For two and a half years, I stayed out of Covid’s way by being an introverted indoorsy germophobe. It also helped that I wasn’t going in to any offices or meeting with strangers for the majority of that time. With the general sense of complacency everywhere now — borders open, masks optional in workplaces, in-person meetings a thing again, restaurants packed — it was only a matter of time.
It seems likely that I’ve been infected with one of the new BA variants; statistically they are most cases now, and reportedly more infectious and maybe even more severe. It’s Day 6 today since I tested positive on Tuesday (though was feeling it in my cells since last Sunday), and I’m still not over it. I started losing my sense of smell two days ago, and it felt like 95% of it was gone when I woke yesterday. After my nose and sinuses cleared, some of it returned. I could taste certain things more accurately, but some frequencies on the spectrum were just missing or muted. Coffee tasted nothing like it used to, only weak notes of chocolate and a thin woodiness like hot water that had been stirred with twigs. It seemed to be only getting worse, so I started preparing for a life without taste. It was a bit depressing.
Things seem a bit better today, although I’ve yet to try the coffee test. I suspect it may take a very long time after I’ve recovered for things to get back to normal. Meanwhile, lungs full of phlegm and wheeze, sudden hot flashes, fatigue, and bad sleep.
Keeping us company has been detective Harry Bosch, of the TV show Bosch, which no one I know has ever talked about despite it having seven seasons. I don’t know why! It’s really good, a sort of modern L.A. noir thing, with a main character who would sound cliche if described aloud (he’s haunted, makes mistakes, an extremely good cop, has no personal life because of his work, takes a pessimistic view of the world), but none of that actually comes across and strikes you at any time, so naturalistically is he played by Titus Welliver. Also: jazz music, cigarettes, great editing and direction. It doesn’t have a large budget but never feels like cheap television. Each season is a seamless story arc with no episodic filler.
Frustratingly, Amazon Prime Video in Singapore claims to have Bosch, but each season has multiple episodes missing/unavailable. I don’t understand the point of putting up incomplete seasons if there are licensing issues holding back some parts.
I managed to find a few hours to spend with Spiritfarer on the Switch which I’d started awhile back but then left alone. It takes awhile to open up and get all the loopy mechanics going, which has now happened. With all the things that need tending to, it’s very easy to get sucked in. Unlike most games in the time management/busywork genre, however, this one is cozy and doesn’t penalize you for taking it slow and chilling out, just enjoying being on the open sea, on your metaphysical boat taking the lost souls of your friends and family to the afterlife.
After some delays, rumored to be China related, Diablo Immortal finally launched here in Southeast Asia about a month after the global release. It takes a criminal amount of time to start up, sometimes close to a minute, because the server it checks for updates is slow to respond. But the game itself is polished, fast, good looking. I played it to Level 21 with my Backbone One controller and it feels like a proper Diablo game. Edit: Polygon has a look at the much-criticized monetization system, and I should clarify I have no intention of becoming invested in this. It’s just a fun game until it ceases to be.
I’m concerned that the ever-growing camera bumps on iPhones are going to make the Backbone One stop working again later this year when the 14 series comes out. Already, Razer’s Kishi controller doesn’t work with the iPhone 13 Pro. If you go on Apple’s official store, the only game grip they sell for it is an odd controller that holds your phone above it in a mount, connected via a lightning cable. Very uncool. It’d be great if Apple made their own. I’m sure they won’t.
I made more Midjourney art.
Cosy eveningCozy eveningPhoton’s DreamA watercolor piece generated off a drawing I fed inRobot SamoyedMagical massive libraries in anime worldsJay-Z album cover by Saul BassJay-Z album cover by Saul BassJay-Z album cover by Makoto ShinkaiCozy evening, Studio Ghibli styleSummer nightsCarefree daysCarefree daysThe best time of our lives
Covid has finally made its way into our household. Kim is down with it, and given our proximity I decided it was impossible. She’s on Day 2 of the whole cough, sore throat, headaches package, while I’ve now started feeling the beginnings of it this afternoon too. So pretty sure I’ll be out of action this coming week.
It’s probably evidence of a new wave of a new variant (BA 2.75?), because several people we know have also come down with it, including about three others at work. I may have passed it to more while I was in the office this week, unfortunately.
We had an electrical scare in the house when a light tripped the power. I wasn’t home when it happened, but Kim forced the circuit back on and the LED bulb exploded. After consulting with an electrician, it seems it was a failure in the track light’s transformer, which apparently happens. He was nonplussed about it and said we just had to buy a new one and put it back on the rail. I’m not really comfortable with the idea that QA in the lighting industry is so poor that this happens and we can dismiss it.
Malaysia’s export ban on chickens continues to generate content opportunities for ChannelNewsAsia, like this program on whether frozen chicken is an acceptable substitute for Singaporeans. We tend to watch these things at night when not in the mood for anything challenging. If Covid ends up giving me brain damage or fogginess, it may be all we watch from now on.
My GR III came but I’ve had nearly no opportunity to use it. Just a couple of snapshots at work.
The bear market continues, but I minted a new NFT for my collection from the release of Collapsed Sequence by toiminto earlier in the week.
After only having access to Dall-e Mini like a pleb for weeks, I finally got access to Midjourney thanks to new friend and good guy Hunn who had a spare invite. You won’t believe how much of my week has been taken up by messing around and trying to get a feel for its prompts. I said in an Instagram post that I’m now 100% certain that these tools are going to be a part of creative work everywhere. No doubt in my mind.
“The god of all cats”“Asian man with glasses using an iPhone, painted by Vermeer““Yeti giving an Apple keynote presentation”Something conflating raindrop ripples and asphalt…I did a bunch of concept camera prompts.Too many. But this one has a clear Leica influence.This one is a compact camera by way of Studio Ghibli.Isn’t this shit insane?“Funeral for a design company”“An eternity on the internet”“An eternity on the internet”“An eternity on the internet”After the lightbulb exploded, I tried words around electricity, fear, and death.“A metaverse by Wes Anderson”“A metaverse city by Wes Anderson”Jose suggested I try “a metaverse by Wes Anderson and H.R. Giger”“A metaverse by Wes Anderson and H.R. Giger”This series’ prompts were inspired by my Subconscious Heirlooms #19 artwork, which I tried to describe.They ended up being impossible photos from a mirror artwork installation.I find them really beautiful.It floors me that anyone can now make these things so easily.More impossible spaces, the prompt was completely unrelated.Still very early in learning how to control the outputs.“Joni Mitchell hip-hop album cover, gold chains, gangster rap”
If last week was long and exhausting then the trend is only accelerating. This week involved a lot of extroversion, conversations, and digging deep for social energy. But there’s change here: talking too much used to wipe me out. Now it can feel worthwhile. Sometimes I even wander into the “need to shut up and listen” zone. Part of this is getting old — people might let you, but it doesn’t mean you should.
I spent some time with a visiting colleague of sorts, and got to talking about how I spent the last year (rest, goofing off, learning random things), and takeaways from this entire period of work and personal growth since joining the company. It’s no wonder I’m tired; I barely recognize who I used to be five years ago. Things that were hard then are easier now, which reminds me of this “NLP” phrase that used to be in the Pzizz sleep app: let things that are easy… be easy. Is it cringe motivational shit? I think a lot of people could learn from it.
Last week I tried to buy a Ricoh GR IIIx and my order got canceled because of supply issues. This week I took my Ricoh first-gen GR out for a bit and decided I’d rather stick to a 28mm field of view and crop if needed, so I’ve ordered a regular ol’ GR III instead. Thanks to Shopee’s June 25th sale, I managed to get a better price than what I found in Funan’s camera stores. Let’s see if it manages to be delivered.
Painfully aware I haven’t played any games recently. The creator of Downwell made a new mobile action game for Netflix, called Poinpy. I’ve only spent 10 minutes on it. It’s much friendlier and cartoony looking, but you can still definitely draw parallels with Downwell.
If you’re a child of the 80s and 90s, you may remember playing Westwood Studios’ point-and-click game adaptation of Blade Runner, which was hailed as a groundbreaking experience. I hadn’t even watched the film at that age, so the game was just weird to me, but it still looked like nothing else owing to its voxel rendering and motion captured actors. It’s now been remastered and released on the Nintendo Switch for just $10 USD, so I’m planning to give it another go.
After seeing some Twitter chatter about Philip Seymour Hoffman’s brief but remarkable impersonation of Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible 3, we watched it again from my iTunes library and… it’s not the movie I recall. Something about its oversaturated colors and tight framing makes the film feel much older than it is, and nowhere as thrilling as I think it was in the theaters. Ah well. At least now I have this line stuck in my head ready to be repeated all day.
Netflix has a new (bad) reality TV show called Snowflake Mountain where a bunch of spoiled young people living off their parents get told they’re going to be on a show set on a luxurious resort, but then they get dropped into a wilderness survival experience. It’s so bad we watched all 8 episodes in one go on Saturday. It’s enjoyable mainly because some of them do grow up and become more mature, but I wonder what the producers would have done if all of them remained insufferable and selfish. That said, the brainwashing playbook is well established! Throw them into adversity to break their spirits, add a little kindness and positive reinforcement to bring them back in, then keep them on their toes throughout.
There’s a fair bit of hip-hop in my library, but Logic’s work is a blind spot. His new album Vinyl Days came up in Apple Music’s New Releases list and I’ve been enjoying its classic production throughout the week.
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.
sangsara.net 