Week 41.26

• The haze (from Indonesia, it should be pointed out) has been steadily worsening, and its combined threat to the local F1 race and Singapore’s global reputation on social media is probably keeping the Singapore Tourism Board on antidepressants. What’s worse, instead of clearing up in a couple of weeks as usual, experts say this time it might hang around until December because of El Niño.
• Hark Pro, yet another AI agent that promises to manage your life for you, went live this week. They’ve got what would have been called a rockstar design team in the old days — led by Abidur Chowdhury, famously stolen from Apple after he featured in the iPhone Air’s launch video; and including Andrew Kim who used to run the popular site/blog, minimallyminimal. I signed up for their waitlist a few months ago, and was rewarded with free credits for the first month.
• The confluence of both those things led to me launching my first new web app in a couple of months: SecondHand (blog post / app). It’s an air quality app that measures the haze in cigarettes, with some fun graphics and animations. I got the project started in Hark, made some edits with Muse Spark in OpenCode, and then returned to Hark for more enhancements. It’s pretty capable for coding projects, and extremely convenient because it can publish directly to my GitHub, put up pull requests for me to audit, and publish to the live site — all through a chat thread on my phone.
• The app has done very well by my lowly standards, with over 18,000 visits in the last four days. Someone put it on Reddit, and people have told me it was forwarded to them by other friends, and I’ve even heard from someone I haven’t spoken to in years all because someone showed it to them at work (and they recognized my domain). The initial version was poorly optimized and consumed some 25GB of my Vercel bandwidth in an afternoon, but thankfully I noticed and managed to rush out some fixes. It’s now lean, mean, and ready to be seen by more people without breaking my account.
• You know what else deserves to be seen? Digger (2026), the new movie by Cruise/Iñárritu that’s (imo) unjustly bombing at the box office. The film has some vocal defenders, though, including Guillermo del Toro, Anne Hathaway, and Mandy Patinkin. It currently has a 51% Rotten Tomatoes score, but is one of the most ambitious, astounding, and aggressively pointed films I’ve seen all year. Even The Odyssey feels like a distant memory now; merely an expected epic, whereas Digger is a shapeshifting subversion of modern life, culture, and their relationships with capitalism. Tom Cruise does his best work here, and I think it’ll be recognized as a masterpiece in the years to come. Five stars. You must avoid all spoilers and watch it soon.

• Kim was down with a cold/flu all week, maybe brought on by the haze which has anecdotally given quite a few people sore throats. I’ve miraculously managed to avoid catching it so far. Possibly due to the following:
• In the middle of her illness, I went for my annual scheduled medical and also got the latest Northern hemisphere flu jab, roughly a year since my last one. I asked the nurse if it was better to get the Southern one that comes out in the spring/summer or this one, and was told you can get both! Each one is apparently like a patch update to the last, including new strains and deprecating old ones. All this time I thought you just chose one and it covered you for a whole year. But perhaps this is unique to equatorial travel hubs like Singapore, where we’re exposed to North/South variants all year round.
• Friend and ex-colleague Bert was also back in town for his annual visit, the reunion around which we’ve taken to calling Bertopia. This year’s festival was attended by Jaz, Jussi, and Ted (Christian and Jean had a date with air pollution at the F1). For the first time in my life, I decided I’d go non-alcoholic all night at a bar — on the assumption that drinking would weaken my immune system. It was… not entirely unpleasant! On top of saving money, you skip all the physiological punishment of dehydration and fatigue the next morning. I mean, intellectually you know this, but actually experiencing a hangover-free Saturday is something else.
• Last week I reported the Beats 360 headphones were too small for me, so of course that ended in me buying a pair of Bose QuietComforts. 10 years ago, I wore their predecessors on a flight from Hong Kong to New York and they were roomy and absolutely painless. What will I use them for?
• The 9th edition of my BLixTape playlists is finished, signaling an increase in the amount of music I’ve been listening to lately. The last few have taken six months each to come together, but this one tracks the songs I’ve liked between July to the present moment — about three months, or half the usual time. I’m quite pleased with some of the juxtapositions and transitions, for example: Bill Callahan’s Computer, an examination of his own distasteful technology use, leads into Ninajirachi’s Fuck My Computer, which is about how she loves it so much she wants to… well, it’s there in the title. Another one-two combo is the Walter Murphy Band’s A Fifth of Beethoven from 1976 going into MEOVV’s present-day K-pop DDI RO RI hit.

BLixTape #9 (Apple Music)

1. In The Stars — The Rolling Stones
2. High Hopes 3000 — ROLE MODEL
3. Candlebox — The Mountain Goats
4. Lost Boys — Phoebe Bridgers
5. Javelin — Kevin Morby
6. Misery – MPLS Unplugged (Live) — Soul Asylum
7. Girlfriend — The Modern Lovers
8. Extra Mile — Will Sheff
9. Over country — Lizzy McAlpine
10. Computer — Bill Callahan
11. Fuck My Computer — Ninajirachi
12. World Citizen (feat. Kabaka Pyramid) — Irie Souljah
13. The Art of Anger — BINA.
14. Hold You — Puma Blue
15. Be Still in the Pain — Tricky
16. Hardly Ever Smile (Without You) — Poison Girl Friend
17. Time goes by — Every Little Thing
18. Saturday Night — Ravyn Lenae
19. Cafe au lait — Nana Mori
20. Sunshine — Jungle
21. A Fifth of Beethoven — Walter Murphy
22. DDI RO RI — MEOVV
23. Ain’t In LA — ADÉLA
24. SS26 — Charli xcx
25. HEADLOCK — Luci Gang
26. EVIL GRIN (feat. JPEGMAFIA) — Denzel Curry
27. 40 Nights — The Game
28. Heavy Burden — 38 Spesh
29. Legends Don’t Die — Morrisson
30. Nobody Knows — Pastor T.L. Barrett and The Youth for Christ Choir
31. Our Love Is Here to Stay — Brandon Sanders
32. Just You, Just Me — Lizz Wright
33. Stella by Starlight (live in Tokyo, 1987) — Chet Baker

Enjoy it loud, your windows are likely closed anyway!