It felt like a long week, mostly dominated by work. I thought it was just me, but several people have agreed that something strange happened with time. The stretch between Tuesday and Friday felt like two whole weeks somehow.
We haven’t settled on a back-to-office rule, and I don’t think it makes sense for companies to have a hard stance on this if people can manage themselves. This week, I headed in three times to meet with various people, restock our candy stash, and er… collaborate analogally. Why isn’t there an antonym for “digitally”?
Going out meant a chance to break in my newest pair of shoes: blue Allbirds that Kim brought back from California. They’re actually made in Vietnam but you can’t buy them in these parts, sadly. Apparently they’re an abomination to sneaker heads, only chosen by tech people who value featureless basics over funky fashion, but hey that sounds like me! And they’re plenty comfy.
Using her return home as an excuse to overeat Asian food, we had a particularly bad week: chicken rice, and two separate all-you-can-eat affairs for sushi and Korean BBQ respectively.
Over the weekend we visited Peishan and James’s new pad, which is a marvel of color and style coordination, at least from the perspective of this fashion-challenged tech-adjacent bro.
I heard a story from my mom she’d never told before, or at least not that I remember. Back in the 70s when she lived in London (Earl’s Court, specifically) with my dad, someone followed her home on the way back from the supermarket, into the building, up the stairs, and then forced his way into their apartment to hold her up at knifepoint. She managed to convince him she had no money, offering all her groceries, and told a story about being poor immigrants, and somehow the guy ran off with nothing!
A few years ago, we took headshots of everyone in the team for various purposes, e.g. bio slides and org charts. After Covid happened, none of us got new name cards, and all the new joiners had no standardized photos. I don’t know if I’m the only person among us somewhat happy to operate a camera, but several people asked for it, and I took a bunch on Friday for people who were in the office. My underutilized Sigma DC DN f1.4 45mm equivalent lens for the Leica CL did pretty well, and it felt like the best thing I’ve done since returning.
After putting it off for months, I caved and ordered a Ricoh GR IIIx off Shopee. The last one I got was the APS-C Ricoh GR back in 2014, during an impromptu post-lunch drive to Cathay Photo with a colleague. We were trying to “crack a brief” at work, as it was called, and getting nowhere — as I like to say: when the going gets tough, the tough go shopping.
(Monday update) My camera order was canceled by the seller, presumably because they didn’t have any stock on hand. Part of me is relieved; money saved and all that. Not sure if I’ll place another order, or perhaps I’ll get the cheaper 28mm GR III instead.
We saw the new Apple TV+ film, Cha Cha Real Smooth, which was really good despite being hard to describe in a way that would convince anyone to watch it. A lot of it comes down to the astounding talent that seems to be contained in Cooper Raiff, the film’s 24-year-old director, writer, and star. It’s only his second film, and yet, he’s 24 and it’s his second film. And it’s sooo assured and authentic (and awkward).
I’ve been revisiting The Tipping Point, from 2004. What a solid album. When people say “the golden age of hip-hop”, they mean another decade completely, but I think it was this period, when The Roots were at the top of their game.
A few months back, I watched Mamoru Hosoda’s Belle after anticipating it for quite awhile — on paper it sounded like a revisiting and refinement of themes he’d be building for years, in particular Summer Wars, which I’d always considered one of my favorite films of all time. It turned out to be a strange disappointment, all over the place and lacking heart, both literally a cohesive center, and convincing emotional resonance. A bit later on, I read a review saying that many of his earlier works actually shone as a result of his writing partner at the time, Satoko Okudera. These days, she seems to be mostly working in Japanese television and other films I sadly will likely never see.
After it came up in a work-related conversation this week, about good depictions of metaverse concepts in film and media, I decided to give Summer Wars a rewatch to see if it still holds up. I’ve been doing it in installments over my lunch breaks and still haven’t finished, but I can confidently say that it does. It has heart in unashamed abundance. I cried because it has sequences that are joyous and beautiful, because it observes life and family from ten thousand feet, because it feels like a once-in-a-career miracle that people made this then went their separate ways. I also learnt that young people today don’t know how to unzip multi-part archives, but that’s another story.
Back on the anime bullshit, I finally got around to watching Netflix’s A Whisker Away after several years. It’s about a girl who gains the ability to turn into a cat, which she uses to get close to her crush. It spends almost no time explaining the spirit world and mechanics behind this, because it would rather focus on how people are all suffering deep down and can’t be vulnerable or open in our society, and those are the parts that end up saving this somewhat uneven but well-meaning film that doesn’t manage to end very elegantly.
A couple of weeks ago, I watched Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop, also on Netflix internationally and not to be confused with Bubble, a high-budget but fully unnecessary and shallow anime film. Naw, Soda Pop is something else, happy to outline and color in its small scaled human story. Pros: it has a refreshing look that’s bright and sketchy, is set mainly in a suburban mall, has a storyline concerned with music and poetry, and a small but well-meaning heart. Cons: the ending is a bit cringe. On the whole, I enjoyed it and want to see it again.
Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop: look at those clouds!
An AI image generation tool called Dall-E Mini hit my timeline this week, and I haven’t been able to get enough of it. I don’t know if it has anything to do with the proper Dall-E 2 at all, which produces vastly more detailed and beautiful results, but hey this is the one we plebs get, and so it’s the one I’ll play with.
You can bring some really wrong ideas to life with this, which I’ve seen and admittedly also tried, things involving deceased personalities in historically unlikely scenarios, for example. Mostly I’ve just cracked myself up trying to create frames from movies that never happened, and things that are mundane yet just enough surreal. I now desire more power, so if anyone has an invite to Midjourney or any of the other proper tools out there, let me know.
I’ll save a few for posterity here, but my Instagram Stories have been full of them this week.
Kim got back from a multi-week business trip. We were worried it would feel too long but talking regularly via FaceTime was surprisingly good at helping with that. The first few weeks did drag on, but ever since I’ve been back in the rhythms of a day job, time just started moving faster. I said to someone that I now experience and visualize time in the form of calendaring software again: a carpet of items stretching forward endlessly, aka Agenda View. The weekends pop up unexpectedly; all I’m aware of is what’s due to happen later today, tomorrow, and beyond. Looking at time and life itself this way is extremely restrictive for the soul, while it perfectly serves the needs of productivity like blinkers do on a race horse. Part of this is a problem with me, but perhaps the rest is a design challenge. There has to be a better way.
I went back to work. There seemed nothing particularly worth getting around to/finally accomplishing the day before, so I just wrote another blog post.
The transition to being back on externally scheduled time was always going to be rough. I expect it to feel even worse before it gets better. I spoke to one friend who took three months off between jobs, and she said by about the second day of re-employment she wanted to go off and be retired. Many of the analogies I’ve been using are quite bleak, relating to incarceration and being resuscitated after experiencing the afterlife.
Kim sent me a box of craft beers to help get through this difficult time, and they’ve been quite effective.
The M1 Macs are so good at getting out of your way the way great tools should, that I’d forgotten how unpleasant the last few Intel MacBook Pros were. Thankfully I’ve only been using a temporary machine, but how can anyone get work done when simply trying to type in Microsoft Teams causes fans to come on and beachballs to appear? What an absolute blight on the history of an otherwise wonderful product line.
Perhaps as a result of my injured psyche, I broke my own NFT collection guidelines and impulsively bought into two projects that will probably prove to be money down the toilet. One is membership into a DAO that plans to use its treasury to launch stupid/funny projects, and the other is a madly overpriced PFP series that is supposedly also a DAO but I can’t understand why.
There was a long-awaited dinner reunion of the Crocohorse gang, one of the more ridiculously named chat groups in my life, where we ate high-end chicken yakitori amidst a previously mentioned national chicken shortage. But given the restaurant’s perennially astronomical prices, I’d wager they weren’t getting their supplies from Malaysia anyway. I ended up eating most of the “cock’s comb” I ordered, because it bothered everyone else for some reason. On work, everyone seemed to be in a bit of a funk. It’s not a phase any more, is it?
While the rest of the world is watching Stranger Things season 4 (not me, not yet) — it’s the number one show everywhere but one country: Japan’s top show on Netflix is SpyｘFamily, an anime series presumably based on a popular manga about a spy, an assassin, and a mind-reading child who form a fake family for spy reasons. I didn’t expect to like it at all, but I’ve now seen all 9 available episodes and it’s… not bad?! Unlike some series, it doesn’t waste much time and some of the gags are pretty good.
Tate McRae put her debut album out, but I couldn’t get through it despite liking her earlier singles. Maybe I’m getting a little tired of this 2022 pop sound, or maybe the subject of these songs just don’t seem worth the time given all the other things happening right now. One goes, “Stupid boy making me so sad / Didn’t think you could change this fast / She’s got everything that I don’t have / How could I ever compete with that? / And she’s all I wanna be / All I wanna be so bad.” Maybe I’m just from Singapore, but I wouldn’t let young women hear this song if I were on the censorship board. Do you think the industry would let a teen male pop star sing these words? What the heck.
But thanks to the latest Sonos firmware update, I’ve been listening to music more often. They finally did it: they made their own voice assistant and took control of their destiny back from Google and Amazon. Sonos speakers are now independent devices that can take voice commands and pass them to whatever service you use. In other words, I can now control Apple Music everywhere using my voice, not just the rooms I have gray market HomePod minis in.
Singapore grappled with a potential poultry problem this week as Malaysia banned the export of chickens to protect its domestic market from rising prices. We get just about all our fresh chicken over the causeway, which leaves only frozen supplies (mainly from Brazil and Portugal, I think). Despite frozen chicken making up the vast majority of consumption today, people panicked and smash bought all the chilled chicken off supermarket shelves, some buying hundreds of dollars worth; I don’t know how they intend to eat it all either. The greatest threat is to our national dish of chicken rice, which seems hard if not impossible, to achieve with frozen fowl.
I did what had to be done and ate two large servings from my neighborhood chicken rice stall, all at once, as a farewell to our precious perfectly poached plucked poultry. I’d love to say that I’m now sick of it and won’t want any for a while, but honestly I could eat it Very Regularly if it wasn’t a terrible idea.
Went out for another drone flying session with my dad, no crashes this time. It was an extremely warm day, but I discovered that if you hover it above your head, the down thrust is just incredible, like a fresh breeze on a cliffside, and it cools you off in a minute. Are mini drones the best portable fans in existence? I think so!
The digital artist Tabor Robak launched his latest project, Colorspace, as an NFT series on Artblocks. I’ve been excited for this: they are tiny interactive, animated programs reminiscent of the 64K demo scene from the earlier days of PCs. Thematically they are matched to that era, simulating a desktop computer experience gone haywire, overtaken by swirling virus-like growths that break through the 2D plane and take over UI elements.
I got up in the middle of night to mint one, but all 600 went so quickly that my transaction failed. Thankfully they’re now on the secondary market for not much more. The NFT art scene still seems to favor static images closer to traditional art, which strikes me as missing the potential of this new format. I’ve mostly been collecting generative pieces that couldn’t exist traditionally: favoring those that are ephemeral, ever evolving, or at least in motion.
Drifting by Simon De Mai is one such project. By animating layers of simple geometric shapes over each other, and then adding cinematic lighting and shaders, it creates extremely cyberpunk scenes that can be read as anything from an endless descent down a megacorp’s elevator shaft, to a microscopic examination of advanced microchips.
The second season of Ghost In The Shell: Stand-alone Complex 2045 was released on Netflix, and I had to watch the recap movie they cut together from bits of Season 1 to remember what happened before. I think it came out before the pandemic! After that I binged the whole new thing over the weekend. In general agreement with the critics, it’s not quite classic GITS, but it’s still good to have something. S2 definitely of overall higher quality than S1.
I was getting a lot of Instagram ads for a game called Peridot and skipping over them without thinking… until… it dawned on me that this is Niantic’s new AR game which isn’t supposed to be out yet. Turns out Singapore is one of their guinea pig (ahem, soft launch) markets!
So I installed it and have been impressed by the leap forward that this is versus Pokémon Go’s AR mode. For one, it hasn’t made my phone too hot to hold. My creature also navigates the physical world very realistically with rock-steady positioning and impressive foreground occlusion (I have an iPhone 13 Pro so I assume LIDAR and ARKit are doing the work here). They’re also doing something neat with computer vision, so not only can the game tell the difference between grass, soil, sand, water, and other surfaces that your creature can dig into, but it also gives you tasks like “show your creature a dog or a cat” or “bring it to a tree trunk”, and will know when the camera is pointed at one.
It actually made me go out and take my new pet for a walk, and it ran ahead of me and beside me just like a dog would. When I brought it beside a body of water, it ran ahead and jumped in (complete with splashing animations). And this all ahead of what Apple’s going to show at WWDC. The AR glasses life is going to be something.
But this is all indicative of the current sad state of the web. Blogging is not popular, and there are few good options left for anyone wanting to start publishing in their own corner of the net, away from social networks. WP probably needs to start making more money from their hosting business, and I’d still much rather pay them for it than run/rent my own server and muck around with the open-source version.
I’m still hopeful for some catalyst in the near future that will bring decentralized self-publishing back into the mainstream.
This is the last post of my sabbatical era. It’s been great! Going back to work is bittersweet. My next update will probably be brief.
The week started with a public holiday (Vesak Day), which I spent having coffee with Peishan and Cien at the National Gallery. We ended up not having any time to see the exhibits. Mid-week, I joined Howard and Hunn at a random crypto meetup in town that one of them had heard about. We didn’t last long there, but ended up drinking at a cocktail bar in Golden Mile Complex for the next four or five hours. I will probably develop Covid in the coming week, let’s see.
Out of nowhere, I decided to start making a new series of abstract paintings/drawings/doodles that I’m calling Subconscious Heirlooms. Drawing them has somehow been very satisfying, and they’ve consumed most of my free time in the past few days.
So far I’ve done 30, some more awful than others, but I want to keep them in series where you can see progression in the process. Taken together with last week’s greater-than-zero creative output, I can only interpret this productive surge as my right brain’s last gasp of protest before returning to regular employment, a “please, can’t you see what we could be?” Hail Mary plea for me to continue being unemployed and free each afternoon to create whatever nonsense strikes me. Well, if you want to support this mission, you can buy one of these as an NFT on OpenSea! Yeah, I didn’t think so.
Here’s the official description/museum wall text:
Endless images lie dormant in our minds — generational lessons encoded in DNA; disassembled dreams; reflections on a lifetime of inaccessible memories. Subconscious Heirlooms is one attempt to surface a small collection of primal forms and concretize them for future generations.
Recursively inspired by automatic drawing and generative art, each piece is made without intentional direction, using a small but continually expanding vocabulary of elements that occur, repeat, and evolve freely over the creative process. Some may cause you to feel a sudden and inexplicable affinity, affirming the connectedness of our lived experiences.
#1#2#7#16#18#19#21#23#26Here are 9 that I happen to prefer at this moment. Might put the rest up later.
Media activity:
Finished reading Daniel Suarez’s Delta-V, and just so you know going in, it’s going to be a series. It also feels like it was written for a film or TV adaptation, which is a feeling I also have with Blake Crouch’s books. It’s fine, anyway, and is a bit of The Martian meets Armageddon with a little more paranoid drama. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but the asshole billionaire role would definitely be best played by Jared Leto.
Just for maximum memory cross-talk, I immediately started on Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves next, which is also set in space, with another version of the ISS and another band of doomed adventurers, and I’m already getting a little mixed up.
I decided to see the Uncharted film, having played all the games. The casting is all wrong for sure, but once you get past that… it’s still a pretty bad movie. The first half works quite well, following the infallible Indiana Tomb Raider formula of ancient clues, exotic locales, and parkour. But by the end, I was on my phone and rolling my eyes at improbable set pieces that would look ridiculous even in a game.
How do you follow that? I asked my Instagram followers to vote between Morbius (Jared Leto in a role nobody asked for) and Memory (Liam Neeson in a role he’s done 1000x before). People are sickos, and 100% of people voted for Morbius, so I put it on… and it wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d expected. There’s a good film in there somewhere underneath, most of it probably on the cutting room floor (isn’t that a weird saying to still be using? Should we say “still in the Final Cut project library?”). I’ll venture that it’s a better film than Uncharted, but being able to waste time on both of them was a luxury.
A week of calamity for many participants in le monde de la cryptographie, as the Terra project unraveled at shocking speed, its two main tokens shedding over 99% of their value in a couple of days. I’m told that other tokens and the entire stock market also had a bad time, but I hardly noticed tbh. Everything looks good next to a raging gasoline fire.
I try not to mention (and certainly not encourage) any proper crypto stuff here, apart from talking about the technology or artistic merits of some NFTs, and this is why. Many people lost life-changing amounts of money this week, and some apparently took their own lives too. A couple of friends checked in to ask if I was affected and if I was okay, which was honestly sweet and appreciated. In short, I am/will be okay. I would be even better had I followed some basic risk management rules I knew well enough but chose to ignore. 🤷♂️
While on the subject… I discovered a bunch of new enefftee art of merit, that made me feel the urge to buy despite the screams, cries of doom, it’s-all-overs, etc. all around. Vice Motherboard reported that Neal Stephenson himself has purchased his first NFTs, which felt like a momentous occasion in SF history. He’s made interesting picks, with the series I liked best being Neophyte MMXXII by Sterling Crispin, which renders living simulations of plant growth in each artwork (disclosure: one now resides in my wallet too). I decided to send the VR-themed Misery Man #61 as an unsolicited gift to his address. As much as I’m fond of that one, if anyone deserves it, it’s surely the man who coined the term “metaverse”.
I also found myself attracted to Memories of Qilin by Emily Xie, which are generative paintings inspired by East Asian art. Both of the above are collections curated by Artblocks, the same platform that launched Fidenza by Tyler Hobbs, and exploring their site and Discord led me to Screens by Thomas Lin Pedersen, abstract pieces based on simulating screen printing techniques and featuring beautiful structural planes with swirling geometry that collide to suggest insane urban architecture and spatial depth. Ancient Courses of Fictional Rivers by Robert Hodgin visualizes the winding paths of rivers over time, and then the growth of human settlements on their banks. It’s beautiful art and a wonderful concept. Finally, Edifice by Ben Kovach also plays with the grids of imaginary cityscapes, generating the facades of impossible buildings. If I were rich I’d collect heaps of these.
Heyo three new creative outlets emerged!
1) Before Covid, I received a DJI Mavic Mini drone as a gift and then never got a chance to fly it properly. Those were the days when going outdoors unnecessarily was prohibited, and then even after the rules were relaxed, I was lazy and it didn’t happen (an example of how much time has passed: DJI just announced the Mavic Mini THREE). It’s been on my to-do list to start flying it during this time off, so that finally happened. My dad’s been into remote-controlled things his whole life, so he had the experience and interest in doing it with me. It was a fun afternoon, and I got some good photos from its pretty capable camera.
When your size is not size.
2) The Kabukicho webcam mentioned in previous weeks is still my background video feed of choice. I’ve decided to embark on a new project where I blow up this live scene onto a wall with my projector, watch it intently, and take photos (not screenshots) of interesting things happening. It’s street photography, but remotely!
Sure I’m restricted to just one angle, but for all purposes it’s a covid-era adaptation to not actually being there to document life on a seedy rat-infested street in a red-light district. And without the threat of being beaten up, as a bonus! The results are filtered through the mediation of space, codecs, optics, light; they look more pixel art than photos. But still street photography, one could argue! Sometimes you’ll see shadows cast by my body or items in my environment. It has layers of removal, but still ultimately real life in Shinjuku. I’ve just started, but already I’ve got a lady flashing her underwear to passers by, a man peeing against a wall after midnight, police stopping an altercation, people mugging for the camera…
3) It’s been five years since Rob and I had the opportunity to work together on something, but now something is coming together over the next few weeks, which should be fun. Albeit remotely and in two different time zones. I hope to be able to share more when it’s over.
Media activity:
I’ve been reading Delta–V, the latest book by Daniel Suarez. It’s set in the near future, and concerns the first deep space expedition by a private company. They want to send a team of extreme adventurers and a few physically impressive scientists up to mine an asteroid for valuable materials, because it makes more sense to get building blocks from space to build stations and ships in space, than to fly it all up there from Earth. It’s good fun so far.
Big week for new music. I’m still making time to hear it all; certainly too early to share any proper thoughts.
Ryan Adams is back with a new double album, just weeks after releasing Chris, which was dedicated to his late brother. Now it’s time for Romeo & Juliet, billed as a summer heartbreak album of sorts, and much more accessible.
Them Yorke and Jonny Greenwood have a new band with another guy, but Pitchfork says it’s pretty much like a new Radiohead album, and that’s very high praise. The Smile — A Light for Attracting Attention.
Röyksopp — Profound Mysteries. I’ve never been a fan, but I played this once through and I’m keeping it in the library.
Finally, Jens Lekman has rereleased two of his seminal albums from the past under new names, with some tracks rearranged and rerecorded, apparently because they are meant to be living works and changing over time. He’s serious about this, because the previous versions are no longer for sale or streaming! I recommend listening to The Cherry Trees Are Still In Blossom (formerly known as Oh You’re So Silent, Jens), because it has more of the songs I love, including Black Cab, of which there are two new versions here. The other album is The Linden Trees Are Still In Blossom (formerly known as Night Falls Over Kortedala).
I actually saw Jens up close when he performed in Singapore wayyy back in Jan 2007!
This was the first week in probably the entire time I’ve been doing these weekly updates (maybe a year and a half) where Monday came and I forgot to sit down and start drafting.
My sabbatical from work is coming to an end, and it’s quite likely that it’ll be hard to continue doing this in its current form once I have meetings to attend and less head space for frivolous introspection and mental health protection — what a concept! Ha ha! I will probably gather bullet points over the course of the week instead, or just write less, which may be a blessing anyway.
The wife-away season of 2022 has begun, as I said on my Instagram stories, but it’s too soon to say if I won’t die of malnutrition, lack of attention, insect infestation, sudden tumbles down the stairs, strokes, or other incidents — with no one to realize my demise until a week later, when one of these blog updates fails to materialize (and now I’ve gone ahead and pre-empted that they may be late; what a genius I am).
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What have I been doing? I started playing Spiritfarer on the Switch. It’s beautiful, it’s chill, I think it will break my heart eventually.
I met up with my closest cousin after probably four years without a proper conversation. Some of the blame must be shouldered by the times we live in, but some of it is mine as usual.
I went to an NFT meetup the other day on Howard’s invitation. It wasn’t nearly as awkward as I expected. I met a couple of good people who were clearly experts in their fields; the time investment and esoteric ecosystem knowledge just radiated from them. I also met some explorers like myself, who know enough from dabbling but are still bewildered by glimpses of the outer lands. Perhaps we don’t need to go there at all. But good to know there are guides.
I’ve been talking to the team behind a project I find fascinating and artistically sound. We might do something together. It feels right and effortless to be involved in something like this on my own time. Perhaps that’s how getting back to work will work out.
I finished reading A Gentleman In Moscow, and found out that the television adaptation is being made for Apple TV+. That’s restored my faith in the project, because I know they won’t shortchange it. It’s funny how ATV launched with the promise of quality over quantity, and how we felt that wasn’t a real positioning. Fast forward to 2022 and the imminent collapse of Netflix subscriber numbers thanks to a perceivable decline in content quality, and Apple’s seal of assurance is suddenly valuable. Some of the best series I’ve seen this year have been on their service: WeCrashed, Slow Horses, Severance. Anyway, fantastic book, not schmaltzy and populist at all. 4.5 stars, I’d say.
The high point of the week was probably a celebratory meal at a fancy sushi place on Monday, an appointment that had to be booked two months in advance. I’d like to say the iPhone’s camera performed well on this occasion, but it did not. Specifically, when using the 3x telephoto in low light conditions and the phone decides to shoot with the wide lens and crop in instead, which happened every time I thought I was using the 3x lens. You might not notice it on screen at the time, but these are usually unusable when looking at them later. I still maintain 2x on previous iPhones was a more useful focal length, and when it did happen, a 2x digital zoom is nowhere as bad as a 3x one. So this makes third-party camera apps like Halide an unfortunate requirement rather than a nice-to-have affectation for “pros”.
Finished reading Grace D. Li’s Portrait Of A Thief which I’d happily give 4 stars for the overall experience: a fun heist caper sprinkled with Chinese-American YA identity crises and politics. The entire cast is Asian; there’s not even a token white friend or anyone else of color that I can remember. That, along with the mechanics of the sophisticated art thievery by confessed amateurs, seems unreal? But perhaps it does feel that way sometimes being Chinese in America, I dunno. There’s apparently a Netflix series being developed around this, if it wasn’t canceled in the last few weeks along with so many other projects, and I’d love to see it at the very least match the production quality of One Of Us Is Lying, but of course To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before levels are welcome.
Am now on A Gentleman In Moscow by Amor Towles, an author I know nothing about, but the book came highly recommended at some point I no longer remember. Was afraid it would be the Paulo Coelho sort of 5-star book, but so far it’s very enjoyable. Looking it up on Wikipedia, it seems there is also a TV adaptation being developed, to star Kenneth Branagh. I can see this role being completely appropriate if he can resist hamming it up.
While reading in bed late at night, it’s become a habit to put up webcams on the projector. And my absolute favorite now is this street-level livecam in Shinjuku that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. It has ambient sounds unlike most cams, so it’s great for having on in the background like a window to another place. I feel like I know this area intimately now, the way people leave bars around 11pm to get the last trains, how the touts stand in the middle of the lane to pull people into their establishments, and (especially) the movements of the rats outside the ramen shop. It’s a Night Trap-like delight whenever I look up and catch a rat scurrying out at the exact time a woman walks by, triggering a scream.
I also saw an altercation on camera one time, but partially obscured by a passing vehicle so I’ll never know how exactly it started. A man seemed to bump into a nerdy looking guy on a bike, but whether he started it or not, the nerd eventually became the aggressor and shoved the guy to the ground with such force he rolled over backwards. It was raining and he practically landed in a puddle. Then the nerd stood over him and menacingly grabbed his collar and said a few words before going off and cycling away. The victim just sheepishly got up and straightened his jacket, picked his phone off the ground where it landed a few feet away, and walked off. Plenty of people nearby, nobody intervened or wanted to stare.
Vanillaware pulled off a pretty ambitious story with 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim. My playthrough clocked in about 24 hours, but I just missed 100% completion because of some bonus objectives that weren’t met. I don’t want to think about it too much more, but perhaps there was just one too many twists for the story’s good. If anything needs a multimillion-dollar TV adaptation, this absurd mashup of The Matrix, Cloud Atlas, The Fountain, Pacific Rim, Evangelion, The Island, Battlestar Galactica, The Terminator, and maybe a dozen more SF classics, is begging for it.
sangsara.net 