sangsara.net

Category: Weeklies

  • Week 32.26

    Week 32.26

    • The dentist frowned at the stains. “These have come back very quickly since your last cleaning”, she said. Well, I do drink a lot of black tea, like maybe three or four big mugs a day, I explained. “That will do it. If you see the inside of your mug getting stained, that’s happening to your teeth as well.” I don’t know why I never thought of that before. So now I have to either switch to green tea or alternate between mouthfuls of English Breakfast and plain water, because somehow even my Oral-B electric toothbrush isn’t scrubbing these out.
    • The contractor frowned at the stains. “We can try to do another round of waterproofing on the roof, but if the water seepage continues after that, you’ll either need to do PU injections in your ceiling or call in a structural engineer.” This temporary solution offered a glimmer of hope, but I’m not looking forward to having our ceilings hacked and drilled and molested if there truly is a structural issue.
    • Look, I’m in no way (in no way!) equating my troubles with those faced by the prisoners at Auschwitz, but as I read Viktor E. Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning this week, I found some comfort in his words — essentially perspectives from an explorer who traveled farther into human suffering than any of us will ever know in our lives, like a psychological astronaut… psychonaut? I cannot imagine going that deep into darkness and reemerging intact. But the human mind (or at least some) is incredibly resilient and/or adept at self-preservation. He writes of their return to society after the war:

    But for every one of the liberated prisoners, the day comes when, looking back on his camp experiences, he can no longer understand how he endured it all. As the day of his liberation eventually came, when everything seemed to him like a beautiful dream, so also the day comes when all his camp experiences seem to him nothing but a nightmare.

    • I finished reading Gabrielle Zevin’s Young Jane Young. The only other book I’ve read of hers was Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, which I loved whole-heartedly, and I’m glad to report that this one was also a minor masterpiece. The subject matter (a political sex scandal) didn’t appeal much to me at all, but her characters, and their dialogue and humanity, were wonderfully handled. Movie trailer voice: “It’s a story about family, friendship, and second chances.” 5 stars, and it goes on my shelf.
    The famous design process squiggle diagram
    • On Thursday I met some young entrepreneurs exploring product and service spaces that they might be able to play in, especially now that the availability of generative AI tools can amplify their talents. I came away impressed by how much drive they have, and was also reminded of how vital the quote-unquote design process can still be in an age where building happens in parallel with ideation. There’s so much value in “slowing down to speed up” in the early stages, as my friend Ted likes to say, and you can save not only time, but now tokens too, with more upfront research and problem selection before committing to code.
    • Kim and I had a choice between an ‘omakase’ yakitori dinner and a visit to Barrel: Story of Hibiki, which seems to be a Suntory-operated or at least Suntory-blessed restaurant that makes use of their Hibiki Harmony Japanese whisky in several recipes. I like yakitori fine, but associate it more with, I dunno, prices that aren’t S$280 a person before drinks?? So Barrel it was, and it was pretty great. Their simple vanilla ice-cream topped with a Hibiki-infused honey and Maldon salt might just be the best soft-serve I’ve ever had.
    • I passed a few hours playing Lumines Remastered, which has now been launched on mobile with controls that are quite usable. Friends will know that I consider Lumines to be one of my favorite game franchises, almost the equal of Tetris in its ingenuity, replayability, and ability to induce a blissful flow state. I’ve bought every one of these games multiple times, on every platform I can (Java featurephones, Symbian smartphones, iOS, Xbox 360, PSP, PS Vita, PS4/PS5, Switch). For S$9.98 (the first few levels are free), I can recommend the new iOS port if you’ve never played it before or don’t have access to a game console.
    • It was also Singapore’s 61st National Day over the weekend. This time, there were three songs instead of the usual one. I didn’t like any of them, and one in particular tried to strike an optimistic note but its titular refrain, “You’ll be okay”, works like a counterproductive doubt-caster. Like saying don’t think of an elephant. Were we not going to be okay? Why are you saying that?
    • It was a big week in proper music: my DOMi & JD BECK record arrived, and they announced two amazing things. 1) They’re coming to Singapore on Dec 1, and 2) there’s an instrumental version of the album coming soon. Those were both of my wishes to Jazz Santa. Thanks, JS, you’re the best.
    • ROLE MODEL also released his new album, Chuck Timely & The Hourglass, which is transparently about being a pretty fuckboi who’s now nearing 30 and still single while all his friends are getting married, and I love it. The sound is fantastic, a sort of alt-Americana piano rock from the good old days of Springsteen, Petty, and Fleetwood Mac.
    • Also, a new album from The Mountain Goats! Days is classic stuff, with better production values than ever, and a Weezer-like song about touring with the band Candlebox that has what it takes to be a hit single.
    • But the highest highlight for me has been Tricky’s new album, which I put off listening to for a few weeks. I said to myself I needed to hear it “in the right conditions” but really I think I was afraid it would suck. I ended up putting it on while on the train. It does not suck. It does not suck so hard! It’s as good as anything he put out after the first two albums of his career. Pitchfork points out that when Maxinquaye dropped in 1995, few would’ve bet on Tricky still making records three decades later — yet here he is, having outlasted Portishead (Third came out in 2008) and Massive Attack (16 years without an album), turning out what they call “a record of pointed modern blues that suggests an artist still driven to create.”
  • Week 31.26

    Week 31.26

    • Home issues, like a roof leak that I need to resolve with the building people, have been attacking my mental health this past week. I’ve spent too many waking and dreaming hours on them already, so I won’t get into it further apart from this record for posterity. Hopefully things will improve.
    • While browsing YouTube, I came across a Rick Beato interview with DOMi & JD BECK, whose 2022 alt-jazz album Not Tight I quite enjoyed. Now, I’d assumed that they had just disappeared, swallowed up by an industry that doesn’t have time for esoteric styles, so seeing them pop up was a surprise — I didn’t dare to believe it meant new music was coming. I started watching and was sucked in for the whole hour, and indeed there was a new album set to launch the next day. I decided right then and there to buy a signed copy on vinyl from the Blue Note online store. Shipping cost $31 USD but I was so keen, nothing was going to stop me.
    • The album WHO ASKED? is now out on streaming, and reactions are mixed. Complaints fall into two categories: technical and musical. They recorded and produced most of it themselves, with little experience, and many think the sound was compromised — muddy, distorted drums, and a very busy mix. Musically, it’s also a very challenging suite with a lot going on: orchestral instruments alongside their frenetic playing, loads of counterpoint, and switching time signatures. Plus, they sing on nearly every track, versus providing only harmony on one song off the last album.
    • Personally I find the Dolby Atmos mix on Apple Music to sound better, with better separation, and think of the whole vibe as a deliberate choice. They mention in the Beato interview that the vinyl mix was shipped earlier (same with Rosalia’s LUX) and has a more hi-fi sound with less bass. Musically it might be too early to call, but I like it and think it sounds exactly like what you get when you let two prodigies make music that interests them. Their live performances online were always better to me than the cuts on the first album, and that may be the case again here. I’ll drop a few links below to get you started if you’ve never heard them.
    • After joyously listening to music all afternoon, I loaded up the short film The Non-Actor on MUBI, starring Victoria Pedretti and Maya Hawke, which turned out to be about a woman who’s going deaf. Well, it’s not just about that, it’s also a lesbian/yuri story, but it made me think a bit about losing my hearing and how this might be my last decade before it starts to deteriorate. Imagine never hearing your favorite songs the same way ever again; the instruments slowly fading out or disappearing. I’d be inconsolable.
    • I also finished reading my 37th book of the year: Yang Shuang-zi’s Taiwan Travelogue, winner of the 2026 International Booker Prize. It’s also yuri, and this author has actually written manga. Although I’d seen numerous mentions of the book online, I started reading without knowing anything beyond what the title suggests. Turns out it’s a metafictional work that pretends to be a new translation of a little-known post-war novel based on a true story — despite being a completely new work of fiction. Ultimately it’s about colonialism’s effects on Taiwanese culture, Japan’s actions during WWII (there are notably several translated Taiwanese novels about this period, which I may read someday), female relationships, translation, and food. 4 stars.
    • My current favorite camera app, Analogue, got a big v1.5 update this week. I’ve preferred this for the last few months because of their unique approach: instead of using Bayer RAW capture to get more natural (less HDR processed) results from the iPhone’s camera sensor, they use a video pipeline — taking screengrabs in Apple LOG, which allows them to get really beautiful, softer images that you can apply LUTs to (including Fujifilm’s official film simulation LUTs in F-Log). Well, what does the new update add? Don’t laugh, but it’s Bayer RAW capture. However, unlike every other camera app such as Halide, Lampa, and NoFusion, Analogue merges the use of Bayer RAW with their innovative processing approach, meaning those Fuji film sims continue to work on top of sharper, native 4:3 photos. If none of that made any sense to you, the plain English is that this is your best alternative to the default camera app.
    Sushiro is helping to break this Japanese sausage brand into the local market, and the sushi dog was their chosen vehicle.
  • Week 30.26

    Week 30.26

    • Kim has fallen ill and is taking me down to Maybe-Covid town with her. Before it turns really bad, I figure I should bang out a short update. I eventually broke my Duolingo streak, my Finch streak, and some days I feel like ‘this might be the week I break my weeknote streak’, because it’s bound to happen someday. But when? Not today, at least. Let’s go:
    • On Thursday I managed to meet up with Brian for a couple of beers and a curry after running a minor errand in town. He’s finally moving on from our former employer, to an interesting insights role that should keep him both busy and amused, which is a minor miracle in this economy.
    • We also got out to dinner with a bunch of Kim’s friends on Friday before the illness took hold (who hired this dramatic tone and can we send him home?). The hosts had a Nintendo Switch with Overcooked loaded up for their kids. After watching her two children play with total focus, another mom who could really use some wine-alone-time said excitedly, “I think a Switch will be appearing in our home shortly!” I was perplexed that the child-distracting benefits of a videogame console had not previously occurred to her, and regretted not being more of a pain to my parents all those years I wanted a SNES or Mega Drive at home.
    • So here we are instead, spending adult money to chase a childhood feeling. I bought Assassin’s Creed: Shadows on the Switch 2 a couple of weeks ago because it was on sale, despite knowing that it would be technically more impressive and performant on the PS5. Well, I needn’t have bothered worrying about frame rates because the game itself is dogshit. It was during a mission where I was meant to kill a few people, and discovered a bug where one of them was loitering outside the challenge’s boundaries (literally beyond an invisible wall I could not cross), that I decided to write off the USD$35 I’d spent and delete this piece of Ubisoft garbage.
    • I finished reading Book 3 of Solvej Balle’s On The Calculation of Volume series, and I haven’t decided if I’ll continue — there is one more book out in English, and there are a total of seven planned. I thought the first book was fine, but these last two have leaned more boring and uninteresting. What kept me reading was an (unintended?) parallel with unemployment that I noticed: being stuck in a day that repeats endlessly is what a sabbatical or retirement feels like at first. Work is the engine that keeps your days moving whether you like it or not. Remove it, and you’re living outside the time everyone else shares. Tara, the protagonist, can’t rely on anyone to understand her experience or keep her company, so she fills her days with idle curiosity — studying history, watching the sky and her backyard, letting time slip by until she loses track of it.
    • [Spoilers follow] Perhaps I’ll read the next book just to confirm my suspicion that this story arc intentionally mirrors the different stages of a post-work journey. At the end of Book 2, Tara suddenly meets another trapped person, which kicks off a period of relief, elation, and connection in Book 3. And then they meet more trapped people, forming a sort of retiree community that tries to navigate their way through this. Some want to return to how things were before, which I suppose is a desire to reintegrate with society and regain relevance, while others don’t believe it’s possible anymore. Some want to simply find a way to live, and some feel a responsibility to use their unique position to improve the world. Given that Balle has lived as a sort of writer-recluse in her small Danish village while putting these books together over many years, I don’t think I’m far off the mark.
    • I want to recommend the app that I used to create this week’s featured image above: tone. I found it through the Japanese developer’s Twitter, which was legible because of how that platform now automatically translates tweets in other languages to English. It is actually a very useful feature that will nevertheless probably be proven at some point in the future to have caused even greater deterioration of society and mental health. Anyway, it changes photos in various ways to look like they were reproduced with vintage printing techniques, not through a simple filter, but a multi-stage process you can actually inspect. Not the first to attempt this, but a really nice implementation of the concept. It’s free, with an optional in-app purchase to unlock more colors.
    • A ton of new music dropped in the past couple of weeks but I’ve been listening to the Takehiro Honda Trio’s This Is Honda (Jazz), and Radiohead’s The King of Limbs, which I’ve somehow hitherto ignored. Oh Charli XCX’s new album Music, Fashion, Film has some great sounding moments (and some painfully shallow lyrics), and its second track, SS26, is a pop masterpiece. It also says something about the times we live in, and my general intelligence, that I wondered for a minute if the album’s cover featuring John Cale, Marc Jacobs, and Martin Scorsese was AI slop.

  • Week 29.26

    Week 29.26

    • I published Subconscious Samples and wrote up the app page myself instead of starting from an AI draft like I often do. The thinking is that since the agent already knows the app intimately, I just need to give it a concept and it’ll do an okay job of filling in the essential info, which I can then edit. Ironically, I don’t think many people can tell the difference between the two, and I worry that maybe I’ve internalized more of AI writing’s stylistic hallmarks than I’d like.
    • Speaking of slop, McDonald’s Singapore has a couple of new menu items to celebrate our upcoming National Day in August. One of them is a collaboration with my favorite curry puff brand, Old Chang Kee. The burger has a fried egg, a deep-fried chicken cutlet, and a thick curry paste with diced potatoes that’s reminiscent of OCK’s signature Curry’O filling. It’s as messy to eat as it sounds, and the top bun gets soggy and falls apart as you’re eating it. What makes Old Chang Kee work for me is the texture and mouthfeel of their crusty pastry, so the soft bun is a weak substitute. To make matters worse, I had the double version with twice the oily fried chicken, and felt like absolute crap afterwards. Speaking with Jose and Henry, who also ate this on the same day, I got tripartite agreement that this creation results in more regret than reward, and none of us will be having it again.
    • Michael’s collaborative crossword game, Crossmate, is finally out on the App Store! It’s free, open source, and I highly recommend it. You can import puzzle files, or use NYT’s puzzles if you have a subscription, then invite up to two other friends to play with you. It’s just like working in a live Google Doc, but funner. I’m not especially good at crosswords, but I’ve completed quite a few with him and others during the beta testing period and had a great time with it.
    • I read what was probably my first Philip K. Dick novel, as far as I can recall, Time Out of Joint, and came away slightly disappointed. Something about its style reminded me of other books from the same era, where you can almost smell the fumes from whatever they were huffing. The core ideas are good, and have been replicated in other works (including a particularly big Jim Carrey hit), but somehow the sum is less than its parts. In contrast with Rendezvous with Rama, a sci-fi classic I recently reread that explores big ideas with prosaic, forgettable writing, Time Out of Joint somehow comes away looking worse because Dick’s writing is too opinionated and rooted in his time, neither of which serves to elevate the story or its ideas.
    • I finished watching the Three Colors trilogy on MUBI with White (1994) and Red (1994). I believe White is often called the ‘weird’ or ‘different’ one out of the three, as it’s tonally and structurally quite a farce. For that reason, I enjoyed it but probably have to rate it lower relative to the emotional power of its siblings. What’s also impressive is how the director began with the legendary Juliette Binoche, and then went on to cast leading women of escalating beauty in Julie Delpy and Irene Jacob. Next up is The Double Life of Véronique (1991) which also stars Jacob, who I’d never heard of before this.
    • Despite believing that I don’t watch or enjoy horror, I think Widow’s Bay empowered me to believe that maybe I can do horror lite, so I bought a ticket to go see Backrooms (2026) on a weekday afternoon. I could have waited for a home release, but I wanted to test myself with a big screen. I have vivid memories of seeing Drag Me to Hell (2009) in a theater that was way too loud, and being so terrified by the sensory overload (despite it being quite an outlandishly funny film) that I felt like I was going to have a heart attack.
    • Thankfully, Backrooms was more fun than fatal, and I had a good time. I’ve seen the short film that this expands on, but the final result still feels a little thin. Rather than doing more expansive world building around the infinite labyrinth (ha ha) and its place in our world, it keeps the scope small, presumably for future sequels. This screening was the “Everything Must Go Edition”, with an extra 15-min segment tacked on after the credits. This strategy seems new — a way to further milk a film near the end of its theatrical run, either gaining repeat viewings from fans or convincing stragglers like me.
    • It was perhaps due to this ‘training’ that I not only endured, but enjoyed, a particular sequence in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey (2026) when we saw it in IMAX over the weekend with Peishan and James. I said before that I wasn’t particularly in a hurry to see this, and that I was anticipating Disclosure Day (2026) much more. In retrospect, it’s almost a crime to draw any comparison between the two. The Spielberg film seems made with decades of Hollywood muscle memory, and probably under healthy conditions that allowed everyone to have a life at the same time. Nolan’s film comes across more like a monumental undertaking, a transfer of life force from human bodies onto 70mm celluloid through back-breaking effort.
    • Afterwards, in trying to rank my favorite Nolan films, I decided that Interstellar (2014) is still my favorite, but this might come in second, followed by Inception and Tenet. The Batman films are dead last. When someone brought up how they were flawed, but Heath Ledger’s turn as the Joker was great, I said that I never understood the big deal about that performance: “For me it’s like if Freddie Prinze Jr. died after turning in a passable Zorro remake”.
  • Week 28.26

    Week 28.26

    • I’m not usually the clumsiest person in this household but I got my turn this week when I slipped on the stairs (wet feet) and fell/slid down to the bottom, on my bottom. Fortunately nothing seems broken, and the bruises aren’t visible, but it hurts! I narrowly avoided landing on my tailbone and took most of the impact on my left side, shoulders, and hands. My first thought was, “if I was in my 70s, this would be real bad.”
    • Ex-colleague Jianjia was in town for a short stopover and we met up for a coffee on Tuesday. She’s about to make a big move across the world, so it will probably be many years before we meet again. Although we last saw each other two years ago, meeting her this time reminded me of the people we were back in 2017, and how much has changed. I think we’re both calmer, a little more jaded, but less to prove.
    • Afterwards I decided to bite the bullet and go watch Supergirl (2026) at a nearby GV theater. I’ve seen talk online about how it’s bombing and people are unfairly blaming Milly Alcock for it, and it’s another example of misogyny among comic book nerds or Hollywood or whatever. I can tell you that the movie has problems and none of them are her; she’s fantastic to watch and brings most of the life to be found in this dreck. I mentioned last week that Craig Gillespie directed this, but I don’t see enough people blaming him. It’s a film that not only fails to carry the baton that Superman (2025) passes it, but fails to achieve anything of value cinematically. It’s a pastiche of boring plot points and cliches. Its needle drops and beat ‘em up fight scenes lack emotional impact. Jason Momoa doing an impression of Jack Black is probably the second best thing about this film. 2.5 stars.
    • After that I came home and fired up the MUBI app like a thirsty man crawling towards a desert oasis. I decided it was finally time to watch the first of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Trois Couleurs series: Three Colors: Blue (1993). No point saving all the good films for someday that never comes, because you never know when you’ll fall down the stairs and break your neck. Maybe it was the contrast whiplash, but what a glorious experience it was. In its first five minutes, it does more than Supergirl manages with a hundred and eight. 5 stars!
    • Not having learnt my lesson, I agreed to watch The Devil Wears Prada 2 (2026) with Kim on Saturday. It was okay, but a far cry from the fun of the first film, too focused on making current moment social commentary but then (unintentionally?) winds up being a downer because it can’t find a silver lining to this shit cloud we’re in. The only way to stop a billionaire is… begging another billionaire. There is a moment near the end that echoes the first film’s resolution where Andy reminds herself Miranda’s life isn’t worth what it costs, but any anti-work sentiment is swept aside and nullified almost as soon as it lands. Miranda’s victorious closing line, “I love working. I really do. Don’t you?” is one hell of a message for the establishment to lob at the general public; a naked admonishment from those boomers who complain “nobody wants to work anymore” without bothering to ask why that is. 3 stars.
    • You know what else was gross? The actions of ex-Apple design team leads which were revealed in a suit filed against them and their current employers OpenAI/io. I’ll leave you to look them up on your own, but I didn’t think it was possible for me to have even less respect for that group than after Jony Ive appeared in his partnership announcement video with Sam Altman. Ive isn’t named in the suit, but whether he knew what his closest lieutenants were doing or just has terrible judgment about who to partner with, it doesn’t look great. What is the point of all that money which lets you do anything you want, if what you choose to do is unethical and stains the only name you have? Absolute loser behavior.
    Selection from Subconscious Heirlooms (2022)
    • I suppose my latest coding project also has something to do with “copying”, if just barely. It’s called Subconscious Samples, and borrows conceptually from the Subconscious Heirlooms series of drawings I made a couple of years ago. The idea is that your mind is always noticing and storing lots of visual patterns and ideas without you knowing it, and when you draw ‘mindlessly’ in a state of flow/play, some of them will emerge. This new software attempts to replicate the process, with a more transparent brain. You add some images, extract contours and shapes, and then it’ll compose new abstract forms out of them, in 2D or 3D space. I’m almost done with it but am still undecided if anyone but me will enjoy having a go.
    App UI: a vaporwave take on classic Mac OS styling
    Some 2D outputs from Subconscious Samples
    • The Rolling Stones’ new album Foreign Tongues is out, and I’ve been listening to it over the week. There are some good songs here, and it’s astounding how good they still sound. One of the comments on the music video (below) starring Anya Taylor-Joy and Charles Melton notes that she was born when the Stones were already 34 years into their careers, and that was 30 years ago. I’m in the middle of the hour-long Zane Lowe interview they’ve done, and hope to be even half as lucid as Mick Jagger is if/when I get to 82.
    • I may have lost a sticker collection when I upgraded my laptop a couple of weeks ago, but I’ve already got some new ones going from my last visit to the B-Side Label store and Village Vanguard in Shimokitazawa. The “How To Enjoy?” #StayHome one is actually from a series of three, with the girl reading a book and playing videogames in the others. What can I say? They spoke to me.
  • Week 27.26

    Week 27.26

    • I published my Jan–Jun ‘26 playlist, BLixTape #8, in a separate post here. Most of my previous ones were stuffed at the bottom of their respective weekly posts, which was the wrong call. Oh well, the second-best time is now.
    • My mother-in-law stayed with us for a few days, which meant having to look up films with a minimum of sex and violence that we could watch together. It was through this process that I realized the vast majority of new shows out on Netflix and so on are rated NC16 and above — it seems producers have concluded that the only way to get views is to pack explicit content into everything, whether the stories need it or not. It must be awfully hard for parents of young teens who want to watch new shows that are PG-13 and don’t suck.
    • Two movies I had in my library that fit the bill: All Is Lost (2013) and Finding Forrester (2000). The former is a one-man survival adventure starring Robert Redford as a man on a boat which suffers sudden damage in the middle of nowhere, and has to find help. It’s really good, with virtually no dialogue to support its tense and realistic depiction of the challenges that a Robert Redford in his mid-70s powers through.
    • Finding Forrester is of course the Sean Connery vehicle that gave birth to that internet-famous line, “You’re the man now, dog!” It’s one of those films with the trope about an elder mentor and their gifted student from the ghetto who could really go to an Ivy League if they wanted, but first they have to overcome prejudice, yadda yada. It’s all good, and possibly even better on a rewatch than I’d remembered from seeing it in theaters when it came out. Beyond the “You’re the man now, dog” line that gave birth to YTMND.com, the other thing I’ve always remembered about this film is Connery’s rant about why socks are badly designed and should be worn inside out: “Dey put da sheams orn da inshide; it hurtch the toesch!”
    • On my own, I finished watching Widow’s Bay on Apple TV and loved it. I’m not really into horror, apart from send-ups like the Scary Movie and Final Destination franchises, so I know a little of the vocabulary but I don’t want to practice it conversationally (so to speak). That said, Widow’s Bay is really a comedy show in horror clothing, but it doesn’t go the Scary Movie route either. Fear and suspense are undercut, yes, but it doesn’t disrespect horror so much as try to find the boundaries of where comedy belongs in it. Episode 4, Beach Reads, is one of the best pieces of TV directing work in recent memory. I love it so much. Its director, Samuel Donovan, has also directed two episodes of Severance.
    • You know who else was really great in Severance? Britt Lower! So we decided to watch her (and Sam Worthington) in the new Harlan Coben adaptation on Netflix, I Will Find You. Expectations were low, because all the Harlan Coben shows we’ve seen have featured stupid stories built around ludicrous revelations that always always have their roots in some childhood events or other repressed memories. But surely Britt will elevate the material, right? Wrong. She’s dragged down into this swamp so spectacularly it now looks like maybe her Emmy was a fluke? Her agent should never have allowed this kind of reputational damage.
    • I try to log every movie I watch on Letterboxd and every TV show on an app called TV Time. Well I just got the news that TV Time is closing down because it wasn’t sustainable as a free service. I’ve decided to move to Trakt instead, which has been around for over a decade and is hopefully more sustainable. The good news for anyone else in this situation is that your data can be transferred over in a couple of minutes. Feel free to follow me.
    • My book club decided to read Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama, a true SF classic if ever there was one. According to Goodreads, I read it 10 years ago but don’t recall anything. I probably read it once more as a teen. When I say I don’t recall anything, I mean it — I’ve finished the whole book now and nothing about it was familiar at all. That is, if you ignore all the ways in which other stories have borrowed from it over the years. Michael Crichton’s Sphere, for example, also starts with some of the same ideas before going in a different direction.
    • On Thursday, I had to go into town to run an errand and thought that I might treat myself to a weekday afternoon screening of the new Supergirl movie starring Milly Alcock. Incidentally, it’s directed by Craig Gillespie, who also did the first two episodes of Apple TV’s Your Friends & Neighbors, which I’ve just started on. In the end, I decided to visit the National Gallery Singapore instead.
    • There’s currently a retrospective for the Chinese artist He Xiangning (1878–1972), on loan from China. Really lovely stuff, which reminded me of the time I spent on my own Chinese Era website, discovering classical Chinese art and poetry. Instead of an appropriately Chinese soundtrack though, I viewed all of it while listening to the clubby sounds of FKA twigs’s reissued version of EUSEXUA. Quite the trip.
    A tale of two plates
    • After that, I stopped by Maji Curry at Funan — to my tastes, still the best standalone Japanese curry rice in the country. Lately they’ve taken to declaring their curry’s base is chicken broth. Odd. In their Thailand outlets, I believe you have a choice between pork and beef-based curries. Nevertheless, still the best.
    • The next night, Kim’s brother inherited a reservation at a small private dining omakase joint run by a single chef in a strange no-nothing mall. We went not knowing what to expect, and got a pretty nice experience with lots of unusual fish directly imported from Japanese markets. Like pomfret, which is normally only eaten here steamed with ginger, or fried. It did, however, cost 10x as much as my Maji Curry meal! The other spendy patrons appeared to be on either side of our decade: in their 30s and 50s, which provided evidence against the prevailing Reddit narrative that everyone out there is struggling and jobless, respectively.
  • Week 26.26

    Week 26.26

    • Whew, I’m still buzzing from the fact I managed to place my order for a new M5 MacBook Air just before Apple raised prices (thanks to AI firms driving up the cost of RAM). When Tim Cook gave the WSJ a heads up, I thought we had maybe a month, but decided to bite the bullet sooner rather than later. I don’t have the cost breakdown to know exactly what I paid for my upgrades, but I think that decision saved me over S$500.
    • It was Amazon Prime Day and I got some accessories: a Belkin USB hub, and a 1TB Sandisk external SSD for the same price I paid to get a better 2TB Samsung one just two years ago. This chip crunch is the worst.
    • The computer arrived yesterday and restoring my old system to it via Time Machine on an external SSD was surprisingly quick and painless. Under an hour, I’d say. One of the first things I did was to install Geekbench and compare it to my old M1 model. It’s true: the M5 is twice as fast. Old habits like picking up my phone to reply because opening Messages.app on the Mac took too long will need to be unlearnt. I also installed ollama and did some local AI inference using a Gemma model, just ‘cause.
    Farewell to my old sticker collection
    • One of the things I never relied on my old M1 MacBook Air to do was play games. I was a PC gamer until I switched to a Mac, at which point I became a console gamer out of sheer necessity. They fare a bit better today thanks to technologies like Apple Silicon and Metal, but it’s not something I’ve paid attention to. This week I decided to fire up Steam for the first time in years and discovered 1) games on sale go even lower in price than they do on consoles, and 2) I can play games on my Mac and view them on a giant screen in Vision Pro. HMMMM! I picked up Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition for just S$4, and will find some time later next week to play it for the first time since the days of my Xbox 360.
    • I finally got access to the new Siri AI on my iPad Pro running the iPadOS 27 developer beta. I did a few tests, like recreating the 2024 WWDC scenario by asking it when Kim would be returning from her business trip — it aced it, finding her hotel stay in our shared calendar, and although there were no flight details, it correctly assumed that she would be returning the same day she checked out.
    • One of the things I was excited to use Siri AI for was as a general purpose research/answers service, like, you know, a little app called Perplexity that allegedly planted rumors in the press that Apple wanted to buy them. I redeemed a free year of Perplexity Pro at some point and have become accustomed to using it several times a day. But that’s yet another USD$20/mo AI subscription I’d be glad to be rid of. It reminds me of when Steve declined to buy Dropbox and told them they were ‘a feature, not a product’.
    • So did Apple succeed in making Siri AI work just as well by licensing Google’s homework instead of buying Perplexity’s wrapper? Signs point to yes. I tried to trip it up by asking who the man appearing in the new Utada Hikaru music video was, just a day after it landed on YouTube. I fully expected it to fail, since the question involved very current information that probably wasn’t in its indexes or training data (remember, Apple says Siri doesn’t rely on Google’s search or world knowledge). But it answered correctly! It cited info from a fan site, and was even able to answer a follow-up question about his (Hiroto Kohmoto) career highlights.
    • On the weekend, we took a few nephews and nieces to see Toy Story 5 in a theater, and I’m happy to report that some of that Pixar magic is still alive. Well, another way to put it might be that Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo, Wall-E) is still alive and working at Pixar. As you may already know from the trailers, this installment has old-fashioned toys going up against today’s attention and confidence-destroying tech, in the form of gaming on tablets, socializing on the internet, and even generative AI. The tech toys start out looking like villains, but the film seems to contend they’re here to stay and can support an existing, healthy imagination (should your child be blessed enough to have one).
    • An old idea came back to me as a possible new vibe coding project, and I’ve started working on the prototype. It’s a generative art concept, and maybe I’m overthinking it and there’s a simpler way than how I’m approaching it, but at present it’s doing my head in. This one might take a while.
    New shareable bookshelf images, for 1–12 books.
    • I also decided to revisit my Shelf Expression project and changed up the approach so that all assets like book covers are fetched and cached just once on build, rather than loading them from internet sources each time a visitor arrives. This dramatically sped up the experience, to the point where I can’t recall why I did it the other way to begin with. I also made a collage tool so users can create shareable images of their shelves, support for custom covers, better AI summarization, and other stuff. So my Bookshelf page (and yours, if you use it) should be much nicer now.
    • What am I reading? I finished Ted Chiang’s Exhalation and am now on R.F. Kuang’s Katabasis. I loved Chiang’s first collections of sf short stories so much that I kept Exhalation on my list for years, too afraid to read it and have nothing left to look forward to. But there’s the risk of suddenly dying and never getting to do all the things you were saving up — so I read it, and it was worth the wait. Katabasis, like Babel, is a book that draws on Kuang’s time at elite universities. Cambridge, Oxford, and now Yale. They say you should write what you know, but it’s beginning to feel like trauma dumping rather than a deliberate choice to set her stories in academia.
  • Week 25.26

    Week 25.26

    • Howard mentioned that he was using Claude or Codex to remake an old game called Little Computer People for his own amusement. That gave me a sudden brainwave: I could remake High Seas Solitaire, a simple Windows-based game I used to love. I’ve tried several times in the last decade to find something like it, or get it running on my Mac — one attempt involved setting up Boot Camp and installing/patching Windows, which took up most of a day.
    • It’s actually simpler and more fun to just make a whole damned game than to deal with Windows. Here’s a post about Island Solitaire, my recreation of the same game mechanics with some of the vibes. Or you can play it directly at solitaire.sangsara.net.
    • Tim Cook spoke to the WSJ and set expectations for Apple to raise prices because of the rising cost of RAM and chips. I took that as a sign that this is the year for me to finally upgrade my 2020 M1 MacBook Air. The order has been placed, and I hope to welcome an M5 model next week. The irony that this is indirectly happening because of people making shit with AI is not lost on me.
    • I was thinking about AI art while in the shower yesterday and came out with some thoughts I figured I should write down, so here’s a little interlude.

    A shower thought on valuing human art against AI art

    When we buy human-made art, we’re not just buying someone’s vision. We’re buying the time put in — a slice of their life that can never be recovered. It’s the process of trying to put a price on a year spent realizing and perfecting a single idea. This much is already obvious.

    AI art works from a different equation. It’s less produced with time than with compute — GPUs, data centers, and electricity. We pay for electricity constantly without a second thought; as an input, it carries no inherent meaning. But when you pay for human art, you are purchasing the accumulated experience of a life. The conversations they had with their parents as a child. The mistakes they made in their twenties. Every influence, decision, and accident that shaped their way of thinking and seeing.

    Generative AI models “think and see” through a distillation of civilization’s digitized products. One process is organic and irreproducible, while the other is probabilistic and derivative. Both are magnificent in their own ways, but we more deeply value the one that speaks to how we are built.

    Collecting art satisfies two deeply human impulses: the urge to possess and the desire to appreciate. When you purchase a work, you are claiming a piece of someone while simultaneously declaring, “This life had meaning.” Even in AI-generated work, the most interesting component is the human intent — the prompter’s editorial choices. An idea is only a nucleus. Yet an entirely human-made work is a whole atom: not just the nucleus, but the colossal mass of time that surrounds it — years of practice and application. An artist may emerge who creates AI works so intricate they’ll take years to complete. That would be a different story because the effort imparts the value.

    When an artist makes many things, we call it a body of work. Each piece informs the next, and narratives emerge; some are easier to see than others. It is a curious coincidence that art uses the word “cycle” to describe a sequence of related works sharing a purpose. But in AI generation, cycles run in the opposite direction: millions of GPU cycles are spun up to produce a single output. Human cycles accumulate meaning through experience over time, while machine cycles search for probabilities through brute force.

    • We watched Alice and Steve on Disney+, a six-episode comedy about what happens when one 50-something man starts dating the 26-year-old daughter of his 50-something female best friend. It’s uncomfortable but funny, which I suppose is the kind of setup for which you cast Jermaine Clement as the older friend. I’d say it’s worth watching although they never quite sell the mutual May–December attraction, and it doesn’t end as satisfyingly as I’d hoped.
    • I went out to see The Furious (2025) with Jose and Reg. This is a martial arts film you cannot help seeing mentioned online this month, in part because the legendary Jet Li talked about it on his podcast (what a world we live in). It’s a Hong Kong production with a Japanese director, and is set in an unnamed South East Asian city that mashes up the entire region. The streets look like they’re in Thailand, but you hear characters speaking Tagalog, Bahasa, English, and Mandarin. It’s designed for maximum relatability, although, as someone pointed out, most of the baddies are brown and the good folks are Chinese coded.
    • I ate two hot pot-based meals and got food poisoning from the sukiyaki (I suspect their handling of “Japanese raw eggs”), but the Chinese one was fine. Coincidence?!
    • It’s the middle of June, which means I listened to Glass Animals’ 2020 song, Heat Waves, quite a few times. This of course is because it contains the line, “Sometimes all I think about is you / Late nights in the middle of June”. I’ll bet it’s a very good week for their global streaming royalties.