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Week 52.22: The end of year playlist edition

December 26th, 2022
Hey y’all. I worked three days this week (was crazy, back to back calls during the Christmas season wha…?) and then felt good enough during the next two days of vacation time to sit down and make a year-in-review playlist again. For some reason I skipped this tradition last year — probably having too much fun in my time off? Previous installments here for reference: 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020.

So if you’re on Apple Music, here’s L–R 2022, featuring cover art made with Midjourney, in a year dominated by generative AI improvements.

Quick liner notes:
- I was happy to see Utada Hikaru returning with a new album, and such a good one at that. I went with Bad Mode as the featured song but there are many great cuts. Aside: we finished the First Love series on Netflix. It fumbled the ending after a pretty good buildup. The last three episodes should be deleted and replaced with a new take.
- I discovered Stromae this year (I somehow missed the 2009 club mega hit Alors on danse) and what a singular talent he is. With his knack for melodies, writing (albeit translated for me) and intricate beats, and a great singing voice, he deserves to be so much bigger.
- There was much to be thankful for in hip-hop, with new material from Black Thought, Kendrick, the RZA, Anderson .Paak, Stormzy!? If only Donda 2 were a real album on real channels, I would have included a track but oh well Ye does Ye.
- Drake and 21 Savage stepped on a Daft Punk classic with Circo Loco but I can’t hate it. Another contender that didn’t make the list was DJ Khaled’s Staying Alive also with Drake, but if you’re gonna rip off a song at least sample it too.
- Local band Sobs did an incredible cover of Gwen Stefani’s Cool which I thought rivaled the original in deserving to exist. I heard them play it live in October at the Esplanade too.
- I cheated a little with the inclusion of Jens Lekman’s Black Cab but hey it’s a new recording! He’s deleted the originals and reworked a couple of albums (I still have the old MP3s thankfully). The song is one of my eternal favorites, firmly planted in the mental territory of my mid-20s.
- It all ends with one of my favorite tracks from the new Taylor Swift and Jack Antonoff album, the most beautiful quiet evening at home vibe to ever be captured in a studio.
A couple of alternative covers I didn’t use

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I sorta finished two games this week and started on a new one.

Robotics;Notes was a real letdown of a visual novel: lots of filler writing to trudge through, and an opaque system of affecting outcomes. I won’t explain, but it’s basically impossible to play out the different paths without a walkthrough. For fans only. I abandoned it after completing the first ending.

Indie darling Unpacking was a lot more fun, despite being literally a simulation of unpacking boxes after moving homes. It was satisfying to see how much narrative they managed to suggest just by having you handle a person’s belongings over a couple of decades.

On Jose’s suggestion, I picked up Citizen Sleeper for the Switch (currently on 30% sale for the holidays) and was blown away by how immersive a text-driven RPG game can actually feel in 2022. It’s a sci-fi story set on a space station, if that helps you decide any.

Related to gaming and growing up empowered and inspired by games, I started reading Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow after encountering a passionate mention of it in Dan Hon’s newsletter, and so far so great. If you grew up in the 80s and feel that games shaped your experience of the world, put it on your list.

I later discovered that it won Goodreads’ user-voted best fiction work of the year award, which is astounding because no one else has mentioned it to me?!

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Merry Christmas!

We had good Christmas Eve, Day, and Evening meals in various family configurations over the weekend with no accidents or cooking disasters, apart from several items of food getting forgotten in the fridge (beef brisket, gingerbread houses, etc.), which were probably signs of excessive ambition and unnecessary procurement anyway. I’m deathly full and ready to skip a few meals in the coming week (spoiler: we’ve got a staycation planned on Monday and it involves eating out).

See you next week.
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Week 51.22

December 20th, 2022
- Twitter’s devolution continues and this John Gruber summary of the week’s palm-on-face events should be enough to convince you that maybe it really will become unusable this time, and you should rethink your continued engagement with Elon/SpaceKaren/Elmo’s platform and find somewhere else to be.
- Among many users I’ve seen migrating to Mastodon, I was particularly impressed by Federico Viticci’s decision to fully move his MacStories operation to Mastodon, and on their own server too. The Washington Post also published a how-to guide for getting started with the federated network, which should help many more make the jump.
- Once again, you can follow me at https://mastodon.lol/@sangsara
- It was a tradition in the early years to assemble the team at work for a Christmas dinner and festive activities, but COVID and various organizational obstacles meant that it hadn’t happened in recent years (I wasn’t around last year either). It wasn’t looking good this time, especially since all the people who’re good at planning anything weren’t around, but at the last minute we managed to make something happen on Wednesday, albeit not Christmassy at all in theme or cuisine, and it was good to have at least tried. Perhaps a proper event will happen next year, if enough stars align.
- There were two more oversized seasonal dinners with friends and family this week, one vegetarian — if that helps with the health aspect. Okay, but the other was a buffet, so maybe not. We also stayed up to watch the admittedly quite exciting World Cup final on Sunday: the only match of this entire problematic and odd tournament that I saw. Blog archives reveal I was once quite into watching football World Cups, though. And in a case of history repeating from 2006 to the present (related: still haven’t finished Netflix’s First Love), the week ahead looks to also be a very busy one at work.
- Music-wise, I discovered The Jayhawks and their debut album Hollywood Town Hall from 1992. It’s solid and very listenable stuff. Also listened to Keith Jarrett as a solo performer for the first time and was perplexed by the strange, semi-possessed yelping vocalizations being picked up in the background of these recordings of jazz standards by his trio. So I looked it up, and hey it’s a thing he’s known for.
- Honesty warning: I had another very hard week as a cat owner and am reflecting on whether this is something I can/want to do for the rest of her life. If you’re also a struggling germaphobe/anxiety nexus considering a pet, I recommend you think really hard about your own limits and expectations, along with your partner. I don’t expect others to understand but at the risk of sounding dramatic, it sometimes feels like my life is about to fall apart.
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Week 50.22

December 12th, 2022

Our new cat continued to be ill, with a progression to some kind of feline flu or respiratory infection. She started sneezing quite a bit, so we took her to a vet who found her temperature a little high and her lymph nodes a little swollen. Add that to the existing stomach upset from last week and it’s all been quite a handful.

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We had some guests from Korea visit the workplace this week, and communicating was a novel challenge. They had been informed that chilli crab was the thing to eat in town, so we took them to Long Beach Seafood one night.

If you’ve never been to a seafood/zichar restaurant as part of a big group, you need to know that ordering appropriately is an art form, best left to the most local, most food-obsessed person at the table. That ain’t me, but there was no one else in our group who could either, so I did my best. When in doubt, hit the top charts: black pepper and chilli crabs, fried mantous, salted fish fried rice, broccoli in oyster sauce, kailan, stir fried beef and peppers, cereal prawns (the most surprising and impressive dish for our guests), roast chicken/duck. I should have done a salted egg something but really it was more than enough.

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After I mentioned Jesse Malin’s new Christmas single a week or two ago, I’ve been listening to his first three albums and loving them all over again. While looking him up on social media to see what’s been happening, I then learnt that the 20th (!) anniversary of his debut album The Fine Art of Self Destruction is coming up next year AND he’s re-recorded the whole thing for a February release! So the two tracks on the new single are first looks at what the sessions sound like. Incredibly, his voice has barely changed in all this time but the new takes have a more introspective forlorn feel.

There’s going to be a live performance of the whole album in New York next year on March 25, with special guests like Lucinda Williams, and for a brief moment I considered booking flights down just for that one event. If you never heard this album back in the day, I highly recommend it.

I’ve been listening to Stormzy’s new album, This Is What I Mean, and loving it. Also the new Metro Boomin album, which I wasn’t really expecting to like.

While dealing with my troubles over the past few weeks, I found myself humming the Charlie Chaplin song Smile, which I hadn’t thought about in years. And then one day at the office Jose was playing music out loud and it was unmistakably a new recording of Smile. I asked him what it was, and it’s a new record from the Ezra Collective called Where I’m Meant To Be.

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We finished The Peripheral on Amazon Prime Video and it’s uneven and frustrating in places, but I’ll take it. They nailed the casting of Lowbeer to my mind, and Chloe Grace Moretz is a fine fit for the role (does her peripheral need such bright red lipstick though?).

Then we got onto Netflix’s new J-drama based on and named after Utada Hikaru’s classic song, First Love. And hey it doesn’t suck! It’s been very nice to get back into watching TV series again, after spending the last few weeks just on YouTube and a British daytime tv show called Four In A Bed, which is a very chill reality tv competition between bed and breakfast establishments. It follows the Come Dine With Me format where the contestants all visit and stay at each others’ establishments before passing judgment. There are 20 official full episodes on YouTube if you’d like.

Got some game time in with Robotics;Note Elite on the Switch for a couple of evenings. I’m intending to pick up GameDec on sale too — it looks like a cyberpunk Disco Elysium (although I’m not expecting that level of brilliance to ever be repeated), also from an Eastern European developer. It’s about being a detective hired to solve mysteries in virtual worlds, in a future where I suppose many important life events take place in them. You know the word for this thing. Don’t say it.

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Week 49.22

December 4th, 2022

It’s alarming how that number suddenly jumped to 49 and we’re nearly at the end of another year.

This week was another tough one, and and our cat isn’t feeling well. Next week will probably continue to be challenging.

The Apple App Awards were announced and this mental health How We Feel is an easy recommendation. It allows you to log and analyze your emotions over time. You just need to quickly check in by picking a word that describes your mood in the moment.

We did go out and have an incredible dinner experience on Friday, however, at a home-based private dining set up called The Estate & Co. — a labor of love by two brothers and their families, telling the story of the Arab community in Singapore of which they’re a part, through the recreation of inherited recipes and a beautiful home that serves as a museum of their culture’s storied past. They only do it once or twice a month, as it takes days to prepare. The amount of food you get is easily double what’s required, as is apparently the tradition when hosting guests. I can’t recommend it enough if you can gather a group of 8–10 people.

Nothing much more this week. I am a shell.

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Week 48.22

November 27th, 2022

Hey reader, I hope you’re doing alright. I’ve had a pretty tough and unpleasant week, dealing with a personal crisis that I’m not particularly well equipped to handle, owing to… I don’t know, OCD? Control issues? Mild autism? Vestigial childhood hang ups?

Life comes at you fast: a couple of days ago I made a crack about how everyone seemed to be in therapy but me, and by the end of the week I was ready to seek professional help. In the grand scheme of things, the problem is/was minor; it just happened to stray into a zone beyond my tolerance — youngers would call it being triggered.

Talking to several people certainly helped: some who’ve been in a similar situation, others who I know have the same issue on occasion. Maybe I’ll embark on some longer plan of action to reduce my anxiety around this topic, but I’m doing better for the moment.

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Photo from my lowly CL

I mentioned Rosalynn Tay’s images at the Leica exhibition, A Celebration of Photography, last week. On Thursday we made it down again to hear her presentation about how she works. Amazingly, she only started taking photos eight years ago, when she decided to do it seriously and was recommended by a friend to walk into a Leica store and ask for an M camera with a 35mm Summilux as her first camera. I was stunned by the privilege, of course, imagine starting with an M and learning the craft on that. But nice work if you can get it, and if you get it, it shows real dedication to learning the physics and mechanics of photography!

She then admitted that she left the camera aside for the first two months, too intimidated to use it. Until she signed up for an introductory course offered by the store, which I used to find a strange service: why would new Leica buyers need to be taught photography basics? Surely all of them had already cut their teeth on lesser cameras and were now upgrading to the gold standard? And then I understood Leica’s customer base to be somewhat similar to any luxury performance brand. Not every Lambo buyer actually makes the most of them.

But not her, in any case. After that false start, she put in the time and curiosity and now has an incredible professional body of work to show for it.

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Oh and we got this year’s Christmas tree! Some years we end up with trees that don’t smell particularly piney but this one has filled the place with a lovely scent already. Cubie seems to like chewing at its leaves so I’ve gotta watch out for that. One more worry on the pile.

Not a lot of music listening but I discovered dvsn’s new album Working On My Karma and it’s modern R&B I actually want to listen to for a second time. It’s on the OVO label if that helps convince you.

I didn’t buy any new gadgets on Black Friday but got quite a few Switch games on sale, including Persona 5 Royal. I never finished the original version on PS4, but perhaps I might now? (Who am I kidding)

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Week 47.22

November 20th, 2022

My camera roll and expense tracker tell the story of a quiet week, mainly spent at home getting this cat to like me (I think it’s working) and not die by falling from the second floor or chewing electrical cables. She’s become more comfortable climbing up and down the stairs, and now joins us to watch TV in the living room without being forced.

Achievements yet to be unlocked: switching her to occasional dry food, giving her a bath, clipping her nails, trimming the fur around her butt, sitting still in my lap for more than a few seconds, and trusting her enough to be left roaming the house at night.

My Nintendo Switch profile tells the story of actually playing a game this week, completing Sifu at the Student difficulty level. I have not gotten the hang of parrying attacks and dodging combos, so I think my character was in his 40s when I beat the last boss. For those who haven’t seen it, it’s a cinematic martial arts game with a novel aging mechanic: each time your character dies, he/she is revived by a magic amulet that ages them by a year. So you can start the game in your 20s and finish as an old wizened kung-fu master in their 60s. Maybe even older! As you get older, your maximum health decreases but your attack strength increases, plus you unlock new skills along the way.

My Goodreads profile (you get the point by now) attests to my also finding the time to read again, finishing John Scalzi’s Kaiju Preservation Society which was a fun little side quest — it had seemingly been described by its author as a pop song, a necessary gift of levity to the world, written during Covid and referencing it (it’s not about Covid). That brings me to 12 books in 2022, short of my overly ambitious goal of 24. It’s like I forgot I was going back to work this year or something.

I spent more time in Mastodon this week as Twitter continued to burn. Musk’s comically shit handling of layoffs and code reviews that aren’t code reviews have been so absurd that there’s no more room for shows like Silicon Valley to parody it. Just like with The Onion and real news headlines these days. If science fiction imagines technological futures that we become compelled to realize, satire sends us towards irresistibly amusing hellscapes.

In doing so, I decided that my original Mastodon identity (which used “brandon” as a user ID) wasn’t great for people looking to find me, so I’m now at @sangsara@mastodon.lol. It’s kinda dumb that you can’t change your user ID; I’m not sure if it’s a result of Mastodon’s federated model, having to support legacy links and all that. So the only way was to create a new account on a new server and “migrate” over. The migration process does NOT move your old posts, only your followers. If you want to follow the same people you did before, it’s an extra manual step of exporting and importing the database via a .csv file, and it’s not mentioned as part of the migration flow. I found out myself, after I had already manually re-followed everyone.

This is what people mean when they say Mastodon’s a little rough around the edges, but what open source software isn’t anyway? As software, as a service, I like it a lot already. As a community, as a place where I can find the opinions and recommendations I want, it will take time. And the final, unmistakable collapse of Twitter. I don’t think a critical mass of people will choose to use both at the same time.

My Apple Music listening history shows that I’ve enjoyed Fred again..’s latest installment in his Actual Life series. They are sort of mixtapes, except I’m not sure people in electronic music use that term? Anyway, Actual Life 3 (January 1 — September 9 2022) is great stuff; try it on your commute.

It’s that time of the year again, but we’re getting some actually good Christmas projects. Brett Dennen has a Christmas EP! And Jesse Malin, another longtime favorite of mine, has also rerecorded two older songs to put out as a two-track single entitled Xmas, Etc. Alicia Keys’s Santa Baby looks promising, but I haven’t been in the mood yet. The holidays still feel so far away.

However, Kim decided it wasn’t worth me waiting another month to get the new AirPods Pro as a gift I already knew about (nor worth her hearing me talk about them for another month), so Christmas came early! They’re actually a big improvement: the XS tip fits my problematic ear quite well, everything sounds both clearer and more fun, and the ANC is way more comfortable. I’ve never had a problem with the “pressure” that turns some people off noise canceling, but it’s so absent here thanks to the redesigned acoustic vents that… they feel open? It’s like how Transparency mode makes it feel like there’s nothing in your ears, but with silence.

On Sunday afternoon we visited an exhibition organized by Leica Singapore at Gillman Barracks, featuring some extraordinary work including Nick Ut’s famous “Napalm Girl” shot from the Vietnam war. We had a chance to speak with Rosalynn Tay about her evocative travel photography which I really loved (if they were NFTs I would have bought them on sight) and will probably attend her talk next week. The exhibition is on until Nov 27, registration seems to be required.

Caught this while having a beer on the way home

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