sangsara.net

  • Week 30.23

    Week 30.23

    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.

    ===

    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).

    I get absolutely nothing out of referring you, but if you use my referral link you’ll get your first month for $1.

    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.

    ===

    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”.

    ===

    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.

    ===

    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.

    ===

    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.

  • Week 29.23

    Week 29.23

    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.

    ===

    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.

    ===

    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?”

    Here’s the prompt:

    ===

    New albums on my headphones this week:

    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.

  • Week 28.23

    At least I’ve got Starbucks in my corner

    It seems my general mood and well-being hasn’t improved. In fact, I fear it may have gotten worse. There were some fires to put out but at some point you’re just on fire yourself and can’t tell if you’re helping or hurting. This is fine, the dog says. But after working over the weekend, I am pretty crispy and ready for a swim.

    Billie Eilish’s new song for the Barbie soundtrack is the vibe I was looking for: all sad, searching, and scared. I watched the Zane Lowe interview of how it came together and that just solidified it for me. I admit that I was beginning to worry her winning streak would soon end, but this is a really lovely song and I think she’s gonna be a great songwriter for a very long time. I also finally got around to Olivia Rodrigo’s Vampire, which I’d heard many good things about, and Jesus this girl sings like she has something to prove. The kids are still alright.

    Oh, at one point this week I had a senior moment, as in I found myself doing something I used to see senior leaders do in my early days in the creative industry: I sketched my ideas out on paper to explain what I wanted to younger people, because I can’t use the newfangled tools as well as they can. I did this twice! Wow, I said aloud, I should just retire soon and move to Thailand and wear beer brand singlets all day like they did.

    I had so little leisure time that I only managed to squeeze in a couple episodes of Love Village, and one more episode of The Bear. I’m getting close to finishing the book Going Zero by Anthony McCarten, which I’m ready to recommend as a fun adventure involving surveillance technology.

    For those who haven’t seen Love Village, it’s a Japanese “dating” reality show for old people. It’s Terrace House where everyone is over 40 and hasn’t been lucky in their relationships — it’s where they go to find their “final partners for life”, as we’re constantly reminded. The show is hosted by Japanese TV personality Becky (no stranger to love problems, it would seem) and comedian Atsushi Tamura (who is described by Netflix in another show he hosts as a “reformed playboy”). I like that they both skewer the participants when they do silly things and shed tears (!) when moved by their stories. It’s exceptionally plain and chill TV, which I like for nighttime viewing.

    I drew my first Misery Man in over a year; inspired, I guess. The caption on this one is “Keep the PMA! (Positive Mental Appearance)”.

    The term PMA actually stands for Positive Mental Attitude, and I learnt about it from the tragic story of Jesse Malin suffering a rare spinal stroke that’s left him paralyzed from the waist down since May.

    Longtime readers may know that I’m a fan of Malin’s music — when he announced a concert to celebrate the 20th anniversary of his debut album, I looked up plane tickets to New York. Not long after that, he was struck down by this rare condition and is now raising money to help pay for treatment. Please consider a donation or buying a “Keep the PMA” t-shirt to help.

  • Week 27.23

    I’ve thus far neglected to mention that I’ve become slightly obsessed with Korean instant noodles, which they specifically call ramyeon/ramyun, and have been buying and eating too many of them in recent weeks. I never went to ramyeon town before because I have a low tolerance for spicy food, but watching Jinny’s Kitchen might have set me off, and I’ve found that there are mild versions and that even the hot ones are sometimes worth suffering through.

    A few notes:

    • Nongshim’s Shin Ramyun is the original, the classic, the Nissin chikin ramen of Korea. The company’s English website says it’s always been a pork-based broth, but the export versions I’ve seen here in Singapore and Australia seem to be based on soy and mushrooms. There’s a new shrimp flavored version that was previously only available in China, but I have no interest in trying that.
    • I was able to find a pack of Shin Black imported from Korea, a premium version that adds beef to the pork base, and it’s certainly tastier and unexpectedly less spicy.
    • The Samyang company’s Buldak range of noodles are of course the notorious super spicy “fire chicken” ones you see in those YouTube challenge videos. I can’t eat more than a bite or two of the original (there’s also a 2x spicier one in red), but there are milder versions like jjajangmyeon and “carbonara”. Still, not for me.
    • I learnt in a video that people don’t think you should add eggs to Nongshim’s Neoguri spicy seafood noodles, which I have been doing, along with sliced cheese, kimchi, and sometimes a sausage. Oops.
    • Yeah I was not keen on this adding of sliced cheese to soup noodles, but now I don’t even think about it.
    • Of all the “Korean style” (basically red chilli and soy sauce?) noodles so far, I think my favorite might actually be Ottogi’s Jin series, which comes in Mild and Spicy versions. The Spicy one is about as spicy as regular Shin Ramyun (export), nowhere as crazy as Buldak.

    ===

    It’s not all sunshine and noodles; my increased consumption is partly due to a demanding work schedule filled with late nights and skipped meals. In general, I don’t believe these circumstances get the best out of anyone, but I’m told it’s the norm in China these days. I’d heard of 9-9-6 (working from 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week), but apparently people joke 0-0-7 is more accurate. If nothing else, you’ve now learnt a lame new way to say 24/7 today.

    I keep thinking it’ll get better soon, but it hasn’t yet. Around the same time, I tried asking ChatGPT to write some funny posts that could go viral on a new social network called Threads, but it only returned some reheated tweets. One of them hit the mark though: “Is being an adult just perpetually saying ‘after this week things will slow down’ until you die?”

    So, Threads!

    Facebook/Meta/Instagram’s Twitter clone was rumored for awhile but I guess I wasn’t expecting a global launch of this scale — normally they roll stuff out haphazardly? But I think we’re now at over 70 million sign ups in two days, for a separate app that you need to download! It seems they rushed this out to take advantage of Twitter’s shambolic state, and even then, everything has been running smoothly.

    They made the choice to go algorithmic feed only, and to populate yours at the start with suggested content. Maybe it’s because I’ve been using adblocking tools for the past few years (who am I kidding), but my recommendations have been terrible.

    It’s been giving me Singaporeans influencers, sports, beauty and fashion, and positive lifecoachy shit. I’ve since found and followed many of my sort of people, and muted over a hundred accounts I do not want. That should be enough data for it to start improving, so I’ll just have to wait until they do something with it.

    But of course, we don’t have to be on Threads. And maybe we shouldn’t, given Facebook’s reputation and past actions. Much has been made of how Elon has managed to make Mark look like the good guy here; a sizeble feat. I’m still getting a lot of specific tech and financial content on Twitter, and I enjoy the quality on Mastodon, which comes from strictly following only accounts that don’t annoy me given the lack of an algorithmic feed.

    I suspect the majority of people on Threads so far aren’t posting, just lurking and figuring out what it’s for. I’ve been followed by a few people but I don’t follow back if they have zero posts or want to have private accounts. Meanwhile, successful IG content creators are either using it exactly like they do on IG (posting memes, photos, and videos) or writing inane things to try and get engagement.

    I don’t want any of these things on a text-centric platform. It’ll take awhile to settle, and maybe it’ll just become a lame sort of normie place like Facebook.

    ===

    I’ve also been utterly captivated by George Harrison’s My Sweet Lord out of nowhere, and have probably listened to it a hundred times and sung it to myself a hundred times more this week.

    It must have come up on my Apple Music at some point and resonated in the midst of my terrible week — the intentional, sutra chanting-like repetition is brilliant, hypnotic, soothing. How can you not be crazy for a song that goes from Hallelujah to Hare Krishna and back again? That declares such pure desire to know an unknowable god, that acknowledges how life is simultaneously too long and too short, that love is all you need?

    So I made a playlist collecting all the different versions and covers I’ve been listening to: My Sweet Lords. It has 23 tracks so far, and I hope you like it and join me in this obsession.

    ===

    We started watching season 2 of The Bear and it’s truly excellent so far, as was season 1. Episode 6 is something else. It’s the television equivalent of Uncut Gems and Kendrick Lamar’s We Cry Together on the Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers album: extremely chaotic and uncomfortable, and not something you’ll rush to re-experience soon.

    We also saw Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part 1 and it feels a little off. Still a good time, but some of the writing feels stilted and theatrical, and overall it doesn’t feel consistent with the others (okay, one can argue MI:2 felt nothing like the rest too, but that was when we were cycling through different directors; Christopher McQuarrie has no excuse). The challenge the team faces here is like nothing they’ve been up against before, but that veil of otherworldliness is distracting, and I didn’t get to appreciate it as much during the film. 4/5, I think.

    ===

    But we can’t end the week without some AI experiments, so I went back to my GPT-4 poetrybot and gave it my thoughts on the themes in My Sweet Lord, and it returned a pretty good poem, albeit several stanzas too long and not quite right in places. A bit of snipping and human co-creation later, we have this:

    Life is long,
    Life is brief,
    In joy, a song,
    In pain, grief.

    Love is low,
    Love is high,
    In knowing, grows,
    In doubting, dies.

    God in the small,
    In the leaf, the bird’s call,
    In the rise, the fall,
    In all the all.

    Seek the divine,
    In the day, the night,
    In the yours, the mine,
    In the dark, the light.

  • Week 26.23

    There was a massive thunderstorm Wednesday morning, and we woke up to water leaking across our living room floor, dangerously close to some power sockets, which would have totally ruined the not-on-fire vibe I’m going for in this apartment. It seemed that some fault on the rooftop was letting water into an unused cable housing that runs through the entire building. Once upon a time, this “pipe” used to carry terrestrial TV signals from the antenna above, and it’s definitely not supposed to have water in it.

    The storm continued all morning, and I was mopping up water and wringing towels every 10 minutes while trying to be on work calls and contacting the authorities and arranging for our own contractor to do something about it. Although the town council sent someone down within a few hours, he turned out to be not so useful, firstly by not understanding the size of the problem (it was already sunny and dry by then), and then by trying to tell me there wasn’t really a problem on the roof. There was no other possible ingress point for the water.

    Because the next day was a public holiday, I was pretty anxious to get it resolved ASAP as staying up 24/7 to be a squeegee operator was not acceptable. By the end of the day, thanks to some prompt private sector assistance — albeit at my own cost — I had the issue resolved (and I was right about the source).

    The leak added unnecessary stress to an already difficult week, exacerbated by the tough transition back to work after my holiday. As if on cue, I came across this piece in the New Yorker on “The Case Against Travel” which I won’t try to summarize. It ends with a sobering observation that holidays are a salve for the grind of working life, and that first-world people just live looking forward to the next trip and the next, each time believing in some life-changing outcome of travel that never actually materializes. This reliance is something I never believed applied to me before, because I’m quite alright not traveling for long stretches — dear god, I just want more time left to my own devices — yet, startlingly, the absence of any further planned trips and the abyss now facing me feels… depressing?

    It’s definitely about being tired. I also read this article (a book plug) about the “cost of traditional masculinity”, mainly centered on the role of providing, which powers economic growth but maybe not happiness. What would the world look like if every socially enforced achievement target was replaced with an appreciation for “enough”? Human progress would be hindered, I can hear you say, but the human-driven damage would be too, and that seems worth it.

    I took a couch break one afternoon and read this other article in the New Yorker about quack surgery for a certain masculine insecurity, which was very, very disturbing. It’s about as graphic a piece of writing as I can ever recall reading. I am still trying to forget some details! Ah, modern life is closing one’s eyes to tragedy.

    ===

    Other bits:

    • We went out for dinner Friday at a Sri Lankan restaurant called Kotuwa in Little India. I don’t remember half of what I ate, but it was very enjoyable. Since Peishan and James were there to enforce vegetable eating, I was able to try the cashew curry — literally a little bowl of boiled cashews in a sweet gravy, which worked.
    • We finished Silo on Apple TV+ and enjoyed the season overall. I’m told the books are light and not very good, so it seems this was an adaptation that took a good central idea and nailed the execution. I’m pretty sure a second season will be coming.
    • I chanced upon an Apple Music page of DJ mixes made to celebrate two Tokyo clubs that closed last year, and I’ve been enjoying a few of them. I don’t think I’ve been inside a club in years, but I remember the feeling of often being disappointed in the music and thinking, “I’m gonna get home and listen to XYZ instead”. But I think I would have loved hearing some of these mixes irl.
    • I started using Vibes, the latest app in the (Not Boring) series by Andy Works. These functional apps (calculator, weather, etc.) borrow video game aesthetics and interactions to offer an appealing alternative to Apple’s flat design, and they’re winning — they won an Apple Design Award last year, and the standard Weather.app has grown increasingly rich and playful of late. Anyway, Vibes generates a real-time videogamey soundtrack for your life, based on your sleep and movement patterns, helping you to rest and focus throughout the day. I usually use Brain.fm or lo-fi music for this, but Vibes is simple: just hit Play and it’ll do what it thinks you need.
    • After watching some Bob Ross on Twitch one night, I fooled around on the iPad and drew a landscape in ProCreate. It’s nothing great, but then I tossed it into Midjourney and said ‘do this like Bob Ross’ and oh my lord. It makes me both want to improve and to never draw again — like, what’s the point?

  • Week 25.23

    • The week in Melbourne went largely as planned. I managed to read about half of Daniel Suarez’s Critical Mass, the sequel to Delta-v, and played some Persona 5 Royal in my downtime.
    • Because the Airbnb had a basic Android-powered smart TV and spotty wifi, I only managed to watch one thing of note: the first Extraction film on Netflix, because my dad was talking about it. It came out a couple of years ago but is getting a bump in the charts now that a sequel’s just been released, imaginatively titled Extraction 2. It has a lot of impressive shots that look like single-takes, and I’d definitely recommend it if you’re in the market for a dumb action flick.
    • We did go out as well, of course, and I enjoyed the ACMI’s Goddess exhibition on women in cinema, and their entirely redesigned (since I last saw it in 2018) permanent exhibition on the history of the moving image, from shadow puppets to video games.
    • The National Gallery Victoria (NGV) had two large exhibitions on: Pierre Bonnard and Rembrandt, and puzzlingly did not offer a combined ticket plan. The cost to see both was around $60 AUD, so we decided to just see the Bonnard one and take our time. It was quite worth it, but I do regret not having bottomed out the whole place with the Rembrandt. The next day we spontaneously dropped in at the NGV’s Ian Potter outpost in the CBD, which is completely free, and dedicated to Australian artists. All in all, a good time.
    • Food-wise, many of the essentials were hit. Croissants at Lune; lunch at Rice Paper Scissors; coffee, pastries, and seafood at the South Melbourne Market; kebabs; wine in the Yarra Valley; cocktails at Union Electric; Korean BBQ at Bornga; some relatively good pho; pretty great pizzas.
    • I’m also glad we managed to stop by The Paperback Bookshop, a cozy little place that manages to hang on — it seems to be thriving, actually. We bought a few books. The last time I came by, I bought some that I ended up reading the ePub versions of, just because I’ve grown out of the paper habit. But I’ll happily keep buying physical books because you can pass them along and every year I trust digital media to stay accessible less and less.
    • This was of course the week that a dumb DIY carbon fiber submarine went missing on its journey to visit the wreck of the Titanic, and it captured public interest to the point that I ended up having a conversation about it with a friendly cafe owner when I was the last customer around (reading Critical Mass). She’d only heard bits and pieces on the news, whereas I, extremely online and living in social feeds, had many factoids and theories to offer, which fanned her disbelief and led her to say the billionaires had “more money than brains”. Later on I saw this very appropriate tweet and thought “it me”, but in my defense I did not bring up the topic first!
    • I didn’t take many photos, but most of what I did get was captured in Halide (12mp HEIC) and processed in VSCO. Then I deleted the originals. Yolo.

  • Strange Beach

    Thanks for coming to my Midjourney art exhibition:

    Edit: I’m currently in the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne and am reminded that most exhibitions also have descriptions for kids. So I’ve asked GPT-4 to expand on the wall text it helped me with and write a version for kids, which I’ve appended below.

    Strange Beach presents a provocative exploration of the uncanny, executed through the fusion of AI-generated imagery, Japanese anime aesthetics, and elements of surrealism and horror. Drawing on theoretical concepts associated with the 1920s Surrealist movement, this collection explores the destabilizing effects of disrupting familiar contexts and spaces. Surrealist influences, suggestive of Salvador Dalí’s dreamlike landscapes, are observable, yet the visual language is distinctively rooted in the tropes and stylistic conventions of anime, echoing the complex, often boundary-blurring narratives found in Satoshi Kon’s filmography.

    Within the context of Strange Beach, the typical Hawaiian-style beach — a common setting within anime — is reinterpreted. The injection of elements that challenge the norms of reality introduces an unsettling quality, resonating with the Grotesque tradition in art history that dates back to the Renaissance. The human figures, manipulated and distorted, bear stylistic similarities to the disquieting characters found in Junji Ito’s horror manga. The images, while unsettling, offer an invitation for viewers to question and reinterpret their traditional understanding of serene landscapes, provoking contemplation on the fluid boundaries between normality and the strange.

    For kids

    Welcome to “Strange Beach”! Have you ever imagined a sunny beach with surprising and weird things happening, like in a dream? Well, that’s what you’re going to see here. This art looks like Japanese cartoons, or ‘anime,’ but has been created by a computer!

    In these pictures, you’ll see a beach that might remind you of your favorite anime show. But look closely, because things are a bit strange. The people might look a bit like ghosts, or their bodies might look different than what you’d expect. It’s a bit like when you have a dream, and things seem a little odd or mixed up. It’s fun to think about what’s happening in each picture. So let’s go exploring and see what interesting things we can find on our “Strange Beach”!

  • Week 24.23

    • A tough and tiring week under dispiriting circumstances. But in the grand scheme of things, the worry is optional and the problems are irrelevant. So I remind myself!
    • It’s Thursday night as I write some of this in advance and we fly for Melbourne tomorrow night. I am ungraciously unpacked, a rarity. I’m hoping to fit everything into a single cabin bag for the first time. I’m traveling light. No cameras, no gear, and no plans to bring any shopping home. The mission seems to be merely spending a week on another continent. Okay maybe I’ll bring my Switch.
    • At work, I started doing team updates as a newsletter. I ask everyone to send me what they’ve been up to, and they’re free to write a few lines or a bullet list. I chuck all of it into ChatGPT using a fairly specific prompt, and out pops an entertaining roundup of the week that reads like a news radio show.
    • It strikes me that I could easily do the same for these weeknotes right here, except for the times I go off and end up writing 1,000 words on something (which is quite often). I hope the act of a human spending their valuable human life minutes every week to write these updates by hand makes them more valuable than if I just ask an AI to elaborate. Lord knows the quality is close.
    • I came across this story about the potential for AI models to collapse as they’re trained on increasingly reflexive information generated by AIs, decaying like analog copies of a tape. This is of course what we’ve been wondering about: can AI keep learning to create new things in the absence of new original inputs from humans?
    • And it might be inevitable, because there’s as yet no way to separate content that’s AI generated, and it’s going to be invisibly and thoroughly mixed into every pool of data. Even Amazon’s Mechanical Turk workers are using ChatGPT to do their work, which is explicitly meant to be human work. It’ll be interesting if years from now we look back at this moment in time when it looked like AI was going to take over everything but then suddenly fell apart and became unviable like seedlings in poisoned soil. Like HG Wells’ invaders succumbing to the common cold.
    • It took awhile but I finished reading Matt Alt’s Pure Invention: How Japan’s Pop Culture Conquered the World. My Goodreads count for the year so far is a pitiful TWO. Anyway the book is enjoyable and well done. It promised previously untold stories about the invention of karaoke, the Walkman, the Game Boy, and others, which I doubted heading in — don’t we all know these stories? Would there really be anything new here? But I definitely learnt some new details here, and Alt does a great job of stitching it all together into a decade-spanning thesis about innovation, globalization, and the power of culture.
    • In Melbourne now after a couple of nights of bad sleep, after a miserable red eye flight where I got maybe an hour of sleep, after staying awake most of Saturday. Finally rested on Sunday. Listening to Apple Music’s excellent playlist of songs produced by MIKE DEAN. Looking forward to a chill week of Nintendo, coffee, reading, a visit to my favorite museum of screen culture, and no expectations of doing much more.
    • Amongst last week’s music releases, I missed a new album from Bob Dylan. And from Ben Folds. If I’m out to shift blame, it’s more like Apple Music neglected to inform me about them. The algorithms could use some work.
    Melbourne

    I started generating Midjourney images for a conceptual series and am in the process of curating the collection. Maybe I’ll put it up in a separate post at some point next week. It’s called Strange Beach, and I’m shooting for “wrong”, trying to prompt my way to pictures that are subtly unsettling or unhinged, yet set on a sunny Hawaiian beach. Some not so subtly.