This week was a slog, like slowly pushing through a muddy swamp. I don’t know why, but maybe grinding through palaces in Persona 5 Royal and PowerPoint decks in real life had something to do with it. I thought I was nearing the end of the former, but nope, still have many hours ahead. I had to double check my last post to make sure I didn’t miss a week here; the presidential election felt so long ago it couldn’t possibly have been last Friday.
I went into work twice and discovered a new free snacks/drinks initiative, the kind that large companies everywhere once generously offered. I thought free food incentives were a low-interest rate phenomenon, but the return-to-office movement needs new soldiers. So there I was at my desk eating banana cake and trail mix, drinking VitaminWater, and getting calories I would normally have avoided.
The real work benefits are the friends we make along the way, though. This week an ex-colleague now based in Tokyo came back for a visit. That led to a three-hour Taiwanese hotpot catch-up last night, the effects of which I’m still feeling this morning. The chief reason is probably sodium, a thing I’ve become more acutely aware of since I wrote about eating Korean instant noodles.
Fun fact: Most Korean ramyeon contains between 1,800–2,000mg of sodium per serving, which is the recommended amount for an entire day. But Singaporeans tend to average 3,900mg daily, probably because of our proximity to hotpot restaurants.
And it’s a brilliant concept! You get a relaxing forest soundscape (the kind I put on sometimes anyway while working) along with a stirring piece of music performed by a master. I hope he does more like this.
The Rolling Stones put out a new single, Angry, and it seemed like all the old men on my timelines fell instantly in love with it. Eh, it’s okay at best? I didn’t get the hype, and the single-idea video with Sydney Sweeney on a car for four minutes didn’t do much to redeem it.
Imagine putting out something that mediocre in the same week as Olivia Rodrigo’s new album, GUTS. I believe it was the New York Times’ review that drew parallels to Lorde’s Melodrama, not stylistically but as a brilliant sophomore album from a 20-year-old breakthrough artist under immense pressure to deliver again. It’s so good, just give it a go.
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Next week is new iPhone week, so I’ll just say for now that if the rumors are true and the periscope zoom feature is only coming to the iPhone Pro Max, I think I’m going to be slightly torn. Apple hasn’t given the larger iPhones better cameras than the smaller ones in several years — that trend meaningfully ended with the iPhone 8 series, where the Plus model had two cameras and the regular had just one. The 12 Pro Max had a 2.5x zoom compared to 2x on the Pro, but that’s minor.
I think I’ve owned six larger iPhones: the 6 Plus, 6S Plus, 7 Plus, 8 Plus, XS Max, and the 11 Pro Max. And that one year in between when we had the iPhone X, which only came in one (small) size, felt like a relief because you didn’t have to choose a trade off.
The question will be how much more useful they can make this longer zoom seem. I’m quite happy with the 3x range on my 14 Pro. While the image quality could be better, the actual zoom range is fine! Do I want to put up with a cumbersome phone just to have a not-great-looking 5–10x zoom I’ll only use when visiting the zoo? If you’re currently using a larger phone and regret it, let me know!
The nation voted for a new president this weekend and the winner was Mr. Tharman Shanmugaratnam, which autocorrect changes to “That Man” (a tad disrespectful in my opinion). He got 70% of the vote which is pretty solid, but nobody’s surprised on account of how well liked and competent he is. It’s worth mentioning how painless the process was: my vote was in the ballot box less than three minutes after I showed up, and I was back home watching TV in 15.
Appropriately, we started Jury Duty on Amazon Prime Video and I think it’s gonna be great. It’s a pseudo-reality show where one man thinks he’s on the jury for an actual case but the whole thing is staged and everyone else is an actor. I’m watching this and wondering if everyone’s following a tight script or just improvising based on their characters, because there are events happening all the time whether the mark witnesses them or not.
That real-time play concept always makes me think of The Last Express, a classic but underplayed PC game by Jordan Mechner set on the Orient Express. It kicks off with a murder onboard and you have to move around the train investigating and staying alive amidst political intrigue and wartime spy stuff. Events are always happening, and if you’re not in the right place at the right time, you’ll miss crucial conversations. You can experience this for yourself on iOS but the app hasn’t been updated in five years and may be removed by Apple soon if they stick to their controversial plans.
A lot of other TV was seen. We finally finished season 3 of For All Mankind, an extremely strong show on Apple TV+. I binged all of the anime Oshi no Ko which is as great as everyone says; I don’t think I’ve ever seen a stronger (or longer) first episode. It’s a 90-minute movie in itself. I’m now midway through another highly rated anime: last year’s Lycoris Recoil, on Netflix. And on Michael’s recommendation we started on a Japanese drama, My Dear Exes, which is very enjoyable so far, maybe because it doesn’t feel like typical Japanese TV. It’s snappier and funnier somehow.
Oh, if Jordan Mechner sounded familiar earlier, it’s because he’s the man who created Karateka and Prince of Persia. And if you want to experience the making of a gaming classic, a new playable history lesson on The Making of Karateka is now out. And in a case of lovely things cosmically coming together, it was helmed by former Wired games editor Chris Kohler, who also wrote the article on Japanese curry that probably changed my life.
Staying on topic, we went down to the Japan Rail Cafe (operated by the actual JR East railway company from Japan, for some reason) in Tanjong Pagar because I’d heard they were doing a tie-up with the Kanazawa style Japanese chain, Champion Curry, for one month only. I had my first Champion Curry back in March, after meaning to check it out for years, and while it didn’t unseat my current favorites, it was still decent by Japanese standards and incredible by Singaporean ones. They sold a small sized plate here for S$19.90 including a drink, but it was sadly inauthentic. The curry’s consistency and deployment over the rice is not going to qualify for a Kanazawa cultural medallion any time soon, but I guess it was good enough that I’d take it any day over most local competition. But I still hope they open a proper operation locally someday and accomplish what Go Go Curry failed to do.
Champion Curry in JapanChampion Curry in Singapore
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I was suddenly inspired to make a new series of playlists, which will periodically capture what I’m listening to, sequenced like a proper mixtape. If I had the skills to make a DJ mix of them, I would! Here’s BLixTape #1 for my Apple Music fam.
And the tracklist for people still on *ahem* lesser services:
Gold -Mata Au Hi Made- (Taku’s Twice Upon A Time Remix) — Hikaru Utada (I said I wasn’t a fan of the regular version but this remix works!)
TGIF — XG
bad idea right? — Olivia Rodrigo
You Are Not My Friend — Tessa Violet
Dancing In The Courthouse — Dominic Fike
For Granted — Yaeji
Bittersweet Goodbye — Issey Cross
To be honest (SG Lewis Remix) — Christine and the Queens
Making this involved a detour into the world of NewJeans’ music videos, which are pretty conceptually twisted and seem to comment on the parasocial relationships fans have with them. For example, in the mostly sunny poppy video for ETA, the girls might only be hallucinations seen by a sick fan, telling her that her boyfriend is cheating on her with someone at a party. So she ends up murdering him and the girl with her car! I guess this is what it takes to stand out now.
Let’s end on a nice note with another video I came across on YouTube while checking out more electronic music. This guy Don Whiting also does a great job killing it on the road — performing a two-hour drum & bass set on a bike, accompanied by a huge entourage of other cyclists. It looks like an awesome day out, at a pace even I could probably handle.
The new fridge arrived without a hitch. It makes the tiniest ice cubes, they’re like chiclets. We also got baited and switched: the model in the showroom said “20 year compressor guarantee” but the one that arrived has a sticker that says 10 years. In any case, we’ve been assured that these compressor warranties are meaningless because they’re never the first thing to break down. Kinda like LED bulbs that claim to last centuries, then.
The Onchain Summer campaign/festival on Coinbase’s Base network (Ethereum L2) continued, and I really got into the release of a few generative art projects on Highlight.xyz, in particular RUNAWAY by James Merrill. It’s designed to be a long-form open edition project, and so the algorithm is wackier than most, with quite a bit of variety in the outputs. Of the four projects launched together, RUNAWAY understood the assignment best.
RUNAWAY by James Merrill
This inspired me to get back to playing with Midjourney, and totally unrelated to the above, I made a couple of images I call “Swamp Aesthetic” and “Pond Aesthetic”.
Pond Aesthetic and Swamp Aesthetic
XG’s buildup to their first mini album continued with the release of New Dance, yet another solid pop song accompanied by a fun video (this one goes for an early 2000s vibe). So far they’ve only released one early dud — Mascara is not a great song imo — and everything else has been a straight banger. It’s an incredible track record, so to speak, and they’ve created a formation where every member is differentiated and recognizable. Back when I found them in February, they had 1.1M YouTube subscribers. That number is now 2.18M. I said back then that they’re gonna be huge and I’m more certain than ever everyone’s going to know them in about half a year.
Apple Music agrees, and they’re featured in this month’s Up Next spotlight, which means a short video, radio interviews, and pre-order promotion for New DNA which drops at the end of September. Just for reference, past honorees of the Up Next program include Billie Eilish, Megan Thee Stallion, Sigrid, and Burna Boy.
I finished reading Ann Liang’s If You Could See The Sun, which turned out to be a YA novel set in a prestigious Chinese high school, with a protagonist from a poor background who’s struggling not to drown amongst her fuerdai classmates, and then… she develops a superpower? It’s pretty fun, and you can see it being Netflix adaptation fodder. 3/5.
We’re currently watching Deadloch on Amazon Prime Video. Throughout most of the first episode, it felt like we would quit, but it somehow picked up and now it’s a fun and ridiculously vulgar ride. It reads as a send up of the small town murder mystery genre (albeit set in Tasmania), but the murder bit is just as interesting as the comedy.
I’m still rationing episodes of Poker Face, watching them like little films. Episode 5, The Time of the Monkey, had such a fantastic payoff I’m still thinking about it days later. I don’t want to spoil anything, but that ridiculous episode title will actually make sense by the end.
Oh oh, I found a silver bracelet I bought off SSENSE years ago and decided to put it on one morning as I was going to work. Some colleagues immediately noticed it and said ‘hmm what’s going on with Brandon lately? He’s accessorizing and wearing new clothes and painting his nails?’, which led me to wonder if I’m going through some kind of weird mid-life crisis? Technically the crisis probably began when I turned 40, which was the year the bracelet in question was purchased. LOL why are people such cliches?
Our fridge is dying. After some eight years of dutifully cooling and freezing our food reserves, it’s losing its mind. Like a soldier left to survive too long in the jungle, it can’t tell right from wrong anymore, and it’s probably a threat to someone’s life. It started midweek when I decided to get some ice-cream and found the unopened tub mushy and soft to the touch. Ditto blocks of frozen salmon — uh oh, not a good sign.
I’ve realized in recent years that I get disproportionately upset when things go wrong in the household. They’re like waves rattling loose the stones in my psychological seawall; things at home simply need to be predictable, dependable, safe. Maybe it’s the result of some trauma. Maybe the outside world is just too much sometimes.
A new fridge has been viewed and paid for now, it will be roused from its Korean factory-induced slumber this Monday and loaded up with every surviving vegetable and condiment. I get images of them as war refugees lining up to get on a boat. They’re the tough ones, made of more shelf stable stuff. Pour one out for their fallen brothers: the spoils of war.
Do you know what new fridges cost these days? I certainly did not. I’m pretty sure our last one was under S$1,000, but they cost more now. Blame inflation, the chip shortage, whatever, but the ones under a grand now are the brands that probably don’t come to mind when you think refrigerators: Whirlpool, Electrolux, Sharp, and local OEM brands you wouldn’t think of at all. So now we’ll have our very first Samsung product, if you don’t count the displays and components they make for others.
Coupled with the so-called seasonal downturn in the markets now underway (supposedly the August and September months before a US election year tend to see significant corrections), there have been quite a few conversations about everyone feeling poor and worried. More than usual, anyway. I know one has to take a long view of these things, but the lack of bright spots is a little daunting.
CNA put out a two-part documentary on Singapore’s fiscal reserves, promising unprecedented access and interviews, which I found quite enlightening. There was a visit to a secret warehouse literally filled with tons of gold, and stories about how this war chest came into being from the early days of our independence. It had not occurred to me before that our reserves were used to weather the 2008 finance crisis and Covid without issuing more debt, a luxury most countries did not have. Nor that one of the reasons we’re able to enjoy such a low tax rate is that annual income from invested assets helps to offset spending on public infrastructure.
Here are the episodes on YouTube:
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I had fun this week with TikTok’s “Aged” filter, which is certainly not a new concept as far as apps are concerned, but it’s probably the most advanced execution yet. Through a blend of machine learning with harvested personal data from millions of non-consenting people and regular ol’ voodoo, it shows you what you’ll look like as a pensioner (should pension funds survive the financial end times). Some people have tested it on photos of celebrities when they were younger, and the aged photos reflect how they really look now, so… this is probably how you’ll turn out! Might as well get comfortable with it.
It turns out that old me will look kinda like one of my uncles, and I’ve been having fun recording aged videos in a wheezing voice and sending them to friends and colleagues.
Some of the other trending filters on TikTok are pretty sophisticated mini apps that involve a prompt box for generative AI. It takes a photo of you and will restyle it as a bronze statue, an anime girl, or whatever you ask it to do. They are also incredibly fast, compared to other generative AI image tools, which suggests Bytedance is burning some serious cash to power these models and gain AI mindshare.
I also came across a new product called BeFake that will try to take this one feature and turn it into an entire social media network based on posting creative generative AI selfies. It makes some sense — you don’t have to be camera ready (already a low bar with some of the beauty filters now available), and you can showcase wild ideas. Will this sweep the world only for people to get tired of unreality and swing back to finding “boring” posts interesting? Stranger things have happened.
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On Sunday we went to the ArtScience Museum (at the Marina Bay Sands) for a rare high-profile exhibition of digital art. Notes from the Ether says it’s focused on NFTs and AI, but it’s also got a lot of generative art that just happens to be encoded on blockchains. I was especially excited to see the inclusion of work by DEAFBEEF and Emily Xie (Memories of Qilin), and Tyler Hobbs and Dandelion Wist’s QQL project was also presented for anyone to play with.
Obviously this movement is in a weird sort of place at the moment. Valuations for most projects are as volatile as shitcoins, and a few “blue chip” projects like the ones displayed are more stable, but only about as much as bitcoin. Because NFT art is defined in large part by the medium, which is currently inseparable from talk of price and value, it’s hard to have a viewing experience divorced from these considerations. You don’t really visit a Monet exhibition and think about how much everything costs. Which is why the Open Editions I mentioned last week are interesting, and likewise with this event, which offers you a free NFT at the end. You get to co-create an artwork with an AI engine by uploading a photo of your own to be transformed, and it’s minted as a Tezos NFT if you’d like. I thought it was a very cool collectible to remember our visit by.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen more affordable tickets at this museum, just S$6 with a further 30% off if you sign up for a free “Sands Lifestyle” account, so there’s little excuse not to go if you’re remotely interested in this stuff.
Since we were already there, we also hopped into Sensory Odyssey: Into the Heart of Our Living World which pairs 8K video projections of natural scenes with immersive sounds and scents. In one space you’re smelling fresh air and damp earth in a rainforest, and in the next you’re underground with mole rats. It’s very cool, but ruined by small children being allowed to run loose in front of screens (can’t really be helped), and elderly museum staff loudly declaring that “this is a night savannah, very dark, no need to be scared!” (can be helped with training) in such a way that any illusion of being in a savannah is totally pierced — unless you’ve gone on a safari tour with a gaggle of Singaporean aunties, of course.
I survived the island. Their warnings of limited internet access were exaggerated, and it turned out that we did have wi-fi in our villa, albeit quite slow; I did not feel completely disconnected, but I managed to avoid being “online”. I did not, however, get a chance to play Hello Kitty Adventure Island, nor finish the book I was reading until I got back to Singapore. That will have to be remedied in the coming week.
We mostly spent our time sitting by the pool, or the beach, or eating, or walking around and exploring the “private island”, which is incidentally a marvel of self-sufficient sustainability. All water used in showers and bathrooms is collected rainwater and natural well water. Wastewater is processed and filtered on-site and used on plants. Food waste is composted and broken down by black soldier flies bred for this purpose, not shipped back to the mainland and incinerated.
I managed to get a tan, and now I’m sporting a ‘just healthy enough to look like a living human’ shade. I also need to shed my lizard skin this weekend and head out to a wedding, so there was a shopping trip as soon as we got back to pick up a decent shirt. Putting on a suit stresses me out more than wearing shorts and sandals on the beach, tbh. There’s a Goldilocks zone of comfort somewhere in between and it looks exactly like a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, which is where I plan to stay for life, thanks very much.
Island photography and phones
Speaking of being indoors and online, I took a bunch of panoramas on this trip with the express intent of viewing them on the Apple Vision Pro when it comes out next year. Enjoy this one, and a vertical video of some gentle waves if you need to take a little mental break.
The majority of other photos were taken with the Halide app as is now my usual practice, and in comparison to photos of, say, the sunsets taken with the camera app on my iPhone, they came out much more natural and aesthetically pleasing. It still boggles my mind that Apple shipped the Photonic Engine on the iPhone 14 Pro the way they did because it looks so overprocessed by default.
I can’t wait to see if the 15 Pro will resolve this, and if I’m honest I’m also keen to replace the ailing battery on my 14 Pro — online anecdotes suggest many of us are suffering from accelerated battery aging this year. I’ve watched mine fall from 88% to 86% maximum capacity over the last two weeks. Some people believe the combination of using a case + MagSafe charging is the cause, because of the heat generated. I don’t know what’s going on, but I don’t want to avoid useful features or stop doing normal phone things just because of this.
Blue skies
I finally got into Bluesky this week, and I don’t dislike it! Threads is unfortunately a place where I’m visible to everyone who knows me on Facebook/Instagram, which is to a large degree my real-life social graph. And what I liked about Twitter was that it was an online place for my online identity and my online people. I’m hopeful that Bluesky can be more of a Twitter replacement, and its relatively smaller size could be a strength, as long as the people I want to follow are on there. At this point, I’m rarely even checking Mastodon.
Coinbase launched their new Ethereum L2 chain, called Base, and its stated purpose is to be a more user-friendly blockchain that could go mainstream and be used by the next billion people (ambitious). They say (and I like this positioning) that “online” was the first revolution, and “onchain” will be the next.
I’ve been playing with it within their Coinbase Wallet app, and enjoying their “Onchain Summer” campaign which focuses on minting a bunch of free/very cheap NFTs. It’s a good demo of how low gas fees are on Base compared to regular ol’ Ethereum; most transactions cost just pennies. There’s still a lot of work to be done to make this more understandable, and arguably the entire user experience of creating and funding a new wallet needs to be rethought.
The main launch event was Cozomo de’ Medici (who I thought everyone agreed was Snoop Dogg but now may not be?) partnering with the Friends with Benefits (FWB) DAO and the Korean animator DeeKay to launch a pair of Open Edition artworks depicting a cryptocurrency future. Importantly, people could buy them with a credit card, instead of fumbling with wiring money to Coinbase and then buying ethereum and then sending it to their self-custodied wallets on the Base chain.
Did I lose you in crypto-jargon land? Don’t worry, I can’t keep up either. Think of Open Editions like an all-you-can-eat buffet, but with a closing time. The intent is to encourage access over the usual scarcity and price speculation. In this case, the NFTs were only available to be minted for 24 hours, and apparently some 70,000 were snapped up at a cost of 0.01 eth each (around $20 USD, I think). That’s still a cool $1.4M made!
Sounds of summer
We enjoyed this summer vibes playlist compiled by XG (Apple Music) while lazing in the pool this week. I still can’t get their housey new song, TGIF, out of my head.
Speaking of Apple Music, I noticed a new personalized radio option appeared on my “For You” tab this week, called Discovery Station. 9to5Mac.com reports that this feature has been in testing for awhile, with people spotting it on and off over the past year (how do I get into these betas?!) — in any case I’m glad to see new features and am hoping for more improvements around the launch of iOS 17.
I fell ill with a fever that spiked Monday night, and then strangely subsided the next day, replaced by wrenching back pain and body aches after a night of hallucinatory dreams that felt perfectly sensible at the time. Then on Wednesday just as I thought I was getting better, I was struck by the worst bout of diarrhea I’ve had in recent memory. It lasted practically all day, even after I’d eaten nothing but white bread and water, even after there was nothing left to expel.
What made things worse is one of our neighbors recently sold their flat and the new owners are doing renovations right now, with the few days of heavy demolition coinciding perfectly with my time in bed.
The doctor I spoke to prescribed me some dubious medication: one of them, meant to be taken an hour before food, is normally prescribed to people with stomach ulcers or gastric reflux problems. I mean, it reduces the production of stomach acid, which surely helps, but I went online and one of the things it’s clearly not prescribed for is diarrhea. It even says that if you are experiencing diarrhea, you need to inform your doctor before they prescribe this. I stopped taking it after the first dose. Maybe I’m too much of a WebMD believer and should just trust real doctors but it was prescribed so casually along with four other things that I can’t trust it’s necessary.
So I got on the so-called BRAT diet, which stands for Bananas, Rice, Applesauce, and Toast — basically all you can eat is bland stuff. I’m surviving on bread and bananas and a little peanut butter at the moment.
Oh, I learnt the above neat trick on Twitter in the process. If you wrap the stems on a bunch of bananas with plastic, it prevents them from going black and rotting. They release some sort of gas while ripening (?!) and by blocking the rest of the bananas from it, they last much longer.
Photo from @BrianLeeWow on Twitter
Another thing I learnt from on the internet this week was the existence of an obscure Sanrio character turned internet darling, confusingly named “Big Challenges”. He’s an optimistic crocodile that was created in 1978 and then dropped off the map until fans petitioned in 2020 for his return. And now he’s made an appearance as an NPC in the new Apple Arcade game, Hello Kitty Island Adventure, which may have been named in reference to a 2006 South Park meme? (Disclaimer: the featured image on this post is not from the game; I made it with AI.)
As for the game itself, it’s getting great reviews, and seems to be very much Animal Crossing but with Sanrio characters. So perhaps I’ll be spending some time with it next week while on my own island getaway.
What island getaway? Well, by the time you read this scheduled post, I will (hopefully) be on a small secluded holiday island with nearly no internet connectivity, no television, and no air conditioning. To be honest, I’m a little worried we’ll get there after two boat rides and an hour’s drive only to be put into cages and executed on camera for the dark web. Barring that nightmare outcome (inspired by a book I read recently), it promises to be three days of unplugged relaxation: reading, floating in a private pool, looking out at the ocean, maybe gaming a little, and sweating my ass off.
But first I’ll have to get over the anxiety I feel when I think of not being online and connected to everything. I mean, things are moving so fast these days, I could back next week to find the stock market’s crashed, or every country’s locked in a room-temperature superconductor arms race, or some new AI has decided I should do twice as much work for less money.
On one of those topics, it’s now 6pm on Saturday and I’ve spent the last hour watching a YouTube livestream by the National Taiwan University’s science department, as they test their LK-99 sample for superconductive properties. That’s another thing that started this week (or last?), some Korean scientists released a paper on their attempts to fabricate a superconductor over the last 20 years, in the most confusing way possible with multiple releases, internal fighting, and not much clarity on whether this thing is real. But it’s gotten every backyard chemist online into trying to replicate their process, which is apparently not hard. It’s something the human race could have accidentally discovered a hundred years ago, which makes my skin tingle! Imagine an alternate universe where we’ve had this technology all that time.
man: thank you God for giving us computers to do the hard thinking for us
god: of course my child, this is what I always intended. that’s why I made them so easy to make with just lead and copper
The stream started strong, but then I was appalled at their inability to present this in a camera-ready way. The lab is a mess, and they didn’t have their workspace prepped to work with the sample; it was being moved around with pieces of paper on a crowded desk, and at one point it looked like they were going to drop it on the floor. Watching it, I finally understand why all the videos and photos posted online so far by other enthusiasts have been so blurry and lo-fi. Scientists are not YouTubers!
So far, it’s been a washout. The tiny sample they derived, in part because of a failure to neatly separate it from the quartz tube without resorting to the use of a hammer, has not responded to a magnet. They’re doing something called a SQUID test now, but I don’t think it’s looking good. Might have something to do with their decision to use different temperatures and baking times than cited in the original paper. In any case, other labs around the world seem to have been able to replicate LK-99 to some extent, so I’m hoping we’ll “be so back” by this time next week.
look, it's really easy. you log on and tweet "it's so over" or "we're so back" depending on any minor development in the current thing or if things are really crazy you tweet "it was so over but now we're so back". you can also post this meme with two astronauts… pic.twitter.com/zJNqocjzkh
Okay that’s enough from me. Here’s some music I liked this week.
XG released the next song from their upcoming mini-album (I can’t wait), and it’s called TGIF, and it stands for “Thank God I’m Fly”. I love it.
I discovered the Japanese ambient artist Haruka Nakamura, who came out of a hiatus to work with The North Face to create four albums of background music for their Harajuku “Sphere” store. One for each season. What a gig.
Utada Hikaru put out a new single called Gold — Mata Au Hi Made which I’ve only heard once but found sadly unengaging. I’ll have to get back to it later.
In the early years of mobile connectivity, we counted ourselves lucky to get 1GB of data per month. Fifty bucks bought you a plan, a phone, and a two-year leash. These days? I’m sitting on an 88GB, 5G mountain for half the price. Thank you, technological progress. But since COVID and working from home, I’m only using a fraction of my allowance.
Yet, like any good consumer, I want more. So I switched providers from Circles to M1, lured by a plan that comes with 150GB at the same price. But there’s a catch, M1’s a little disorganized and provided me no updates on when my number would be ported. Right now I have two eSIMs jostling for control in my phone.
Their checkout process also insisted on a “delivery” date. Delivery of what exactly? I’d already gotten the QR code for my eSIM over email. Assumed it was just a holdover from the old physical SIM days, too much bother to scrub from the website. But no, someone actually turned up to my doorstep at the appointed time, just to verify I’d activated my eSIM, then had me sign off on it.
Let me repeat: M1 sends a flesh-and-blood human to confirm I got an email, but can’t drop me a line to say when my number would switch over. I had to spend 10 minutes on a support call to find out that it’s scheduled for next week. Will the data bonanza make up for this frustration? We’ll see.
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On a mellower note, I started to make use of my dormant brain.fm account again, to provide background music while I read and work. Is it pseudo-science? Beats me. But I like most of the tunes and it seems to work. The app has been significantly upgraded since I last saw it, with many more genres of music to choose from, and the option to vary the intensity of their brainwave-enhancing signals (which sound like wobbles).
With a little help from brain.fm and last week’s recommended music from Alice Sara Ott, I finished Sayaka Murata’s Life Ceremony, and also Hervé Le Tellier’s The Anomaly, and Lee Child’s 20th Jack Reacher novel, Make Me. Of all those, I can recommend The Anomaly most wholeheartedly. It’s a book you probably shouldn’t know anything about going in. If you really must know, it has science and mystery elements, but that’s all I’ll say. I’m now reading real-life astronaut Chris Hadfield’s The Apollo Murders.
Not bad for a guy who’d only finished one book two months ago, now 8 out of 12 down on his Goodreads Challenge.
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I’ve been listening to Tessa Violet’s new album, MY GOD!, and it’s a playful catchy affair. Incredibly, Blur have reunited with a new album, The Ballad of Darren, and I couldn’t find much wrong with it after one playthrough. Maybe it’s the halo of how good the last Gorillaz album was after a decade of underwhelming me, but I think Damon Albarn is back.
I made a commitment to use my AirPods Max more — they’ve been neglected because they’re somewhat of a pain, both literally and figuratively: the headband’s a little tight for me and the Smart Case remains a questionable design, adding friction to the simple act of turning a pair of headphones on and off.
Two things have improved the experience for me. First, a dubious Reddit post from another big-headed owner who suggested bending the metal frame open, briefly straightening them open to form a 180º line, to ease the squeeze. This could obviously damage them, so do it at your own risk. But I think it’s made a difference. This is something you can’t do with the plastic Beats Studio Pros, sadly.
Secondly, an updated audiogram from the free Mimi hearing test app. The last time I did the test was 2021, and I got slightly different results this time. I highly recommend everyone does this if they’re old enough to worry about losing some hearing. Thankfully my ears are still pretty good.
Saving your test results as an audiogram effectively personalizes your listening experience on AirPods and supported headphones, applying an EQ profile that compensates for the frequencies you’ve become less sensitive to. You’ll hear music the way you used to, once you dive deep into the iOS Settings menu and find the section on Audio Accessibility, and turn on “Headphone Accommodations”.
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Another app that played a part in this week is Darkroom, the photo editor for iOS and Mac that I’ve mentioned a few times. They launched a portal to showcase presets made by community members, and kindly put a spotlight on some of the ones I’ve made and shared. You can access this catalog through a new button in the app, too.
As Twitter is living on borrowed time (this was the week their petulant man-child owner pushed out a hasty, clumsy rebrand to “X”), I decided to republish my thread of Darkroom presets to… Threads. Annoyingly, it’s still buggy and messed up the chronological order of my posts. Nevertheless, I think they’re all still there, and I’ll post future presets to the same link.
New ones I shared to celebrate being on the presets portal:
E1: This is my reproduction of the popular E1 filter in VSCO. I wrote that it adds warmth, color, and film vibes in a single tap, and it truly is quite a versatile everyday effect.
MEM3: This is another strong effect from my nostalgia-forward MEM series. It lightens and fades images with a blue-magenta cross-processed wash. You pretty much lose all highlight detail, but it’s a good look for certain scenes.
MEM4: I said that this creates a warm and dusty sunset feel, but it’s really also great for low-light scenes. Check out the last photo sample through the link. Again, you do stand to lose detail in contrast areas, so vary the strength to taste.
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Growing up in the 80s, I caught reruns of Takeshi’s Castle on Chinese TV channels with no context, and no ability to understand what was said. On reflection, I grew up watching a lot of shows visually rather than verbally, which continues to this day whenever I choose to watch movies on planes without headphones.
Anyway, Takeshi’s Castle, for the uninitiated, was a long-running Japanese game show (?) featuring normal people tackling an obstacle course of heinous physical challenges that would make insurance men squeamish. It was a precursor of Ninja Warrior, American Gladiators, and yet a different beast: whimsical, insane, hilarious. Why the name? It was hosted by the infamous Takeshi “Beat” Kitano, who played the err… lord of the castle that 100 contestants each week tried to storm. Here’s the Wikipedia article.
I’m pretty sure you all know this, anyway. It’s a cornerstone of modern media culture! Turn in your TV licenses if you don’t.
So imagine my elation while browsing Amazon Prime Video in bed and suddenly seeing a new Takeshi’s Castle, a 2023 reboot! We’ve seen two of the eight available episodes, and it’s still gloriously fun. It’s still not rolled out globally, as some markets will get English voiceovers (the UK one will have comedian Romesh Ranganathan as one commentator), but I wouldn’t watch it any other way than in the original Japanese, and maybe even with the subtitles off for old times’ sake.
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On Sunday we visited the Illustration Arts Fest where some talented friends were showing their work. It was packed, and probably the most crowded place I’ve been in since Tokyo. Let’s hope I don’t get COVID again.
The most common theme was cute cartoon cats. On stickers, posters, keyrings, enamel pins, you name it. Some other artists were out there, scratching their own freaky itches and looking for kindred spirits in the crowd. We bought a couple of things for the apartment, including these little guys below from our friend Reg at Ocio Ceramics. A dumpling and a frog. Cuteness sells.
I’ve implemented a new blog theme, which you’ll notice if reading this on the web (as opposed to an RSS feed reader or the email newsletter — I’m surprised at how few people still use the former, and that people are using the latter). For the first time in many years, I’m experimenting with having a listing page instead of just having every post on a long page. Let me know if you think this is better.
A new cafe opened nearby and we’ve made something of a new routine to go there on Saturday mornings and spend quality time together. The coffee’s good, I get to see and hear people in this community that I’m normally ignorant of, and most importantly, it’s a chance to see cute neighborhood dogs.
After last weekend’s work commitments, I took Monday off to chill and fly my underused Mavic Mini 1 drone with my dad (who has a newer FPV model that he flies with a video headset). Hmm, I wonder if you’ll be able to use your Apple Vision Pro for such applications — I can’t see why not.
Bookworm mode has been engaged: I finished Anthony McCarten’s Going Zero, and both started and finished A.G. Riddle’s Quantum Radio this week. Along with Daniel Suarez’s Critical Mass a month ago, that’s a big dose of SF — so I’m now halfway through Sayaka Murata’s Life Ceremony, a slim collection of weird short stories. Whenever life feels like a directionless mess, I always find reading to be the cure.
Shitty films, such as the latest Fast and Furious installment (Fast X), where I couldn’t even make it past the halfway mark, don’t offer the same solace. It’s not only dumb and unengaging, it’s not even engaged with itself; the writing is awful and nothing makes you care at all. So instead, I watched Dwayne Johnson in Skyscaper on Netflix, and although it was a dumb and kinda bad action movie, it at least had a pulse.
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Now let’s talk Beats, baby.
The long-awaited update to the Beats Studio over-ear headphone line finally dropped with the new Beats Studio Pro. My first pair was the Beats Studio 2 circa 2013, with that iconic Ammunition-designed silhouette (the original Studios were fugly, like everything from the early Monster-made Beats by Dre era) — all smooth swooping lines and a low profile on the ears. It’s a design so good they didn’t really change it in 2017 with the Beats Studio 3, and it remains untouched in 2023’s version.
Throughout all incarnations, the sound quality was, to be blunt, crappy. I love a good design as much as the next guy, but when it comes at the expense of audio quality, it’s a hard sell. But somehow, I ended up buying three pairs. Go figure.
After being acquired by Apple, there was hope that sound quality would improve, and indeed the entire Beats line has received significant upgrades, with two exceptions: the on-ear Solo series, which got a short-lived premium noise-canceling reboot with the Beats Solo Pro, and the Studio series. After the Beats Solo Pro was discontinued (my guess is Solo buyers are price sensitive and so the Pro model flopped), they went back to selling the pre-Apple Beats Solo 3 Wireless model and never bothered to update the Beats Studio 3 Wireless. Until now!
The new Beats Studio Pro looks like a proper contender for anyone on Android and those okay with skipping the latest Apple features (e.g. adaptive audio is only coming to second-generation AirPods Pro later this year). It does however have the key ones: spatial audio with dynamic head tracking, improved ANC, and USB-C support including lossless audio over a cable. Given the improved sound quality of recent releases like the Beats Fit Pro and Beats Studio Buds+, I have high hopes for these.
The Beats video aesthetic is still fresh, like an Apple design language from a parallel universe.
Beats recently brought Samuel Ross onboard as “principal design consultant”. His job? Picking out colors. Sandstone is a good-looking warm shade of white; Navy seems like an improvement on previous versions, darker and less saturated; Black is, well, black; and Deep Brown is the interesting new addition here. It reminds me of the original Zune. Ross says in the product video that he was going for “elevated” looks, but man, these are plastic. Luxe colors on plastic? Personally, I would’ve preferred a bit more energy and attitude.
However, a long-standing concern remains: the clamping force. These headphones have always been a bit tight, making them uncomfortable to wear with glasses. Early reviews indicate no change in this aspect, so that’s a good excuse to stop myself from getting them.
If I do, Sandstone has my name on it.
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Someone mentioned how you could use ChatGPT as a therapist, which prompted me to try writing a prompt that anyone could use for this purpose. Keep in mind that you’ll get better results with GPT-4, and of course this is no substitute for real professional care and advice.
That said! I tried it out on a couple of scenarios and it was pretty good at guiding a conversation, suggesting strategies like reframing your thoughts, and helping you to reflect on your situation. I’d suggest talking to it like you would a real person, and saying things like “see you next week, what do you think we should talk about then?”
The last one came into view after watching her breathtaking performance of some Chopin on NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts of all places (embedded below). I only just learned that she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (like Jacqueline Du Pré, who I mentioned a few weeks ago) in 2018, but has apparently managed to overcome it for the moment. It’s a cosmic joke that bad things happen to the most incredible talents.
sangsara.net 