sangsara.net

  • Week 37.22

    Big week for Splatoon enthusiasts: the new game finally dropped for the Nintendo Switch! But I’m… not actually a big Splatoon player. I just love the aesthetic and music and bonkers world it takes place in. I clocked about 10 hours in Splatoon 2, most of them losing to much better players, and it never became a habit.

    But that game came out five long years ago, and I wanted to see how Nintendo would squeeze the last dregs of performance out of their aging hardware with Splatoon 3. Initial reactions: loading times have been greatly improved and it kinda looks like a current-gen game, which I mean in the best way possible! It’s colorful and sharp and the action is very fluid — almost too fluid. I basically suck at this; there’s so much visual chaos with paint being thrown everywhere, plus your enemies can swim in the paint virtually invisibly. But I’m having fun anyway.

    ===

    Big week also for iPhone enthusiasts: what was expected to be just a camera-focused upgrade to the Pro model (that a strong enough person [not me] could shrug off and then go hibernate for another year), turned out to be a little more substantial. First up, I decided not to go with “Deep Purple”. It’s not really my favorite color + the “gray” model is called “Space Black” this year (it was actually “Graphite” last year), so I went with that. Apple usually reserves “Space Black” for things that are pretty much black, so I’m hopeful it’ll approach the iPhone 5’s yet-to-be-surpassed black and slate color scheme.

    The Dynamic Island is early adopter catnip; it changes the core everyday experience of interacting with an iPhone in the biggest way since the iPhone X introduced the Swipe Up Multitasking interaction model. How could you not want to play with that? Like everyone else who read the last-minute leaks that the new sensor cutouts would be visibly “joined with software” into one solid black area, I took that at face value: they don’t want a distracting dot and oval visible all the time, so they’d make it one solid black entity. I didn’t think about you could do something interesting by embracing that concept. The little announcement video that shows the island morphing to become a secondary Dock of sorts sold me instantly.

    Some people on Twitter think the animations are superfluous and will get annoying after the first few times, and while I agree, they’re kinda delightful and novel now and will probably be turned down over the next few years of iOS releases. Like most of iOS 7’s jarring and annoying changes!

    Oh, I also ordered a new watch from the Series 8 lineup. It’s one of the smallest hardware updates ever, with hardly anything new except a new temperature sensor and accelerometer, but I’ve been on my current model for four years and even having an always-on display is going to feel like a big upgrade.

    AirPods? I’m err… content with my current ones. Or at least content enough to not pay full price for improved noise cancelling. I can wait for the eventual price drop on Shopee maybe six months from now. Fortunately, the new Personalized Spatial Audio feature doesn’t actually require new AirPods. After upgrading to iOS 16, you’ll be able to scan your ears and use the personalized profile with older AirPods. I installed the iOS RC on my phone this weekend to try it out a few days early, and it’s definitely made a difference to the feeling of immersion with head tracking on.

    ===

    Kim got back from her work trip, and we got started on Season 2 of For All Mankind, which is such a good series I don’t recall why we put it off for so long. We also saw Nope, and while most people I know loved it, and I get what it’s doing and some of that was very much appreciated, I just couldn’t give it more than three stars on Letterboxd. It’s essentially a two-hour build up to a Jaws joke. With that, Jordan Peele’s batting average with me is 1/3. I was talking to a film buff about it, and was drawing comparisons to Shyamalan’s work: how he showed almost his whole hand with his first film, and then spent the next few struggling to break free of expectations and his own language, which was really a well-practiced, keen sense of cinematic tradition more than the Twists. He films the way Bumblebee talks in the Michael Bay films: in pastiche, homage, and remixes. Which I happen to Really Like, by the way. Nope is Peele’s Signs. There’s even a scene where a slow, freaky motion by an object you can’t quite make out sends a chill down your spine, just like the first time you see the thing in Signs. Anyway, the other guy thought I was talking about Peele, not Shyamalan, and agreed. So I guess there really is something in that comparison.

    ===

    In between meetings one afternoon, I found myself near where I keep my always-growing Monocle backlog (I subscribe but ever hardly read) and flipped through an issue from last year. I’m confident I’ll clear the pile soon. Whilst reading about Veja sneakers and the 10th anniversary of their Monocle 24 radio station, I realized it’s been awhile since I tuned in.

    And thus I discovered Enfance 80, an instant classic of a song from 2020 by the French electronic duo, Videoclub. I don’t exactly know what they’re saying, but it’s something nostalgic about childhood in the 80s, and by god does the sound nail that vibe (as remembered in the 2020s).

    The other song that I’ve had on heavy rotation this week is Paul McCartney’s The Kiss of Venus, both his original and Dominic Fike’s reworking of it. The base melody is super pretty, which Fike dials up with Beatle-esque organ parts, but it’s his addition of a funky new bass line and electric energy in the chorus that are pure bliss. And like all great songs, it ends far too soon.

    I also heard Santigold’s new album, Spirituals, once through and really liked it.

    Here’s one MidJourney artwork inspired by a song and a couple more I made this week.

    The Kiss of Venus, co-created with MidJourney

  • Week 36.22

    Further COVID measures were lifted here this week: masks are no longer required indoors with the exception of medical facilities and public transport. I’m not sure this is entirely a good idea, but The Rest of the World apparently demands it so we’ll have to see what happens now.

    Coincidentally, but so quickly that it can’t be related to the above, someone from work tested positive the day after they were at the office with a bunch of other people (I was home that day). That understandably got some worried and we made plans to work remotely for the rest of the week.

    I was meant to meet Rob one final time before he went home to the UK, but then his whole family came down with something and we had to cancel. Thankfully, not Covid. Note to self: get a flu shot soon.

    ===

    Kim left on Sunday for a work trip, which gave me time to try out Ooblets, a cozy new indie game on the Switch which has you moving to start a new life on an island called Oob (definite Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing influences here), but throws in cute creatures (the titular Ooblets), card-based dance battles, and a lovely low-poly pastel style that recalls Untitled Goose Game. So far so fun; it’s very light hearted and the busywork doesn’t feel like a chore yet.

    The introductory price of $20 (down from $30) and their very nice FAQ sealed the deal for me:

    Q. Will Ooblets be a phone app or free to play?
    No, it’s just a normal game you buy with money, like you might buy a vacuum cleaner or a kebab

    Can I submit ooblet designs for you to use in the game?
    Unfortunately we can’t use any designs you send in due to intellectual property stuff we don’t really understand.

    I also started playing Wolfenstein: The New Colossus which I also got on sale, and boy are the Switch and its Pro Controller not ideal for FPS games. It’s a quality production underneath, if overly violent and depressing, but the low detail and sluggish response time simulates having cataracts and about 30 extra years of age. When I found a YouTube clip recorded from the PC version, the quality difference was shocking.

    ===

    The reading slump is over! I returned to Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves, which I started back in May (over three months ago!!) and made some very enjoyable progress. I’m now about halfway through and at the end of Act 2, where the book’s title is finally explained. Since I’ll have quite a bit of alone time next week, I hope to keep going and maybe catch up on my annual reading challenge. Stephenson’s books should really count as three each, at least.

    ===

    I minted my first artwork from Art Blocks in quite some time: The Inner World by Dominikus appeals to the part of me that likes glitchy abstract pieces, especially with the pseudo-3D shading that appears in roughly of these. I might be mostly alone in my appreciation though, as only 88 out of 400 have found owners so far.

    The Inner World #44

    ===

    My MidJourney use this week was limited to playing with their new photorealism-centric beta model (–testp). I generated a ton of portrait photos trying to make someone who looked like me, with no success, but the improvements are stunning. Where we used to be afraid of how faces would ruin an otherwise beautiful image — almost all of them were distorted and unnatural — they are now really coherent.

  • Week 35.22

    I met up with Rob again to talk side projects, debate the existence of meaningful work, and see some free art at the National Gallery. The children’s biennale was on and offered the most impressive sight of the entire visit, a massive work called Head/Home by Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan.

    It’s a sprawling installation pieced together from cardboard houses and elements, many customized and signed by visiting children. There’s also an online component on the above-linked site, where you can pick a space to “move into”. I was immediately struck by its resemblance to the Bidonville NFT project I bought into a few weeks ago; the drab uniformity of the cardboard and the haphazard placement of everything atop everything else recalls the appearance of a slum, but like in Bidonville, it’s presented with childlike wonder instead of judgment.

    In the pursuit of more creative escapes, Rob’s also committed to blogging again, supposedly inspired by this weekly update. He’s put out a banger of a post already. We also started a game of doodle/caption tennis, where he draws something and I write the caption, with neither of us knowing what the other is doing. So far we’re four for four, and the combinations have made a sort of sense! Might start a blog or an account somewhere to put them if this exercise has legs.

    Otherwise it’s been a somewhat physically exhausting week: my injured legs have made getting around more tedious and painful than normal; good sleep has eluded me; I’ve had a higher-than-acceptable number of frustrating “conversations”; my introvert’s social savings account went into overdraft with the number of people I’ve met, talked to, had dinner with; and the weekend has not felt very restful at all.

    ===

    • I played zero video games but managed to read a fair bit more of Seveneves. I may yet finish it this year.
    • We watched Five Days At Memorial, the new Apple TV+ series set in a hospital during Hurricane Katrina, and it’s one of those stories you can’t believe took place in recent history. Not only for the scale of the tragedy and how comparatively little we (me, anyway) remember of it, but the failure of government to prepare for something they should have known about from past experiences? Scratch that. It’s not surprising at all.
    • There’s a bit where someone says, “this is supposed to happen in third-world countries, not here”, and it just made me wanna go “oh, honey. I’ve got news for you…” at the TV.
    • I came up with the name Man-Sized Vase for a band I might like to be in one day. Shortly after that, I saw a man-sized vase on the Raffles Hotel’s grounds.
    • MidJourney briefly enabled a new beta model, for like a day, which made all outputs more realistic. It was reportedly a combination of their engine with the newly open-sourced Stable Diffusion model. Before they closed it down for “improvements”, I managed to make this masterpiece of a golden retriever drooling an entire river in the Amazon rainforest.

  • Week 34.22

    I fell down. It happened walking right in the middle of the sidewalk, where someone had decided to place stone benches, a civic design decision made nowhere else in the entire country that I know of. I’d just been avoiding its siblings in the moment before, most of them brightly painted, but the one that got me was dark gray, and it was 9pm and dim, and I was looking at a giant mural to the side while talking about it with my companions. We’d been out all day to see art, ending up at the ongoing Singapore Night Festival.

    I stubbed my right big toe first, I think. Then my right shin. Then I toppled over the bench, knees first, palms outstretched. Smashed both knees down onto the concrete sidewalk from seating height, and thankfully avoided a broken face with my hands. Everything still hurts now, the day after. Maybe I’ve fractured the toe. It doesn’t want to bend. I think I’ll be okay, but any sympathy is welcome.

    I got up quite quickly and felt the burn, but was alright to keep going. My friends said, “sit down for a minute and catch a breath, you’re over 40 now. Take it easy. It’s too late for parkour.” This is good advice in general.

    ===

    Earlier that day with Rob (he’s back in town again, hence I took some time off), we saw the strange work of Australian artist Patricia Piccinini at the ArtScience Museum: We Are Connected. I suppose you could describe them as grotesque, body horror explorations of biological variety, mostly in the form of human-animal chimeras. Kim found the exhibition for us, saying “It’s weird. I think you’d both like it.” For the record, she would have hated it.

    B&W photos are straight out of the Ricoh GR III’s signature high-contrast mode

    Rob said they reminded him of the work of Ron Mueck, so afterwards we dropped his name into a MidJourney prompt and created something not too far from what we’d seen.

    Later in the evening, we visited another exhibition of AI-generated art, pieces clearly composited from MidJourney outputs — scenes similar to what we’ve also created playing with these tools. What happens to art some day when viewers can engage, challenge, and remix on equal footing with artists? When execution counts for nothing, and only what you’re saying matters (RIP the massive teams of studio interns)? Will you walk into a gallery and see a textual prompt and seed number in a frame? Hmm… gimme a minute!

    Prompt Art #1

    I also put up an AI art explainer as an Instagram story, so if you’ve been wondering what MidJourney is and what this is all about, this may help.

    One of the better things from that afternoon: a crude 3D animation about viruses, played across seven screens, with a shot of a man licking an android’s eyeball.

    This was at the Singapore Art Museum’s temporary outpost at Keppel Distripark. Which is a pretty stark middle-of-nowhere-feeling industrial space, interesting in itself. We saw an old sign that said “climb the stairs to the fifth floor for more artwork”, which turned out to be a cruel exaggeration on a very hot afternoon. There was but one lonely birdhouse-sized installation, a sort of wind-powered music box based on structures we’d already seen on the first floor. But the view sort of made up for it, and watching shipping containers being loaded onto trucks is not bad at all.

    ===

    I finally leveled up my deca.art Decagon to L30. Left with nothing else to shoot for, I bought a basic one and started leveling it up too.

    This week’s been a good reminder that you’ve gotta have fun/meaningful things going on a regular basis, otherwise you’ll be left talking about LEVELING UP AN NFT as the most exciting thing that happened outside of taking an afternoon off and getting injured.

    ===

    Last week I mentioned the MusicHarbour app and started talking to Michael about music recommendation engines. He mentioned Apple Music’s “For You” playlists, and I realized I hadn’t used any of them in weeks, maybe months. Today I tried my New Music Mix and discovered the RZA has put out new stuff both as himself and his Bobby Digital persona. Two album/EPs, actually! Saturday Afternoon Kung Fu Theater with DJ Scratch, and RZA presents: Bobby Digital and the Pit of Snakes. I also wanted to correct my earlier opinion of King Princess’s Hold On Baby: it’s grown on me and I love it now. The same thing happened with her previous single Pain. It sounded absolutely crap the first time I heard it, and then it absolutely slapped. How does she do it?

  • Week 33.22

    It was National Day week. I half-watched the parade on TV, hoping it might stray from the usual formula. Nope, same old military parade. The COVID years were more interesting — in the same way Apple had to make expensive and polished presentation videos to replace their in-person events, we got a mix of prerecorded material and ‘live’ small-scale performances beamed from venues across the country. I liked that much better than watching thousands of people waving flags in the heat.

    We’ve obviously heard the reports of brutal heatwaves everywhere, but it’s probably not any hotter here than it usually is in August (too damned hot). I had to go out most days this week and I figure 10 minutes of walking outdoors is the limit. Any more and the sweatiness would border on socially unacceptable.

    It’s worse on men and fat people, and on that note… we continued on from last week’s birthday-related celebrations with too much eating out again. In a single day: an unagi lunch with my parents at Uya, an omakase-type dinner at an izakaya called Kamoshita that I saw Hunn checking into, and then cocktails at The Tippling Club. Later in the week, Beauty in the Pot, which never leaves you feeling very healthy.

    Inspired by our viewing of Groundhog Day last week, I decided to buy Loopers for the Nintendo Switch. It’s a Japanese “kinetic novel” which promises a similar premise. Kinetic novels are a subgenre of visual novels, but ones where there are no choices to be made; essentially there’s no “gameplay”. You just click through and experience a written story with accompanying illustrations and voiceovers. I expected a long and convoluted time travel narrative but it was over in about three hours. Hard to recommend at $25 USD but not the worst idea if it ever goes on sale. 3/5 stars if you already like this sort of thing, 1/5 for everyone else.

    On TV, we caught up to the second season of Only Murders In The Building (still ongoing), which starts off worryingly weak but begins to get some of its mojo back from episode 3. I spent most of the time wondering why Selena Gomez’s speaking voice sounds strange and strained, and it turns out it’s a question others online have also asked. One suggestion is it’s related to her lupus, but it sounds like an armchair diagnosis from people who get paid for clicks.

    We also watched The Bear, an 8-episode drama about running a restaurant/burnout/addiction/family/team management/craft. Several real life friends recommended it, but surprisingly I never saw a single tweet. The filter bubble needs adjustment. The first few episodes are like if Uncut Gems was set in the food service industry: stressfully fast and overlapping conversations (shouting matches?) and general chaotic energy, but it’s worth it. It’s all worth it.

    I used my AirPods Max for the first time in many months. Turns out having to take them in and out of the floppy carrying case (which turns them on/off) is a major usability obstacle for me. It’s not as carefree and seamless as popping open the case for my AirPods Pro or Beats Fit Pro, so I just never reach for them on a regular day. Probably the best way is to never use the case, lay them ready to go on the desk all the time, and charge frequently.

    Thanks to a scene in The Bear in which Van Morrison’s Saint Dominic’s Preview song plays, I checked out the album of the same name for the first time. It was good but not really what I needed at the time, which led me back to his Astral Weeks album which I heard through twice while commuting.

    I was very excited to accidentally learn that Danger Mouse and Black Thought just released an album together: Cheat Codes. According to YouTube, a couple of songs came out awhile ago, but I had no idea. Despite many discovery features in Spotify and Apple Music, there’s a gap in letting us know about new/upcoming music from artists we might like. Seems like a basic thing but there must be commercial, label-related reasons why this still doesn’t work in customers’ favor.

    In the meantime, there’s the MusicHarbour app which I don’t use enough because of how long it takes to sync new data on start up, but does actually do the job of tracking new releases based on artists you have in your library. It didn’t alert me to Cheat Codes because I didn’t have music by “Black Thought” in my library, only “The Roots”.

    Hah, did you think I’d let a week go by without more AI-generated imagery?!

    I’ve set up an OpenSea collection called Blee+ where I’m minting some of my better experiments so far as 1/1 NFTs, priced in ETH. You can buy one for about 40 bucks in today’s money.

    In addition to MidJourney, I’ve also started using Stable Diffusion and have been very impressed with what it can do. I suppose the model is closer to Dall-E, as it’s better at visualizing literal concepts such as “a poster” or “a page from a graphic novel”, whereas MidJourney would just kind of grok the style but not necessarily the format and conventions of the medium.

    Here are some abstract typographic prints I’ve generated, which are far and away more beautiful to my eye than the generative art attempts to do the same that I’ve seen, e.g. Para Bellum on Art Blocks.

  • Week 32.22

    Hello, it’s Sunday evening and I was hoping to say that I’d started and then spent all day playing Lost Judgment on the PS4. That didn’t happen but I saw two films instead.

    Prey (4/5) was a surprise: the strongest and most memorable Predator franchise film in probably decades. All the other spinoffs and reboots haven’t stuck in memory because they were generic and lacked characters you care about. Prey takes place in a space and time we don’t often see in film, especially not in a genre flick like this, and splashes in some Horizon Zero Dawn and Tomb Raider familiarity by having a young female hunter protagonist master her dangerous environment.

    Comparatively, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (3/5) was a letdown in the competence department, essentially taking its joke premise and stretching it out to feature length — and didn’t Jean Claude Van Damme already do something like this? But I enjoyed much of it, to be fair.

    A few days ago, we put on Groundhog Day (500/5) on a whim, thinking we’d just see a little, and ended up watching the whole thing to the end, again. It is such a perfect film, the kind where you’re thankful every variable in the cosmos came together for it to exist.

    Later: We binged all three parts of Netflix’s new documentary on Woodstock ‘99. It’s well made with extensive ground-level footage, and builds satisfyingly from ‘oh boy’ to ‘this is totally fucked’ just by chronologically following events. The scale of mismanagement and delusion from its organizers dwarfs that of the Fyre Festival. I don’t know why I have no mental recollection of this happening. Perhaps I was in the army at that point and didn’t get much news.

    Game-wise, a quiet week. After finishing Life Is Strange: True Colors last Sunday, I only had time for a little Spiritfarer before we went on a brief staycation from the middle of the week. The hotel break was a long-unclaimed gift, maybe from last Christmas, that we decided to use now since it’s something of a long weekend ahead. Although only two days, it put us in the area bordering Arab Street and Little India, which meant a chance to see some sights and eat at a couple of new places.

    I live in this city but it’s taken me all these years to finally visit Atlas, a cocktail bar that is probably on several World’s Best lists, on account of not having that many friends to drink with and its reputation for being a fancy place for people who like to dress well. It was rather good and not unreasonably priced either. The Art Deco interior is remarkably cool (if you played Bioshock, it will trigger unpleasant memories), but didn’t photograph very well on my iPhone given the late afternoon mixed lighting. So what I did was try to generate a similar scene with Midjourney, and then used Pixelmator Photo’s AI-powered “match colors” feature to transplant the vibe over to the real life photo. Not a bad idea, if I do say so myself.

    Before
    Midjourney render
    After

    It also took about two or three years since Nicolas Le Restaurant was first recommended by my brother-in-law for us to finally make a reservation there. My threadbare jeans, flat pockets, and lack of wine knowledge were swiftly recognized and appropriate recommendations were deftly made to accompany the five-course meal, all of it excellent to our unrefined palates, and so I happily pass the recommendation onto you now.

    We also did a quick introduction to pottery “throwing” (?) as an afternoon activity on the second day. It was my second time, and proved that I must have gotten lucky the first time around where I did really well. It seemed much harder this time to control the clay while trying to make a simple high-walled cup. One wrong move and you’re taking home an ashtray. I guess that’s a life metaphor.

    In the unlikely jackpot event of you 1) still reading this AND 2) being into NFTs, then I’d like to direct you to a couple of new Deca galleries I’ve made. Cities is mostly made up of pieces I (sadly) don’t own, but that suggest urban shapes and structures to different degrees of abstraction. GPU Burners is a work-in-progress featuring pieces I do own, that are graphically intensive and best seen on a proper computer. The first artwork on the page is a new acquisition from the Jiometory no Compute series, which I’ve been wanting to get into for awhile now.

  • Week 31.22

    I opened last week’s update wishing for an Apple Music playlist that recreates detective Harry Bosch’s jazz music collection for those of us who’re okay with digital in place of vinyl. Well I’ve found one: BOSCH JAZZ by Bobby T. It’s 111 songs (nearly 12 hours), lovingly put together by an obvious fan — you know an amateur playlist is going to be good when they’ve bothered to make their own cover art.

    There’s so much new music out, I’m going to need a commute again to get through it all. I’M KIDDING! I think I’d rather be unemployed. But Ryan Adams seems back to his old ways, just musically, one would hope, releasing a third album called FM available on his site now and on streaming soon. If you count Romeo & Juliet as a double album, then he’s put out four already this year. Also, King Princess with Hold On Baby, which I’ve heard through once and wasn’t entirely satisfied by. The first half of DOMi and JD BECK’s NOT TiGHT on Anderson .Paak’s new label, though, sounds amazing and entirely tight. Plus there’s new Perfume, Maggie Rogers, and Billie Eilish…

    I saw somewhere recently that the use of ellipses, as in the punctuation mark above, is a boomer (not really, but just everyone who isn’t young) thing. It’s made me very self conscious lately.

    ===

    Wednesday was my day off which I spent playing games and drone flying with my dad in a very pleasant return to the sabbatical era.

    https://twitter.com/bookaholic134/status/1552706287003209728

    It never occurred to me 1) to call them reading slumps, but it’s a perfect name for this state of being all read out after going through too many books too fast; which happens to me annually, or 2) that it also happens to other people. I read the first third of Seveneves (enjoyed it fine) and then suddenly left it alone for weeks. No progress this week either.

    Instead, I picked up Life Is Strange: True Colors for the Nintendo Switch on sale, having enjoyed the first series many years ago. True Colors is still episodically arranged, but released as a single installment. I’m about halfway through, and would recommend it as a light gaming experience (no skill required) with good writing and some actual emotional weight. It features an inclusion and diversity situation that seems unrealistic for the small town it’s set in (you play a Chinese American girl and get to determine her sexual orientation, you’re surrounded by people of color, mental health issues are discussed), but I love that they’re simply showing and not telling. Bear in mind the game looks a decade old on the Switch, so just get it on your platform of choice. I prioritized portability and a lower price.

    End of Sunday update: I’ve just about finished the main game now. It felt shorter than I expected, but was still about 10 hours? I would have enjoyed a more epic and twisty mystery, but the point seems to be soaking in the quiet small town moments, music, and interactions with new friends. And feeling depressed. There are a few sucker punches in here.

    Have also started on a new mobile gacha game, ALICE Fiction by Wonderplanet. Years ago, this company released another title that borrowed the aesthetic and some of the narrative set up of Mamoru Hosoda’s Summer Wars, recently mentioned here as one of my favorite anime films. Sadly, while they had the idea then, the execution in Crash Fever did not pay off. This time, they seem to have brought a much bigger budget and many more influences. The result is a more generic but probably quite crowd-pleasing anime-ish puzzle game. While there’s the old tiresome squad battle thing going on, it’s underpinned by a color-matching game mechanic that I don’t mind at all. In fact, this linear gem conveyor belt thing is definitely familiar. I may have encountered it before in some game on the Xbox360. Anyway, it looks great and is worth a look if you’re into any of this.

    It’s worth mentioning that ALICE Fiction’s conceit, seen in the second App Store screenshot, is that it’s set in the metaverse. Not new, we’ve had this for ages, e.g. Sword Art Online and its many game adaptations. But I’ve been seeing an increase in mediocre open-world games that bill themselves as a/the metaverse, for obvious marketing and investor-attracting reasons. I expect this trend to accelerate, with hundreds of companies willing some faux-metaverse into existence, creating extreme confusion as to what it really means, so that by the time we actually have one it will (thankfully) be referred to as something else entirely.

    ===

    Looking for a new show on Amazon Prime Video, we found Chloe, a co-production with the BBC with a premise that sounds like you’d struggle to get with it, but by god does it work somehow. In part thanks to Erin Doherty’s shapeshifting performance of a pathological shapeshifter, and in part due to deft direction that creates effective suspense. It’s not something to watch directly before trying to sleep.

    ===

    Midjourney upgraded their algorithms and the new V3 system creates even more impressive images than before. I’ve been playing with creating food photos lately, trying to make unlikely pairings such as Spam slices sprinkled with 24K gold flakes. Also a series on Conscientious Consumption, where you are bludgeoned over the head with symbols of the environmental and moral costs of what you’re eating.

    Midjourney v2: color drawing of Asian female superhero
    Midjourney v3’s interpretation of the same prompt
    V3 does a great job with details and coherence in this magical steampunk library
    The same prompt with a Studio Ghibli style modifier
    Default quality, prompt involves a futuristic city in the desert with greenery
    Using the new Quality setting to increase GPU time by 5x
    Future travel agency booth, using teleportation
    Teleportals on a larger scale
    Ramen burger, professional food photography prompt
    Steak and cotton candy
    A sorbet shaped like a massive diamond
    An amuse bouche resembling AirPods
    Conscientious Consumption 1: Fried chicken and feather
    CC2: Dairy ice cream on terroir signifying the acres of grass utilized to produce it

    Oh, I’ve also been using the VSCO app’s fairly new Dodge & Burn brush feature and loving it. Fairly mad that in this day and age of touchscreens, all the other popular photo editing apps don’t let you just reach out and light pixels. Instead, we have radial/linear masks in Darkroom, and other clunky controls. VSCO has been flirting with the bottom of the barrel lately (Hipstamatic firmly owning said bottom), but the addition of this one classic tool has helped its chances of survival significantly.

    Just putting this here to say I love the Ricoh GR III

  • Week 30.22

    • After three weeks of watching little else (thanks, Covid) we finished all the Bosch in the world. That’s 7 seasons of the original series and one season of Bosch Legacy — wherein he’s retired from the LAPD and working as a PI. The vibes are off; it struggles to maintain the structure and entertainment value that came with Bosch having a partner and a team. They try to do something interesting with the idea that he no longer has the authority of the law behind him, but far from enough to sell the new concept within 10 episodes.
    • My speakers and headphones have played even more jazz than usual thanks to Bosch’s record collection featuring prominently on the show. Lots of Art Pepper and Wes Montgomery. Pity it’s an Amazon Prime Video series (and they still don’t have all the episodes available here for god knows what reason). If it were on Apple TV+, I’d bet there would be a great companion playlist on Apple Music.
    • Spiritfarer continues to be a cosy little time sink on the Switch. That’s about all I’ve played.
    • I bought Into The Breach for the Nintendo Switch about two years ago and haven’t started it up once. Always meant to get around to it, you know how it goes. It’s a turn-based strategy game featuring giant mechs fighting off an alien invasion in pixel art style. This week, it released on iPhone/iPad as a Netflix game — totally free to play for subscribers. I’m unable to decide which platform I would rather play it on.
    • Speaking of Netflix, we (okay, we started together but I was left to watch the remaining 75% myself) saw their latest big-budget mess: The Gray Man. It’s supposedly based on a book, but it must have been a comic book because the tone is completely off for a globetrotting spy/assassin caper. It suffers from the Marvelization (actually, is this also Joss Whedon’s fault) of entertainment, where everything is jokey and wacky and the stakes always feel low and the one-liners are channeling Ryan Reynolds freestyling at an open mic night (you’d be forgiven for being confused that it’s Ryan Gosling here). Depending on how much you’re forgiving of Marvel Tone, it’s either a 2 or 3-star film, but add another star because Ana de Armas is in it.
    • We went to see the National Museum’s exhibition OFF/ON: Everyday Technology That Changed Our Lives, 1970s – 2000s. It starts very strong, with a recreation of an office out of the 70s and 80s — the Olivettis and stationery and furniture brought me back to messing around at my mom’s workplace as a child. Overhearing conversations are absolutely part of the experience: someone encountering a typewriter and asking “how do you backspace on this thing?”; kids expressing surprise that we had ‘emojis’ for texting back then (they were emoticons :D); a zoomer pointing at a roll of developed film negatives and saying to his friends that “they’re like SD cards, in a way”.
    • Disappointments: Only one old camera on display, an Olympus Pen. I was really hoping to see a nice collection, and some more detail on film photography, because honestly the kids have no idea. And the section on Gaming was woefully underdeveloped, like it got none of the budget at all — featuring just ONE retro-inspired pachinko-style game developed for the exhibition. They could have had a few screens showing videos of old games, or put in a couple of MAME cabinets for people to play on. Maybe down to copyright issues, oh well.
    • I came across a generative art project that immediately got my attention: Bidonville, by Julien Labat. The title translates to “slum”, and each of the 512 pieces features a randomized, chaotic, yet organic layout for its little dwellings. As the artist’s notes say, it’s a thoroughly serious subject rendered with childlike naïveté. It’s moving. And by pressing E and W on their keyboard, the viewer can supply or cut off electricity and water to the community, and see their effects in the lights at night, and laundry being hung out to dry.
    • Speaking of moving, I forgot to mention last week that I came across this poem so moving it stopped me from speaking.
    Scenes from OFF/ON: Everyday Technology That Changed Our Lives, 1970s – 2000s