sangsara.net

Month: December 2025

  • Week 52.25

    Week 52.25

    Merry Christmas! For my main gift, I received a turntable, something that I’ve been very conflicted about wanting for awhile. Apart from the fatal hipster embarrassment, I know that the urge to repurchase all my favorite albums on vinyl is a road to financial ruin.

    Back in February, I was on the lookout for a CD player to bring home from Tokyo, but decided against it because digital streaming is identical, if not superior in the case of lossless and Spatial Audio, and I couldn’t see many instances where I would bother to get up and pop a CD on instead of just call out a request to my HomePod. And HomePods don’t accept Bluetooth or line-in audio, so I’d have to use my Sony soundbar or buy a third speaker for the living room. Too much hassle!

    But vinyl, goddamnit, just barely dodges the killing blow of that logical argument by having a different value proposition. One, the physical LPs are more collectible, more beautiful, more mentally stimulating in a world that wants to turn itself into ephemeral bits. People say that intentionally putting on a record for close listening deepens your connection with the music over just tapping a link. Two, the audio characteristics of an all-analog reproduction chain are surely different from digital. So if you can, why not have both options for home enjoyment? Three, it’s just kinda cool?

    So I asked Santa for an Audio-Technica LP70X, which has the option of Bluetooth output. I briefly considered buying one of those Marshall speakers to pair it with, but the idea was so cringe I couldn’t face it. Besides, that would nullify point No. 2 — why bother if you’re going to digitize it? So I hooked it up to an unused B&O Beolit 12 speaker (which has unceremoniously served as a stand for our bedroom HomePod mini for years) via RCA cable instead. Voila, money saved that can be used for buying records!

    But first, guardrails were needed. I decided that I would only buy absolute masterpiece, timeless, desert island discs. No new pop/rock stuff that wouldn’t benefit much from the analog format. And that my collection would 95% focus on jazz. The exceptions are things like LUX and J Dilla’s Donuts, maybe.

    After some laborious rewiring, we got it set up on Saturday and played some records that Kim bought as souvenirs many years ago. Radiohead’s OK Computer was one of them, and while I suspect much of it is down to the different speakers’ sound profiles, the analog version is bassier and warmer. When the HomePod plays a lossless digital version of the same song, it has an incredible immersive quality, so clear and bright that the band could be in the same room. A film camera versus iPhone’s computational photography. Room for both.

    Anyhow, it’s been wayyyy too addictive browsing records on Amazon — and the ones that ship from Japan are usually much cheaper than the US versions. Here’s what’s on the way but please recommend me your faves!

    1. Miles Davis – Kind of Blue
    2. Vince Guaraldi Trio – A Charlie Brown Christmas
    3. John Coltrane – A Love Supreme: The Complete Masters
    4. John Coltrane – Blue Train
    5. Chet Baker – Chet Baker Sings
    6. Ornette Coleman – The Shape of Jazz to Come
    7. Bill Evans Trio – Sunday at the Village Vanguard
    8. Bill Evans Trio – Waltz for Debby
    9. Sonny Rollins – Saxophone Colossus

    ===

    While we’re out here talking about physical artifacts and meaningful rituals, I want to point out that this final post of the year is also the 287th weekly update on this blog. About five and a half years of regular writing — all because I started one week with no idea how long I would keep going, just the hope that it would help me to write more often than a couple of times a year. Today, this weekly blogging of things that captured my attention has become my most meaningful routine, and produces a living artifact that I find quite valuable.

    Writing is thinking, and so putting time aside to articulate your feelings and actions, and reflect on the patterns within them, might be the best way to understand and recalibrate your own life. You don’t have to blog in public; journaling works too. Several times a year, I find myself reading an old post that I’d completely forgotten about, and recognize that something happening with me in the present began with something further back.

    Mark Curtis, one of the co-founders of Fjord where I once worked, has just started a Substack called Full Moon with a partner, and in their latest post suggest that everyone should start a habit of “externalizing their thinking”, because a personal archive of written thoughts and ideas has new applications with today’s LLMs. Having such a corpus can be an asset, and not just for training a soulless version of yourself who goes to work for the corpos while you stay home and watch vids. One thing generative AIs do well is find patterns across large amounts of data, and so with journal entries they provide a means of browsing your own brain over time.

    No stranger to this idea, I assigned Claude to read all 51 posts of the year so far, looking out for trends and threads that I might not have seen while posting in real time. What came back had a hint of that AI voice, but contained a helpful synthesis of several threads. Let me explain in my own words rather than simply paste the results.

    There were several recurring themes and obsessions, for instance deaths and funerals earlier on in the year, and it linked those to some musings on age and mortality when I started to feel old around my birthday, and when I recently said I should watch my purine intake for fear of developing gout.

    It suggested that I was doing something meaningful by making plans to meet up with people during this sabbatical, and that keeping in touch with ex-colleagues and helping grade college students’ presentations was part of staying connected to design culture and “keeping the ladder down”. There were also many words dedicated to creative experiments; chasing after the beauty in imperfections, from film grain to mistranslations; and of course, AI concerns.

    From that overarching theme, I ended up musing about the vulnerability of the junior designer pipeline, the commercial pressure to abandon not only proven methods but our values, and the dissonance caused by being a regular user of AI tools while knowing they come at some unknown but surely high cost.

    It also provided some insights into how I spent my time, calling it an attempt at presence over productivity. I certainly didn’t do any work I didn’t care about! I recall saying in Week 26.25, as I revisited my CliftonStrengths profile, that my natural inclination is to hate keeping busy and productive for the sake of it. I recently wrote something down in my notebook that sums up that energy: “I take tremendous joy in being able to do quite a few things extremely well and yet choosing to do none of them.” Perhaps underachieving is my passion.

    More acts of presence: I went overseas for about two months out of the year and chose a slow “daily life” approach over hitting up a flurry of tourist attractions. I deleted a bunch of games off my backlog — if it doesn’t spark joy, I decided, then I don’t have to finish it. I fell into a Japanese curry “research” rabbit hole in the first half, and now it’s sardines. I managed to make more time for reading, and am now starting on my 52nd book of the year, which is quite a nice achievement even if some entries were short stories and novellas.

    The last book I read was so good that I’m making it recommended reading for everyone who comes by here.* Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in his own words is a free ebook by the Steve Jobs Archive, collecting in chronological order various speeches, emails, and interviews he gave. It’s not so much about Apple the company as it is about his views, spirit, and character that famously evolved between his ouster from that company and his triumphant return.

    I read it on the plane back from China, and maybe I was coming off an emotionally taxing time, but I had to stop reading several times because my eyes were tearing up. Don’t discount the beautifully cosmic coincidence of an adopted boy landing in the right family at just the right time in Silicon Valley. The result was that the whole world now enjoys thoughtful personal computers anyone can use. In another universe where the Mac never existed, there’d probably be no Windows either, and likely no smartphones as we know them.

    If you’ve ever heard him speak, you’ll hear his voice in all of these snippets. He had a way of keeping the forest in view, and often framed smaller moments (and even human life) against a vast span of time: what we’re doing here as a species, how it matters when we make things for each other, and thereby why we must carefully choose where we spend our time.

    *I’ll take this year-end opportunity to say thanks for reading, whether this is your first visit or you’ve been here all along. I get messages sometimes, and it’s always gratifying to hear something was a useful tip or interesting to someone else. Happy new year!

    ===

    I almost forgot. My seventh BLixTape playlist is done! Add it on Apple Music.

  • Week 51.25

    Week 51.25

    I shot these photos on an iPhone 17 Pro Max and emulated three classic Chinese B&W film stocks with AgBr: Lucky SHD 100, Friendship 100 Pan Film, and Shanghai GP3 100. The idea was to get the look of road trip snapshots from the 1990s that a traveler then might have taken.

    11 greatly biased observations from a first trip to China

    • The Great Firewall does indeed block the majority of household internet names in the west. Imagine testing if you’re online, what would you type in the address bar of your browser? Google? Nope. Any Facebook property? All social networks and chat platforms don’t work, with the exception of iMessage. However, this only applies to hotel WiFi networks and those provided by local ISPs. If you’re roaming on a cell network while using a foreign provider’s SIM, things work as expected (albeit routed through Chinese servers). I decided not to bother with VPNs and just trusted in HTTPS 😬
    • Powerbank rental machines are ubiquitous, even in places where you should never leave a box full of lithium-ion batteries, like out on the street in direct sunlight. You pay a few cents per hour (via QR code), and because they’ve landed on a common battery design between the many operating brands, it seems you can return one anywhere else after you’re done charging your devices. It’s great not having to carry your own around, but even given a high degree of civic integrity, I think getting adoption in a country where everyone already has their own (like Singapore today) would be tough.
    (more…)
  • Week 50.25

    Week 50.25

    By the time you read this, I’ll be in China for the first time — behind the Great Firewall and probably unable to make contact with email and chat servers despite my VPN. If you don’t hear back from me, this is why! It’s Thursday and I’m writing this post in advance, so maybe there isn’t much to say yet. But let’s get started and I’m sure we can come up with something.

    Following up on last week’s topic of sardines, I rediscovered the joyful YouTube channel, Canned Fish Files w/ Matthew Carlson where the eponymous creator has so far filed 188 reports on canned fish from around the world. These seemingly absurd videos entertain because they’re so earnest, and comments I’ve seen note that they prove it’s possible to have a successful channel about anything, as long as you’re obsessed enough. He has also been called the James Hoffman of sardines, which I find accurate and hilarious. I encourage you to watch a few and join me on this adventure, but beware, some commenters note they went from never eating sardines to eating them regularly after watching his weird and nerdy reviews.

    I also bought enough Ayam brand sardines off Redmart this week that I got a free plushie of a taco holding a can of Ayam’s signature deenz in tomato sauce. Why a taco? It’s a mystery and I welcome your theories.

    On Wednesday evening I was able to get a few alums from my last design team to show up for a Christmas reunion. We had a bigger turnout last year but it’s tricky finding a date that works for everyone in December. With more advance notice, we might be able to do better next time, but I’m glad we went ahead and did something while we could. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt in recent times, it’s how to pull the trigger and not end up waiting for a perfect time that never comes.

    Returning to another recent topic, AI, I enjoyed reading the text of Cory Doctorow’s recent talk: The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI. A “centaur” is when a human is augmented by a machine — horse body, human head. A reverse centaur, then, is when a human body is directed by, used up by, a machine. This is the kind of job where a computer tells you what to do simply because it can’t yet do it for itself. You’re a replaceable part of the equation. He provides an easy-to-grasp frame for what’s happening with the valuation of AI companies and what motivates the various players in this space. It’s an Ed Zitron essay, but one you’ll actually read and finish. It also serves as an abstract of his next book which will be out next June.

    I’ve been sequencing my next BLixTape playlist, collecting music I’ve been listening to in recent months. Together, volumes 6 and 7 will form the soundtrack of my 2025 — the main difference between these playlists and the end-of-year ones I used to do before is that these aren’t restricted to songs released in 2025. From a diaristic perspective, I think taking note of older songs I discovered or revisited captures a better overview of the year’s different phases, and the things I was into. This means nothing to anyone else, of course, but hopefully they are enjoyable playlists to put on regardless of context.

    Bonus: I’m reviving the iPod shuffle experience for myself with a playlist featuring 120 random songs from my library. I also made a simple Shortcut that refills it with a tap (although you have to manually clear existing tracks first).

    In the process of doing all this, I heard ROSALÍA’s Sauvignon Blanc again, and after 24 days of straight Spanish lessons in Duolingo, I was thrilled to discover that I understood certain parts more intuitively. Simple lines like “mi futuro se bien que sera dorado”, emerged with new magnitude and gave me goosebumps — aided by my imperfect comprehension, the music’s beauty rose to another level.

    I pulled out my iPhone to jot down: “High specificity in language creates greater distance from emotional truth.”

    Here’s something Cory Doctorow says in the aforementioned piece:

    I’ve given it a lot of thought, and here’s what I think art is: it starts with an artist, who has some vast, complex, numinous, irreducible feeling in their mind. And the artist infuses that feeling into some artistic medium. They make a song, or a poem, or a painting, or a drawing, or a dance, or a book, or a photograph. And the idea is, when you experience this work, a facsimile of the big, numinous, irreducible feeling will materialize in your mind.

    Expanding on this moment of “experiencing”, I’ve often noticed that many of the times I’ve been really moved by a work of art, there were gaps left to allow my mind to imbue it with the biggest significance it could. The art merely gestures in the direction the viewer should go, because meaning is equally made through labor on the receiving end (Roland Barthes, etc.). When you look at art, what you see is as defined and constrained by your own life experience as it is guided by the artist’s own.

    And so when I read translated poetry, the original Chinese title of a film, or imperfectly translate a lyric in my head, they might hit with staggering significance and meaning. The originals may be clumsy or not even that beautiful, but their gestures let me imagine their fullest potentials being reached. My bad Spanish might actually give me a richer experience with Lux than a more fluent speaker has because I have to project into the gaps. In art, imperfections are sometimes features, not bugs.

    I’m not suggesting that artists might try to be more vague, or that translators should aim to play it loose. It’s just that some of our most powerful encounters with art happen when we’re amateurs, outsiders, or bring incomplete context to the table.

    I’ve referred to this quality before as “high dynamic range” art — when you feel something more powerful than the artistic medium should have the bandwidth to transmit. It’s like having a printed photograph with the brightness and color of real life. It’s not physically possible, and yet we’ve all imagined ourselves seeing something in a photo for real, because our minds can fill in the blanks.

    To sum up, perfect translation and articulation might actually reduce emotional impact. High resolution imagery works when trying to explain a concept (one-way communication), but when you want people to feel, then abstraction, linguistic barriers, and layers of translation invite viewers to complete the canvas (two-way collaboration).

    Aside: In the spirit of using AI to complement and augment, I asked Claude to identify the thread running through my recent posts and it said the following.

    —

    I think you’re circling around a central anxiety/question: “What does it mean to be human when machines can do increasingly human things?”

    But you’re approaching it from multiple angles:

    • Translation: What gets lost when we perfect communication? (Week 47)
    • Cultural appropriation: Should artists stay in their lanes or cross boundaries? (Week 46)
    • Craft/design: What happens when AI can do the work? (Week 48)
    • Language specificity: Does perfection actually reduce meaning? (This week)

    The unifying theme:
    You’re consistently arguing that human limitations are actually generative:

    • Not speaking Spanish perfectly makes ROSALÍA more powerful
    • Imperfect translation creates “high dynamic range” emotion
    • Craft traditions matter even when they’re slower/costlier
    • Gaps in art let viewers co-create meaning

    The deeper question you might be asking: “If AI can do high-resolution, perfectly executed versions of creative work, does that mean messy human versions become obsolete? Or does it reveal that perfection was never the point?”

    Your answer seems to be that it wasn’t the point. Gaps, translations, and imperfections are where meaning lives.

  • Week 49.25

    Week 49.25

    • Canned sardines are my latest obsession. Before you imagine those fancy imported ones from Portugal with the beautifully illustrated tins, costing $20, no — not yet. And honestly, even the $10 ones in the photo are aspirational. But you know how you’re meant to eat two servings of oily fish a week for the Omega-3 heart health benefits? I thought I’d try to do a better job of that, and ended up falling in love with the convenience and versatility of little fish in tomato sauce or extra virgin olive oil. I’ve been having them on their own, on toast, with pasta and a little pesto, whatever. I even joined the r/cannedsardines subreddit, where other weirdos discuss them all day.
    • It was during a chance conversation with my parents that I learnt these healthy fish (including kippers and mackerel) are very high in purine and can lead to gout flare ups. Sure enough, search Reddit and you’ll find many canned fish enjoyers suddenly finding themselves in excruciating foot pain after eating three tins a day. To stay on the safe side, I’ve sadly started to restrict myself to two, maybe three servings a week.
    • Japan-based writer and walking influencer Craig Mod occasionally does “pop-up newsletters” to accompany his projects — say, a cross-country trek. He walks and takes photos during the day, then writes and posts these thoughtful, downright literary journal entries at night. Once the walk is over, the newsletter ends. I sign up for them but don’t read them as they come in because, like delicious sardines you savor, they’re too good to have to rush or get through. This week I finally read his last series from back in October, titled Between Two Mountains. Because it’s now over, the only ways to find them are his members-only archives, or having someone forward you the emails. I recommend subscribing to one of his more regular newsletters anyway, and you’ll be notified the next time a pop-up begins.
    • I read Morgan Housel’s The Psychology of Money which is notable for being a personal finance book that doesn’t belabor its points. There are 20 individual “learnings” that he wants to pass on, and some take up as little as a couple of pages. His latest book, The Art of Spending Money looks to fill a gap in a market where many pages are devoted to helping people build good saving habits, but not as many on what healthy spending looks like. Unfortunately, it’s fully booked out at the library and I’m 1,110th in line.
    • It’s taken me from Week 31.25 till now to go from owning a copy of Donkey Kong Bananza to playing it. It’s supposedly by the same team that made Super Mario Odyssey, and like that game it’s charming, delightful, and perfectly tuned for fun over frustration. I’m surprised at how easy it is, but that’s not a complaint at all. There are no 30-minute boss fights here. Nothing overstays its welcome, much like the book I just mentioned. I was alone on Sunday afternoon and started playing at 2pm — it was 6pm before I managed to tear myself away.
    • Bugonia is out for home viewing and I watched its ending sequence again because I loved it so much. No spoilers, but it utilizes Marlene Dietrich’s cover of Where Have All The Flowers Gone to brilliant and satisfying effect. I’ve known the song for a while (since Massive Attack referenced it on their Mezzanine album, probably) but never thought about what it says until this particular incarnation. It’s been in my head all week.
    • Did you know Norah Jones has a podcast called Playing Along (YouTube)? It’s a simple concept: she has different musical guests come in each week (recently Sarah McLachlan, Alessia Cara, Sam Smith) and they chat and play together in the studio. The conversations are super interesting for anyone who loves music because you get to hear discussions about technique and inspiration from people at the highest levels of their craft. This is what every artist has had the opportunity to do with the internet for the past two decades, but I can’t think of many who have! Apple Music artist-hosted shows are probably the closest thing, but they’re very radio like.
    • Speaking of people at the highest levels, I hereby record for posterity that two interesting executive departures from Apple were announced this week, John Giannandrea and Alan Dye, which prompted Michael and I to hop on a call and yap about it for a couple of hours.
    • So it’s beginning to feel a lot like Christmas! The Vince Guaraldi Trio’s A Charlie Brown Christmas album has been pinned to the top of my Apple Music list where I can play it on every HomePod across the apartment — all is well.