sangsara.net

Tag: Amazon Prime

  • Week 30.23

    Week 30.23

    In the early years of mobile connectivity, we counted ourselves lucky to get 1GB of data per month. Fifty bucks bought you a plan, a phone, and a two-year leash. These days? I’m sitting on an 88GB, 5G mountain for half the price. Thank you, technological progress. But since COVID and working from home, I’m only using a fraction of my allowance.

    Yet, like any good consumer, I want more. So I switched providers from Circles to M1, lured by a plan that comes with 150GB at the same price. But there’s a catch, M1’s a little disorganized and provided me no updates on when my number would be ported. Right now I have two eSIMs jostling for control in my phone.

    Their checkout process also insisted on a “delivery” date. Delivery of what exactly? I’d already gotten the QR code for my eSIM over email. Assumed it was just a holdover from the old physical SIM days, too much bother to scrub from the website. But no, someone actually turned up to my doorstep at the appointed time, just to verify I’d activated my eSIM, then had me sign off on it.

    Let me repeat: M1 sends a flesh-and-blood human to confirm I got an email, but can’t drop me a line to say when my number would switch over. I had to spend 10 minutes on a support call to find out that it’s scheduled for next week. Will the data bonanza make up for this frustration? We’ll see.

    ===

    On a mellower note, I started to make use of my dormant brain.fm account again, to provide background music while I read and work. Is it pseudo-science? Beats me. But I like most of the tunes and it seems to work. The app has been significantly upgraded since I last saw it, with many more genres of music to choose from, and the option to vary the intensity of their brainwave-enhancing signals (which sound like wobbles).

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

    With a little help from brain.fm and last week’s recommended music from Alice Sara Ott, I finished Sayaka Murata’s Life Ceremony, and also Hervé Le Tellier’s The Anomaly, and Lee Child’s 20th Jack Reacher novel, Make Me. Of all those, I can recommend The Anomaly most wholeheartedly. It’s a book you probably shouldn’t know anything about going in. If you really must know, it has science and mystery elements, but that’s all I’ll say. I’m now reading real-life astronaut Chris Hadfield’s The Apollo Murders.

    Not bad for a guy who’d only finished one book two months ago, now 8 out of 12 down on his Goodreads Challenge.

    ===

    I’ve been listening to Tessa Violet’s new album, MY GOD!, and it’s a playful catchy affair. Incredibly, Blur have reunited with a new album, The Ballad of Darren, and I couldn’t find much wrong with it after one playthrough. Maybe it’s the halo of how good the last Gorillaz album was after a decade of underwhelming me, but I think Damon Albarn is back.

    I made a commitment to use my AirPods Max more — they’ve been neglected because they’re somewhat of a pain, both literally and figuratively: the headband’s a little tight for me and the Smart Case remains a questionable design, adding friction to the simple act of turning a pair of headphones on and off.

    Two things have improved the experience for me. First, a dubious Reddit post from another big-headed owner who suggested bending the metal frame open, briefly straightening them open to form a 180º line, to ease the squeeze. This could obviously damage them, so do it at your own risk. But I think it’s made a difference. This is something you can’t do with the plastic Beats Studio Pros, sadly.

    Secondly, an updated audiogram from the free Mimi hearing test app. The last time I did the test was 2021, and I got slightly different results this time. I highly recommend everyone does this if they’re old enough to worry about losing some hearing. Thankfully my ears are still pretty good.

    Saving your test results as an audiogram effectively personalizes your listening experience on AirPods and supported headphones, applying an EQ profile that compensates for the frequencies you’ve become less sensitive to. You’ll hear music the way you used to, once you dive deep into the iOS Settings menu and find the section on Audio Accessibility, and turn on “Headphone Accommodations”.

    ===

    Another app that played a part in this week is Darkroom, the photo editor for iOS and Mac that I’ve mentioned a few times. They launched a portal to showcase presets made by community members, and kindly put a spotlight on some of the ones I’ve made and shared. You can access this catalog through a new button in the app, too.

    As Twitter is living on borrowed time (this was the week their petulant man-child owner pushed out a hasty, clumsy rebrand to “X”), I decided to republish my thread of Darkroom presets to… Threads. Annoyingly, it’s still buggy and messed up the chronological order of my posts. Nevertheless, I think they’re all still there, and I’ll post future presets to the same link.

    New ones I shared to celebrate being on the presets portal:

    E1: This is my reproduction of the popular E1 filter in VSCO. I wrote that it adds warmth, color, and film vibes in a single tap, and it truly is quite a versatile everyday effect.

    MEM3: This is another strong effect from my nostalgia-forward MEM series. It lightens and fades images with a blue-magenta cross-processed wash. You pretty much lose all highlight detail, but it’s a good look for certain scenes.

    MEM4: I said that this creates a warm and dusty sunset feel, but it’s really also great for low-light scenes. Check out the last photo sample through the link. Again, you do stand to lose detail in contrast areas, so vary the strength to taste.

    ===

    Growing up in the 80s, I caught reruns of Takeshi’s Castle on Chinese TV channels with no context, and no ability to understand what was said. On reflection, I grew up watching a lot of shows visually rather than verbally, which continues to this day whenever I choose to watch movies on planes without headphones.

    Anyway, Takeshi’s Castle, for the uninitiated, was a long-running Japanese game show (?) featuring normal people tackling an obstacle course of heinous physical challenges that would make insurance men squeamish. It was a precursor of Ninja Warrior, American Gladiators, and yet a different beast: whimsical, insane, hilarious. Why the name? It was hosted by the infamous Takeshi “Beat” Kitano, who played the err… lord of the castle that 100 contestants each week tried to storm. Here’s the Wikipedia article.

    I’m pretty sure you all know this, anyway. It’s a cornerstone of modern media culture! Turn in your TV licenses if you don’t.

    So imagine my elation while browsing Amazon Prime Video in bed and suddenly seeing a new Takeshi’s Castle, a 2023 reboot! We’ve seen two of the eight available episodes, and it’s still gloriously fun. It’s still not rolled out globally, as some markets will get English voiceovers (the UK one will have comedian Romesh Ranganathan as one commentator), but I wouldn’t watch it any other way than in the original Japanese, and maybe even with the subtitles off for old times’ sake.

    ===

    On Sunday we visited the Illustration Arts Fest where some talented friends were showing their work. It was packed, and probably the most crowded place I’ve been in since Tokyo. Let’s hope I don’t get COVID again.

    The most common theme was cute cartoon cats. On stickers, posters, keyrings, enamel pins, you name it. Some other artists were out there, scratching their own freaky itches and looking for kindred spirits in the crowd. We bought a couple of things for the apartment, including these little guys below from our friend Reg at Ocio Ceramics. A dumpling and a frog. Cuteness sells.

  • Week 20.23

    • A correction: Last week I said that the the 10th Anniversary release of Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories would have been better if mixed in Dolby Atmos spatial audio. It actually IS! But the entire album isn’t labeled as such because the “second side” of outtakes and behind-the-scenes bits aren’t. With that knowledge, I’ve been enjoying it on headphones and need to put aside more time to hear it again. We regret the error!
    • There’s been a slight Korean bent to the week, in that I’ve had KBBQ and soju twice in four days, watched a lot of Jinny’s Kitchen on Amazon Prime Video, and am actually listening to BTS intentionally for the first time as I type this.
    • Jinny’s Kitchen is a reality TV show about a pop-up restaurant in Mexico run by five of Korea’s most recognizable stars, who go largely unnoticed by their customers. Each of its 10 episodes is 1.5 hours long, which is practically feature film length! They could be much shorter, but it focuses on a lot of mundane, repeated scenes like the staff rolling gimbaps, cooking noodles, and plating fried chicken. Perhaps that’s the point, giving fans a chance to watch them doing normal people things? Or maybe it’s normal for Korean reality TV? Is it designed to be left running in the background? Or was it an Amazon Prime Video decision to hit streaming time KPIs?
    • In any case, Korean soft power is wave after wave of these campaigns. The show should be boring but it kinda works, plus it has an unheard-of 9.2/10 score on IMDB. The best moments for me are when someone does recognize one of them, like when an incredulous customer sees V from BTS (59 million followers on Instagram) pop his head out from the back, and likens it to Drake running a restaurant in a country where no one knows who he is. Watching celebs do normal people things is straight out of the idol playbook and it works — I’m listening to their music with an open mind now, and we’re talking again about visiting the country someday.
    • The Anbernic RG35XX arrived and it’s a nice little device that really recalls the Game Boy series in spirit. It feels good in the hand and the screen is bright and beautiful — the community seems to recommend replacing its software with something called GarlicOS but it looks like wayyy too much trouble. The thing just works out of the box, and I’m not in the mood to start modding it. It still blows my mind you can have this for S$90 including shipping, and it does come with uhh lots of software loaded, so it’s great value if you’re looking for a gift.
    • I’m still going strong in Breath of the Wild on the Nintendo Switch, in the final stretch but honestly still in no shape to face some of the game’s stronger enemies. I’m now thinking that if/when I eventually finish this, I’ll probably have to take a break before starting the sequel, Tears of the Kingdom, given that it reuses the same world map and I won’t be in any mood to cover it all over again. Note to self: don’t pre-order any more games unless they comes with discounts or exclusive bonuses!
    • We had a nail painting team event at work, for which the turnout was more male than female because of scheduling conflicts and maybe even a bit of self selection, so I’m sporting gray/lilac nails at the moment. It’s probably been over 20 years since I’ve had colored nails, and I think I’ll keep this going now that I’m too old to be told off and it’s not such a big deal.

    I asked ChatGPT to analyze my post and it suggested I add a conclusion. I said “you do it, then”. Here’s what we agreed on:

    This week has been a whirlwind of diverse experiences and discoveries. From immersing myself in the captivating sounds of Random Access Memories in Dolby Atmos to exploring the world of Korean soft power through Jinny’s Kitchen, I’ve been on a journey of curiosity and appreciation.

    The Anbernic RG35XX has provided me with nostalgic gaming moments, while progressing in Breath of the Wild has been both thrilling and daunting. Even a simple nail painting team event at work has reminded me of the freedom to embrace self-expression.

    These experiences have sparked my curiosity and inspired me to share my thoughts as a writer. Life is full of opportunities to explore, connect, and find inspiration in unexpected places. So, whether it’s through music, cuisine, gaming, or the little joys, embrace the unknown and discover the stories and experiences that await.

    Thank you for joining me on this adventure, and until next time!

  • Week 19.23

    The new Legend of Zelda game, Tears of the Kingdom, launched this week about five or six years after the last one, which I never finished. I pre-ordered the new game, of course, planning to join the rest of the world on launch day, exploring together and participating in conversations online, collectively figuring out unique solutions using the game’s open-ended physics engine. For those who haven’t seen it, the new game is sort of a sandboxy, Minecrafty affair where you can weld stuff together and build novel mechanical solutions to obstacles, almost certainly in a different manner than your friends. Think rudimentary cars from planks of wood, or hovercrafts, or the forest booby traps from Rambo First Blood.

    But the guilt of never fully playing Breath of the Wild was getting to me, and I’ve been trying to get back into it over the last few weeks. Despite memories to the contrary, I’d made shockingly little progress in my 40+ hours of gameplay, spending most of my time bumbling about the countryside and climbing mountains, instead of conquering the Divine Beasts (1 out of 4) and collecting quality stuff. It seemed wrong to jump ahead to the sequel while I’m finally seeing what the last one had to offer.

    So in this past week I’ve made more progress than in the previous four years: conquered two more Divine Beasts, got the Master Sword at last, and uncovered most of the world map (two more areas to go).

    ===

    Craig Mod tweeted and tooted about having had enough of the iPhone’s (14 Pro, I assume) overprocessed look, and said he was making Halide his default camera app. Huh? But how does that help, I thought, unless he means to shoot in non-ProRAW RAW all the time (which is a thing Halide does: shoot in traditional RAW files which don’t involve the “Photonic Engine” processing pipeline). After some poking about, I realized something I should have ages ago: by turning off “Enable Smartest Processing” in Halide’s settings and choosing HEIC as the output format, you can actually take regular old (non-RAW) photos that look more natural and have more editing latitude! This effectively cancels out the iPhone 14 Pro’s image quality regressions.

    The overstimulated look of the default camera is one of the main reasons I hardly took any phone photos on my recent vacation to Japan, but if only I’d known… I could have! So with that, Halide won an instant annual subscription from me, and I now have a complication on my Lock Screen that launches straight into it.

    My toot about this was boosted by Mod, making it my most “engaging” Mastodon post ever, at 44 likes and 12 boosts.

    You have to see a comparison to understand how obnoxiously oversharpened and artificial the Photonic Engine is on the 14 Pro’s 48mp sensor for some reason. It increases local contrast and highlights texture “detail” that does not look like what you see in real life. It’s a Clarity slider turned all the way up, and I’m not a fan of Clarity sliders. The example below is a corner crop from two larger photos, not edited in any other way.

    Left: iPhone 14 Pro’s default processing | Right: Halide’s “dumb” processing is loads better

    ===

    My AI experiments this week have been around trying to teach ChatGPT to write better poetry. I posted a few days ago about getting it to do a critical reading of a poem, wherein I was completely stunned by its comprehension skills. But writing good poetry, not just gimmicky rhyming lines, that should be a different thing.

    I semi-accidentally discovered that asking a “persona” (that I’d established in another chat instance to test the idea of using an AI prompted with a human backstory as a customer research proxy) to write poetry yielded subjectively better results than when I asked a brand new ChatGPT instance. The mere suggestion that the bot’s point of view should draw references from vaguely described life experiences and preferences seemed to make a difference to what it spat out. Which is why many SF stories have AIs that don’t know they’re AIs, I guess, and they have memories of childhoods that never happened.

    Here’s a poem that “Frank” (quite a salaryman-type personality) wrote about retirement:

    A lifetime spent in labor’s thrall,
    In structured days and office halls.
    Oh, to retire, to end the grind,
    To leave the corporate world behind.

    The dawn of leisure’s quiet grace,
    In this new, unhurried pace.
    Days unbound by ticking clocks,
    Unfettered as the wandering fox.

    Yet in this expanse so vast,
    Shadows of the past are cast.
    Habits of a lifetime past,
    In this new role, steadfast.

    A time of freedom, yet confined,
    By boundaries of the seasoned mind.
    Retirement’s paradox, I find,
    Is having time, yet being time-blind.

    Wow! No? It was coming up with absolute drivel before I handed the job over to Frank in another window. Side note: I started paying for ChatGPT Plus, just to have access to GPT-4; it’s a much better poet than the default GPT 3.5 model.

    So lately I’ve been working on giving feedback to an poetry-writing AI that I named Penrose and instructed to believe in itself as a 50-year-old professor of creative writing and philosophy, who’s bad with money, had two failed “great loves” because of their selfish acts, grew up in Boston, now works in London, and so on.

    Here’s one of the first things it wrote:

    In the chilled reflection of a London morn,
    I see a face, lines etched by yesterday’s turmoil.
    Cracks, not of frailty but life, loud in their silent form,
    That’s you, mate, and it’s all right.

    Witness the march of years, the dance of decades,
    In the ceaseless play of ambition and regret.
    Weaknesses? They’re the worn pennies in your pocket,
    The unpaid bills of your character, yet, not your debt.

    They’re the stumbles on cobblestones,
    The missteps in Milan’s echo-filled alleys.
    Not a damning verdict, but life’s hasty loans,
    A ledger, not of losses, but of rallies.

    In this world where even stone yields to rain,
    We’re all apprentices to time, chiseling away in vain.
    We’re all works, works under the master’s patient hand,
    Unfinished, flawed, yet, in that, something grand.

    ===

    • I haven’t been able to bring myself to watch more of Amazon Prime Video’s Citadel beyond the first two episodes. A colleague said he quit after 10 minutes. It’s reportedly one of the most expensive TV shows ever made, at an average of $50M per episode.
    • Silo on Apple TV+ has been very good so far. It’s a little bit YA sci-fi, a little Hunger Gamey, a little Snowpiercey (but better).
    • I saw a segment on NHK about how this iconic street corner featured in Slam Dunk has been inundated by tourists now that Japan is open again. They interviewed pilgrims from S. Korea, China, and Taiwan who said they just had to come down and see it — “if you love anime at all, this place is a must”. So I decided to get started on the ancient anime, which Netflix has 8 seasons of. The day after seeing episode 1, I ended up standing behind a guy on the train watching the show on his phone.
    • The 10th Anniversary Edition of Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories is out, and the album still holds up extremely well for me. If only they’d come back to remix it in Spatial Audio, that would have been incredible.

  • Week 13.23

    • We traveled from Kobe to Hiroshima via Shinkansen, then went back to Tokyo for a few days until a red eye flight back to Singapore on Saturday. As with most holidays, it didn’t feel long enough; I could have used another week. But I’m thoroughly pooped from all the walking and general lack of sleep. It was wonderful to see Japan again after five years, and our chat with the old taxi driver who spoke English with us on the way to Haneda Airport indicated that Japan might almost be as happy to have us tourists back. I fantasize about dropping in for another week within the next year, but who knows how long it’ll be again.
    • Hiroshima felt very different from Kobe, partly because of its terrible history, and the gravity of it which pulls every experience towards a discussion about peace, awareness, and suffering. It has quite a few museums, and they all inevitably address the atomic bomb in some way. I had bad dreams each night. I’m not normally one to believe in this sort of thing, but there is so much death there and so recently, that my first thought was “bad vibes”.
    • While we were there, though, the sakura bloomed fully across the city and it was beautiful to see.
    • We visited a Picasso exhibition at the Hiroshima Museum of Art (beautiful building, galleries were a bit dingy though in the basement), and also lots of art and exhibitions dedicated to remembering the atomic bomb at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). We didn’t have energy or syllables left for the Hiroshima Prefectural Art Museum. MOCA was wonderful though, newly renovated after two and a half years and opened for less than two weeks when we visited.
    • Did you know Picasso created a series dedicated to the horrors of the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima? No? What are these then, AI-generated photos from Midjourney v5?
    • After many years of being a Go Go Curry fan curious about Champion’s Curry, the Kanazawa-style curry franchise that Go Go supposedly ripped off down to the signature yellow, I finally got a taste of it. And… it was sadly disappointing. It’s soundly beaten by Go Go’s richer flavor and dedication to excess — there’s no preset that comes with the works. On this trip, if I had to rank curries, Hinoya might come first, followed by Coco Ichibanya, closely followed by Go Go in third and Champion’s in last place.
    • I saw a Japanese toothpaste ad of some sort that demonstrated people brushing their teeth in a curious way: holding their brushes like pens or chopsticks. Is that how everyone does it? I’ve never seen it. Perhaps it’s time for a new Japanese Wisdom Fad to go global: the secret art of teeth cleaning. Anyway I tried it out for a laugh and was surprised by the ergonomic improvement! Holding the toothbrush in pen grip means your elbow stays close to the body rather than sticking out, and your forearm is perpendicular to the ground. This gives you more power in the up-down motion by moving your entire arm rather than your wrist. Combine that with the added directional precision from being able to move your fingers, and it feels easier to do those small away-from-the-gumline strokes you’re meant to do, versus holding in an overhand grip.
    Please excuse the iPhone finger sketch
    • You may remember that I became quite fond of watching a live street webcam in Shinjuku about a year ago, leaving it up on the bedroom projector as a sort of video wallpaper or magic window into another world while I read or did other things. Well, we finally got to stand on that very street and see ourselves on the screen! With tourism back, the street is much busier than it was a year ago, uncomfortably so, but now I finally know what the inside of the ramen restaurant looks like, and confirmed my suspicions that there’s a gap under the steps of the KBBQ place where the rats probably hang out. We waved at the camera and tooks a couple of photos from a street-level POV. What’s great was that there were many other people obviously there to see the cameras too… my weird little Kabukicho webcam community!
    • I ended up not finding very much to buy in terms of electronic souvenirs. I don’t need another camera or headphones, as mentioned a couple of weeks back, and I couldn’t even bring myself to buy a phone case that I don’t need and that will be obsolete in half a year when the iPhone 15 comes out. I did however get a little $12 plastic robot at Don Quijote that plays their unforgettable jingle with the push of a button. It’s going to get a lot of use in my home, I think.
    • Wait that’s not correct, we got a portable massage gun called an Exagun Hyper from the Doctor Air brand. Not an insignificant factor in this decision was the advertising campaign featuring Ryoko Yonekura, also known as Doctor-X in the TV series of the same name. She was clearly hired for that reference alone and seems to relish it. I’m kinda sure they even pronounce Doctor Air with the same flourish that “Doctor-X” is usually delivered with.
    • If anyone in Singapore is wondering why Netflix removed the first six seasons of Doctor-X and now only has Season 7, it may be a licensing issue with Amazon. Seasons 1–5 are now on Prime Video locally, so you have a chance to catch up and hopefully Season 6 will turn up someday. Be warned though, this is not strictly speaking good TV. It’s a cheesy, overly dramatic manga-style live action show about a doctor with miraculous surgery skills and no social ones. Like House but turned up even further.
    • I also got some tees and socks from FamilyMart, because I’m always on the lookout for good black t-shirts and their white/green/blue brand socks were an internet sensation a year or so ago. Oh, and some sake straight from their Kobe breweries. That’s about it for physical souvenirs.
    • What I have brought back intangibly, though, is a renewed enthusiasm for gaming on mobile and the Nintendo Switch — I didn’t bring my Switch along and now I’m dying to play through my backlog. It’s hard to explain but the media and cultural environment there for gamers is immersive. You see giant ads for Splatoon 3 in the subway. Billboards and TV spots for mobile games like Dislyte and Genshin Impact. Late night shows on TV where people play trading card games. Most of these games aren’t even Japanese in origin, but they’re part of the landscape and it’s encouraging? Inspiring? To feel your hobby validated as a visible part of society. Nearly none of that is the case in Singapore, the irl city.

    A selection of (sakura-centric) photos from this week follows. Please rotate your iPhone to landscape because WordPress’s masonry layout somehow doesn’t work on narrow screens!

  • Week 5.23

    We got our fourth vaccine shots today. Based on historical results, I’m going to be ill tomorrow and she’ll be fine. It’s been about four hours and I’m already feeling a little lightheaded and tired.

    It feels like it’s been raining here almost continuously since late December — dark all the time, and practically every day we get storms that last most of the day or night. And so it feels unusually cool and damp indoors, and our dehumidifiers have been working overtime to get clothes dry and keep mold at bay.

    This Chinese/Lunar New Year period is often associated with blazing, cloudless skies, and sweating through one’s new red clothes while shuttling around to visit relatives, which makes this year an outlier. And it’s not just me saying it! Several taxi drivers have used this observation as a conversation starter these past few weeks.

    And every year, there’s an outsized “Hong Bao” lottery draw that generates long queues at betting outlets. I bought a single ticket for fun while in a convenience store one night, and in the process of getting the link above have discovered that I’m sadly not one of the three winners of the S$12M prize. Or a consolation prize, even.

    ===

    I generated some cityscape illustrations using a mix of anime and artwork keywords with Midjourney (no artist names), and got some surprisingly great compositions — good enough that I’m using one of them as my phone’s wallpaper now. And then just to mix things up, I asked it to put Godzilla in the cities, and that actually worked.

    ===

    TV
    We finished all 10 episodes of Echo 3 on Apple TV+, a quasi-action series involving a group of special forces types conducting some personal business in Columbia. It’s not a straightforward, fast-moving Jack Ryan sort of show, although it could have been. Its typographic title styles actually reminded me of 80s-era Golan–Globus films — a look and feel and attitude I wish Hollywood would unironically revive. But no, Echo 3 has arthouse ambitions and slows things down with gauzy dream images, flashbacks, and psychologically troubled characters. Which I can’t say I cared that much for! 3/5

    We’ve now been subscribed to HBO for a full week and only started using it yesterday. The Last of Us is good television after all, not leaning too much on the game beyond key pieces. My main complaint so far is that shots of the wider world look too much like how I remember the game: CGI rather than realism.

    Something odd is happening here in terms of anime licensing. SPY×FAMILY started out on Netflix, then new episodes appeared simultaneously on Amazon Prime Video. I thought this title sharing was a weird one-off, but now Chainsaw Man is no longer on Prime Video only; it’s also on Netflix. If only this disruption of exclusivity happened more so we didn’t have to subscribe to every service.

    Incidentally, I finished Chainsaw Man despite not really having any appetite for demon-hunting stories — this one is wild, weird, and really well done.

    Music
    Speaking of strange behavior, I discovered the #youngstar playlist on Apple Music at some point last year and enjoyed its focus: emerging J-Pop acts that have gained traction first on alternative channels like YouTube and TikTok. But when I checked it out today, I found an international version of the playlist, with English songs only.

    Checking in with Michael, I realized some localizing or geofencing was afoot because he still saw the Japanese version (with a US account, in Japan). Highly annoying that we aren’t given a choice which version we see; is it so difficult to just publish separate playlists like “#youngstar (Japan)”, “#youngstar (International)”? So we’ve done that, manually, for anyone else who wants them. You can send us the checks, Tim.

    The English-language #youngstar playlist still shows up on the J-Pop category page as a relevant item. I want to fix this, call me.

    Singling out one song off the Japanese playlist, I enjoyed XG’s Shooting Star and then found myself sucked into their YouTube channel for awhile. For a group that’s only put out about four full songs, they have a ton of content, from training sessions and mixtape-style demos to random behind-the-scenes videos like one where two members practice a rap segment for about seven minutes. The polish on the Shooting Star video reminds me of early Blackpink, and I think these girls are going to be huge (they have 1.1M YouTube subscribers now). It helps that they sing in English, Japanese, and Korean. How do you even source talent like that, and seven of them? Headhunters and recruiters in every other industry need to learn from the music business.

  • Week 50.22

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

    ===

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

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

    ===

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

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

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

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

    ===

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

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

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

  • 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 18.21

    • COVID cases have re-emerged in the community here, after many months of quiet, just a week after Bloomberg put Singapore at the top of a worldwide list of the safest cities to be right now. The main cluster is centered around a hospital where I believe a nurse was infected, and 27 linked cases have been discovered so far. The entire ward has been quarantined and thousands of patients in the hospital have been tested. Somehow, there are also cases at a secondary school, and I saw a headline about a spa technician being another one. So the scope of this will probably expand a little over the next week.
    • Already, the government has backtracked on its previous recommendations to have the majority of employees return to offices. We’re now being told to work from home where possible. It’s my opinion that this should simply be the default recommendation forevermore.
    • We tried watching more Runaways on Disney+ after last weekend, but it’s not sticking anymore. Its initial narrative energy, all nitrous borrowed from its subversive premise, has burnt out. Each episode is now a meandering, time-wasting YA cringefest. I think we’re going to quit it at this point in the middle of season 1.
    • I was in the mood for a dumb action movie over the weekend but had a lot of trouble finding one quickly on Netflix. I eventually settled on Bloodshot, which is a Universal Soldier-alike vehicle for Vin Diesel, who I remember starting out as a likable personality but by all accounts today is a horrible person/co-worker and something of a modern day Steven Seagal on the set. I made it maybe halfway through before quitting out of boredom.
    • If you’re looking for a recommendation: Without Remorse, starring Michael B. Jordan and out now on Amazon Prime Video, is not a shit film at all. In fact, it has fresh ideas that make for a couple of original-feeling set pieces.
    • Birdy has a new album out, which I discovered through this video for the single, Second Hand News. Apple Music’s liner notes says she had writer’s block after a breakup, and these new songs were shaken loose after she rediscovered Joni Mitchell’s “conversational songwriting”. I love it. It does feel a little Joni.

    ===

    Right after I published last week’s post with a picture of my new HEY.com t-shirt, the founders of the company released a controversial statement about how they wouldn’t allow “distracting” non-work discussions in the workplace anymore, which resulted in a PR shitshow and about 30% of their company publicly quitting on Twitter.

    I haven’t looked deeply into the details, but some parts I skimmed suggested a toxic environment and leadership style mixed with the ever-inflamed issues of race and politics in the US. Who knows if they’ll get the message and rebuild their culture, but I’d be upset if it means I’ll have to change my email address again. The amount of mental time spent on that deliberation last year was enough for another decade. I really like the service so far and would subscribe for a second year.

    ===

    Not at all related to a toxic workplace is the small announcement I can now make that I’ll be taking some time off in a few weeks to enjoy a long-wished-for sabbatical. The Currently Reading/Playing/Watching aspects of these updates will probably expand. I can’t wait to start on my backlog of games and books.

    As mentioned several times in the past few months, I’ve been feeling in need of a recharge and also interested in the concept of mini-retirements throughout life. Granted, I can’t travel in this current climate, but there’s still plenty of room to develop new interests, ideas, and directions. As I enter the second half (hopefully not third) of my so-called career, it seems like it’s worth taking a wider view of what other kinds of value can be extracted from the ever-diminishing energy and light of this short stay on Earth. Maybe I’ll get into finger painting?

    A few weeks ago while writing one of these posts, I referenced an article about the nature of work, and was slightly irritated by its very broad definition. It used “work” to encompass all labor, whether for the purposes of making a living or not. Contributions to society, to one’s family, towards your own interests and goals — all of it was called work. I preferred using the word to mean paid labor only, and thought it was quite a privileged stance to include all sorts of things one freely chooses to do. There are too many people toiling at their limits to stay fed and sheltered, dreaming of the day they can finally rest in the absence of work: retirement, the promised realm of reward.

    However now that I’m on the precipice of free time, I can see a little dimly through that lens. For those with the opportunity to opt out of paid labor, even if only for a little while, a new terror appears in the form of questioning “am I relevant? Am I valuable?” Freed from our contracts, we want to fill the gaping hole in our calendars with Meaningful and Impactful activities. We want to do work in any form. If we’re raising a child, we tell everyone it’s “a full-time job”. If we’re volunteering out of passion at a non-profit organization, we say we’re finally “doing our lives’ work”.

    I don’t disagree with this use of the word now. It’s not that we should label everything we do as work; it’s that all purposeful activity can fairly be called work. Anything that takes something out of you to produce an outcome is work, and we should all engage in it for as long as we can, even after we stop being traditionally employed. Your work can be about learning, teaching, or doing. It can find you producing or repairing, supporting or leading, communicating or meditating. It can be social or entirely solitary. Even when we take the time to rest, it’s in service of our work. Retirement might be the wrong state to aspire to, after all. It’s dying, becoming inert; all subtraction and invisibility.

    In this tiredness, I so badly want to do nothing, but I’m also afraid I won’t let myself. Or that I shouldn’t. We’ll see what comes of it in the months to come.