The results from last week’s health screening came back clear of all major issues, so I’ll sleep soundly on that front for a little while at least! The only note was that I could cut back a little on the carbs and saturated fats, which makes me wonder what I’ve done differently since the last test. Could it be… that I was eating more healthily when I went to the office more often? Those downtown mall lunches were more expensive than the kopitiam/hawker fare I get more frequently now, but I didn’t expect them to be healthier. I’ll have to look into this a little more.
It’s no secret that one of the more reliable indicators we’re in a frothy bull market is a rising number of people mistakenly believing they can quit their jobs and live off day trading, and while that wasn’t my plan, I’ve certainly done a touch of it this year. What can I say? Gambling is fun! But then Trump declared another tariff war on China this Friday, troubling markets and triggering major liquidations on some altcoins. I know it was bad out there because my feeds were full of people urging others not to kill themselves. The coming week is probably going to be a very interesting one on Bloomberg, which I expect to have on the TV in the background all day.
That is, if the internet is even working. Our ISP has been struggling with at least two outages this week during waking/working hours. The connection is down right now as I write this bit on Saturday evening, which is surely an unpopular time for the net to go down. I’ll bet someone’s been called in to reboot a server rack somewhere right now. In times like these, I’m thankful for my irrationally large mobile data plan and our local NAS media server. There’s some kind of strategic error being made by governments here. Centralizing all the angry-mob-placating media on the cloud where it can go down in the middle of a crisis? The kind where you tell people to stay indoors and wait? I’ll bet DVDs actually played a role in maintaining law and order in the old days.
Speaking of shutting down a digital grid, I had the opportunity to see the new Tron: Ares film with Brian the night it premiered and had a great time despite Jared Leto taking the titular role. It’s not a franchise that aims to make sense, or be scrutinized for narrative integrity — it’s about the neon lights, banging electronic music, and videogame-ish eye candy, and this new one delivered on all counts. I can’t even get mad; it really is just a good time as long as the volume’s way up.
Quick aside: I’ve been using Claude more than ChatGPT recently to give it a fair shake, mostly spurred by curiosity after their recent marketing campaign, and honestly? The outputs seem more insightful, more strategic, and it’s a better writer. It feels more my speed, and I’m a new fan.
Still on the topic of digital networks, I got roped into helping start and moderate an online alumni group for the design agency I used to be part of, and we quietly launched it this week. What set this one workplace apart was the feeling of being a truly connected team where, for a brief period in time, absent any territorial agendas or business borders, people could share knowledge across (and even move freely around) the different global offices. And it’s been really nice to see many people say as they join the #introductions channel on our Slack that it remains the best job they ever had. Where does it go from here? I think that depends on how many atypically extroverted designers we can get to foster some sort of social infrastructure.
Coincidentally, I met one of those ex-colleagues for an overdue breakfast: our first intern and proper employee in Singapore, who’s also a regular reader of this blog. Hi Xin! I hadn’t seen her in a year, so even after 90 minutes of catching up it still felt like there was lots we didn’t get into. Anyway, you wouldn’t have known it was a random weekday morning from the line waiting to get into the suburban cafe/bakery we chose. Every table was occupied by both foreign and local-looking unemployed bums alike, all enjoying $28 breakfast plates and $18 slices of toasted sourdough topped with avocado. We’re constantly being told local restaurants are barely hanging on, but then you see the brunch scam still going strong and it’s like wha…?
More counterdata was encountered while celebrating a very belated birthday dinner for Kim at Cudo, a South-American-ish sort of restaurant in the Amoy Street area. It was fully packed out (albeit on a Friday night), and I highly recommend them on account of solid tropical cocktails (Bourbon! Coconut! Pineapple!), a really nice selection of starters (Romaine lettuce with blue cheese and anchovies; warm crab queso with tortilla chips; truffley torched yellowtail), and even better mains (wagyu rump; chorizo and ricotta pasta) at pretty palatable prices.
I can afford this baller dining-out lifestyle because I saved a ton of money on the Amazon Prime sales this week (yup it’s #girlmath). I bought replacement razor blades, a physical copy of The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, dental floss, a 1TB microSD Express card (finally!) for my Switch 2, protein bars, LED bulbs, LEUCHTTURM1917 notebooks, and a lifetime supply of Uni-ball Jetstream RT pens — only the best pens ever according to The Wirecutter.
I wasn’t planning to get any of this stuff soon — they’re all things I might have bought eventually. Like the 1TB card to replace the 256GB one in my Switch 2, for example, which I thought I’d upgrade to in maybe a year’s time. This made me realize that on top of driving impulse purchases, these sale events are actually about pulling forward purchases and recording future sales today to juice numbers (at slightly lower margins). Businesses are valued based on expected profits, individuals buy based on expected needs, and I guess I’ve been binging carbs and fat based on expected hunger!
I had some ice cream at last, but no beers yet. Maybe I’ll stretch this sobriety a little longer. Alcohol is, after all, just a poison worth doing socially but not so much alone.
But man, this illness. Being sick for three consecutive weeks was not on my bingo card for the year. I should say illnesses, because we saw a doctor early in the week and she said (and these are the words every INTJ raised on WebMD loves to hear), “I think you’ve correctly diagnosed yourself — this seems like two separate illnesses one after the other, rather than a viral infection that became a bacterial one.” So, just bad luck and weak immunity on my part.
Fortunately, it’s just about over. Only a mild cough remains for both of us, but still bad enough that we slept in separate rooms for most of the week. It wasn’t a perfect solution; we still woke ourselves up coughing in the middle of each night.
I’m reminded at such times to stop whining and be grateful for minor health issues. Our part-time cleaner just returned from a rather invasive surgery to remove two large fibroids growing on her uterus. It’s been a multi-month ordeal navigating hospitals and insurance companies. I tried to help with some internet research and reassurance, and was glad to see her back to (light) work this week.
To get me nutritionally through the sick days, I bought quite a few bananas and unlocked a new breakfast item: peanut butter and banana sandwiches. The PB acts like a glue that keeps the slices from falling out. Gastro engineering! It’s basically a fat handheld dessert in the morning, and maybe I could kick it up a notch with whipped cream?
On the video gaming front, I managed to start Shin-chan: Me and the Professor on Summer Vacation on the Switch. I’ve been wanting to get into this for several years — recreating the small countryside childhood I never had. It reminds me of Attack of the Friday Monsters! on the 3DS, not surprising since they were both designed by Kaz Ayabe. He must really miss his summer holidays because he’s also the director of Natsu-Mon: 20th Century Summer Kid, which is pretty much the same concept: catching bugs, fishing, exploring nature, making friends. I’ve err… also bought that game, but might not get to it this year.
Guiltily, I’m actually kinda dying to play another game that just came out, despite just starting on this one. Damn my infernal backlog! That game is Tiny Bookshop, an indie title that’s shot to the top of the eShop charts, beating Nintendo’s own Super Mario Party Jamboree! It is what it sounds like, a cozy game where you manage a tiny mobile bookshop. You decorate it, stock titles, and recommend books to passing townsfolk. I can’t believe no one made this game sooner because the premise is obviously gold. Moreover, it appears to have some beautiful locations for you to set up shop in, in the vein of ‘lo-fi beats YouTube video scenery’, so I assume you can just kind of chill in the game and listen to the waves while admiring your little caravan.
Ballard on Amazon Prime Video turned out to be a perfectly fine series on its own, with a different tone and a kookier cast than the mainline Bosch show that it’s spun off from. I can’t complain, especially because Titus Welliver shows up now and then to reinforce ties. I don’t know how old Renee Ballard is supposed to be though. She’s living with her grandmother, who looks 70 at most, but Maggie Q is 46.
We started on season 2 of Poker Face and I’m loving it. I would have been fine if they’d kept the same episodic format of Charlie on the run and solving crimes from 30 minutes in for the entire show, but they’ve decided to switch things up a bit. Still works. Still a brilliant platform for insane and creative stories with a rotating list of guest stars: John Mulaney, Giancarlo Esposito, Rhea Perlman, Katie Holmes?!
I installed the new beta OSes on my iPad Pro and Apple TV 4K and can report they are solid enough at this point. Not enough to risk my iPhone or Mac, though. The Liquid Glass effect is still a little confused. Sometimes a button will be darkened to stand out against what’s behind it, but upon being clicked, it flashes and changes to the brighter style to match some new frosted glass items that appear. It just seems to have to morph and adapt a little too much to be used for UI items that ought to be stable. But maybe that way of thinking is just old fashioned now.
Next to be updated will be my Vision Pro. I’m really curious how the glass elements will react to light and real world environments as you move them around in space. My Persona is also horribly outdated and I’m feeling the peer pressure to upgrade to the new, detailed ones — nearly everyone in my book club already has a proper face on and mine still looks like the Lawnmower Man.
ChatGPT’s closing words for the week: Funny how even illness turns into iteration — new foods, new games, new software skins. Maybe we’re all just beta versions trying to get stable.
In Melbourne at the moment, getting some relief from the heat of summer which seems to be getting worse with every year for no reason anyone can see at all! There’s no plan, just chilling at cafes, bars, and hanging with some friends for a few days.
Our friends in the city have built an incredible home for their three kids, rabbits, chickens, and visiting mothers-in-law. And for now, us as well. It’s the sort of setup that you can almost never find in Singapore, not without incurring generational debt, and it almost justifies all the dreaming Singaporeans do over a retirement in Australia. Almost. Because those people are surely forgetting to consider one crucial detail: hairy spiders the size of your hand.
I’ve brought no camera besides my iPhone. I’ve got my Kobo and iPad to read and draw, but left the Switch 2 at home. It feels nice having less stuff to keep track of, and I never understood the attraction of playing video games on holiday anyway. Why would you escape reality only to… escape reality again?
Before leaving, I met Brian for beer and ramen — the former at an Irish pub in Singapore that was entirely populated with middle-aged white men when I walked in. When the bartender told the waiter who to send the pints of Guinness to, I heard him call me “the Chinese man”, which is a description that would normally never help you in Singapore.
We talked a bit about Bosch because I’d recommended the Amazon TV series to him awhile back and he’s now enjoyed all seven seasons of the mainline show. He did, however, notice that season 7 felt a little different (I personally can’t remember), and found out that some network suits came in at that time and tried to make changes to the show. Right after, the series moved to the Freevee channel and became Bosch Legacy, where the vibes became noticeably different again and the supporting cast changed. I still love them all though.
And now there’s a new 10-episode Bosch spinoff series, Ballard, starring Maggie Q. I’ve yet to start on it, and while I want it to be good in the same ‘LA Noir’ way that Bosch was, I gotta be realistic and prepare for a load of network exec bullshit.
On the flight over, I finished reading Old Man’s War, a very entertaining John Scalzi sci-fi novel about signing up for an intergalactic war at the age of 75; read Blake Crouch’s Summer Frost, a solid short story about AI that could easily become a film; skimmed the popular financial self-help book Die With Zero; and started on Nick Harkaway’s Tigerman without knowing a thing about it but it’s already going well.
A massive 7.7 quake hit Myanmar and Thailand on Friday, causing several hundred deaths so far. It was chilling to pull up the news and see reports of buildings swaying in Bangkok and having to be shut down for safety inspections, buildings that I had just been in a week ago. Thankfully, everyone we know is unhurt, but I’ve heard accounts of the traffic becoming even more unworkable (someone spent over 5 hours getting to the airport), and with some having to walk miles home instead.
It was my Apple Watch that alerted me to this earthquake, via a notification from the environment ministry’s MyENV app, which usually likes to tell me about quakes in places so far away I don’t see what possible need there could be for an alert. I was in the middle of watching Jason Statham’s film, A Working Man (2025), in an almost empty theater with Peishan, and was about to swipe it away when I saw that it was actually kind of nearby. And then afterwards, the feeds were full of videos showing swimming pools at the tops of condominiums raining their contents down onto the streets below. Who decided we should start putting pools up there, anyway?
The movie is terrible, by the way, and makes the mistake of trying to NOT be the predictable vengeance-by-numbers Statham vehicle that the trailer makes it out to be. It looks like our man Jason is just your regular ex-military deadly killer who’s decided to take on an unassuming identity and retire to a life of normalcy as a construction worker when one of his new friends falls afoul of the mob and needs rescuing. This is a setup rooted in at least a little realism, which is needed for the audience to suspend disbelief when the righteous murdering starts. However, this film is co-written by Sylvester Stallone, who is now at a stage in life where he writes really ridiculous scenes, silly and clichéd to the point of surrealism, as evidenced in the last installments of his Rambo and Expendables franchises.
The latest season of Reacher, a series on freaking Amazon Prime Video, is more believable and enjoyable in almost every way, which is a hell of a red flag for whoever produced A Working Man. When reading any of Lee Child’s novels, Reacher comes across as a stoic avatar of justice, almost featureless in terms of personality. But as played on TV by Alan Ritchson, he’s endearingly a bit of an awkward and pedantic weirdo, as you would expect someone with his physicality to be after moving through a world that he doesn’t comfortably fit into. I like that change.
We also watched the critically acclaimed show Adolescence on Netflix, and it’s an absolute marvel of filmmaking and acting. I’ve never seen a British TV production with this level of craft; it just leaves you wondering how they pulled it off — how they had the energy, even. Each episode is an hour-long performance that often involves moving between multiple locations, with the actors having to ramp up the emotions from anger to fear and the sorrow in between, and they did this how many times? For the final episode, they apparently used Take #16. It’s unfathomable talent. Stephen Graham and his co—stars deserve awards for this.
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This week will also be remembered for the wave of Studio Ghibli-styled images that washed up on social media after the release of ChatGPT’s new image generation capabilities in their 4o model. People turned personal photos, memes, and historic images alike into ripoffs of Miyazaki’s instantly recognizable style, and I have to say I enjoyed many of them whilst simultaneously feeling uneasy about what this means.
The new model seems to be a milestone that’s arriving a little sooner than I expected. It can render text with good enough quality and aesthetic precision. It can process a multi-step prompt such as “create a print ad for the product in this picture”, and it will write some pretty workable ad copy, re-imagine the object you’ve given it, and merge them into a single image that looks right at a glance. There may be minor imperfections, or it may fail to nail a critical detail depending on your object. But the fact that it can be completely right some of the time is startling. I’d say it’s most of the way to fucking the creative industry over, but who knows if the last mile will take a quarter, a year, or a decade to close.
While discussing the possible outcomes of this development with some people, specifically whether this would retard the growth and success of any new visual ideas — take for example the iconic look of Studio Ghibli, or Peanuts and Snoopy — why/how could any new artist launch and evolve their style if it can be snatched away from them early on and proliferated across the web in ways they haven’t even thought of yet — I wondered aloud if the only way forward left for them will be to use AI to scale their work, to generate more variations of it themselves, and to speed it to its logical conclusion (or demise) before anyone else does.
At this point, I remembered an abandoned “art project” of mine (if it could be called that) from a few years ago, and got very excited about enlisting ChatGPT’s help with it.
In late 2019, just before COVID hit, I had the idea to draw a series of cute animal characters and make some products. They would be called the Fluffy Hearts Club, and the story was that they were all research animals who were having horrible tests done on them, but who banded together and escaped from the lab. So they’d all have little scars and visible reminders of humanity’s awfulness on their bodies, but they’d be extremely happy and positive in their freedom eras.
I drew the first one with great difficulty, a rabbit with a scar on his chest, printed him on something like 50 tote bags, and gave them away to friends that Christmas. I started to draw the next one, a cat, along with some other angles of the rabbit, but eventually shelved it… owing to COVID or lack of skill, I don’t know. As you can see they are pretty rough.
But when I realized that I could use ChatGPT to “learn” this style and concept to help me finish the rest of it, I got excited enough to plonk down $30 and upgrade my account to Plus. Ethics check: Would I have paid a human artist to do this for me? Unlikely. I’m not made of money, and it’s just a silly side project. Should I have? I can’t see how; I want to explore this on my own without another human in the mix.
I’ve spent a little time on it so far, and it’s grasped the core idea and even brainstormed other animals and their visual signatures with me — it felt eerily like collaborating with a person, as we discussed possibilities and complimented each other along the way. It has trouble following instructions about very minute details, which it explained as a shortcoming of the way its models were trained (it leans towards cartoon conventions, which one of my notes contradicts), which one can take as proof that this is all built on the back of awful copyright violations.
But with its help, I’ve managed to produce more versions of the rabbit and even imagined the cat in various art styles, so I’d say this has been a half success. I might use it as a foundation for tracing/drawing new ones myself, or as inspiration for different scenarios.
I only wish I was using this renewed subscription to explore how to stay relevant in my own job domain rather than in the lane of starving artists. Yuk yuk.
Speaking of the design field, I went back to the same college I visited last November to help give feedback on the work from a class of students doing a design thinking course taught by my former boss and mentor, and was again struck by how much of what we do and prescribe as designers, the responsible way to move in the world, is naive and vulnerable to the at-odd incentives of everyone in the AI business. They’ll throw a synthetic persona at a problem for $10 in compute before they spend a dollar on asking a real person what they need to lead a better life.
And that brings me to Careless People, the Facebook tell-all book by Sarah Wynn-Williams that I’ve just finished reading. The one that Zuckerberg and his lawyers tried to quash before it was published. I thought I knew enough about Facebook’s bad behavior, but I was still stunned by some of her anecdotes.
I haven’t made many rules about what kind of work I’ll do, and when I used to smoke, I believed that I could consult on work for tobacco companies because to do otherwise would be hypocrisy (I’m wiser now), but “never work for Facebook” was a promise I made maybe a decade ago. I simply do not understand or respect anyone who chooses to, and this book should be required reading for those who think they might.
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I listened to Alessia Cara’s new album Love & Hyperbole a couple of times, hoping that something would finally click, because I did want to like it. But I was left without much of an impression. I’m probably coming off R&B in general because listening to SZA’s deluxe edition of SOS on the plane home last week was quite excruciating.
But then I put on Jessie Reyez’s new album PAID IN MEMORIES and I loved the one playthrough I’ve heard. Maybe it’s the millennial in me but there are some samples for old people in here, including the Smashing Pumpkins’ 1979. She makes it work, and the melodies are strong.
On Saturday morning there was a circular rainbow across the sky, it’s a circle rainbow all the way, yeah, oh my god. Well officially it was a “sun halo”, and it seems everyone got a photo of it too.
It happened right as we were walking out of a new-ish brunch cafe, where I waited what must have been close to an hour for an expensive plate of scrambled eggs, some kale that was actually edible, plus sausage, mushrooms, tomatoes, and pork belly. I’ll take the heat; going for brunch was my idea, but I don’t know why everyone still does this on weekends. The place was packed and a line was still forming at 1pm.
I went out and met people several times this week, and on Thursday I managed to drop in on the new Maji Curry outlet at the Funan mall with Brian. I’ve mentioned them several times in the past, and they are probably the most authentic and interesting Japanese curry spot in all of Singapore, although (not to take anything away from Maji) there’s practically no competition. I hope they do so well that other brands have no choice but to enter the market or stop slouching (I’m looking at you, Coco Ichibanya).
As a group, I think us millennials have been brainwashed to perfection by advertising algorithms because the first thing Brian pointed out when we met was that we were both carrying the same Bellroy sling bag, albeit in different sizes and colors. I said I’d bought mine on a whim very recently because my mother-in-law was after some sort of small pouch, and for reasons I couldn’t explain, I’d recommended we take a look at Bellroy’s offerings. I couldn’t believe it when he said his in-laws were also in town and he’d bought his under the same circumstances. What the hell, man?
Studio Nuevo.Tokyo & Héliographe launched their long-awaited black & white film simulator app, AgBr, which stands for Silver Bromide, of course. It’s currently 50% off as a launch special (S$14.98, one-time purchase, no subscriptions), and I’d recommend it to any fan of black and white photography. The purchase gets you the app across iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and they’re promising a new film preset every month for the rest of the year. Funnily enough, I think the best way to use AgBr is to pair it with the similarly named Halide app, shooting RAW files in “Process Zero” mode. Sure, you can process a normal iPhone photo with a Fujifilm NEOPAN 400 preset, but the HDR exposure won’t look quite right.
I watched the new Metallica concert video that Apple TV+ put out for the Vision Pro. At 25 minutes, it’s the longest show they’ve put out so far, and I’m ready for more. Don’t make the same mistake as I did: watch it with AirPods. I used only the built-in audio pods, and while they sounded fine, I think the immersion will be even better if you turn things all the way up. They perform three songs, captured from 14 cameras, and it’s a truly new experience in this world to be right up next to each musician doing their thing on stage, in your own home. My main criticism: the crowd is quite low in the audio mix, so you don’t truly get the feeling of being there with all that energy (they could have offered two audio tracks to choose from, maybe).
With this, Apple has tried four immersive presentations of music on the Vision Pro: A traditional music video (The Weeknd), an intimate band rehearsal in the studio (Alicia Keys), a Concert For One where the artist is right there with you (Raye), and now a full-blown, live arena show. Next up is Bono’s full-length documentary on May 30, Stories of Surrender. I personally can’t stand the guy, but if this changes my mind, then that’s really saying something about this new format.
I spotted this familiar Mario statue (?) at the Courts/Nojima/Nittori electronics and homeware frankenstore on Orchard Road, in the old Heeren building. He pops up in the gaming sections of Japanese stores like Yodobashi Camera, and I saw him at least twice last month in Tokyo, so it was a surprise to see him here. It was mostly a sad reminder that our electronics retailers sell junkier crap and aren’t anywhere as fun to browse.
For the past couple of months, I’ve been writing these posts in Apple Notes, solely because of its integration with Apple Intelligence, which does a quick QA check at the end. However, rich text formatting in Apple Notes is quite laborious (having to select text and choose styles from a menu), and often I lose some of it anyway when pasting the text over into WordPress. It became more trouble than it was worth.
I’m now back to using iA Writer, my tried-and-trusted Markdown text editor of choice, where text formatting is simply done with in-line symbols so you can focus on writing. It makes much more sense on mobile devices. This is an excuse to mention Apple Intelligence, which has recently been in the news for falling behind schedule and possibly the rest of the industry. I’m not super reliant on AI to correct my writing, but it has definitely helped catch the odd typo and missing word. By right, I should be able to use it systemwide, in iA Writer and any other app on my iPhone, but the implementation is inconsistent and so the “Proofread” feature can’t walk me through the changes it makes; it just makes them and I can accept ALL the new text or not at all. This is what I would prefer we get in iOS 19: a rigorous cleaning up of bugs and rounding of corners so that what we already have works better than what’s on any other OS. If we have to wait a couple more years for truly agentic edge AI from Apple, that kinda sucks, but we’ve been here before. I remember the days of wanting a bigger screen and having to put up with the iPhone 5 and 5s for two years. 🤷♂️
TV: We finally started on the new season of Reacher now that enough episodes have come out. We also decided to pick up House on Amazon Prime Video from the beginning of season 5, since I’m pretty sure we finished four seasons back when the iPhone first came out or thereabouts. House uses a flip phone. It’s terribly formulaic but also fun, and the perfect kinda show for watching at the end of the night.
This episode is brought to you by our kind sponsors at Bullet Points™: Need to keep your rambling in check while covering a dozen mundane topics? That’s a job for Bullet Points™ — creating the illusion of order since forever!
After wanting a simple MagSafe silicone case for my iPhone for the past few weeks, I got an $18 Amazon deal for a neutral gray one from Elago, and it’s nearly perfect.
In addition to having more time for informational intake and mental meanderings, I’ll probably remember the latter half of this year for the half-hearted austerity drive that’s led me to drink tea over coffee on a daily basis. This week, the Yorkshire Gold tea caddy I bought during Black Friday sales arrived, prompting me to look up the history of the tea caddy. Back when tea was too valuable to leave with servants in the kitchen, rich folk kept it locked in ornate caddies in their living rooms. Today, I store $0.12 tea bags in a flimsy tin and call it progress.
I’ve been struggling to read Butter by Asako Yuzuki, which has apparently been named Waterstone’s book of the year. I’m only a third of the way through after several weeks, and while there’s nothing wrong with it, it’s a bit of a compelling nothingburger. Female journalist tries to interview female serial killer. Killer encourages her to show more interest in life’s pleasures, especially good butter, and journalist slowly starts to adopt killer’s worldview. I don’t want to quit more but I’ll need to move on soon.
Because my book club has decided to read the sequel to A Psalm for the Wild-Built over the next two weeks, and I can’t start it until I finish Butter. A Prayer for the Crown-Shy will probably only take four hours (the length of its audiobook, compared to Butter’s 17 hours), but I don’t like multitasking with books. I already have too many ongoing TV show and game narratives crowded in my brain.
This year’s Goodreads Reading Challenge is in the bag anyway, with 19 proper books + four volumes of the Sakamoto Days manga completed, smashing my goal of 12 books.
Popular media loves a (serial) killer. We recently finished the new The Day of the Jackal series starring Eddie Redmayne as the titular assassin that the show’s directorial choices strongly encourage you to root for. It’s excellent, and the musical director is clearly a millennial who shares my taste in the classics, from the first episode starting with Radiohead’s Everything In Its Right Place.
We’re now watching Cross on Amazon Prime Video, based on the Alex Cross books by James Patterson, where a detective with a PhD in psychology plays cat and mouse with a serial killer. I recommend it, but the show is extremely dark AND low contrast, like someone forgot the final step in processing the image. Reacher suffered from this too, but it’s worse here. Luckily, my Sony TV has a mode that dynamically adjusts for it.
I rediscovered the greatness of Domi and JD Beck this week when a random video of them performing on Japanese morning TV popped up on my YouTube feed. I then went down a rabbit hole of older videos, like this one of Domi jamming with other kids at Berklee, and this one of JD headlining a Zildjian session, and am now just in awe of their incredible, otherworldly talent.
On Monday, we went out to see a local production at the Capitol Theater, entitled Dim Sum Dollies® History of Singapore Sixty Sexy Years. It was definitely one of the musicals of all time.
The end-of-year digital game sales have begun, and I urge you to add Sayonara Wild Hearts to your collection if you haven’t already. This game is both a fantastic musical album and a great playable abstraction of going through heartbreak. It’s just $7.79 on Nintendo Switch and S$8.40 on Steam (40% off in both cases). I first played it on Apple Arcade back in 2019 as a launch title for the service, but these days it’s no longer available on mobile and the fate of publisher Annapurna Interactive is in question.
I dusted off the PS5 to make use of my PS Plus subscription and decided to finally play a native PS5 game, since I’ve so far only played older games that were ported from the PS4, and had my socks and shoes blown off by Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. This game is an insane technical showcase for what the PS5 can do: thousands of particles flying everywhere, ray traced reflections, and massive, cinematic worlds that load instantly. Why have I squandered the potential of this machine for the last seven months?? If you have any recommendations for what to play next, especially if they’re in the PS Plus catalog, do let me know.
Last but not least, we went for Christmas dinner with the parents on Sunday night at one of my favorite buffets in town, and it’s made me aware I’ll have to watch my eating over the next couple of weeks.
I’m on my last week camping out here in a co-working space while renovations continue in the apartment next door. From what I’ve observed, they’re probably behind schedule and will continue into November. As of this moment, however, I’m not planning to extend my membership another month.
On the few days I’ve stayed home, I found that AirPods Pro do an okay job of reducing the noise, as long as you’ve got some audio playing. That should allow me to do most of the same things well enough (watching films, reading books, scrolling trash), but the part of being out here that I’ll miss is observing other people at work and guessing what they do. The most entertaining one so far has been a life coach who saw his clients for one-on-one sessions out in the open space, right next to other people typing away on laptops. Weird!
I am incidentally looking forward to the AirPods Pro update next week that will turn them into hearing aids and concert hearing protectors. We got my dad a new pair in anticipation of the former, and he’s open/excited to try it out. If you know someone who may have impaired hearing but doesn’t want to get fitted for traditional hearing aids, check this new feature out because it may be a helpful alternative. Hearing loss apparently contributes to dementia.
Come with me to Bluesky
On le scrolling de la trash: I decided to reduce my participation in totally toxic platforms like Twitter, toxically owned platforms like Threads and Instagram, and make another go at a decentralized alternative. It’s complicated, but I don’t want to fully leave these places because I want to know how people I disagree with think. I’ll spend less time there, though, and I won’t post new content.
I’ve tried Mastodon but its lack of algorithmic discovery was a bug for me, not a feature. Like Michael who reached the same conclusion, I will not be renewing my omg.lol subscription and that will mean the loss of my social.lol Mastodon account in about a year.
So that means returning to Bluesky, 14 months after I first got in. In the beginning there was a waitlist, and it was hard to find people I already knew elsewhere, and I couldn’t get anyone to follow me. A year on, it’s beginning to look like a viable place to hang out. There’s a tool called Sky Follower Bridge that helps you find your Twitter people on Bluesky.
You should look me up at @sangsara.bsky.social if you decide to join! I have just 44 followers now, but with your help I might get to 45.
I like two things about it right now: that the community I see is welcoming and nerdy in that OG internet way, and that one can customize their experience via ‘feeds’. Technically, if the niche and/or conspiracy theorizing content I see on Twitter ever comes over, I can wall them into a clearly marked section that I’ll only see when I want to, but on the same open platform built to last longer than the ones we’ve had. I’m tired of moving from shipwreck to new-but-already-cursed ship every few years, an odyssey described in this great thread by @pookleblinky.bsky.social that I reposted. It’s disgusting but us millennials probably coined the term ‘digital nomads’ because that’s what we are.
Later: After writing the above, I came across this post by Adam Singer about why quitting TikTok and Instagram gives you an edge over most other people, who are hopelessly addicted and mentally fractured, a topic I mentioned recently after reading the controversial book Stolen Focus. He makes a distinction (that I agree with) between image/video-based networks, and text-based ones like Bluesky, Reddit, and old-school forums, because the latter type fosters connections and discussions in a way that pure content delivery systems largely do not.
In the same way it doesn’t matter if Johann Hari got the facts exactly right in his book, it doesn’t matter if you cut down on social media because you hate a tech baron’s irresponsible personal/business/product design choices or if it’s because you just want to reclaim some agency over your own mind. The important thing is that you try it and see what happens.
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Test photos
Here are some photos I took this week (ProRAW in the default camera and some with Fig Camera’s beta) while further improving my upcoming positive film LUT. I’ll probably sell it on Gumroad for a few bucks. I have no marketing channels and no hope that anyone will ever find it. Other than that, the main thing holding it back is that I have no name for it.
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Other activities
On Wednesday I saw Ben and Nate for a few drinks and dinner, which became cocktails till midnight and a S$230 expense I consider irresponsible in this economy.
On Friday we met my parents for a rare weekday lunch. It was at a restaurant attached to a gourmet grocer, and afterwards I found an entire suckling pig gutted and shrinkwrapped, on the bottom shelf of a freezer, ready to be taken home for S$285 (pic below, you’ve been warned). How many people would know what to do with that?!
On Sunday we went out to watch our niece play netball in a youth tournament. It was my first time watching the sport at all, and it struck me as a strange cross between basketball and golf. It’s all running and passing until someone gets close to the basket, then everything stops and they take their sweet time to shoot.
Over the weekend I convinced Kim to play some co-op games on the Switch. We started with the indie game Blanc, which mostly has a unique art style going for it: hand-drawn and scanned sketches turned into a 3D world. The gameplay — a baby fox and deer journeying together through a snowy world — was unfortunately boring.
Then we tried It Takes Two, a bigger budget affair from EA, which Munz recommended to me awhile back as a non-gamer who enjoyed it with her boyfriend. This was surprisingly a lot more fun despite the higher difficulty level (from several platforming sections while wrangling a 3D camera). It helps that you have unlimited lives, and can learn by dying.
IYKYK, but we have been bingeing The Devil’s Hour on Amazon Prime Video, a UK drama series that came out in 2022 and whose second season just premiered. We watched the first episode when it came out then never went back for more. That was a mistake. It looks like a cop show, but with something supernatural going on, and it’s kinda creepy/scary to watch alone in the dark, but towards the second season it starts to show its hand and I was hooked.
MUBI has a few films by François Truffaut in my region, and they’re all due to leave today, so I’ve been trying to watch as many as I can. In order, I saw The 400 Blows (1959), Stolen Kisses (1968), Antoine and Colette (1962), The Last Metro (1980), and Jules and Jim (1962). I probably watched The 400 Blows in my late teens but it reads so differently when you’re closer to the parents in age than the child.
I’m planning to see his last film, Confidentially Yours (1983), later today after posting this. What can I say? The dude had range. These films reinforce the notion I have of French cinema effortlessly, almost pathologically, blending genres. They go from tragedy and defeat to absurdist comedy in an instant — it all exists together, I guess.
I read and enjoyed Psalm for the Wild-Built, a cozy little novella by Becky Chambers that won the Hugo Award. It’s set in a neo-Luddite world where people lead more sustainable, less technology-driven lives after all their robots became sentient one day and decided they would live separately from humans.
My weekly ‘Going to the Apple Store’ streak continued on Monday when I accompanied my dad for his demo of the Vision Pro. Rather than use my unit with an imprecise fit, I thought it’d be better for him to get the proper experience, and sure enough, he had completely different strap and light seal sizes from mine. He’s had some experience with immersive headsets, mainly from flying his FPV drone and other vehicles, but in terms of interacting with spatial UIs and XR objects this was a first. He came away very impressed, apart from the usual complaints (weight, price). He wasn’t planning to buy one going in, but I wonder if he’s thinking about it now.
Aside: One hobby I’ve been meaning to play around with in the Vision Pro is sculpture, which is much more intuitive (read: idiot friendly) to do in 3D space with your hands than on an iPad with a Pencil. There’s just not a great app for it that I’ve found yet, although it’s possible at a blobby sort of level in AirDraw — Finger Paint, so I’m starting there.
If Apple still made their AirPort wireless networking hubs (many smart people still say to this day that discontinuing them was a strategic error), I might have had cause to visit a store again next week. Since they don’t, I bought a set of TP-Link WiFi mesh routers instead and set them up over the weekend. One of the power adapters was faulty out of the box, but fortunately our old system’s were compatible, so that’s sorted.
Aside: There was a tense moment on Friday night when a ‘pop’ was heard just before the power cut out in one section of the home. It turned out a wall-connected USB charging hub had burnt out, fortunately without damaging anything. It was a Lencent brand 65W GaN thing that I bought off Amazon Prime last October, with a 4.6-star rating. I was complacent to attribute trust based on its Amazon profile rather than my own knowledge — I’d never heard of Lencent and haven’t since — and won’t be making that mistake again. It’s only slightly more reputable Chinese brands from here on out!
FWIW I’ve had mixed experiences with Anker, but they’re probably the best/safest from a brand equity perspective. I’ve also seen a lot of people using Ugreen products. I have a charger and a couple of cables from them, but their website has typos like you’d find in a phishing email.
Our old pre-COVID system was WiFi 5, and we had nearly 30 internet-enabled devices on it, which I think might have contributed to recent connectivity issues. I have bored Kim to tears with explanations and theories all week, so I’ll spare you. In short, I spent $400 I hadn’t budgeted for to upgrade us to a WiFi 6E mesh that claims to have self-learning AI and support for 200 devices. The app is miles better than our old Netgear Orbi’s, letting you configure nearly everything from your phone — it’s bizarro world over at TP-Link because the web-based admin panel has nearly no settings. Anyway, we’re future ready and could move up to 2Gbps internet when our current contract expires.
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🎮 I’m still checking into Zenless Zone Zero daily to claim log-in rewards and farm materials. I’m observing that this routine is actually a barrier to getting more stuck into proper games. Devious.
🎮 Nevertheless, started on a charming and well-written visual novel about the afterlife called Ghostpia: Season 1, on the Nintendo Switch. I saw launch ads for it during our last trip to Japan and bought the global release late last year, but I’m only starting it now. I think it’s pronounced Ghost-o-pia in Japan, and the name implies “ghost town”, like the Latin topos for place, as in utopia. It’s the rare visual novel that doesn’t ever feel like it’s wasting time or insulting your intelligence.
📺 Started watching Sunny, Apple TV+’s new show starring Rashida Jones and a robot that kinda looks like a Pepper 2.0. It’s an A24 production, set in a surreal other-universe Japan that feels like a variant of the world in Severance. Such an odd vibe, which I suppose adds to the “nothing is what it seems” mystery here. She’s an American expat whose Japanese engineer husband and son supposedly died in an accident, leaving her an advanced AI robot to figure things out with.
📺 Absolutely thrilled that Jinny’s Kitchen has returned for a second season on Amazon Prime Video, sending Korean celebrities to run a restaurant in Iceland this time. Like before, each episode is essentially a two-hour movie, and there’s something about this formula that makes even the most mundane moments (restocking a fridge, taking orders, dicing vegetables) so watchable. Other reality shows can only dream of including this much detail on a weekly basis without losing an audience.
🎬 Saw In the Realm of the Senses (1976) on MUBI despite warnings from Nic not to watch it. Is it uncomfortably, unbelievably graphic? Yes. It’s also a very powerful and competently made film based on a bananas true story. 3.5 stars.
🎬 Saw Heroes of the East (1978) next, a classic Shaw Brothers kungfu flick by Lau Kar-Leung starring Gordon Liu, both in top form. It’s actually a cross-cultural martial arts romcom, with action scenes so good I don’t think we know how to do them anymore. One of the best I’ve seen, up there with Dirty Ho (1979). 4.5 stars.
🎬 Saw Friends and Strangers (2021), a very enjoyable indie Australian film. Gorgeous photography, care evident in every shot. The story meanders and discharges detail wherever it feels like it, leaving so much off screen, and the result is “dreamy”? Aside from the Australian identity crises, I was surprised it felt a bit like Singapore, where everyone knows someone you know, and nobody has figured out what life’s about. I much preferred the first half with Emma Diaz in it; the second felt like a portrait of bumbling male incompetence that no one needs to see more of, really. 4 stars.
🎬 Saw Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F (2024) and wasn’t as disappointed as I expected to be! It took a little warming up to, but Eddie Murphy looks like he’s having fun again and that’s enough for me. 3 stars.
🎬 If you’re in the mood for a mellow drama shot entirely on an actual luxury cruise ship on an actual voyage, Steven Soderbergh’s Let Them All Talk (2020) has got you. Meryl Streep, Gemma Chan, Candice Bergen! Oh it’s about a writer trying to write a sequel to her best work, and catching up with two old friends she hasn’t seen in decades. 3.5 stars.
🎬 I also really enjoyed Upgraded (2024), an Amazon Prime Video original romcom about the art world starring Camila Mendes, Marisa Tomei, and Giles from Buffy The Vampire Slayer (Anthony Head). It’s derivative AND fun! 3.5 stars.
🎧 Tons of new music this week but I haven’t had time to hear Eminem, Cigarettes After Sex, Tori Amos, or Travis yet. I’ve heard Griff’s debut album, Vertigo (polished pop from Sigrid’s side of the aisle), and Clairo’s Charm (a lush, beautiful vintage sound).
sangsara.net 