- I’ve been with Gomo (budget SingTel) since last August, barely scratching my absurd 600GB/month plan. But after reading Michael’s blog post about switching telcos, I jumped back to Giga within the hour — they’ve finally fixed 5G support for iPhones, and it’s a 5G Standalone network (better) as well. Overall, this will save me a few bucks each month, drop me down to a still-generous 400GB limit, and give even more international data. This new trend of bundling roaming data is a boon for travel; I’ve managed to do without buying separate eSIMs on a few trips now. Until next year, then.
- After finishing the Shinchan game last week, I started on a game that I fell in love with at first sight: Tiny Bookshop. It’s almost as good as I was hoping — you do run a tiny bookshop, stock its shelves, and recommend real book titles to fit people’s needs, but the core gameplay loop is quite simple. That’s not a bad thing — it just means this is the sort of cozy and casual game you play alongside something more involved and epic. One thing that did happen almost immediately: it gave me a hankering to do some reading.
- I got tired of waiting for my book club to inch through Cloud Atlas and finished it on my own. It’s not as groundbreaking as I recall it feeling when I read it in 2013, but perhaps that’s because many of its moves have been copied in popular media since. It’s also a lot less sci-fi than I remembered, and much more like a genre writing exercise with several loosely (and one might argue unnecessarily) connected stories. In my Goodreads review, I called it a 3-star concept with 5-star execution.
- Much more sci-fi: I also finished John Scalzi’s The Ghost Brigades, which I’ve been reading in parallel over the past couple of weeks. It’s a lot of fun, and a sequel that’s even better than the first book, Old Man’s War.
- Speaking of old, Ryan Adams released a reworking of his seminal album, Heartbreaker, for its 25TH ANNIVERSARY (!?). Where did the time go? Incidentally, I came across that album the year it came out when a friend in the army recommended it. I remember borrowing his copy to burn a CD-R because I couldn’t afford to buy my own. I haven’t seen that guy in 20 years, but coincidentally this month, I discovered that Kim knows him through work and sent my regards. The original record was a lightning bolt: raw, full of yearning and reckless honesty. The new version sands it all down into a flaccid bore. He’s taken a hungry debut and embalmed it in strings and piano. Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now is an example of how to do this well. A few tracks survive the treatment, but most of it lands like one of those Disney live-action remakes: glossy, lifeless, and unnecessary.
- Speaking of old, it was Peishan’s birthday this weekend and we hung out for a brunch that went from noon to evening. Nice day, no notes. The discussion touched on topics that have come up on ChannelNewsAsia programming recently — it turns out I watch too much of this — such as home-based businesses, which is incidentally where our coffee came from. I also thought for a brief moment that it might be fun to do a podcast from the future, recorded in an underground bunker after the fall of society, discussing found pop culture artifacts from our present day and guessing at the role they played in the apocalypse. Things like Labubus, Season 4 of Entourage, Magic: The Gathering, Blackpink, live-action Snow White. Maybe call it “Funintended Consequences”.
- We also talked about the different approaches men and women (generalized) take to making podcasts. Men apparently are happy to record hours of conversation that’s interesting to nobody else, refusing to edit it down to only the useful bits; basically having no interest in the needs of their audiences, as seen in real life in a meeting room near you. I figured that this makes sense because men get together and record podcasts mainly as an excuse to hang out and shoot the shit with friends. At least, that’s been the motivation every time people I know say they should start one.
- Speaking of old, I put on Apple Music’s “Classic Hip-Hop” radio station (algorithmic, not human hosted) expecting to only hear the usual 80s–90s boom bap, you know, the stuff I was too young to hear in real time, but oh my… there was some Jay-Z and Dr. Dre material from the 2000s mixed in there. We’re the classics now.
Week 36.25
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