed pretty dry skin in some places. It got bad enough that the pad of my right thumb became rough enough to get in the way of using my iPhone’s screen. And now, after just a few days back in the soupy Singaporean air, everything’s returning to normal.

    Media Activity

    • It was good to be reunited with my Vision Pro. I’d considered bringing it, but didn’t think it would be essential given the presence of a smart TV in the apartment, and not a whole lot of free time to be sitting around watching movies or anything. In the end, I think that was the right call, but coming back to it has felt great. I’ve only seen one of the two new Apple Immersive Video features that came out, the “Deep Water Solo” episode of Adventure, and although some have said the rodeo documentary is better, it was still extremely cool and nerve-wracking to watch.
    • A bunch of other new apps and experiences came out in the last month, and I tried Synth Riders for the first time because there’s a new Kendrick Lamar stage featuring the song HUMBLE. It’s an Apple Arcade rhythm game not too dissimilar to Beat Saber, where you hit targets and trace lines rushing towards you with your hands. I’m not great at it and at this age, my hand-eye coordination will probably never master its intricacies, but it’s certainly a thrilling game. I agree with critics who say that AVP gaming needs physical controllers, because the lack of haptic feedback does hold the game back from total immersion.
    • We caught up with Severance on Apple TV+, and this show deserves all the attention it’s been getting for episode 7. Visually and conceptually, there’s nothing else out now that comes close to its artistry. Supporting the creation of prestige TV of this quality is reason enough to keep buying iPhones, imo.
    • Over on Netflix, where the shows look like ungraded LOG files with scenes lit at random, we found their new limited series Zero Day a pretty satisfying watch. I expected Robert De Niro to fully phone it in, but hey, it’s okay! The set-up is a good one, and very much like a 90s Michael Douglas thriller, but I also loved that it reminded me of Neal Stephenson’s Interface, in which an American president has his integrity compromised in a really interesting way.
    • I’ve started on two games on the Nintendo Switch. Bunny Garden is like if you took the hostess club minigames out of the Yakuza/Like a Dragon series and made them into a standalone title. So it’s just making conversation choices and optimizing a job loop to make more money to buy more gifts and level up your relationships.
    • The other “game” is Witch on the Holy Night, by the developer Type-Moon. The original is a legendary classic that came out in 2012, but this 2022 remastered version has updated graphics and is probably the most kinetic and impressive visual novel I’ve ever seen. There is so much beautiful, animated art accompanying the text, and with so little repetition, that it feels like an impossible achievement: a triple-A visual novel. It’s just too bad there’s no gameplay here, no choices to make at all. It’s an animated book with an audio track.
    • In terms of traditional books, I finished reading Pierce Brown’s Red Rising, a YA book that feels very much cut from the same cloth as The Hunger Games. I started off not liking it much (possibly for that reason), but it has some unique twists and tensions, and I found myself enjoying it more and more. By the end, I was ready to read more of the series, of which six books are currently out. Well, I’ll get to them someday.
    • After literal decades of putting it off for fear of the staggering challenge, I’m now reading Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, and loving it. It’s been years since I’ve read one of his books, and I’d forgotten how playful, funny, ingenious, and inventive his writing is. It’ll probably keep me busy for the next month at least.