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Category: Weeklies

  • Week 24.24

    Week 24.24

    ✅ Saw Seinfeld live

    His 2024 tour had just one Asian stop, here, before heading to several Australian cities. We decided to splurge on S$300 tickets late last year for the one-night-only show on June 14. After all, when are you ever going to see Jerry Seinfeld again? It’s a once-in-a-lifetime, bucket list opportunity.

    And he was pretty good! I can’t believe he’s 70 and still working the circuit. Although the face says he’s aged, the material suggests he’s still the same unserious, childish complainer we love. Some bits on modern subjects like AI and smartphone addiction screamed ‘boomer!’, but his timeless takes on marriage, the lack of innovation at the Sun-Maid Raisin Company, and putting old dish sponges out of their misery, were solid gold.

    ===

    I attended an inspiring memorial service for my uncle, who passed away a few weeks ago. It was a large and well-attended affair, on account of him having been a prominent member of the local medical community.

    Relatives are usually these distant figures we only see during Chinese New Year reunions. But under the surface, there’s a lifetime of stories we never hear, and it’s a pity. If not for the history lesson and stories that his son shared, I would never have known about how he was born in China 90 years ago, arrived in Singapore at the age of 10, suffered tragedy at the hands of the Japanese, and became an award-winning multihyphenate equally accomplished in matters of art and science. That generation really was built different; the risks they took seem unreal when compared to our modern lives (but tbh they couldn’t handle a zillion social notifications destroying their mental health either).

    ===

    It was WWDC week and while I don’t have to comment on Apple stuff, I kinda always do, so let’s keep traditions alive. They unveiled a slew of software features coming to every platform, and I was most excited to see that Journal, Notes, and Freeform are still being improved and haven’t become forgotten hobbies. As a word-centric computer user, they’re the ones I rely on most — the Math Notes demo on iPad was super cool but I couldn’t begin to use it.

    I’m not convinced the Photos app redesign was necessary or an improvement for most users. Its single-page design seems like a conceptual simplification that might add more complexity in real-life use. I haven’t lived with it yet, so I hope I’m wrong.

    I’m convinced Messages will continue to absorb all popular chat features until it eventually catches up to where Telegram was about four years ago. And that’s all it needs to do, really.

    They announced that Apple Vision Pro will finally be sold outside the US, with Singapore as one of the first countries to get it, alongside Japan and China. Wow, that’s a hell of an upgrade to our starting lineup position. Back in Week 5, I correctly predicted that the global rollout would start in June, but I also said that the product would see annual updates — the consensus on tech Twitter now is that there won’t be a new model until 2026. Which… makes me think that I could get one after all? Getting two years of use out of a S$5,500 device is a lot more palatable than getting just one. Once you add the cost of AppleCare+ (S$749), a travel case (S$299), and prescription inserts/contact lenses though. Hmm.

    On Apple Intelligence: I was happy to see them begin by laying out their design principles (we do this on a lot of my projects, but they are rarely communicated to the public), which are critical for this particularly suspicious and misunderstood technology, for which Apple needs to differentiate their approach and model. Some, like Google, already have access to your data but can’t be trusted not to monetize it with ad targeting. Others, like OpenAI, may only have what data you choose to share but can’t be trusted not to train their models on it. Apple is unique in that it doesn’t seem to want to do either.

    Finally, we’re getting a smarter Siri that’s an actual agent, i.e. able to string together various tasks in pursuit of a goal, and take action on behalf of users. So much for the Rabbit and all that bullshit. Doing as much locally as possible is the only responsible way to do AI agents. And Apple’s private cloud compute solution, which looks to be yet another privacy engineering breakthrough, is probably the second-best way.

    The image generation stuff was probably the most contentious part. I’ve seen upset takes from artists but no one can put this stuff back in the bottle. The only way to stop AI art is a full-scale public revolt, and that requires everyone getting a good look at it first. It’s the four packs of cigarettes your dad forces you to smoke after he catches you sneaking one. When we’re all tired of seeing gross AI styles, human-created art might be appropriately valued.

    But I don’t think Apple is on this exact mission, so I was surprised at the examples they chose to showcase. The Genmoji of a surfing dinosaur looked terribly similar to Meta’s own AI chat stickers in style and quality (cheap). But being able to create Genmojis and illustration-style images for documents all across the OS, for free, is no doubt a big deal. I think many people will generate their first AI images with Apple Intelligence.

    ===

    Media activity:

    • I just finished R.F. Kuang’s Babel and loved every page. If you’re into university-set adventures, deep dives into language and literature, the aftershocks of British colonialism, and tales of the Chinese diaspora, this one’s for you. I had no idea that she also wrote Yellowface, which I’ve heard many people rave about. Props to Kuang, she gets a lot more out of being Chinese than me. 5/5 stars.
    • Bought Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name for S$31 on PlayStation’s summer sale, and immediately started playing it. I thought I’d had enough of this series for awhile, but I’m six hours in and having so much more fun than in the preceding game. Part of it is even set in the same Yokohama map as Yakuza: Like a Dragon, but running around here is so much better without the annoying turn-based combat. Recommended if you like absurd storylines played with the straightest of faces.
    • Started watching Constellations on Apple TV+, which has sadly been canceled after one season. The first two episodes lean into a space horror vibe which had me seriously tense, but it’s lightened up a bit now in episode three. Recommended for fans of Noomi Rapace, Dead Space, sci-fi mysteries.
    • Watched A Quiet Place Part II and was let down because I remember enjoying the first one, but this sequel is a much lesser use of mostly the same ingredients. Plus that annoying post-apocalyptic trope about how the human survivors are worse than the monsters. PUHLEASE. 1.5/5 stars.
    • Watched Hit Man on Netflix, the first Richard Linklater film I’ve caught in years. It kept me guessing (and I had a lot of wrong guesses where it was heading), and has a lot of fun with the concept. Glen Powell is going to be a huge star, isn’t he? 4/5 stars.
    • Alex Garland’s Civil War was like most of his films: plenty to look at, not much to say. It shows what a civil war in the US might look like, but doesn’t care to fill anything in, mirroring the photojournalists it follows. Early on, Kirsten Dunst says “we just shoot the pictures, others can ask why”, or something to that effect. Well, isn’t that convenient for you, Alex Garland. 2.5/5 stars.
    • Discovered the band Fantastic Cat after seeing a vertical video somewhere of them inviting Adam Duritz of Counting Crows to be on their new song. It may have been a clip of the video for the song, actually. Following that I checked out Now That’s What I Call Fantastic Cat and really enjoy its pre-my-birth country rock sound. A quick internet search revealed that they’re a supergroup of four singer-songwriters that I unfortunately have never heard of.
    • Am listening to Charli XCX’s very popular new album, BRAT, and it might be her best work yet. I’m also listening to A.G. Cook’s new Britpop album and since he produced half of her album, it can get confusing.
    • Have also been following the drama of Taylor Swift allegedly releasing numerous editions of her albums on the eve of other female artists’ album releases to block them from the top spot on charts. She apparently tried it with Billie Eilish’s album, and now she’s done it to Charli with a UK-only release of two new editions of The Tortured Poets Department, each with different demos or live versions tacked on. She’s free to defend the throne but there are apparently 34 different versions of that album out now. Even The Guardian has weighed in and declared Charli the winner on artistic grounds. This releasing of multiple variants to milk fans feels gross to me. Back in my day, musicians just released one version of an album (okay, plus maybe a Japan-only one with bonus tracks) and it had to fend for itself on the charts for years!
  • Week 23.24: Chilling with Sony’s Reon Pocket 5, New Camera Apps, and a Playlist

    Week 23.24: Chilling with Sony’s Reon Pocket 5, New Camera Apps, and a Playlist

    Sony Reon Pocket 5

    I discovered the existence of a cool new device this week when a Sony catalog wound up in my trad-mail inbox. After some online research, I visited the nearest Sony store for a demo of the Reon Pocket 5 device and ended up buying one for S$249. Okay, what is a “Reon Pocket” and why is this the fifth version? The four previous iterations were only sold in Japan, but the tech is now mature enough that Sony is launching it in the UK, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Thailand this year.

    It’s best described as a wearable gadget for helping you feel more comfortable by fooling suggesting to your body that the temperature is more bearable than it thinks. It does that by cooling or heating a small metal plate pressed against your skin (in this case, at the base of your neck), which contrasts with the environment and changes your perception of it. Surprisingly, it works with just a difference of a few degrees.

    I first learnt about this effect a decade ago from a Wired article about an MIT prototype and have been eagerly awaiting a commercial product ever since. I had no idea until after buying the Sony version that the researchers mentioned in that article have actually shipped their own wrist-worn product called the Embr Wave. It resembles a smartwatch and is more discreet than the bulkier Reon Pocket 5 which sticks out from beneath your shirt collar like some kind of life support system. However, since I already wear an Apple Watch, I don’t know if I’d wear an Embr Wave too.

    In some ways, I seriously see this device as a “life support” technology. I think I’ve struggled with heat regulation all my life — always feeling warmer and sweatier than everyone else; most days you can hold your hand over my head and feel the heat radiating off it. I read that our bodies’ core temperature doesn’t actually change much (when it does, that’s hypothermia or heatstroke), so how comfortable we feel is all down to skin temperature, which this sort of thing hacks.

    After a couple days of testing, I’ve found the Reon Pocket 5 doesn’t perform miracles but offers a different sort of relief than a handheld fan (though one could use both). But it’s like constantly holding a cool can of soda against your neck in hot weather, which is welcome! It’s a glass of ice water for someone in hell. Even when the temperature isn’t that high but it’s stuffy and humid, this takes the edge off. If you’re the sort who’s always feeling cold in Singapore’s air-conditioned spaces, it also heats up and offers the opposite effect.

    There’s a lot I could say about the app, and how it’s another example of Sony’s generally poor UX design, but once you figure out what settings you like, you can lock them in and operate the device without it. It also comes with a separate “tag” that you can attach elsewhere on your body, which monitors the external temperature and humidity so the device can automatically switch modes, but I haven’t bothered to take it out of the box at all. All they needed to do was put a button on the thing to switch between hot and cold, just like the Embr Wave does.

    Building a separate piece of hardware instead… reminds me of how Sony headphones try to “intelligently” adjust noise cancellation levels by guessing whether you’re commuting, or working, or lazing about, by using GPS location and accelerometer data from the smartphone app — an absolutely mental and roundabout solution to replace the user pressing a button. Incidentally, Apple’s Adaptive Audio mode on AirPods Pro is a much better take: they dynamically adjust the balance between noise canceling and transparency based on environmental noise, letting you be aware but not annoyed.

    The battery, if you’re wondering, should last an entire day out. At Level 1 cooling power it’s rated at 17 hours; at Level 3, 10 hours; and at Level 5, 4 hours. Operating on Smart Cool mode, it switches between them as necessary. There’s also a “wave” feature that I recommend turning on, which follows the same core principle as Embr’s device where cooling power fluctuates so you don’t become desensitized to it. If you need even longer performance, you can plug it into a power bank and it will work on direct power without charging. Imagine using it at the same time as Apple Vision Pro, with two power banks in your back pockets. That’s living in the future, baby.

    In conclusion, wearing the Reon Pocket 5 around your neck makes you look dorky or hooked up to some medical device, but when it’s over 30ºC in the shade, who gives a damn?!

    ===

    New camera apps

    I’ve been using two new camera apps: Kino, from Lux Optics who also make the Halide app, and Leica LUX (no relation).

    Kino is a logical move. Halide was a “pro” app focused on bringing intuitive manual controls for still photography. Kino does the same for video. Unlike Halide, it’s a one-time purchase ($20 USD) and a big part of its functionality is the ability to apply different looks (color grading via LUTs). I’ve always wished Halide would do something similar, to help lazy shooters get the most out of RAW captures. I hardly shoot any video but I thought Kino was worth buying, especially since I’ve let my Halide subscription lapse for lack of use.

    One of the best things Kino does is allow the system to shoot in Apple LOG but write the files in HEVC format instead of ProRes, which saves a lot of space but still conveys some of the benefits. You can also shoot in LOG, apply a color grade preset in real time, and save the baked file in HEVC. That’s awesome.

    Leica LUX is not so logical and I’ve been puzzling over why a company with their luxury brand equity would take a risk like this. On the page linked above, they’re saying the app “lets you capture the iconic Leica Look with your iPhone” using their “deep color science” and digital simulations of “legendary lenses”, like the Noctilux-M 50mm f/1.2 ($7,895 USD), and claiming it “reproduces” its “signature aesthetic bokeh”.

    I present two exhibits. The first (below) is what you see when selecting the “Leica Standard” profile: a statement that it handles color the same way as their cameras that cost upwards of $6,000 USD do, using your iPhone’s sensor. Whether it’s true or not is beside the point; Leica is saying you can enter their world with a free app and the phone you already own. To my eyes, it’s not far off from the iPhone’s default color handling, and looks like some gentle H/S/L shifts. The other Leica Looks are a mixed bag: I like the Leica Natural one, but some others are heavy and feel like “filters”. I’d hoped these would be more like Fuji’s in-camera film simulations, which are more like “color profiles”.

    The secret sauce is leaking out!

    The second shows how their implementation of a depth effect is inferior to Apple’s own Portrait Mode, with rough edge artifacts, despite the hyperbolic claims of giving your iPhone the “unique aesthetic of Leica’s legendary M-lenses” with their “distinctive look and beautiful bokeh”. If it did, that dark shot of my Misery Men mug would look like it came from a 28mm Summilux f/1.4 lens, and I can assure you it does not. Moreover, their digital depth effect only adds background blur, not foreground blur, which makes for a less realistic result that Apple’s own Portrait Mode which your iPhone already does for free.

    LUX’s App Store description
    See how the digital replica handles the mug’s edges

    One nice feature is the photo library viewer they’ve built into it, which lets you switch between seeing All photos and Leica photos only, including ones taken with your Leica cameras. And photos taken with this app sit alongside them as equals! In the field where the camera model is specified, it simply shows “Leica LUX”.

    What are they getting out of this brand dilution? Well, the app is subscription-based and asks for S$99.98/yr to unlock more Leica Looks and lenses. They claim new ones will be added monthly. I think perhaps anyone who owns or intends to own a physical Leica camera will not bother with this, and it’s a move to grab all the aspirational customers who want to touch the brand — including a bit of overlap with the market they tried to target with their Huawei and Xiaomi smartphone collaborations. The question is whether this will do any significant reputational damage, and so far all the comments I’ve seen on Leica blogs and communities have been negative. Could they stand to make more on app subscriptions than they’d lose from upset camera buyers? Maybe! Is that capitalization model the right way to run a company? Maybe not?

    I’m still optimistic because I’m not emotionally or financially invested enough in the brand to care how they destroy themselves, and will wait to see if they update the app to improve edge detection and add some better Leica Looks. If it ever gets good enough to be my primary iPhone camera app, a hundred bucks a year is steep but not out of the question.

    Before: iPhone defaults. After: Custom Photographic Style

    Meanwhile, I’ve found the following settings get me calmer and more natural photos out of the default iPhone camera app. First, go to Settings > Camera and make sure you turn on “Exposure Adjustment” under the “Preserve Settings” section. Then in the camera app, set exposure to -0.3ev, and using one of the Photographic Styles as a base, change its values to -20 Tone and +5 Warmth. Note: If you have a 14 Pro, the only way you’re getting less crispy shots is to use an app like Zerocam or Halide and disabling smart processing.

    ===

    Media activity

    • Started playing Spider-Man: Miles Morales on the PS5. It feels just like the first game I played on the PS4 years ago and I can’t say I’m getting next-gen from this, but it’s good fun.
    • Finally got Balatro on the Switch, the highly acclaimed indie poker roguelike game. It reminds me so much of Solitairica, the indie solitaire roguelike game on iOS. That’s a good thing. It’s the kind of game you can play for a few minutes, or hours on end.
    • Started watching season 2 of Link Click, a Chinese-made “anime” series with a cool ‘catch a serial killer through time’ kinda story. I saw season 1 a couple of years ago and was impressed by how well executed it was.
    • Saw Still of the Night (1982), starring a young Meryl Streep and Roy Scheider. It’s a Hitchcock-inspired psychological thriller with Fatal Attraction vibes. 3/5
    • Saw The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, a Guy Ritchie WWII joint that feels like if Inglourious Basterds was a Jason Statham vehicle. Except he’s not in this, Henry Cavill is, as well as Alan Ritchson (of Reacher fame) who plays a gay Dane (Swede?) who loves killing Nazis almost a little too much. Quite a bit of fun. 3/5
    • Saw The Fall Guy, a movie I’ve been anticipating for a long time on the strength of its trailer and what little I’d assumed about its story. I didn’t know it was based on an old TV show. But it was a messy, empty disappointment of a blockbuster that even Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt couldn’t save. 2/5
    • Saw Carnival of Souls (1962), a cult classic surrealist quasi-horror film on Kanopy, a video streaming service that’s free if you connect your library account. It’s got Ed Wood B-movie vibes and special effects, a lot of rough edges, but still manages to be a compelling work that I’ll probably remember for a long time. 3.5/5
    • Saw To Have and Have Not (1944) in which Lauren Bacall plays a character who is stated as being 22 years old, to which I thought “she’s gotta be a lot older than that”. I looked it up and she was probably 19 💀. So that’s proof that people really used to look older, and you’d be forgiven for assuming it was the copious smoking (on display in this film). It’s a weird one, almost a musical showcase for Hoagy Carmichael who shows up as the hotel bar’s piano man. Doesn’t quite have that Casablanca magic yet. 3/5
    • Saw Dream Scenario in which Nicolas Cage convincingly plays a loser who suddenly becomes famous due to an unexplained phenomenon (he starts appearing in people’s dreams). Towards the end, it pivots from uneasy mystery to comical cultural commentary. That’s not a complaint though. 3/5

    A playlist for you

    As reward for making it this far, here’s the next installment in my Blixtape playlist series, covering music I listened to from January to May this year. Hope you find something to like.

    Add BLixTape #4 on Apple Music

    The tracklist:

  • Week 22.24

    Week 22.24

    I used to drink 3–4 coffees a day, measured in espresso shots, usually from our home Nespresso machine or the office’s barista. At Starbucks prices, that would cost $10 a day or more, depending on the drink formulations. At home, about $3.20 in Nespresso pods.

    While looking at where I could trim unnecessary expenses (which has resulted in pausing Netflix for the past month, I’ve barely missed it; and canceling YouTube Premium, much more painful because of how frequent the bad ads are, so perhaps a necessary expense after all), I thought perhaps I could drink more tea. After all, I like tea! It’s just a bit more bother, waiting for the water to boil and then standing there for 4–5 minutes while it brews, or at least having to remember to come back in time — I usually don’t, and then it stands there on the counter for 20 minutes becoming cold and uncommonly strong.

    So I got some UK supermarket brand teabags in, because local supermarkets don’t do tea much cheaper and can’t do it much better, I assume. And boy are they ridiculously cheap. A box of 80 Sainsbury’s gold label teabags runs about S$5–6 (and less than S$2 in the UK), making each hit of caffeine about 10x cheaper than Nespresso. If you do the math, simply switching to tea will save me enough to buy a new iPhone Pro every two years.

    Starbucks revenue is down, coincidence?

    ===

    I finally got the third and final dose of my hepatitis vaccine after recovering enough from Covid — that cough is still around though. For reasons too hard to explain here, I ran into YJ immediately after, and we managed to chat for about half an hour. It was my first time seeing him in years; I think the last time was a noisy fast-food lunch just before Covid happened.

    He runs a bunch of coding classes for kids and I got to sit in for a little bit of one. What I want to mention here is how astounding it is to actually watch young teens use their computers in a classroom in 2024. They swipe between desktop spaces on macOS: they’ve got windows for Discord, Telegram, YouTube, Figma, oh and some multiplayer FPS they’re killing their classmates in, casually multitasking between all of it while still participating in the lesson.

    I said to YJ either we’re really old and slow, or this generation’s brains are cooked. I assume the former. We were premature in calling millennials “digital natives” because the world they and Gen Zs grew up in were not sufficiently digital. I think these kids are there now.

    Media activity

    • I know I said I was committed to finishing Astral Chain on the Switch, but I lied. The graphics are good for the aging platform, but the story is not engaging, the levels waste my time, and the combat is over complicated for no reason. Cutting my losses.
    • Likewise, after 24 hours invested, I’m ready to call Yakuza: Like A Dragon the worst installment I’ve played in an otherwise brilliant series. Perhaps it’s the decision to make it more of a JRPG, with all the tedious combat and level grinding that comes with it. The city of Yokohama where you spend most of your time is so much blander than it is in Lost Judgment — just compare the maps and you’ll see Yakuza’s version is a barren wasteland where Judgment’s pops with shops and activities on every block. I’m at a stage where the game is telling me to level up before the next chapter begins, and I’m saying no to hours more of pointless street fights.
    • I went back to Lost Judgment to finish the add-on DLC adventure, The Kaito Files, which took about four hours. And then I deleted it along with the two games above. Clean slate and it feels good.
    • I decided to see more films each week, and to cut down on the decision paralysis, they don’t have to be great.
    • Firestarter (2022) was terrible. I was actually excited for it because I saw the original 80s film several times as a kid; it had horror vibes and terrified me. It was based on a Stephen King story and starred a child Drew Barrymore as a girl with the power to set things on fire with her mind. This new one has Zac Efron playing her dad, and there are nearly no redeeming qualities. 1/5.
    • I rewatched David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo over two days and loved it more than I probably did when it came out. Although it wasn’t as successful, it made me want to rewatch The Girl in the Spider’s Web too, but had to confirm my vague recollection that it was a new standalone story written after Stieg Larsson’s death ended the trilogy. Turns out there are now SEVEN books in the Lisbeth Salander series, and Spider’s Web is book #4. I’ll probably read the new books first to see if they’re any good.
    • In the Heights was a fun musical with Lin Manuel-Miranda’s fingerprints all over it. The songs were satisfying, with the occasional clever bars that make you go ‘ooooh!’, and Jon Chu (of the Step Up films) is obviously the guy you call to direct big dance sequences. Perfect Sunday afternoon viewing. 4/5.
    • Completely without meaning to, I saw an Anya Taylor-Joy triple feature this week: The Northman: I was prepared for a mid-budget Viking tale, but had no idea it would be a star-studded, intensely violent, artistic triumph (4/5); The Menu: I was prepared for cannibalism and risked watching it before dinner anyway, but instead it was an absurd black comedy wrapped in layers of detestfulness — it attacks pretension with a blunt weapon forged from pretentiousness itself (3/5); and Furiosa: Jesus Christ, George Miller has action cinema running in his veins, you can’t take your eyes off the screen for a minute. Anya is incredible in all three, a victim with hidden strength. I’d like to see her do some lighter comedic material. Maybe I’ll watch Emma next week.
    • YouTube recommended me a music video by Kenshi Yonezu and I want to know why no one told me about this guy. I’ve seen three of his recent videos now and they’re brilliant! They make use of practical effects, clever editing, and great art direction to keep you engaged throughout the songs. Take a look:
  • Week 21.24

    Week 21.24

    Kim’s post-trip illness last Sunday turned out to be Covid, so we shuttered ourselves home all week and tried to sleep it off. Since it was our last test kit, I didn’t get a chance to test myself, but I assumed that the lingering illness I’ve had since returning from Hong Kong was probably it, or else I’d just get reinfected (which didn’t happen). We received new tests on Thursday and, thankfully, both tested negative.

    Games

    Being stuck at home allowed me to clock over 10 hours in Yakuza: Like A Dragon (#7 in the series) which, unlike its predecessors, is a turn-based RPG. Since Kiryu Kazuma rode off into the sunset in Yakuza 6: The Song of Life, this installment has a whole new cast, from ex-Yakuza henchmen to ex-detectives, ex-nurses, and ex-hostesses. It’s more ridiculous than any of the other entries: one side quest has your party fighting adult Yakuza men wearing diapers after you crash their bizarre infant roleplaying session. After beating them, you make up by sharing a milk toast from baby bottles. You get the idea.

    According to HowLongToBeat.com I’ve probably got another 40 hours to go, which puts my massive backlog even further back on the calendar and makes me a little impatient tbh. I should take on shorter games, like the slew of great-looking new indie titles that just dropped this month. Luke Plunkett at Aftermath asks how the hell we’re supposed to find the time for this embarrassment of riches. For my part, I’ve already bought 1000xRESIST and Little Kitty, Big City. Backlogs are a neverending to-do list, even for the unemployed.

    Film and TV

    There’s a new 6-part drama series on the UK’s Channel 4 called The Gathering, and some people involved in the excellent show Line of Duty are supposedly involved in it. It looks at the effects of ‘toxic ambition’, class lines, and online behaviors on the lives of some teens and their families in Merseyside. It was good enough for us to see the whole thing over the weekend.

    We also binged all available episodes of Dark Matter on Apple TV+, a show I’ve been looking forward to since it was announced. I’ve enjoyed Blake Crouch’s novels for awhile, and they are always conspicuously written as if selling their film rights is his real goal. That’s fine! They are fast-moving sci-fi action movies in book form. Unfortunately, the series gets off to a slower start than I’d like. I find it frustrating when characters in films behave as though sci-fi tropes don’t exist in their universe. Mild spoiler alert, but if I come home and find my house looks completely different and my wife is a different person, it wouldn’t take me days to deduce I’m in a parallel universe, especially if I’m a scientist who’s worked on the bloody idea before. Things do pick up after episode 2, though. It’s made me resolve to read more sci-fi in the next few weeks.

    I mentioned starting on Sugar last Sunday, the new Colin Farrell show that is best enjoyed with zero knowledge going in. It was so good we finished all episodes the next day. I am proud to say that I called the events of the final episodes very early on. But I want you to enjoy it, so I won’t say anything more. Except… its love for classic Hollywood cinema made me resolve to spend more time watching films in the next few weeks.

    Did you know that Singapore’s National Library Board (and I suspect many others globally) has a deal with a streaming video service called Kanopy that gives you unlimited access to their catalog? It even has an Apple TV app! See if your library card lets you in; they’ve got a ton of classics and indie films.

    We saw Woody Allen’s Wonder Wheel (2017), which was more remarkable for its cinematography by Vittorio Storaro (Apocalypse Now, The Last Emperor) — light and color saturation/tonality are constantly changing in the middle of scenes, making full use of this “channel” for communicating the story — than for the fact that Kate Winslet, Jim Belushi, and Justin Timberlake?! are in it. 3 stars.

    But wow was I wrecked by She Came to Me, a weird little film that I held at arms length but found myself fully embracing by its absurd and perfect operatic ending. I don’t know how to judge acting, if I’m honest, but Peter Dinklage, Marisa Tomei, and Anne Hathaway inhabit their characters effortlessly and subtly. I had to look up writer and director Rebecca Miller afterwards, and oh, she’s only Arthur Miller’s daughter and Daniel Day-Lewis’s partner and the author of several books that I will now read. 4 stars.

    I also resumed watching Blue Giant, the anime film about a trio of young men striving to make it as jazz musicians, and it perfectly captures the intensity and ecstasy of a great performance in a few superb animated sequences (at one point during a solo, the protagonist’s body soars through space past a black hole depicted in the style of Interstellar). It’s like the performance scenes from Whiplash rendered in the style of Into the Spider-Verse. It made me resolve to spend more time listening to great jazz albums on my headphones in the next few weeks. 4.5 stars.

    ===

    Channel News Asia, the Singapore-based er… news channel, puts out some good documentaries from time to time, but they’ve outdone themselves with the scope of their latest three-part series, Walk the Line.

    It follows a group of Chinese citizens eager to escape poor financial prospects and/or persecution in their country, as they make a dangerous journey through South America to become illegal immigrants in the US. It’s heartbreaking and insane how they persevere through the difficult journey, and how naively they think America will somehow be worth it.

    After arriving in Monterey Park, California, they join thousands of others vying for dishwashing jobs and so on. It’s a story that’s been told in other media before, but CNA’s team really did the field work and it’s worth a watch.

    ===

    Books

    I finished Jack Reacher #21, Night School (Jack goes to Europe and gets involved in something big that still feels as intimate as the usual conspiracies he deals with, 3 stars), and decided to try something different. Boy did I regret it.

    The chosen detour was Anxious People, by Swedish author Fredrik Backman, who I saw giving a jokey ‘I don’t normally give talks about being a writer but here goes’ kinda talk on social media that someone shared with me. I should have known from that video he would have a dad joke sense of humor, and it was excruciating in the novel. Covered in a layer of schmaltzy philosophizing about life that came off like a motivational quote poster in a school counselor’s office, the thing somehow has a Goodreads review average over 4 stars. I made it through about 37% before returning the ebook to the library and giving it a 1-star rating. Just reading it filled me with pure hatred.

    Now desperately in need of a palate cleanser, I decided to embark on R.F. Kuang’s Babel which Munz has been recommending to me for a year, and oh god it’s exactly what I needed. I never had the young adult experience of reading a Harry Potter book, but I imagine this is what that must have felt like, with ample magic and intrigue, but a more literary and historical take with colonial criticism and racial identity crises to round it out.

  • Week 20.24

    Week 20.24

    It’s been a full week since I fell ill but this virus seems to have booked a late checkout, so we have no choice but to wait. Once they’re gone, housekeeping can get to clearing out the sinuses and emptying the phlegm bins. Even worse, it’s now Kim’s turn on the back of some work travel to Bangkok, so maybe I’m headed for Round 2. Is/was it Covid? A test said no, but anything’s possible. The news is reporting a doubling of local cases last week, at a rather alarming 26,000 cases.

    Fortunately, I haven’t had much occasion to leave the house. I did go out to the nearby supermarket once to get some supplies, but despite leaving Kim a message that I’d gone grocery shopping, she also dropped by on her own way home and bought some. So now we have about 29 eggs knocking about the house. 😑

    The awards show shortlisting is going well and has become a regular afternoon activity, but there’s so much of it to do. I don’t know how anyone with a full-time job is managing this without giving up a weekend or two. Looking forward to sharing some of the more impressive work I’ve seen when this is over.

    Speaking of the industry, I saw an ad for Merge Mansion (a Candy Crush sorta mobile game) starring Pedro Pascal a few months back and downloaded the game, but forgot all about it without even playing. Well, I did this week and now I’m bloody hooked. It’s monetized on a timer and energy-based system, meaning you run out of moves and have to wait for more (or pay), so I’m constantly hitting that wall and checking the app several times a day to make a little progress. Games like these are cruelly designed to exploit those with a lot of free time throughout the day: children, homemakers, the jobless, me.

    Another gaming loose end is Lost Judgment , which I bought for the PS4 the last time I was on sabbatical but then I ran out of time and never started. The purchase included the PS5 version, so when I got the console last week I decided it would be my first game. After some 20+ hours, I’ve completed the main story and don’t feel excited enough to play through the DLC or remaining side quests. It might be because it repeats much of what was in Judgment, its predecessor, or because I’m anxious to get on with the rest of the ‘Like a Dragon’ series in my backlog (of which the Judgment games are a part).

    For reference, I’m planning to play

    • Yakuza: Like a Dragon (#7)
    • Like a Dragon Ishin! (a spin-off set in about the same era as the recent Shogun TV series)
    • Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name (#7.5)
    • Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth (#8).
    • And that’s skipping Yakuza 0, Yakuza 2 Kiwami, and the remastered fourth and fifth games! Those might have to wait for the next time.

    As if that wasn’t enough, I’m also committed to finishing Astral Chain on the Switch, which plays fine but looks like an Xbox 360 game in visual terms, and really can’t compare to the current generation. I don’t think it maintains 30fps and the characters’ faces don’t even move during in-game cutscenes. I need to play all these ancient action games before I get spoiled by the likes of Stellar Blade on the PS5, where every surface gleams in ray-traced splendor.

    If I had to describe the Switch’s value proposition in light of now owning a PS5, it’s a fantastic portable console better suited for indie games (and Nintendo exclusives, of course), especially 2D platformers and puzzlers. For example Animal Well, which just came out to overwhelmingly positive reviews; and the poker roguelike everyone says is digital crack, Balatro. Oh, and visual novels too. I powered through and finally completed an awful one this week that I’ve been “playing” for the last couple of months, which has prevented me from doing anything else on the Switch. I’m glad it’s finally over, and no, I don’t recommend it (Our World is Ended – 59% on Metacritic).

    ===

    Side note: OpenAI showed off an impressive demo of a new GPT-4 model that is omni-modal, smarter, and works in nearly real time. I’m also pleased that these features will supposedly be coming to free users too, along with the use of custom GPTs like the ones I’ve been making. I recently canceled my ChatGPT Plus subscription since I don’t have any regular jobs for it to do at this time, apart from helping me edit this blog, but now I may even be able to keep doing that.

    ===

    Media Activity:

    • Started on two episodes of Sugar on Apple TV+, and I’m locked into its modern LA noir mystery. There’s something weird going on beneath the surface with its meta-Hollywood thing, but what I immediately loved was how visually fresh and uninhibited it is.
    • After languishing unfinished for what feels like a year, we recently picked up season 1 of Acapulco again and can’t recall why we ever stopped. Just like its setting, it’s sunny, breezy, and takes your mind off everything — perfect end-of-day TV. The best part is there are two more seasons just waiting now.
    • I started watching the anime movie Blue Giant on Saturday and was halfway through before realizing I wasn’t in the right mood and should save it for later in the week. It’s based on a manga about an earnest guy who moves to Tokyo to be a jazz musician, and is just steeped in the jazz culture there with the kissas and live houses. I saw a bunch of promotional art for it in Tower Records a whole year ago when we were there, and I’ve been wanting to watch it since. It’s just that I’d read something about it not having a huge budget, and so wasn’t expecting too much from the animation. But it turned out well and sounds amazing!

    There’s so much new music out this weekend that I have to break the format.

    Let’s start with an album I enjoyed back in the day and have just rediscovered through Michael’s weeknotes, Tourist by St Germain. I didn’t even know it received a digital remastering and Deluxe Version re-release in 2012, but it sure sounds great. This could come out today and make waves, apart from having some light Cafe del Mar vibes.

    Billie Eilish’s new album HIT ME HARD AND SOFT is out now. I played it once through in the background and plan to give it some closer listening, but it’s already surpassed my expectations. I was afraid she’d settled into consistently making very samey music, but sonically this sounds fresh and does some interesting things.

    Apple Music is doing a list of their “100 Best Albums” (of all time), and I was happy/disappointed to see Portishead’s Dummy land at #67. There’s no overstating the impact of that band on my tastes, and Beth Gibbons’ voice is a huge part of that. So I’m really afraid to put her new (second) solo album on. Even the title, Lives Outgrown, gives me goosebumps of nervous anticipation.

    There’s also a new Kamasi Washington album, Fearless Movement! A new Andra Day album, CASSANDRA (cherith)! A new A.G. Cook TRIPLE album, Britpop! A new reworking of a 2020 Childish Gambino album that I never heard, Atavista! And a Deluxe version of the last self-titled Bleachers album that I didn’t like that much!

  • Week 19.24

    Week 19.24

    I’ve been sick for days, probably a bug I picked up coming back from Hong Kong. There were quite a few coughing people in the airport and on the plane. It started with a sore throat, moved to a crushing headache and tiredness, and is now in the final stage (I hope) with a phlegmy cough.

    The ongoing headaches are the worst part, making it hard to do anything that involves looking at screens, so I’ve had to listen to podcasts to pass time outside of trying to sleep, which incidentally has been one fever dream after another soundtracked by the latest Kendrick Lamar songs. I dreamt of eating fried rice at New Ho King. My brain won’t shut up and keeps playing the BBL Drizzy refrain on repeat.

    I surprisingly made it through a three-hour episode of the Accidental Tech Podcast talking about the new iPads, which I would normally never have the patience for. I think I learnt just one new thing: the 256GB version of the iPad Pro has only a single RAM bank, resulting in slower performance compared to the other models. Three hours is pushing it for me, I think an hour is an ideal length for a regular podcast. But I’m really impressed they’ve kept the show going for so long. Editing it weekly must be a bitch.

    I also mostly enjoyed an episode of a show I’d never heard before, Normal Gossip, which tells/stretches out banal real-life stories submitted by listeners. It was an episode about “the joy of being a hater” which obviously spoke to me. And in the spirit of hating, I need to say that I find the host annoyingly chirpy and fake, but she was offset by the dour and acerbic guest she happened to have this week. At times the storytelling and incredulous laughing of the listener felt a bit like Reply All, which I used to enjoy when I listened to podcasts more.

    A better thing I brought home from Hong Kong was a brand new PS5 of the Slim variety! When the original PS5 came out, I was disgusted by its form factor and massive footprint. It was more like a PC that went under your desk than a console that sat on your, er, TV console. So I’ve been waiting patiently for years with my PS4 Pro (barely touching it in favor of the Switch tbh), for the inevitable slimmer and smaller edition to be announced. Which happened earlier this year.

    It retails for about S$650 here on average, so I hadn’t rushed out to get one given my deep Switch backlog — a whole other platform of games wasn’t exactly urgent. But on our last morning in Causeway Bay, we stopped by the Times Square mall and found that they go for about S$520 in Hong Kong. Wtf?! It was an instabuy followed by a brisk walk back to the hotel to repack our luggage.

    Our new Sony TV automatically detects the PS5 and configures itself to work with it, which is nice! It also supports all the fancy stuff like 120hz variable refresh rate, but the games I’ve got to play first are kinda last-gen ones that have been ported with some PS5 support: Lost Judgment and Like A Dragon 7, both from the series formerly known as Yakuza in the West.

    The best feature of the PS5 so far? Incredibly quick loading times, nearly instantaneous, such that moving from one area to another in Lost Judgment doesn’t break the immersion like it would when I played it on PS4. With a single “Resume” command from the system’s Home Screen, you can even cold start up a game, load the last save, and get back to it in under 10 seconds. Compare this to last-gen consoles where you’d have to do all that manually, waiting, pressing buttons, and waiting some more — probably for up to a minute.

    You can tell the Panadol has shut my headache down now because I’m rambling far more than I thought I would. This was supposed to be a quick two-paragraph update! See you next time.

  • Week 18.24

    Week 18.24

    Last week marked the 200th installment of a blogging rhythm I wasn’t sure I could keep up for a year, let alone nearly four. I thank any readers I have, the makers of iA Writer, WordPress, and of course, my wife for graciously giving me space on Sunday mornings to engage in this act of reflection and blabbering.

    Except I’m not writing this on Sunday, no it’s currently Thursday and I’m getting a head start with some structure because we’ll be in Hong Kong for the weekend. It was a last-minute idea, driven by a primal craving for Chinese roast goose, a desire to escape the summer heatwave currently roasting all of SE Asia, and the realization that we won’t have a pocket of clear calendar space like this again for several months.

    I haven’t been back in the territory since May 2019, and so much has obviously happened since. Did you know that this very site was once blocked by the great Chinese firewall? I have no idea why, but I hope I don’t find myself unwelcome upon arrival. Anecdotally, I’ve heard the city doesn’t quite feel the same these days, and we’ve seen the numerous ChannelNewsAsia documentary features about people looking for fresh starts, emigrating to the UK and so on. But as an infrequent visitor with only superficial interactions to speak of, I don’t expect to sense any changes at all.

    What’s changed is that while I used to be excited about Hong Kong’s lack of sales tax and abundance of electronics and camera emporiums, not to mention official Apple Stores, those things are less interesting these days. I’ve got nothing on my shopping list (plus I’m in low-cost mode — see previous entries), I’m content with snapping photos on my iPhone and Ricoh GR III, and Singapore has so many Apple Stores these days I’ve started taking them for granted.

    (CW: some camera nerdery ahead)

    I am looking forward to photographing the city a little with Dmitri Novikov’s new camera app, Zerocam (in beta). The concept is an extremely simplified camera with one button; there’s not even a way to quickly look at the last photo you took. When you hit the shutter, a RAW image is captured with as little of the iPhone’s intelligent processing as possible, plus some specific settings that Novikov prefers (-0.5ev and some very light touch color grading, as far as I can tell), and then saved directly to a HEIF file.

    Unfortunately it only gives you photos at 12mp size, probably because third-party apps don’t have the option of 24mp and 24mp is a result of the computational photography processes that Zerocam avoids anyway. And while you can use Halide to capture similarly unprocessed photos (turn off “Enable Smartest Processing” in its settings), you can’t make it remember a lowered exposure setting between sessions.

    The intermediate solution I’ve landed on to retain 24mp files while getting better everyday photos is to set Apple’s stock camera app to remember a -0.7ev exposure, and tune Photographic Styles to -20 Tone and -7 Warmth. I really like the look of this “recipe” on iPhone 15, and it’s kinda like shooting with Highlight Priority exposure and the Negative Film effect on a Ricoh GR III (which I’ll also be doing).

    Actually in HK now:

    We’ve chosen a wet and gloomy weekend to stop by. Our flight was delayed by 2.5 hours, I suspect because of turbulent conditions at HK International Airport around our original arrival time. Just two days earlier, some Cathay Pacific passengers were tossed around and couldn’t land for six hours, with the descriptions of a vomit and scream-filled cabin in the news fulfilling the conditions of a personal nightmare.

    I take back a little of what I said — things do feel somewhat different. The city is grubbier than I remember; prices are higher and some people must be struggling to get by (well, HK isn’t alone in this); and there’s a hint of economic decline in the many empty shop units with ‘For Lease’ signs up.

    One tool that’s been super helpful all week has been the Arc Search app on iOS, which added a voice mode that you can assign to the Action Button on iPhone 15 Pros. When the app launched with an AI feature that summarizes search queries on custom-generated webpages, I was wary of this “browser that browses for you” concept, which gives users few reasons to visit the underlying pages being mined (thereby ruining the web), but maybe they’ve made some changes since. It’s easier to click through to the sources.

    I’ve been using it to answer questions like “what interesting art exhibitions are on in HK right now?” and it performs some light research, and I do end up visiting the linked websites for further details like location and pricing. It’s effectively a better way to present search results (albeit with the same bias and ranking concerns as search results). I hope iOS 18’s AI overhaul will see similar utility coming to Siri and Safari. Perhaps this is where the rumored Gemini partnership with Google comes in.

    ===

    Media activity:

    • I started on a new Jack Reacher book: Night School. It’s what I do when I can’t decide what to read next.
    • I’ve been watching the new-ish MF Ghost anime, which is a sort of sequel to Initial D. Some people seem to think it’s an insult to the original show, but I wouldn’t know — I might watch it after this? It’s got a funny premise: in a future Japan, electric vehicles are the norm and gas-powered cars are only allowed in a special racing tournament called MFG. But drifting has become a lost art! Enter Kanata Rivington, a hafu born in England who trained under a master who I presume is the main protagonist of Initial D, returning to Japan for the first time to find his lost father and school a nation on how to burn rubber while chucking a uey.
    • The Japanese saxophonist Sadao Watanabe is back with a new album at the insane age of 91. It’s called Peace, and I’m digging it. Speaking of, I first heard him as a child digging through my dad’s music collection.
    • I’m also loving Tigers Blood, by Waxahatchee, which I discovered on Pitchfork’s list of The Best Music of 2024 So Far. I’m aware that Anna Wintour fired a bunch of people from Pitchfork and it’s supposedly not the site it used to be, but this is a great pick. They say: “Recommended if you like — Indie-country; Sheryl Crow; Gillian Welch; that Brad Cook Sound; MJ Lenderman showing up; catchin’ skinks down by the creek; ice cream stand off the highway; letting your legs dangle off a pier”.
    • What a week in rap battle history! The beef between Drake and Kendrick Lamar has been giving us explosive drama and incredible diss tracks, sometimes more than one a day, and Kendrick’s the winner in my book but honestly I’m afraid just watching it unfold. It feels like someone’s going to get shot or jailed as a result of this.

    Oh one more thing! The Cannes Lions Festival announced the shortlisting juries for 2024’s awards, and I’m pleased to share that I’m on the panel for the Brand Experience & Activation Lions. That should keep me occupied for the next few weeks.

  • Week 17.24

    Week 17.24

    I turned 44. After a minor celebration, I expected to start figuring out my new daily routine, but then some bad news landed and things got worse very quickly in the first half of the week.

    It was only two weeks ago that I mentioned how a family friend, someone who was a significant presence for most of my youth, was recovering from surgery while battling cancer, and now I’m sad to record that she didn’t make it. Cancer is especially cruel because it tells you to expect the worst, and still manages to surprise. I thought we’d have more time. And this happened far away, across screens and apps, limiting how much I could know and help — so the loss was twice a void, and the fact of death was conveyed by a sequence of lit-up pixels on an iPhone.

    Part of what inspired me to take some time off was how I felt unable before to give important things like this my full attention. There were moments I almost didn’t answer messages or pick up the phone quickly enough for a literal life and death matter, because of something else that should have been a distraction at best. Together with other things I want to focus on more, it felt like a recalibration of priorities was due.

    In the following days, it seemed like I couldn’t escape darker subjects. I tuned into NHK and landed on a grim documentary about middle-aged hikkikomori dying of starvation alone in their homes, unable to support themselves after their elderly parents passed away. I tend to think of these types of shut-ins as being in their 20s and 30s, temporarily retreating from society after some setbacks in their late-school or early-work years, but these were people in their 60s who never recovered even after four decades. For a brief moment, I wondered if that might still be in my future, but decided I would rather face the worst case of agoraphobia than run out of food at home.

    I also finished Sequoia Nagamatsu’s How High We Go In The Dark somewhat unwillingly, because of how crushingly depressing it is at points. The Goodreads-like app that I’m testing, Bookshelf, has a feature called “Book Chat”, where you can discuss what you’re reading with an AI, and I told it that I couldn’t go on. It replied that “the book does touch on some heavy themes, especially in the beginning, but as you progress, you’ll notice a beautiful blend of hope, resilience, and human connection.” It was not wrong (probably plagiarized that from a bunch of reviews), but the book continued to be challenging through to the end. It’s one of those novels where multiple threads and characters finally come together and make sense as a coherent world, and manages to sidestep feeling forced or corny (although several parts should have). It was, to me, mostly a story about letting people go, and an unexpectedly sci-fi one at that.

    ===

    It feels trivial to mention our new television now, but it provided an avenue for escape and “self-care”. At any other time, I would not have been able to shut up about how I’d been a fool to hang onto that old HD screen for nearly a decade, when the upgrade to 4K HDR is such a dramatic one. Especially given how much stuff I watch. If there’s a lesson here, it’s to stop denying yourself the small pleasures you can afford and enjoy them while you can.

    ===

    Media activity:

    • We finished Shogun, which is the most effective reminder to the world in years that Japan has a very weird relationship with death and suicide. Anna Sawai (Mariko) redeems herself here from the part she played in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, but the MVP is Moeka Hoshi’s (Fuji) adorable haircut, which looks like two flappy dog ears on either side of her forehead.
    • I linked to Sawai’s Wikipedia page instead of her IMDb one because it contains the fact that she was an idol in the group Faky up to 2018. I thought the name sounded familiar, and it’s because another member, Mikako, appeared on the Netflix season of Japanese reality dating show, Is She The Wolf?, that I am NOT actually recommending here.
    • I saw the final episode a few months ago and LOLed when the scene below came on. In summary: One or more of the women were secretly told to be The Wolf and string the men along, and if any of the men chose them as partners, game over. So if you’re a Japanese TV producer, what do you do to ensure everyone remembers the show’s name? Put the women in cartoony wolf suits during the emotional, tearful reveal of course.
    • In an effort to save some money, I’m going to follow in Jose’s footsteps and pause my Netflix subscription while catching up on everything else we haven’t seen on Apple TV+ and Amazon Prime Video.
    • I have many unfinished shows on Netflix, and many of them are so bad they’ll probably stay that way, but I wanted to finish the last three episodes of The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House before my subscription ends, and they were really beautiful. Hirokazu Kore-eda depicts familial ties and friendships with an intentional, unmistakable worldview that makes nearly everything he’s done among my favorites. In a show like this with innocence and sweetness at the core, he goes to the wall for it without worrying about realism. The ugliness of the world still exists, but set aside out of frame, as if to say “now is not the time”.

    Coming back to what I said earlier, that might be one of my new sabbatical goals: to develop the resolve and clarity to make room for important things, and to everything else say, “now is not the time”.