sangsara.net

Month: July 2025

  • Week 30.25

    Week 30.25

    • In Melbourne at the moment, getting some relief from the heat of summer which seems to be getting worse with every year for no reason anyone can see at all! There’s no plan, just chilling at cafes, bars, and hanging with some friends for a few days.
    • Our friends in the city have built an incredible home for their three kids, rabbits, chickens, and visiting mothers-in-law. And for now, us as well. It’s the sort of setup that you can almost never find in Singapore, not without incurring generational debt, and it almost justifies all the dreaming Singaporeans do over a retirement in Australia. Almost. Because those people are surely forgetting to consider one crucial detail: hairy spiders the size of your hand.
    • I’ve brought no camera besides my iPhone. I’ve got my Kobo and iPad to read and draw, but left the Switch 2 at home. It feels nice having less stuff to keep track of, and I never understood the attraction of playing video games on holiday anyway. Why would you escape reality only to… escape reality again?
    • Before leaving, I met Brian for beer and ramen — the former at an Irish pub in Singapore that was entirely populated with middle-aged white men when I walked in. When the bartender told the waiter who to send the pints of Guinness to, I heard him call me “the Chinese man”, which is a description that would normally never help you in Singapore. 
    • We talked a bit about Bosch because I’d recommended the Amazon TV series to him awhile back and he’s now enjoyed all seven seasons of the mainline show. He did, however, notice that season 7 felt a little different (I personally can’t remember), and found out that some network suits came in at that time and tried to make changes to the show. Right after, the series moved to the Freevee channel and became Bosch Legacy, where the vibes became noticeably different again and the supporting cast changed. I still love them all though.
    • And now there’s a new 10-episode Bosch spinoff series, Ballard, starring Maggie Q. I’ve yet to start on it, and while I want it to be good in the same ‘LA Noir’ way that Bosch was, I gotta be realistic and prepare for a load of network exec bullshit.
    • On the flight over, I finished reading Old Man’s War, a very entertaining John Scalzi sci-fi novel about signing up for an intergalactic war at the age of 75; read Blake Crouch’s Summer Frost, a solid short story about AI that could easily become a film; skimmed the popular financial self-help book Die With Zero; and started on Nick Harkaway’s Tigerman without knowing a thing about it but it’s already going well.
    • Without any in-flight entertainment on the budget flight, I mainly listened to the excellent 1998 Counting Crows live double album [Across A Wire — Live From New York](https://music.apple.com/sg/album/across-a-wire-live-from-new-york/1440858296). It’s still as good as it was when I was younger, [but I would say that](Why our teenage music listening has a life-long impact – BBC Teach), wouldn’t I?
  • Week 29.25

    Week 29.25

    • It was a low-key week after those few days in Bangkok. There’s more travel lined up soon, so I figure it’s no bad thing to enjoy the quiet while I can. We had someone come by to look at a house issue that’s been worrying me, but the prognosis was that it’s not a big problem for now, and they’ll do some proactive repairs in the meantime. So I have to admit life’s pretty good.
    • When I first went to Bangkok back in March, I found the retail scene vibrant and thriving in a way that you don’t see in Singapore anymore, and this week there was a long and well-researched piece on CNA about how shopping in other SEA countries has made Singapore seem dull in comparison. It’s a rough situation because we’re short on both land and entrepreneurial spirit, which means a vicious circle of high rents and safe concepts. People like to blame greedy landlords, but I suspect they’re the same ones counting on retiring with their REIT and bank dividends. You can’t have one without the other.
    • Doing my part for the restaurant scene, I ate out thrice this week and two were unhealthy affairs. A Singaporean sort of pub (al fresco) with Guinness and Thai food, and a Chinese hot pot restaurant picked for its amusing name, HIPPOT, that turned out to be one of those meals that goes down easy but feels awful after. Too much grease and heat. Note to self: make better choices!
    • The only thing I bought on the Amazon Prime Day sale was a book I’ve been wanting for a while, but the shipping cost is usually almost as much as the book itself. Thanks to the questionable economics of Amazon, shipping was free this time. The book is A Handheld History by Lost in Cult, and it covers the corner of gaming hardware that I have the most affection for: portable systems like the Game Boy and PSP. I suppose the smartphone is inadvertently part of that lineage; a stepchild or distant cousin. I don’t know when I’ll sit down to read it — paper books are just… inconvenient — but I look forward to that rainy afternoon.
    • I just finished reading The Butcher’s Boy by Thomas Perry, a 1982 thriller about a hitman. The anniversary edition’s foreword was written by Michael Connelly, author of the Bosch series, which got me in the right mood. If you liked the recent Day of the Jackal TV series, this will likely do it for you. The killer is the sort that doesn’t look especially athletic or dangerous, in fact he has the kind of face people don’t remember, but he’s great at what he does and when he gets into a jam, you root for him to get out. There are three more in the series [Goodreads], so those are going on my list.
    • Evan mentioned to me the existence of an Amiibo emulator a few weeks back, and when I saw one show up on Reddit it nudged me into ordering a unit off AliXpress. It’s a small electronic device that you can program to mimic the NFC chips on various Nintendo Amiibo figures, which unlock benefits in certain games when held next to your Switch/Switch 2 console. As I am very much against the idea of making people waste money buying large amounts of unnecessary plastic crap to unlock software features built into the games they already own, I have no moral qualms about using one of these.
    • This doesn’t have Amiibo support, but I played and finished Caravan SandWitch this week on the Switch. Weird name that doesn’t tell you much, I know, but hey it’s French. It’s a chill little indie game about exploring a planet (inspired by the landscapes of Provence) in search of your missing sister, with strong anticapitalist vibes, and was mentioned in a recent NYT article about videogames with a Studio Ghibli-like aesthetic. I enjoyed it enough as a short adventure, but the English translation lets it down in some areas. It runs well enough on the Switch 2, but I think the frame rate will be choppy on a regular Switch. 3.5/5.0
    • Pulpy paperbacks and cozy games are good and all, but a great media diet needs something of substance, and thankfully MUBI delivered. They’re featuring a two-film collection by the director Shinji Somai on their front page, and I was floored by both of them. They’re linked by a shared theme of childhood summers marked by transformative upheavals — broken families, deaths, newfound freedoms — but also the building of friendships, independence, and memories that become strengths in adulthood.
    • Moving (1993) features an incredible performance by Tomoko Tabata who was probably 12 at the time; the kind of work that’s almost too good, too early — fortunately she’s still working in film and TV today. There are lines in this that hit so hard, and incredibly audacious and magical sequences that are as good as anything I’ve seen put on film.
    • Notably, the three titular child actors in The Friends (1994) never acted in anything again. Scrambled by emotion after the ending, I hastily wrote on Letterboxd: “A film doesn’t have any business being this good! I cried till my Face ID struggled. There are frames in this so beautiful they should be hung in the Louvre.” Both films are a 5/5 for me. Perhaps for the way they perfectly capture the haziness of childhood memories, the nostalgic look and air of that era, and the open-ended way that school holidays felt as you experienced them. Stuff we didn’t think would matter becomes what we remember most.
  • Week 28.25

    Week 28.25

    • Despite a brief setback, we ended up going to Bangkok for a few days as planned.
    • After spending hours in traffic the last time, I stayed within a smaller radius this time and walked a bit more. There wasn’t any agenda, really; Kim had some things to do and I wanted a change of scenery.
    • There was a jam coming in from the airport, of course, but we were thankfully in a very comfortable ride provided by the hotel. Ours was one of many cars squeezing down the narrow side lanes on the freeway — those buffer zones you don’t normally think cars should (or could) be using. Other cars in the ‘proper lanes’ skooch over to make way for this to happen, and it struck me as a neat metaphor for designing permissive, flexible systems with a normal mode but hiding ample bandwidth to accommodate emergencies.
    • Amidst more news of layoffs and economic rockiness, I think using AI in design (or most things, maybe) should be the side lane to ‘proper lanes’ of humans doing work, but we’re trying to do the opposite. Someone showed me a new customer research platform called GetWhy, where AI personalities conduct interviews over video calls with people, and synthesize some manner of insights automatically. They call it “human depth at survey speed”, which I knew AI would eventually enable: a merging of qualitative methods with quantitative scale. I saw it coming a couple of years ago but didn’t have the strength to look at it directly and figure out the pros and cons. At a gut level, I think it’s a shame that companies will now be able to insert another artificial layer between the people working on services and the people they’re supposed to be serving (or, more cynically, extracting profit from).
    • Anyway back to Bangkok. I saw three films to pass free time in the afternoons. Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning for a second time; Jurassic World Rebirth, which was so terrible and completely lacking in the magic of the original film, the lasting fumes of which this franchise is still somehow able to sustain itself on; and James Gunn’s Superman, which I accidentally saw in Thai, without subtitles. I decided to sit through the whole thing and get by on just the visual language of it, and I think the experiment went okay! I probably couldn’t watch Tenet (2020) this way, though. 3/5 stars with the above qualification.
    • On Brian’s suggestion, I visited the Thailand Creative & Design Center (TCDC) which is a government office in a historic postal service building, mostly notable for its extensive resource library. You have to be a member to enter, although day passes are available for about S$4. It was a good way to pass a couple of hours, and I flipped through some interesting books that are now on my Amazon wishlist.
    • One of them was For the Love of Peanuts, by Elizabeth Anne Hartman, which covers the Peanuts Global Artist Collective — a project where seven artists reimagined Schulz’s characters through public art and exhibitions. There’s more information and photos through the link above. I was coincidentally thinking about learning to draw Snoopy recently, the “correct” way, and seeing this book was such a jolt to my narrow way of thinking — it had simply never occurred to me that I was free to recreate Snoopy however I wanted. Lots of new synapses to build here.
    • At the last minute, I decided not to bring my Switch 2 and it was fine. I always imagine hours of downtime on vacation where I might actually want to play a game, but it never happens. I did use my iPad Pro and am going through a sort of second wave of love for it. I recently got a third-party Smart Folio-type case, for just $12 off Amazon, which makes it much thinner and lighter than Apple’s Magic Keyboard case. The original Smart Cover (launched with iPad 2) is/was such a brilliant and minimal design, giving the device a perfect midpoint between versatility and portability, and having it again with this case is great for traveling.
    • It’s worth mentioning that each night back at the hotel I’d get into a trashy reality tv cable channel dedicated to “courtroom cases”. The quote marks are because I don’t know if you’d call these actual legal courts (but with the US, who knows?), but the two series I saw were awful and entertaining. Paternity Court sees couples come in and argue about their children, usually born on the side with another man or woman, culminating in the results of a DNA test revealing whether the man really is their father. Divorce Court is better, because you get other sorts of relationship issues being worked out, and the judges are sassier and give out strong advice. The name is a misnomer; some of these couples aren’t even married or looking for a divorce, they’re just airing their shit on TV. You can watch full episodes on their YouTube channel.
    • On the flight home, I caught Doctor-X: The Movie Final (2024), the supposed concluding chapter to the long-running Japanese medical drama that’s so bad I fell in love with it. Back in February, I spent an absurdly cost-inefficient chunk of my Tokyo trip watching Seasons 4 and 5 on local Netflix. Seasons 6 and 7 don’t have English subs, so I don’t know when I’ll get to see them — unlike Superman, this is too important to risk rawdogging in a foreign language.
      The movie… well, they went for higher stakes: explosions, AI, helicopters, the works. But that also meant less of the dumb fun and weird humor that makes the regular show a cult favorite. Or maybe not so cult at all — maybe it’s unironically loved in Japan. I kinda hope so.
  • Week 27.25

    Week 27.25

    • It’s getting hot down here, and reluctant as I am to use air-conditioning during the day while just sitting indoors, I’ve had to have it on in short spurts to bring the temperature down at times. Depending on the fates, I might be off to Bangkok again next week, where the heat’s reportedly even more brutal. Let’s see.
    • It was Apple Music’s 10th anniversary, and they’re doing some things like opening a new studio in LA, releasing a Top 500 list of the most-streamed songs, and — this one I especially enjoyed — a two-hour show with Zane Lowe and Ebro Darden, founding DJs of the Beats 1 (now Apple Music 1) radio station. It’s mostly Zane reflecting on their experience and telling behind-the-scenes stories from the frantic early days, backed by some all-time great tunes. For example, how they had just three months to find studio spaces around the world and go live, how the first song to be played on-air was chosen, and how the difficulty of recruiting DJs led to them having artists host their own shows (the best things usually start as hacks).
    • The show reminded me why I still love Apple Music, flaws and all: it’s here for the culture. It’s the one streaming service where passion for music is clearly evident, and it comes from the people helming the shows, both the DJs and the artists as mentioned, like Elton John, FKA twigs, Anderson .Paak, Jamie xx, and The Weeknd, to name a few. Shows and playlists put together by artists are such a cool (and obvious!) way to connect with fans, it’s hard to believe they weren’t really a thing before Apple Music.
    • I remember exactly where I was (Reykjavik) the day Apple Music launched, and how absolutely furious I was that the Beats 1 radio station wasn’t available in Singapore. It’s just goddamn internet radio, so why!? It was only after a year that it finally launched for us. I never found out the reason, but I assumed censorship and broadcast licensing hoops had to be jumped through, and welp I guess that’s the cost of being Singaporean. Still, I switched over from Spotify on day one and haven’t looked back. While looking through the archives, I found this post in 2014 before the acquisition, where I was pretty sure Apple would keep the Beats brand on their headphones but turn Beats Music into the backend of an “iTunes Unlimited” service. I sorta called it.
    • A Japanese mobile game I’ve been waiting for had its global launch on July 3: Persona 5 X (P5X). When you hear that, you might expect a gacha-based Persona 5 spinoff, based on some crappy mobile game squad battle mechanics. So I was surprised by how close it is to an actual Persona game, despite the necessary gacha and mobile elements. The graphics look and feel so close to the mainline titles that I’m convinced they could port them to iPhone if they wanted. However it’s mostly a solo adventure game, and I would love to see a different, massively multiplayer social game design uniting the world to fight shadows in the “metaverse” (don’t blame me, it’s the actual term they use).
    • However, the Japanese mobile game recently launched globally in English that’s been blowing up on my timeline is Umamusume: Pretty Derby, which is a horse racing game based on actual legendary champion horses, except they’re personified as idol girls who perform in full-blown concerts after winning. I’ve downloaded it for kicks, but I think it’s a neigh for me.
    • I came across a new drawing app for iPhone/iPad called Graintouch, and instantly bought it for S$15 after seeing its lovely Risograph aesthetics (a sort of Japanese photocopier from the 80s). It’s wonderfully minimal, to the point of restricting you to just 18 predefined colors, and simulates the look of paper prints. You can even hit a “misalignment” button that offsets the layers at random. It’s a welcome change from the overly powerful Procreate, which makes me feel like a learner driver at the wheel of a Ferrari.
    • I decided I might use this for the drawings I’d planned on doing, and started doodling around to get a feel for it. The result is a bunch of silly characters with googly eyes, and I kinda like them! Maybe I’ll do more and try to improve them.
    “Valentine”
    • I took my parents out to see F1 The Movie in a cinema, and found that senior citizens only pay S$5 per ticket on weekdays. If I had that benefit, I’d see every movie. Anyway, the film was great, and I say that as someone who doesn’t give a damn about F1 (my dad, on the other hand, is a total fanatic who watches every season). Apple did the right thing putting this out in theaters properly before streaming; it really deserves the big screen and too-loud speakers. An incredible popcorn movie, so good that for two hours you’ll find Brad Pitt likable despite everything we’ve heard about how he’s fallen out with his kids and maybe isn’t such a great guy. 4.5 / 5 stars.
    • We binged Season 4 of The Bear over the weekend. It made me wonder if there really are people out there like these characters, raised in so much chaos that their primary mode of communication is shouting and clashing with increasing intensity. I love watching it happen in 30-minute bouts, but by god it’s tiring. Overall, I think this was a slightly stronger season than the last one, and while I still love the directors swinging for the fences with concept episodes, they are becoming a little too expected. The best thing they could do in Season 5 would be to subvert those expectations and deliver a full-heartedly commercial happy ending.