- I went to Apple Orchard Road and tried the Beats 360 headphones. They’re not large enough for my head. Money saved… or it would be if this whole endeavor hadn’t gotten me thinking about a pair of Bose QuietComforts. Still undecided but I had a pair once, a decade ago, and they were comfortable enough to wear for 10 hours easily.
- My new Apple Watch likes to try cheering me up by telling me that my body is “Ready” to “Go For It” (I assume “It” is a marathon, a swim to the far side of Australia, or something equally implausible) and that I had excellent sleep the night before, but these science and sensor-backed statements simply don’t match my reality. I’m tired; I wish I could sleep more!
- I just took a little break (after one paragraph, natch) and went on Instagram, where I saw a post that read “Anyone else turn 40 around the start of the pandemic and now blinked and you’re somehow 46 wondering what the hell just happened?” On one hand, that sentence perfectly captures the fatigue that you’d imagine comes with being abducted by aliens and losing six years of your life — at the very least, the weariness of having to catch up with a lot of missed information, which is what being alive in this time of AI feels like, always on the back foot with lots to learn — but on the other hand, it implies not knowing at all where the time went, which I can’t identify with. Oh I know where the time went. I remember it all perfectly well, but it plays in my mind like a timelapse — hundreds of days passing, the figure getting in and out of bed, the view outside the window gradually changing.
- Armchair theory: maybe what’s caused this ‘blink and time passed’ effect for many is the combination of massive disruption followed by repetitive discomfort. This is different from repetitive boredom, where days are long and time moves slowly. With repetitive discomfort, you’re constantly insecure and stressed, so the mind protects itself by generating summaries and discarding the details. This sharp change, followed by pain you’d rather forget, dislodges you from whatever life you were living before, making it feel like a separate country.
- I’m listening to Apple Music 1 and three Taylor Swift songs have played in a short period of time. Without checking, I’ve known it was her from the fact that all her recent music sounds the same. It’s hard to feel bad for a billionaire, but that’s an awful place for any creative person to be. It’s like she doesn’t listen to any other music, or won’t allow herself to appear influenced by anyone else. Lonely at the top, as they say, which is why you won’t find me there (among other obvious reasons)!
- Kim and I met Mandy for dinner one night to mark her birthday, and we went to a wine-focused place called Fiasco which has taken over the spot where Kilo used to be, that weird little building out in the middle of nothing near Lavender. The food was all really good (I forgot to take pictures), and they’re doing some really interesting things with hanger steak and pork collar, the latter seasoned to resemble a very fancy charsiew.
- In an example of culinary R&D jumping the shark, we ate at Surrey Hills over the weekend, where my mother-in-law’s corned beef hash came partially covered with a purple sweet potato foam. Needless to say, she did not appreciate the touch. The place purports to be Australian, and with her being Australian too, I tried to gaslight her into believing that it was an authentic Australian recipe that she’d somehow never heard about. Needless to say, I was not successful.
- I finished PARANORMASIGHT: The Mermaid’s Curse, and found it a worthy sequel, arguably better than the first game in every way unless you want a spooky atmosphere. This one can’t be classified as horror at all. It’s a mystery adventure with supernatural elements so tame they’d elicit no more than a shrug from a timid baby. Like the first game, its story concerns Japanese history and legends that one might find a little boring, but you don’t have to read all the text in its menus.
- Playing that game unwittingly prepared me for the film Inu-Oh (2021), which I’ve had in my library for years and suddenly decided to watch. From the opening scenes, it eerily echoed story points from PARANORMASIGHT, concerning the 12th-century Heike samurai clan, and their vengeful spirits said to linger across the land after they were wiped out. Inu-Oh is a wildly ambitious and stupendously well-animated musical that is let down by, well, its music. The concept is a fusion of traditional Japanese music with glam rock, and a main character starts playing his biwa one day like an electric guitar without any explanation. The visuals work, but the songs are poorly structured to modern ears, overly long, and basically repeat the same melodies while pages of historical narrative are sung over them. Imagine Billy Corgan’s worst material, stretched twice as long, and the lyrics are all about random days of Napoleon’s life, and you’ll begin to understand how it feels.
- We finally saw Sentimental Value (2025) and wow it really deserves its Oscar and 95% Rotten Tomatoes score. The opening scene with the house, and the title card needle drop that follows it, was so good that my body felt compelled to stand up and applaud — I didn’t allow it, but that feeling went on for much of its running length. The train oner is a wonderful bit of technical showing off, and actually the whole film’s lush 35mm look just stunts on the pervasive digital signature of Netflix movies. Everyone is great in this, making art about how art both fucks you up and saves you — 4.5 stars.
- Found time for a grab bag of other films too: Runner (2026) — not to be confused with Gal Gadot’s The Runner (2026), Good Boy (2025), Elle (2016), Grand Theft Hamlet (2024) — the one to watch out of all of these, a very human documentary about two out-of-work actors putting on a production of Hamlet inside the GTA Online videogame whilst stuck at home during the pandemic — Shelter (2026), and Tony (2026).
- Singapore made headlines this week because of the launch of a new dating site by the government, currently in a pilot phase only open to civil servants. It’s called FirstDate, and matches people based on compatibility assumed from their responses to a questionnaire. The idea of a state-run service has amused observers, with some seeing it as a dystopian step towards arranged marriages by Big Brother, amongst other hot takes on this strategy to combat our falling Total Fertility Rate (TFR). History rhymes, of course, and older folks will remember the existence of the Social Development Unit (SDU) in the 1980s, a pre-digital precursor to this scheme, that was something of a government-run activities club to help rescue graduates from singlehood after being encouraged (by the same authorities) to optimize for good grades instead of dating during their teenage years.
- But it’s hard for outsiders to decide if Singapore’s environment really does produce a special breed of hapless, rizzless forever-aloners, uniquely ill-equipped to find their own mates through empathy and communication, so Singapore’s own state-run media conglomerate is providing some data in the form of a new reality dating show called Wingman. The show’s format introduces an original element to the Love Island formula, namely that each contestant brings their own wingman/wingwoman to serve as hype men/women, espousing their good qualities so they don’t have to — a perfectly valid and brilliant tweak for Asian cultures where tooting your own horn unironically is a major ick. The contestants, in addition to a few Singaporeans, are a bunch of attractive 20-to-30-somethings from the Philippines and Thailand, all of whom resemble functioning young adults who can read social cues and body language, and interact normally with members of the opposite sex (there is no LGBTQ+ representation). There’s obviously a tilt towards extroversion, which you’d expect from people volunteering to be a dating show, but even correcting for that, there’s an intriguing, discernible difference between the Singaporeans and their SEAblings that’s best seen for yourself. Full episodes are available on YouTube. We binged all 10 so far in one night.
Week 40.26
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