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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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”.
I listened to Maggie Rogers’s new album a lot more this week. At a scant 36 minutes, it was nearly the perfect length for my commute into the office. And I went in every day this week, for maybe the first time in the four years since Covid, which seemed appropriate for my last full week after seven years with the company.
Yes, as mentioned a couple of weeks ago, the sabbatical is underway. I’m looking forward to having more time on my hands to focus on a few important areas (my vast media backlog being one of them). For how long? I don’t know yet, and frankly, I’m not ready to consider it. If there’s one thing I learnt from the last time around, it’s that approaching leisure with a planning and productivity mindset is for amateur layabouts. Still stressed while doing nothing? Skill issue. You have to let your time go wherever it wants.
In the process of saying goodbye to the team I’ve loved working with, a few more people learnt about this blog’s existence. Hopefully they’ll forget to come back. But watching over their shoulders as they browsed it the other day, I realized some of these posts are really too long so I’ll keep this week’s short.
I knew I wasn’t getting away without a farewell, but made clear that I’m not a fan of the greeting cards that everyone signs or writes something in — make it an NFT and send it to my wallet, I said. That way I’ll never lose it. They didn’t quite do that, but I was super pleased to receive a PDF document loaded with photos and messages, now safely stored on the cloud. Ben and Munz even remembered my fondness for the poem, Miss you. Would like to grab that chilled tofu we love., by Gabrielle Calvocoressi, and included a remixed version that makes reference to our shared places and memories (albeit treating me like a dead and departed person), and remains incredibly powerful for it.
Where was I? Oh yes, Maggie Rogers. Listening to her reminded me to go back and spend more time with the music of boygenius, and I discovered their live cover of Shania Twain’s You’re Still the One for BBC Radio 1, which is simply life-giving. I think it’s Shania’s finest pop song, up there with Mariah’s Always Be My Baby, and this version sublimely elevates the core melody.
In sort of the same North American indie rock vein, I’ve been enjoying the music of Rosali (last name Middleman), specifically her new album Bite Down and 2021’s No Medium. I was stumped trying to provide a description so I asked Google’s Gemini AI, which suggested that her music is similar to Neil Young and The War On Drugs, and I don’t feel that’s inaccurate! It’s early days and I don’t know her albums inside out yet, but first impressions were strong.
I don’t feel the same way about Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department which admittedly has only been out for a day, but I’ve played it through twice in the background and felt nothing. My expectations were already set low because of its cringey title. I’m in agreement with the reviews calling out the bland sameness from song to song — perhaps Jack Antonoff has finally exhausted his creative run and needs to take some time off too. Double albums are tricky. They need variety, progression, and invention to provide signposts and avoid being unmemorable mazes. Even some of the greatest double albums in history are hard to appreciate all at once. I’m deleting it from my library for now because keeping it around makes me feel obliged to take it in.
But I’m really looking forward to the new Billie Eilish album coming next month after hearing her talk to Zane Lowe about it. The 14-second sample of Chihiro that she shared might have more life in it than all two hours of Taylor’s tortured poetry.
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Late Sunday evening note: We finally got a new TV after 9 years, just in time for my upcoming jump in screen time. It’s coming next week.
It was Hari Raya Puasa here on Wednesday, which, along with the city’s oppressively hot and humid weather, left those of us who don’t celebrate the holiday feeling somewhat unsatisfied upon returning to work on Thursday. More than one person slipped and called it a Monday, or asked how the weekend was. So instead of a four-day workweek, it felt like two weeks in one.
Perhaps the depressed mood was justified. Earlier in the week, tragedy struck a colleague who lost their father to a heart attack — a feeling all too familiar within our team as the same thing happened to another young designer just over a year ago. And you may recall just 9 weeks ago, another friend lost their dad too. At the same time, my thoughts have been occupied by a family friend, virtually family, currently recovering from surgery with an as-yet-unquantified cancer running loose in her body.
I’m tired, but feeling better about the recent decision to make room for more important things than my current work. I came across this poem about mortality that captures the suddenness of loss and how we take everything for granted: If You Knew, by Ellen Bass. I was also reminded of this Zen concept that a glass always exists in two states, whole and broken, while reading responses to a tweet asking for “sentences that will change your life immediately upon reading”.
Hitting the books
Speaking of reading, I picked up Isle McElroy’s People Collide again after months of sipping its beautiful phrases through a tiny time straw, finishing it quickly. It’s the best thing I’ve read in many months; a profound questioning of what it means to be a particular person in a specific body, and how much of you makes up who you are to everyone else. At its core it’s a Freaky Friday body swap story. I don’t know if it’s because McElroy is trans that these perspectives and insights are so tangible, but I felt them. Even though the story didn’t go where I wanted at all, I gave it five stars on Goodreads because the final page is a triumph. I had to fight back tears of admiration while reading it on the bus.
Right after that, the book train was rolling again and I read After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul by Tripp Mickle, which had some inside stories and gossip I’d not heard before, and an interest in how Jony Ive “neglected” his design leadership role in the later years, a story I’ve been interested in hearing. Still, it’s one of those non-fiction narratives that dramatizes and assumes a lot about what its subjects did and felt at key moments, things nobody can know for certain.
Here it comes, the AI part
Meanwhile, the Apple Design Team alums who decamped to Humane launched their first product, the “Ai Pin”, to largely middling reviews from tech outlets like The Verge. Quick recap: this is a camera-equipped, voice-enabled wearable you attach to your clothing, letting you access a generative AI assistant so you can ask general questions and take various actions without getting your phone out. In theory.
Most of its faults seem to stem from issues intrinsic to OpenAI’s GPT models and online services, on which the Pin is completely dependent. It’s a bit tragic for Humane’s clearly talented startup team. I’m inclined to see the hardware as beautiful and an engineering accomplishment, and what parts of the user experience they could customize with the laser projector and prompt design are probably pretty good, but it doesn’t change the fact that the Pin’s brains are borrowed. A company with financial independence and the ability to make its own hardware, software, and AI services would have a better chance. Hmm… is there anyone like that?
Meanwhile, a new AI music generation tool called Udio launched in public beta this week and I spent some time with it. I’ve only played with AI models that do text, images, and video, but never audio. It’s currently free while in beta and lets you make a generous amount of samples, so there’s no reason not to take a look.
Basically you describe the song you want with a text prompt, and it spits out a 33-second clip. From there, you can remix or extend the clip by adding more 33-second chunks. It generates everything from the melodies to the lyrics (you can provide some if you want), including all instruments and voices you hear. Is it any good? It’s very impressive, although not every song is a banger yet. Listening to hip-hop instrumentals featured on the home page, I thought to ask for a couple of conscious rap songs and they came out well, with convincing sounding vocals. I then asked it to write a jazzy number about blogging on a weekly basis and you can judge for yourself if the future is here.
At present, I see this as a fun toy for the not-so-musically inclined like myself, and as an inspiration faucet for amateur songwriters who work faster with a starting point. So, pretty much like what ChatGPT is for everything else. And like ChatGPT, I can see a future where this threatens human livelihoods by being good enough, at the very least disrupting the background music industry.
Comfort sounds
One musical suite that stands as a symbol of human ingenuity’s irreplaceability, though, is what I’ve been playing in the background on my HomePods all week while reading and writing: the soundtrack to Animal Crossing New Horizons. Because Nintendo hasn’t made the official tracks available for streaming, I’ve been playing this fantastic album of jazz piano covers by Shin Giwon Piano on Apple Music. It takes me right back to those quiet, cozy house-bound days of the pandemic. Could an AI ever take the place of composers like Kazumi Totaka? I remain hopeful that they won’t.
Maggie Rogers released her third album, Don’t Forget Me. I put it on for a walk around the neighborhood on Saturday evening and found it’s the kind of country-inflected folk rock album I tend to love. One song in particular, If Now Was Then, triggered my musical pattern recognition and I realized a significant bit sounds very much like the part in Counting Crows’ Sullivan Street where Adam Duritz goes “I’m almost drowning in her sea”. It’s a lovely bit of borrowing that I enjoyed; putting copyright aside, experiencing a nostalgic callback to another song inside a new song is always cool. It’s one of the best things about hip-hop! But why is it okay when a human does it but not when it’s generative AI? I guess we’re back to Buddhism: Everything hangs on intention.
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Miscellanea
I watched more Jujutsu Kaisen despite not being really blown away by it. Mostly I’ve been keen to see the full scene of a clip I saw posted on Twitter, where the fight animation looked more kinetic and inventive than you’d normally expect. I decided that it must have come from Jujutsu Kaisen 0: The Movie, because movies have bigger budgets and the animation in season 1 looked nothing like it. And I had to finish season 1 in order to watch and understand the movie.
Well, I saw the movie and it was alright, but it didn’t have that fight scene. So where is it?? That got me watching more episodes of the TV anime, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a jump in quality like this between two seasons of a show. It seems a new director came on board (maybe more money too), and suddenly the art is cleaner, the camera angles are more striking and unconventional, and everything else went up a notch. I guess I’m watching another 20+ episodes of this then.
I finished Netflix’s eight-episode adaptation of Three Body Problem. I’m not invested enough to say I’d definitely watch a second season, assuming they pick it up at all.
On that topic, Utada Hikaru released a greatest hits compilation called Science Fiction, with three “new” songs, and 23 other classics either re-recorded, remixed, and/or remastered in Dolby Atmos. I don’t really know these songs in that I have no idea what many are actually about, but I’ve heard them so much over the last 25 years, I probably know them more deeply than most.
I’ve gone and given myself another sabbatical. I’m looking forward to getting ‘important’ things done, like reading till my Kobo dies so I can buy a new one with USB-C charging, finally playing the new Zelda, watching Tampopo for the first time, exploring our public libraries, drawing a couple more Misery Men, and listening to finance podcasts because I need to graduate from roboadvisors. This will also involve stepping into a sort of low power mode when it comes to spending: public transportation, teabags instead of Nespresso pods, no new TV or PS5, canceling YouTube Premium…
Some people asked when I made the decision or started to think about time off, but I couldn’t realistically pin a date on the donkey. I started to look through recent updates and found that I mentioned needing more videogame time as recently as two weeks ago, but it was definitely on my mind before.
Perhaps the seeds of this extended leisure were planted during the final weeks of my last funemployment break, as seen in this post where I suddenly found a bunch of new interests and projects just as my freedom time was running out. I’d forgotten so much about that period until I started to re-read old entries while writing this update; a sort of climbing back into a dream after visiting the bathroom at night. This is week #197, which means I’ve been at this for nearly four years, and I must say it’s been worth it.
It’s safe to assume I’m looking forward to this break, but I’ll definitely miss many aspects of working with the team I’ve been part of for the past seven years — a side of my life I deliberately omit here, but consequently won’t have an extensive external memory of to revisit (apart from photos, chats, and remnants of the work we’ve done floating out in the world).
On that note, a few of us attended a community-run service design meetup on Serangoon Road Thursday and were surprised by the large turnout. One lovely thing that happened: we met a young designer working at one of our earliest clients, in the experience team we had a hand in setting up. Hearing from her that the work I did is still being used and built upon, helping to drive customer experience at one of the best brands in its category, felt like a nice bookend to this phase of mUh cArEeR.
I don’t know what I’ll do next, but have no plans to think about it for at least a few months.
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Media activity:
How are we supposed to build memories on digital copyright quicksand? I noticed that track 14 of Vultures 1 has disappeared from Apple Music, at least in Singapore. More than the fluctuating prices, algorithms influencing commerce influencing art, and the shitty business model for musicians, the impermanence and lack of ownership might be my least-favorite thing about the shift to streaming.
According to the song’s Genius page, the song was also removed from Spotify back in February owing to “clearance issues”. My relationship with music would definitely be different if I’d grown up with mixtapes that could suddenly have gaps of silence in them after you’d given them away.
We finished Season 2 of Below Deck Down Under, and as I’ve said before, these two Australian seasons show some of the best teamwork and leadership (although not without the drama that people watch this show for) out of all the Below Deck we’ve seen (easily over 100 episodes, oh my life…) and it’s simply down to Captain Jason and Chief Stew Aesha acting like adults, communicating openly, and not being lazy. We’ll probably head back to Season 8 of the main show after this and I’m dreading being back under the command of Captain Lee.
I tried to resume watching Three Body Problem on Netflix despite online comments that it gets too slow and boring. The fourth episode certainly was, and I almost gave up, writing in my notes that it was “such a shame an intriguing premise can be flatly shot, shoddily paced, and annoyingly acted into mere weekend background fodder.” And then I saw episode 5, which features a bonkers CGI-heavy set piece in the middle plus a lot more going on, and now I’m back in.
During a chat on Good Friday — a public holiday here that I’d always assumed was less common than Easter Monday, but it turns out that’s not the case! — I realized Michael was in the middle of his workday in Tokyo and I was probably being a distraction. Our conversation started with him asking what I knew about Ethereum these days, and ended with how scaling leadership and quality in large organizations is hard, which might be related topics when you think about it. When a blockchain becomes too costly and congested, the solution is to spin off nimble L2 side-chains, just like how companies try to establish secret skunkworks teams that operate outside the rules. Both of these are an admission that we’re really bad at handling complexity.
I put the long weekend to good use by sitting down to do some adulting with a semi-thorough look at finances, lifestyle, and possible futures. The process that works best for me is one I only realized later in life (and often forget and have to rediscover again): thinking aloud in writing. It looks like a long bullet list, occasional paragraphs, and maybe a table in Apple Notes.
As I formed a loose decision-making framework, I asked ChatGPT to think it through with me and find any gaps in my logic or assumptions. It justified its monthly fee by calling out things I had failed to consider on more than one occasion. By the time a picture emerged, I was in disbelief. When did I start spending (or expecting to spend) so much? What idiot signed up for so many monthly subscriptions? Shockingly, ChatGPT did not suggest that I cancel it.
It was at this point that my daily Co—Star notification popped up with an enigmatic line: “Shatter your old intellectual loops.” Hmm! What could that mean? “What you do with your money is your choice,” the detailed horoscope reassured me. While I don’t believe in this stuff, I respect how it can add randomness to one’s internal monologues. Harder still to do is read from the other perspective and see if it still says what you want to hear. It seemed to pass the sniff test this time.
>> Sidenote: I’ve found myself using ChatGPT less lately because Perplexity is so damned convenient. It beats ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot (née Bing) for combining AI and search to answer questions. Arc Search is alright if you have a “web research” kinda job to be done, but if I just want to ask “What is X?”, Perplexity is fast and offers sources and links for further reading. A big part of this convenience is the availability of widgets and Lock Screen complications on iOS. Yes, I do know this shit is destroying the web and I hope somebody stops/solves it soon. Still, I need answers!
After making some progress, I went out for a walk that felt great despite the insane heat and humidity we’ve been experiencing over the past few weeks. It’s impossible to step out and not immediately be sweaty; in fact you’ve probably been sweating indoors already. Strangely, at one point, with nothing nearby except water on one side of me and a forested patch on the other, I felt waves of cool air blowing past me, close to the ground. This continued for several good minutes, and it felt like when someone leaves the door to an air-conditioned room open and it flows out. Perhaps it was so hot above that even air just 1ºC cooler coming off the river felt remarkable? I thought to myself, “Am I injured and bleeding out? How is it cold?”
Speaking of sudden shifts in temperature and bleeding, are we really ‘still early’ when more than one person in a week starts a conversation about crypto? I had drink plans the evening before Good Friday, which made for a Pleasant Thursday, and a lot of the chat was about NFTs and memecoins. I have shifted my stance on the latter from ‘not touching that nonsense’ to ‘everybody needs a little casino time’, and so currently own some “Jeo Boden” coin, a little “Dog Wif Hat”, and as of yesterday, some “Costco Hot Dog”. The last one is funny and so might do very well: you know how their hot dogs are famously pegged at $1.50 no matter what the economy does? Well the coin is about 9 cents now, and the idea is that it’ll pump to hit $1.50, because it must! (Disclaimer: I’m in for insignificant amounts of money, please don’t go nuts.)
My overall outlook on web3 has moderated a little since the last cycle and can probably be summed up like this: We know Computing is good, we’re quite sure Decentralization is good, and we’ve seen interesting ideas around Tokenization, but all the “crypto” solutions built on those three ideas today have got something wonky and unstable about them. It’s hard to see most alts having any lasting value.
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Media activity:
We’re halfway through Season 2 of Below Deck Down Under (SPOILER) and the infamous sexual assault incident that was kinda viral on Twitter when it happened has now happened. Awful stuff, and I think Laura’s reaction afterwards was just as bad. I’m glad that was taken care of. Captain Jason is the goat.
I’ve been watching a little Jujutsu Kaisen after seeing an incredible fight scene clip online. This was a shonen show I’d long ago decided I didn’t care for, like Demon Slayer and all that shit, but seeing the quality of animation in that clip changed my mind. Sadly, I think it was actually from the movie, and the regular TV show hasn’t gone that hard yet. I think I’m up to episode 10 and I’ll keep at it.
I started Netflix’s adaptation of Three Body Problem while Kim was out for a couple of nights. It’s much better than I’ve come to expect from Netflix, and it’s moving fast from my vague recollection of the first book (the only one of the series I read). I can see myself finishing it over the next few weeks.
I came across Adrianne Lenker’s new album, Bright Future, in my Apple Music recommendations and decided to hear it even though I couldn’t recall her name at all. It was really good, and if I had to say, it’s indie folk rock? Emotionally, although not so much musically, it reminded me of Gillian Welch’s Americana alt-country. Then Perplexity informed me that Lenker has a band called Big Thief, which sounded kinda familiar? Did I dismiss them out of hand at some point because I didn’t like the name? I put their debut album, Masterpiece, on during my aforementioned walk and was blown away.
If you’re reading this on the web, you might notice that this site is now running WordPress’s new ‘Twenty Twenty Four’ theme, with a more traditional blog-like homepage (it has a sidebar) linking to single-column post pages. Navigation remains unchanged, but typography and minor details are improved.
I’m happier with this than I was with the blocky grid of last year’s ‘Twenty Twenty Three’ theme, because this comes with the freedom to put up shorter posts without Titles or Featured Images. Over the years I’ve gone back and forth on microblogging here, or having all tweets mirrored here, but it’s never stuck. But at least I have the option again, especially since I haven’t properly posted on Twitter in a year and most people I want to follow are still scattered across Threads, Bluesky, Nostr, and Mastodon.
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We celebrated a little life milestone this week with a nature walk, a “Gold Class” viewing of Dune Part Two, a nice bottle of French Malbec, and a perfect Canadian pork chop with a side of the butteriest mashed potatoes. A mix of simple and simpler pleasures.
I’ll expand: We were recently in New Zealand, and took a couple of walks in nature reserves. I’ve never bothered to attempt the same in Singapore because it’s ridiculously hot, but visiting the Rifle Range Nature Park in West Singapore was interesting for the stark contrast offered versus our recent experiences. Every step on its paths is sure footed by design; suspended walkways take you through the forest without trampling plants, and they’re so convenient all the monkeys we saw were using them as well, rather than walking in the dirt. You get the sense that everything is regularly inspected and all dangers have been scrubbed. It reflects the usual criticism of Singapore being a theme park, which is only a problem because living in a safe environment breeds complacency. At several points on the easiest routes at Te Mata Park in New Zealand, slipping off a path and tumbling into a ravine was a genuine possibility. I wonder what other metaphorical tumbles Singaporean life has not prepared me for.
The new Dune is as superb as all reviews have indicated, and I could not imagine rating it any less than 5 stars in Letterboxd. The art direction and photography are flawless, and it looks twice as expensive as it is. Never once while watching did my brain check out and think, “oh, that’s CGI”. The only change I would dare suggest is Austin Butler’s casting, as he’s not anywhere as menacing as the movie treats him. His character is already a nepo baby who just enjoys killing defenseless slaves and servants, and Butler didn’t bring the presence to suggest he’s also one of the most dangerous people in a universe full of freaks.
Another 5-star film for us this week was Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days (2023), which won a Best Actor award at Cannes last year for Koji Yakusho’s nearly wordless performance. I enjoyed it tremendously as a loving tribute to the city of Tokyo and its toilets (really), a meditation on repetition and routine, an ode to proud and purposeful work, and a parable about how avoiding the messiness of life might obscure living itself. The soundtrack is a Gen X dream. Visually, it’s filled with beautiful everyday moments so mundane as to be overlooked by most of us going about our daily busyness. The way all its themes and music choices come together in the film’s final minutes is worth half a star alone.
Continuing the theme of Japanese films about appreciating life, we watched Living (2022), the transposed-to-England remake of Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952). I’ve never seen the original, but it’s now high on my list. Bill Nighy is fantastic in the role of a civil servant who learns he’s dying and wonders what it’s all about, and plays his deconstruction with impressive vulnerability. I looked at the trailer for Ikiru afterwards, and while Takashi Shimura’s performance in the same role is regarded as iconic, it was a little theatrical and may not have aged as well.
Anyhow, the message in both these films is timeless: stop working so hard at meaningless things, smell the roses (or watch the shadows cast by leaves — ‘komorebi’ in Japanese, as the end credits of Perfect Days tells us), and make a difference to another human being’s life.
Take a little forest bathing break with this video I captured.
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Additional media activity:
We finished Season 1 of Below Deck Down Under at last, and I was glad to learn that Captain Jason and Chief Stew Aesha return for Season 2, which we now must see. The leadership and teamwork these two have put Captain Lee and Kate of the mainline series to bottomless shame.
The new Call of Duty mobile version of Warzone has finally come out, after being delayed for about a year. As a somewhat devoted player of the original Call of Duty Mobile title, I’ve been waiting with very high expectations for this. Unfortunately, the launch has been a bit of a dud, with many complaints from the worldwide community. For one, Android devices seem incapable of running it well. On my iPhone 15 Pro Max, it runs at peak performance and the graphics are truly console quality; I was running around maps that I knew instinctively, but my brain was exploding from how different and detailed everything looked. Sadly, the phone runs hot and it drained the better part of my battery in maybe an hour. I’ll wait to see if they improve anything before calling it quits.
The new Kacey Musgraves album, Deeper Well, is not bad at all. It even has a song called Anime Eyes which drops a line about a “Miyazaki sky”. Very weird times we live in.
I started using a new social app that tries to be a Letterboxd for music: Musicboard. Unfortunately, it doesn’t automatically log/scrobble your listening activity, so rating music and broadcasting your taste is a manual affair. You also can’t start playing an album directly in Apple Music from within the app — it only supports Spotify at the moment.
sangsara.net 