sangsara.net

  • Week 46.22

    This one week with the new cat has felt like the longest week of my life. My brain cannot square the fact that it was only last weekend that we brought her home. I’ve aged significantly from worrying all the time!

    I spoke too soon last Sunday when I said she was comfortable enough to use the toilet here. She went another three and a half days before pooping again — three and a half days in which I became obsessed with wondering why, and with when she would go again, during which I poked my head in to check the litter box, like, every hour.

    I went and got some pumpkin to be boiled and pureed and mixed into her food for extra fiber; I made sure she was calm (I wasn’t); I think I even tried to talk her into it. Eventually it happened on its own, and my relief was as warm and palpable as the final product.

    After being told that they have finicky gastrointestinal systems and raw/unprocessed food is best, I got her some 100% freeze dried salmon treats. That are literally chunks of recognizable salmon meat. You wouldn’t think a cat could turn down fish, but I found one. As I brought the uneaten treats to be flushed down the toilet, Asian parent as I am, I reminded her there were wild cats starving in sub-Saharan Africa.

    Anyway it’s now Sunday and she hasn’t gone in three days — the cycle begins anew!

    ===

    Speaking of cycles, this season of Crypto is jumping the shark. The news this week was the sudden collapse of FTX (the world’s second largest exchange after Binance), which was seemingly caused/engineered by Binance’s CEO, starting with a couple of tweets that caused a bank run that FTX was not prepared to cash. Then it turned out that FTX had secretly transferred billions of dollars of its customers’ funds to Alameda Research, its sister trading company, who lost it all on a series of gambles.

    So FTX declared bankruptcy, its CEO Sam Bankman-Fried went from poster boy of the industry to most hated, dirty laundry about sex cults and drug addiction in the company got aired, and then on Saturday hundreds of millions of dollars started being transferred out of their accounts and liquidated on decentralized exchanges in a purported “hack” — surely a euphemism for insider theft. The great thing about on-chain finance is that this was visible to all, and unfolded live on Twitter and Etherscan.

    ===

    Twitter, of course, is also going through an existential crisis. The last time this happened and we thought it might be time to leave was likely in 2017, because that’s when I set up a Mastodon account (that hasn’t been touched since). I can’t remember what happened then, possibly a post-Trump disinformation deluge or boycott? It sounds more serious this time, with the company falling apart thanks to the mismanagement and ego-driven strategy of you-know-who.

    If that does happen, you should follow me at @brandon@mastodon.cloud.

    In the meantime, the chaos has been fun to watch: blue checkmarks given to fake brand and celebrity accounts for $8 a pop, resulting in hilarious fake tweets. There was speculation that one tweet about a medical company making insulin free was the reason behind a huge drop in its stock price (who cares if it really was, what a great story!).

    ===

    In gadget news, we’ve been using a handed-down Dyson v8 vacuum cleaner for the past few months. It’s a pretty good product but with the amount of fur we’re dealing with now, I couldn’t shake the feeling that we needed better.

    So I was keen to get a new one at this year’s Singles Day sales on 11/11 but somehow their latest model, the v15, has been sold out for weeks even on Dyson’s own site. To compensate, there were pretty good bundles and deals for their last model, the v12, which is better in some ways than the v15 (lighter, has a proper on/off switch) and worse in ways I can deal with (smaller bin, slightly less suction).

    It arrived on Sunday and while not in the same league as Apple, the unboxing and set up experience was pretty damned good for a household appliance. Everything was self-explanatory with minimal assembly. The laser “detection” module on the fluffy head makes cleaning up like a game: you see dust on the floor ahead literally light up, and sucking it up is so satisfying. They made housework fun.

    All other 11.11 purchases in our household were also cat maintenance related; still no AirPods Pro for this big ape.

    ===

    The Singapore Writers Festival is back again and we went to see Ted Chiang speak at the Victoria Theatre on Sunday. It was a little strange, in that he basically delivered a (very entertaining) lecture on time travel in fiction and film, but it was the sort of thing you’d expect to hear from a guest lecturer at a university. I was grateful for the chance to hear it, of course, but I suppose my image of a writers’ festival is one of writers talking about their own work. But if what our beloved authors really want to do between books is travel the world and give lectures on their pet subjects, I’m down.

  • Week 45.22

    Caturday: We picked up our new ragdoll kitten (Cubie “QB” Catbot aka QBasic aka Cubit 3000 aka Yung Cubes aka Cubie Gooding Jr.) and the trip home was a lot less dramatic than I had psyched myself up to expect. No vomiting, screeching, weaponized feces or anything of that sort. Upon getting her home though, things were a little ambiguous. Introducing a cat to a new environment is massively stressful for them somehow — they are my spirit animals, I guess — and she took hours to come out from hiding under the bed and armchair of our guest room.

    When I fed her later in the evening, she seemed to be afraid that the food wasn’t really hers to have. She ate a little and watched my reactions. Thinking maybe she needed to be alone, I left the room for over half an hour and hoped she would finish it. But instead, it was barely touched at all. Before taking it away, I thought I’d give it one last try. Sitting on the floor at her level, I nudged the bowl forward with my knuckles and waited. And finally for some reason she realized that it was okay and wolfed it all down in a minute.

    The framework for all this in my mind, every minute, is that I am a giant ape and she’s a wild feline, and all our interactions are going to be weird by nature. I’ve been talking to her in a range of different pitches (as in tones, not propositions, but I suppose also propositions!) to get her used to what I sound like, explaining the absurdity of our situation: that she was bred to take the money that this ape has earned by doing advanced ape cognition tasks in an office environment, and although the ape now owns her in the eyes of a legal system, she’s really the boss at this very moment so could she please come out from under the bed?

    Yes I’ve watched some Jackson Galaxy videos and read a bunch of articles. Yet her mind is still absolutely illogical and knowing what her tail movements mean only confuses matters. Ape and cat conventions are not very compatible! Instead of smiling and staring, you have to blink At them slowly and obviously to show you’re being friendly! Absurd stuff.

    Despite the initial distance and wariness, which absolutely everyone has prepared us for and that I’m prepared to endure for days, she has at least shown that she’s comfortable enough to pee and poop in the allocated box on the first night. Which in some cases does not happen in the first, second, and maybe even third days. I’ll repeat this fun fact: cats can hold their pee in for days.

    Reprogramming my aversion to messes, bacteria, excrement, and other catty chaos is going to take much longer. Yes I signed up for it, somewhat consciously. Some will say that this is character growth, but as I was fact-checking a joke before I made it, I discovered that it may also be parasitic growth that I need. You know that cats carry a single-celled brain-altering thing that infects mice and humans, right? It’s like a fungus that makes you like cats, and nudges your behavior in ways that serves cats. Given that I might be brainwashed by my new boss, I thought I’d look it up again and was surprised that 1) it’s really real and 2) for some reason we’re not all talking about this all the time.

    They say something like ONE-THIRD of all humans on Earth are already infected with this parasite, which creates permanent cysts in the brain that mess with dopamine production, essentially making its victims (cat owners) more uninhibited and likely to take risks (and also more likely to cause car crashes). It’s like that Jeff Bridges film, Fearless, where he survives a plane crash and comes out with a devil-may-care attitude to life, except you’d call this one Furless? Sorry.

    Anyway this parasite actually helps cats by infecting mice, which then become emboldened to step out in front of cats and become their dinners. It also makes the smell of cat feces attractive, luring them out. Not a stretch to imagine it also causes anxiety-ridden humans to be emboldened enough to let cats into their homes, creating new routines that they don’t really have time and energy for (sample size: one). Nature is truly terrifying and ingenious.

    In humans, the article linked above says that infection with toxoplasma gondii supposedly increases the likelihood of them quitting their jobs and becoming entrepreneurs, and amongst entrepreneurs, the ones who have been infected earn an average $6,000 more per year than the ones who have not. I’m surprised people aren’t microdosing this stuff in Silicon Valley.

    ===

    For reasons I can’t recall, the subject of Enneagram personality tests came up again at work; the last time this happened was maybe three years ago with a different set of people. I sat down to do the test at Truity.com and found that I was still the same: a Type 5. (Later, I would be told that your basic type doesn’t really change throughout life, so that’s another 15 minutes I won’t be getting back.)

    Your highest scoring category is the “Type” you are, and once you have your results from Truity, you can look up what it means for free over at this page by The Enneagram Institute instead of paying $29 to Truity.

    It gets more fun when you have people or some form of team to compare your type to, and explore your compatibility. Do I believe this stuff? Well, it’s not as bad as astrology: you basically provide the behavioral inputs and they make some logical assumptions about your preferred approaches to situations and tell you where you might be self sabotaging or not collaborating properly. So yeah I do find it pretty interesting, but then I would… because I’m a Type 5.

    ===

    I’m excited that Anna of the North has a new album out and will be checking it out as soon as I am able (currently listening out for yelps and mews). Have also been dying to revisit The Beatles’ Revolver in its newly remastered Atmos/spatial audio mix. On my sporadic commutes this week I’ve been playing Rx by ROLE MODEL, Stumpwork by Dry Cleaning, and Charcoal by Brambles. All three are new artists to me, all pretty cool so far.

  • Week 44.22: No cat, no mood

    A cataclysmic catastrophe. Specifically, our new cat, who did not arrive on schedule. We were notified just the day before she was meant to come home that she’d developed a slight case of the sniffles. So she will stay a little longer where she is for observation and we’re hoping to get her next weekend instead. This means an additional week of fur-free living surrounded by our toxic plants, but made for quite a disappointing weekend.

    Also, slightly disappointing was episode three of The Peripheral, which sagged a little bit compared to the impressive introduction of the world and technologies in episodes one and two. It also looked as if the budget was significantly reduced for this episode, and several scenes had a small, green screen sound stage feel to them. I hope this is not indicative of the remaining episodes.

    Being impatient for the rest of it to be released, I intended to start reading the book again, but somehow picked up John Scalzi’s Kaiju Preservation Society instead. It’s a book that manages to meld a serious enough approach to its science and drama with a premise that just can’t be taken seriously. So far so pleased.

    ===

    An update on my foray into publishing Darkroom presets: the company published a curated collection of creations from the community and featured a bunch of mine.

    Koji’s an original I shared this week. As the tweet above says, it’s inspired by characteristics of both Kodak and Fuji films, but not from comparing and copying any existing ones — just a vibe from the mental pictures I had of both brands at the time. I first made the Koji preset about four years ago, but it’s since been tweaked a hundred times probably and doesn’t resemble its original self anymore. Nevertheless, I find it an attractive analog look that suits both portraits and holiday snaps, leaning warm/red in the skin tones (Kodak?) while having subtly green-forward shadows and rolled-off highlights (Fuji?).

    ===

    Oh, we also saw Ticket To Paradise, a new rom-com starring Julia Roberts and George Clooney that goes for the feel of more successful genre pictures from the 2000s, but somehow only manages to achieve the hollow, plastic soul of a Netflix algorithm joint or one of those Chinese-financed vehicles for an aging Hollywood star that also has a minor role for some Chinese tycoon’s niece.

    But here we have two Hollywood stars who have aged really well, no Chinese money in sight, and it’s still a weird dud. It wants the 2000s energy so bad that it’s also kinda tone deaf about race and white privilege, purporting to be set in Bali while not looking the part, and having its Indonesian cast members play exotic, superstitious, speak-a-no-English Easterners who openly make out with foreign women they just met, and in front of their families too.

    In one scene, though, Clooney gets to tell a mediocre story with all his indelible charisma and likability turned on — that easy voice, low with emotion, taking you into its confidence; a precision tool calibrated for both paternal warmth and Nespresso/Omega endorsement — and afterwards it doesn’t really matter how the movie ends, you’re just glad to see them both on screen again, even if they allowed a hack director to momentarily make them look like two sad has-beens fighting over who can harvest the most seaweed.

  • Week 43.22

    I am quickly finding out that owning a cat can be expensive (and this is even before the cat has arrived). So far we have purchased a grooming brush, a more extreme grooming brush for shedding season, a pair of nail clippers, a litter box and accessories, a motorized drinking fountain (TIL cats have evolved to prefer fresh moving water instead of stale water, so a regular drinking bowl will not suffice), an assortment of toys, a cat carrier, a reusable lint roller for our couch and other surfaces, a scratching pad — with still more to come, e.g. an automated feeder, a bed, anti-parasite medication, probiotic supplements, and on and on.

    In the name of research I joined a couple of subreddits devoted to cats, and soon found myself sucked into a web of paranoia and anxiety. One poster said their “mental health plummeted after adopting a cat”, not because of any feline misbehavior, but their own neuroses — feeling chained to the cat and a routine of feeding it, playing with it, and cleaning up after it, afraid to leave it alone and feeling guilty whenever they stayed out late. While not feeling as unstable as them yet (there was a mention of crying all the way to the vet’s), I can definitely see myself having a miniature form of that reaction.

    Add to that the cornucopia of diseases and mishaps that could threaten the life of our cat, and I’ve just bought myself a whole new world of things to worry about. Many of our house plants are also toxic to cats, and getting rid of them is starting to be a point of domestic disagreement. Cats are cute and companionable, they say, but no one mentions the conflict and debilitating despair.

    ===

    We saw local band Sobs play live at the Esplanade on Friday, in an annex theater I didn’t even know existed on the premises, and this being Singapore of course it’s been named “The Annexe” — a word so vile my autocorrect tried twice to stop it happening. It was probably my first standing-only show since the pandemic began, and honestly plus a few more years on account of age.

    But oh yes, Sobs were great! They played their new album, Air Guitar, which comes out digitally next Wednesday. The sound was, unfortunately, poor as is usual for the Esplanade: muddy, vocals obscured, keyboards absent; amateur hour. These artists deserve better, and I don’t know when they’ll do something about it. It’s honestly crossed my mind to switch careers to sound engineering and give it a go myself.

    I tried taking some photos and video with my iPhone 14 Pro just to challenge it. The photos suffered from the same grainy artifacts around moving objects that I noticed before, where sharp but low-quality images are presumably getting stacked onto long exposure images of higher quality and lower noise. It’s an issue with the Photonic Engine process, probably, and maybe one that can be fixed in an update. I would rather have motion blur than such unevenness, but that’s subjective. The 4K video was surprisingly good: stable, clean, and bright even with the 3x lens.

    ===

    I got some nice Twitter feedback from the devs on my Darkroom presets, and shared two more.

    CPB: Short for Cross Process (Basic), a replica of the effect you get from the camera app Cross Process, a favorite of mine from the early days of the App Store by Nick Campbell. The app is still available for sale but is under new ownership now. This look is not subtle, with strong vignetting and center brightness, but a lovely blue/yellow bias that I suppose mimics cross-processed film (it’s been so long since I shot film I’ll take their word for it).

    Clean Plate: A recipe designed to brighten up food photos and make them look a tad warmer and more appetizing. I use this often, sometimes it’s good enough on its own and sometimes it’s an appetizer.

    ===

    There was a new Taylor Swift album this week in Midnights, and boy does it sound great. I’ve enjoyed only a single play through so far, but it struck me as having a very Jack Antonoff-y sound (or is it just the sound of American pop music today?) — if you close your eyes, you can mentally swap Taylor out and it becomes a new Bleachers record.

    We saw the first two episodes of The Peripheral on Amazon Prime Video and it’s just about everything I hoped it would be. If you haven’t read the book yet, you may as well just go straight in without knowing anything. One cool thing Amazon’s done here is have a QR code (at least on the TV app) that takes you to a microsite with more info on the show’s characters, key locations, and technologies. A DVD booklet for a streaming generation. I expect it’ll get updated as new episodes come out weekly as well. Don’t read it until you’ve seen it!

  • Week 42.22

    We got a cat! Well, pretty close to it, more accurate to say that we have reserved a kitten from the breeder we were previously speaking with. The next few weeks will be spent buying essential equipment, clearing up some of the mess around the house that she might destroy, and then she should be with us by the end of the month.

    Appearance wise, she is what’s known as a seal bicolor ragdoll, white with brown markings on her face and tail. I’ve discovered that this combination combines the most popular and most common traits in these cats, so in gachapon terms we’ve pulled a three-star kitten. Although you wouldn’t know she was a kitten from looking at her; several people who’ve seen photos have remarked “oh, so you’re not getting a kitten?” They grow up to become large cats, with females possibly reaching 6 kg and beyond.

    We’re still thinking of a name (her dead name is Dewey) but already have a strong contender. In branding terms, this phase is what’s known as “writing the rationale after having found a name that sounds great but isn’t especially meaningful”. Aside: is it a bad idea to name your cat after a Microsoft product?

    ===

    Darkroom (a photo editor I’ve used since it came out for iPhone — it now works as a universal app on iPad and Mac too) released their new update supporting the sharing of filters/presets. Early users of the app will remember that you could always share filters via a QR code, but this feature was removed a few years back when they switched to a new architecture. The way it works now is the preset’s details get uploaded to their server, generating a link that you can share. Anyone who clicks the link can see how your preset looks applied against four standard photos, and install the preset in their copy of Darkroom with a single click.

    As someone who enjoys making presets in Darkroom, I’ve got a few that I would like to share with other users. I went through a phase of copying film looks from other apps like VSCO and RNI Films, as a sort of pastime, as I found it quite a soothing and mindless activity to switch back-and-forth between two photos and gradually nudge them closer together by adjusting sliders. Someone should make a game around that mechanic!

    I’ve posted a few on Twitter already, but have quite a few more that I’ll put soon — “better” ones that I’ve done on my own without referencing existing film stocks or looks. I even wrote about wanting to share a new preset last October!

    Darkroom presets shared so far:

    ===

    This week’s update was written via voice dictation on my Mac — with a few minor corrections. And that’s with a sore throat, stuffed nose, and raspy voice! As far as I can tell it’s not Covid, just this drawn-out flu that’s been getting quite a few people. On that note, Covid cases are once again rising here in Singapore due to the new XBB variant.

    I can’t wait to upgrade to Ventura, assuming that it will have the same voice dictation enhancements as iOS 16. I wonder if this post reads differently, stylistically, given that I am saying this out loud rather than typing it. Related to that, I am now reading the book Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch (oh my God I can’t believe dictating that name out loud worked — I await the day this happens for Asian names). It’s about how language has been changed by the Internet and Internet culture (one of the things that involves is not capitalizing the word Internet, but macOS has seemingly not been informed).

    What a good week it’s been for reading: I finished Adrian Tchaikovsky’s One Day All This Will Be Yours and went on to finish Blake Crouch’s Upgrade two days later. With this post-Seveneves sprint, I should be able to finish the year with a not-embarrassing 12 books or more.

    I recommend both books by the way, the former being an unusual and fun time travel/time war story, and the latter another one of Crouch’s written-for-film-rights thrillers (his earlier novel, Dark Matter, is in production for Apple TV+). It is better than the film Limitless, but nowhere as great as Ted Chiang’s (dictation failed here) short story Understand. As you may already have guessed, the story is about a man whose genetic make up gets altered, giving him new abilities.

  • Week 41.22

    My Seveneves journey on Goodreads

    After four long months of procrastination and avoidance, I finished Seveneves. I hope that’s the end of my 2022 reading slump. Someone said that Neal Stephenson books start well but fizzle out at the end, and one could say that about this, but it wouldn’t be fair. The first half is an incredibly detailed look at the mundanity that occurs inside a giant tragedy; the eye of an apocalyptic storm — the world is ending, okay, but how is a small team going to engineer their way to survival over two years? And then a lot of time passes, and the final third of the book is a sort of sci-fi action movie, but not at an epic scale. So, super meticulous world building, some powerful ideas about humanity’s purpose, and then an ending that doesn’t quite shoot for fireworks.

    I still loved it though! Coming after Daniel Suarez’s Delta-V, also involving survival in space, it was a lot of mental time spent banished in an orbitory purgatory. Back when I started in late May, I was reading it in a darkened bedroom, with live-streamed video from the ISS projected on a wall, feeling intensely alone and stranded. Perhaps that not so enjoyable experience made it hard to pick up again and continue? Anyway now that it’s over, I need to make up for lost Goodreads reading challenge time so I’m moving on to the (relatively slim) One Day This Will All Be Yours, by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

    ===

    Earlier this week I got exposed to Covid in the workplace via a client who tested positive later, but still haven’t developed any symptoms myself. I’m hoping to make it through the next few days without incident.

    ===

    We had an excellent dinner at Brasserie Gavroche one night to celebrate my brother-in-law’s birthday, where I declined to taste the bottle of wine in that little ritual they do. What are the odds, really? One bad bottle in a million? Is that worth the amount of sniffing and swirling time this steals from humanity in aggregate? All the interrupted conversations; the sheepish nods to say okay?

    ===

    I met Ci’en and Peishan for a Saturday afternoon coffee and chat for the first time in what feels like forever. Somewhere, an alien observer has a record showing that we used to do this more often, undoubtedly along Orchard Road in cafes long-since shut, and they’re probably writing in their little notebook that some things in human life do stay easy and stress free. If you’re reading this, I appreciate you both immeasurably.

    ===

    A few weeks ago, I read Michael’s complaints on his blog about not being able to get a pair of Uniqlo shorts that matched what he was used to, and I want to rant a little about Muji’s jeans in a similar vein. I’ve bought several pairs over the years — completely switching over in allegiance from other brands — solely because they had a dedicated smartphone pocket. It’s on the hip, just above and to the side of the regular right back pocket, high enough and to the side enough that you can sit down without sitting on your phone. It wouldn’t fit a Max iPhone, I think, but anything below. It was discreetly sewn into the lines of the jeans, enough to be hidden away that if someone robbed you and wanted your phone, they might not be able to find one.

    This obviously freed my front pockets for putting my hands and mask and maybe a single credit card in. It was wonderfully minimal. The phone had its own place, and it wasn’t in the way of anything at all. And for some reason, their new jeans do not have this pocket. I think some of the skinniest jeans may still have it, but I wouldn’t/couldn’t wear those. It suggests that Muji believes the pocket is only useful in scenarios where you can’t put your phone in the regular front or back pockets, but that’s a ridiculous conclusion to make. A dedicated phone pocket is always welcome!

    I discovered this a few weeks back while looking to renew my currently faded pairs, and have made several visits to confirm that none of the ones they sell, and that I fit in, have this pocket anymore. Liberated from my obligations, I may now be in the market for some nicer specialist denim, I don’t know. They’ve really done it to themselves.

  • Week 40.22

    We had a funeral ceremony at work to say goodbye to the brand we all joined, which has now been subsumed into a larger new corporate brand. Everyone who could physically make it turned up and we ate pizzas, drank beers, and told stories about the last five years. We didn’t exactly put the fun in funeral but it was a thoughtful and appropriately introspective end.

    I brought my new and underused Ricoh GR III along to document the moment. If I’d purchased the IIIx I originally wanted instead, I’m not sure it would have worked as well. 28mm and 24mp is a pretty good setup for capturing everything and then being able to crop in to interesting parts if needed. The only thing better would have been a 48mp Leica Q2.

    Why didn’t I just use my iPhone and its new 48mp sensor? Firstly, I wanted to be intentional about it, and having a dedicated tool in hand prompts you to keep looking out for pictures. So I did end up taking more photos than anyone. Secondly, the vibes are not comparable. Comparing them with colleagues’s photos, the ones from iPhones are clear, sharp, and clinical. The Ricoh alternately underexposes, blows out highlights, focuses on the wrong thing, and occasionally white balances like daylight film when you’re indoors. These “choices” and limitations are beautiful, as is the rich detail from its large APS-C sensor; no neural network is filling in the blanks here. iPhones document things the way they happened; dumber cameras still somehow capture the way we’ll actually remember them. Or I’m just old and like things to look old too.

    Edit: It seems vintage digital cameras are making a full-on comeback. I should never have thrown away those IXUSes and FinePixes.

    Ricoh on the left, iPhone on the right

    As I type this, we are watching Apple Music’s “live” stream of Billie Eilish performing at the O2 Arena. It’s been billed on the Browse page as a live performance (not inaccurate), but since it starts at 10am SGT (3am in the UK), this was clearly not going to be live in real time. So it turns out this is a pre-recorded concert film from the end of her tour, just now making its premiere on the service. It’s a good one though!

    I mentioned before that we’ve been thinking of getting a cat. I also posted a photo of a ragdoll that a friend owns, whose home we’d visited as a sort of allergy test. I never really knew about cat breeds before this, but ragdolls seem lovely and are reportedly as chill and affectionate as they come. Things are escalating quickly: we submitted an inquiry to a breeder about the possibility of adopting one of their “retiring” adults, and this week had a call with them about the details.

    But they don’t have any suitable retirees at the moment, only a kitten with a congenital physical anomaly — still in good health for the moment — which may develop into a problem requiring more care later in life. As people with no recent cat-owning experience, it’s not a decision we can make lightly.

  • Week 39.22

    I revisited some drawings I made awhile ago and deleted some, finished one, started doodling another. They’re pretty terrible but it keeps me feeling like I’m doing something on days where I’m objectively doing nothing else of value.

    ===

    Splatoon 3 has been my only game on the Switch this week. I’m getting better at it, but the short multiplayer matches are kinda unsatisfying. Over too soon, and with a team of four randoms playing together without the benefit of voice chat, you never get that feeling of great teamwork. I guess I’ll need to go out and make some new friends in real life and convince them to buy Switches and play with me. None of my current ones seem interested.

    Just on a whim, I installed Apex Legends Mobile and started playing it with my Backbone controller. It’s… not bad? But Battle Royale games simply take too long and there’s no simple deathmatch option, so I may be back to Call of Duty before too long now that I’ve got the shooter bug again.

    Netflix Games has a new title called Lucky Luna from Snowman, the makers of Alto’s Adventure and Alto’s Odyssey. It’s kinda like Downwell + Celeste but casual and atmospheric rather than punishing and frustrating. I mention this because I played it a little while, but also we’ve been thinking about adopting a cat, and one named Luna popped up through a family contact around the same time, and I thought it was a nice coincidence (but not a sign).

    There’s a new Death Cab album called Asphalt Meadows which I bet no one saw coming? I heard it through on my commute and it did nothing for me. Formless songs that don’t seem to be about anything interesting. The new Blackpink album has also been played a few times, and it has a couple of strong songs but mostly feels way overproduced while also lazy in places (the annoying “whipitwhipitwhipit” lyric + nursery rhyme melody line in Shut Down).

    If you want more catchy songs that don’t try to say very much, the new Mura Masa album demon time is very good. Collaborator Channel Tres (who guests on the delightful track, hollaback bitch) also released a collection of musical NFTs with the lo-fi musician omgkirby this week on Opensea. I actually minted one, because what NFT slump??

    The new AirPods Pro have obviously been on my mind as a serial Apple product collector, and as more reviews keep coming out saying how much better they sound, the fight just keeps getting harder, my friends. But with any luck, I’ll be able to make it to Christmas without them. I mean, I’m typing this while listening to music out of my bloody iPad Pro’s speakers and still having a good time, so I should be able to do it.

    One of the things I aspire to, and that new AirPods Pro would help me achieve (of course), is to be a listener of podcasts. I just haven’t ever been able to turn this into a sustainable habit because when I have headphone time on the train or around the home, it’s music I want. But the news that Adnan Syed, the murder suspect subject of season 1 of the Serial podcast, was freed after his conviction was overturned brought my mind back to this goal. Someone told me the Serial team is going to cover the new developments.

    I tried to listen to their second season back in the day, about some army guy or whatever, and just couldn’t get into it. Maybe because the life and times of some army guy or whatever doesn’t appeal at all. After Jose told me Season 3 was about observations on the criminal justice system after spending time in one courthouse for a year, I decided to give that a go. Episode 1 was good listening: a case where the victim of a bar fight ended up the only person arrested and put on trial.

    ===

    On Sunday evening we went to see the Lee Kuan Yew musical now on at the Marina Bay Sands theater. It’s a simplistic reduction of an important man’s life, and there’s a lot to unpack. Why does this even exist, and in musical form? Alexander Hamilton had a couple hundred years to grow cold first; this first debuted in 2015, the same year LKY died. The poster bills it as “history, his story, our story”, but to what degree is it accurate? Is this really a historically sound account? Why does every actor sing in an affected British accent, even the ones who have exaggerated Singaporean accents when they’re speaking? Why are the songs so rough? Why is there literally only one woman in the cast of 21?

    But hey on the positive side, it’s a super impressive production in technical terms, all hybrid video projections and moving stage pieces! Most of the dramatic parts are entertaining and the music is performed by a live band. It’s surprisingly affordable (from $50) and made for a good night out. I also ran into my friend Xin who I haven’t seen in years!