sangsara.net

Tag: Anime

  • Week 46.24

    Week 46.24

    I just got back from a Sunday night dinner date in the East at a newish place called Carlitos. It was new enough that it didn’t have a Swarm entry, so I made one. That reminded me that the Foursquare app is about to be shut down, and I’m choosing to be optimistic about Swarm’s future. We’ve been promised some meaningful changes in the coming year and I hope the rethink will bring check-ins back in vogue.

    Vision Pro updates

    Kim got back from her work trip and the first thing we did was head out to the Apple Orchard store to pick up the new Belkin Head Strap that everyone’s talking about. And not a day too soon, because it’s now backordered into mid-December!

    It is what it looks like: the top bit of Apple’s own Dual Loop Band, which you can attach to your existing Solo Knit Band — a rare best-of-both-worlds occurrence where the comfort, adjustability, and non-hair-mussing qualities of the Solo are met with the weight-relieving structure of a top strap. It works well, and I’m never taking mine off. I was using the Dual Loop before, but its thin strap that pulls upwards near the base of the skull cannot compare to the quality, fit, and comfort of the Solo band, which is such a wonderful design and product that it belongs in a museum.

    I haven’t tried Spigen’s slightly cheaper version, but having read many reviews of how poor its adjustment range is, I can’t recommend you take the risk. You’ll want to get the tightness just right, so Velcro is the right solution, and Belkin has rightly made it.

    Belkin was never an accessory maker I took too seriously in the last two decades, I mean, they made alright cases and cables, but I’d never choose them over first-party versions. That seems to be changing. This new Travel Bag for Vision Pro is further proof; it’s significantly smaller than Apple’s own Travel Case, and half the price.

    Career leak publisher Mark Gurman implied in the tweet above that Belkin is Apple’s secret partner; the one they go to when they want an accessory on the market but don’t want to make it themselves. The fact that they stock Belkin’s products in Apple Stores is supposedly proof. In this world, Apple knows the practical flaws of their own form-over-function accessories, and nudges Belkin (which is connected to Foxconn) into making uglier but more effective alternatives to keep customers satisfied. I don’t know if I believe it works exactly like this, but it’s not a bad arrangement? Let’s see if Belkin makes some kludge to access the power button on the underside of the new Mac mini, then.

    A new Apple Immersive Video (AIV) feature was released this week, and a music video at that. It’s the song Open Hearts by The Weeknd, and Apple’s own press release says it’s a limited time exclusive for Vision Pro. Interestingly, they’re inviting people to visit their nearest Apple Stores to watch it, which means we’re entering a phase where the retail arm is positioned as providing free public access to the Vision Pro experience, not unlike the ‘Today At Apple’ sessions where people can learn to draw or take better photos with Apple products, even if they don’t own any yet. This is fine, but the barrier to getting people off their butts to see something cool (for free!) is somehow extremely high these days. Is this because the culture promotes ownership hand-in-hand with enjoyment, and people don’t want to try a device they already know they can’t/won’t pay for? I can’t afford a bottle of 55-year-old Yamazaki but I’d sure as hell have a free taste if offered one.

    The new Apple Immersive Video from The Weeknd is worth experiencing. For one, it features a lot of movement but none of it is nauseating. I’m not sure if they’ve just figured out ‘one weird trick’ to make that possible.

    — Brandon Lee (@sangsara.bsky.social) 2024-11-15T05:26:48.235Z

    Anyway, the music video is very impressive, as I said on Bluesky after seeing it. There are a couple of magical moments, some achieved with special effects and some that are just beautiful to experience in immersive video. For some reason, it never feels disorienting or nauseating even though the camera travels at speed for a fair bit. I wonder if they’ve cracked the motion sickness code and are inserting buffer frames or using some other imperceptible technique, but this bodes well for future productions. Perhaps it’s just very smooth dollying and sticking to just one axis at any time.

    Apps

    Perplexity: Google continues to struggle with integrating its Gemini generative AI models with search results in a way that doesn’t spit out lies, but Perplexity has been working great for me since I started using it earlier this year. It could be the types of questions I ask it, or the default stance of skepticism I adopt when it answers them (the sources are there for you to check, if something feels off), but it’s been a net positive for me and I keep the widget on my iPhone’s Home Screen and use it several times each day. In fact, I thought everyone was using it, and was very surprised to learn while talking to Viv that she had never even tried it.

    This week, I got access to a year of Perplexity Pro for absolutely no money, thanks to a giveaway in Kevin Rose’s newsletter, and it feels great to have virtually no daily limit for Pro requests. Standard requests basically use a simpler model, think OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 series, which parses search results and writes an answer to your question. Pro requests use the latest models including Claude 3.5 and GPT-4o, and break your question down into its components before processing results, all to have a better chance of understanding what it is you’re trying to learn and answer accordingly.

    I’m aware of the icky implications of Gen AI scraping and that this mode of bypassing publishers will probably destroy the web as it currently works. Perplexity claims to be paying publishers that it sources answers from, on a per-query basis that sounds similar to music streaming services, so it might be a best-alternative model worth watching. It’s an analogy that makes sense because of how Napster upended that entire industry through theft and wanton disregard for copyright laws… kind of like what AI companies are doing now.

    ===

    Mattebox: Now here’s a name I never expected to hear again. I first mentioned Mattebox on this blog 13 years ago in December 2011, when I posted some photos I took on a holiday to Bintan. What I remember is that it was a camera app (as opposed to a photo editor), modeled on the ergonomics of the Konica Hexar camera (respect), and that its developer (Ben Syverson) cared enough to replicate a film-like response to clipped highlights. That torch is currently being carried by the upcoming Fig Camera app. It appears I even made/shared a filter for it called Velvius, which proves this has been a longer-standing hobby than I thought.

    Anyway it disappeared off the App Store a decade ago for reasons I never knew, and then reappeared last week completely rebooted and redesigned. It’s now an editor, but still leans hard into the making and sharing of filters. It even lets you share a filter as an App Clip, which means people can apply your looks without even installing the app — probably a first in the photography app world.

    I’ve played with it for a little while today and am quite impressed. It focuses on editing ProRAW files, even disabling tone mapping by default for a less HDR look (the trend these days), and a Pro subscription (S$40/yr) unlocks granular controls to dial in micro contrast, black levels, noise reduction, and so on. It even simulates physical diffusion filters, a feature that’s rare these days after the discontinuation of the Tiffen FX app around the same time Mattebox disappeared.

    The UI is MUCH better than before, and although I already own the RAW Power app which includes all the same adjustments mentioned above, I would rather do them in Mattebox because of how neatly they are laid out. For a “first” release, Mattebox 3.0 gets so many essentials right, from having a double-tap gesture to reset values, to saving edits non-destructively over originals. You can even export your filters as LUT and Lightroom preset files. I’d like to try making filters for it but will 1) need to subscribe and 2) learn to use its HSL curve system, which is different from what I’m used to.

    I’d love to see:

    • Undo/redo for adjustments
    • Indicators for RAW files in the photo picker
    • Using the system photo picker, actually, so you can view by media type, etc.
    • Grain tool

    Media activity

    • I finished reading Variable Star after two weeks and gave it 4 stars on Goodreads.
    • I started on Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, just because it recently won the Nobel Prize in Literature. I’m 32% through it and I can’t say it’s anything terribly special yet. I saw that Sara reviewed it on Goodreads seven years ago and (I’m paraphrasing) said it was the kind of mediocre East Asian book that Western readers just lap up.
    • I watched Megalopolis (2024) in one straight sitting, in a giant virtual theater in Vision Pro, and it kinda rocked. What a Taj Mahal-grade vanity project, a pastiche of Shakespearean and Capital-C for Cinematic bombast. Watching this, you wouldn’t think that Coppola knows anything about urban design or architecture, they’re just metaphors for the story he wants to tell about great (and very pretentious) thinkers who change societies. They’re just MacGuffins for a crazy CGI movie that owes as much to Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004) as it does Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). I typed that and then searched to see if anyone else made the same connection, and indeed they have. 4 stars.
    • We watched Look Back (2024). It’s an anime adaptation of Tatsuki Fujimoto’s one-shot manga work of the same name. It recently had a successful theatrical run in Japan, and I’ve been dying to see it since seeing the reactions online. It also played here, but I missed it, and it seemed weird going to the cinema for a film that clocks in at just 58 minutes. Amazon Prime Video secured the worldwide streaming rights, thankfully, and the whole time watching it I wondered why it wasn’t acquired by Apple TV+. That would have been a great fit. I don’t want to say too much about it, but it’s brilliant, beautiful, and a showcase of how animation can express feelings that live action could never. 4.5 stars.

    Can I just take a minute to show you this Labubu I saw hanging on someone’s bag on the train? It’s carrying a Chanel bag like the very one it’s attached to! That is just so super cute to me, I think I have a brain worm like the future American Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.

  • Week 45.24

    Week 45.24

    This felt like a very long week, and I’d say my mood has been pretty low on account of two cockroaches: Donald Trump winning his second presidency, and an actual one I found at home (the last time was a couple of months ago). The fact that Kim is out of town probably added to the anxiety.

    I’ve been keeping windows closed and things locked down, so my working theories for how the real one got in are troubling: it either crawled up a drain/sink or through a tiny gap along a false wall that I’ve since sealed with silicone. It was nearly dead, presumably from the poison I’d put out. I bet the ongoing renovations next door are also a factor; maybe they were driven out of their usual hiding places by the vibrations?

    The last time I wrote about this topic, Michael texted me to say that while he was used to the idea of encountering cockroaches in the home growing up in NSW, Australia, he simply hasn’t encountered any since living in Tokyo. Which I’m sure is an exception — shortly after, I opened TikTok and was shown a “day in the life of an unemployed woman in Tokyo” video, and she’d just found a dead cockroach in her kitchen — but I’ve put buying a holiday home in Tokyo back on my to-do list.

    On the other thing, I’m just deeply disappointed that someone who so explicitly displays who is he could be voted in again by many of the people he despises, and who will likely suffer the most over the next four years. As much as I have any right to be, I’m disappointed in American society, free markets, confrontation instead of collaboration as a default response, our collective governance of the internet, and the networks that propagate misinformation.

    I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about politics, and I didn’t even know how to describe my political mindset. I found this Political Compass quiz that maps your outlook, and scored more left and libertarian, but leaning towards authoritarianism. Maybe it’s a product of being Singaporean, but there are some things that I don’t want left up to a gullible and/or selfish public. But it’s just shocking that people would choose to install an authoritarian of Trump’s quality! Aren’t there any charismatic, intelligent, and attractive psychopaths we could have instead?

    ===

    Perhaps I set myself up for a downer of a second half of the week by spending too many days mostly shut in and binging mostly mediocre anime to make use of my new Netflix sub.

    There were some exceptions: I met Brian and Jussi for an evening beer along the river on the eve of the election. We thought it could go either way, but didn’t want to believe it. On the bus to town, I saw this older guy with cute plushies hanging from his backpack. Live your best life, dude. I still haven’t got a Labubu of my own yet. Over the weekend, I met Peishan and Cien for a rainy day brunch at Dough, where they have a really satisfying brunch plate (for about S$33 including tax). It included a “pancetta steak” — I guess a seared slab of pork belly — and awfully good scrambled eggs. I also stepped into a gym for the first time in my life that evening, not to work it off, but for a birthday party.

    But, here’s the anime in question.

    • Oshi no Ko: The second season finished strong, and the third season is sadly at least a year away. I liked its deep dive into the production of stage shows, and its very specific endorsement of the “Stage Around” format where the audience is surrounded by a 360º stage, and their seats rotate to bring different sets into view. The “IHI Stage Around Tokyo” theater opened in 2017 and closed this April, so I guess I’ll never get to experience it.
    • Terminator Zero: I’d heard so many good things about this new addition to the franchise, and with Production IG involved, I was ready for something cerebral and beautifully animated. While the art was alright and recalled classic 2000s anime to my untrained eyes, the story is unnecessarily drawn out and the conflict isn’t very interesting. I ended up watching it at 1.5x speed, which made it feel normal, that’s how sluggish it is.
    • Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft: I’ve had this series bookmarked on Netflix for a couple of years, I kid you not. There was an empty placeholder detail page for it, and I added it to my list before there was even a cover image for it. I’m pretty sure I read somewhere that it was going to be anime, but as it turns out, it’s an awful American animation. I quit in the middle of the first episode.
    • Solo Leveling: I watched the entire season and am already having trouble remembering it clearly. It’s based on a Korean fantasy manhwa that feels like an isekai, where a weak fighter gains access to a floating UI that no one else can see, suggesting that he’s living in a simulation, and then levels up (which no one else can do) to become a formidable fighter.
    • Wind Breaker: Pretty generic brawler story where a gang of high school delinquents ‘defend their town’. Might not finish this.
    • Ron Kamonohashi’s Forbidden Deductions: A comedic detective show I watched an episode of over a year ago and forgot about. That I’ve now picked up again instead of better shows because I hate myself?

    Oh, I also decided to watch The Substance (2024) while feeling lousy, which was not a smart decision because it’s so thoroughly depressing, but I loved it. It reuses some ideas and even shots from the director’s earlier short, Reality+ (2014), but is even more deranged and ham-fisted in its commentary on beauty than I could have ever imagined. French cinema must be protected at all costs. 4 stars.

    XG’s second mini-album/EP came out, along with a new single, Howling. I love that they’ve put a song out into the world with a very prominent “awoooooooo” in it, and better yet, it echoes the yell in Led Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song.

  • Week 44.24

    Week 44.24

    Monday got off to a good start when I finally landed one of the coveted booth seats at the co-working space. Up to then, they were always occupied by the time I got in, and it was a feat not repeated at any other point in the week. Because I’d only signed up for the month of October, and with Thursday the 31st being a public holiday (Deepavali, not Halloween), this chapter of drinking too much coffee and watching movies while surrounded by busy people has come to an end — let’s be honest, though, most of their screen time looks like chatting on Slack/WhatsApp and browsing the web.

    I’m feeling a sense of loss about it, actually. For starters, the renovation noise is set to continue next week and might drive me out of the house still, now without a place to go. But more than that, I was just getting used to the routine and would jokingly say to Kim, “I’m going to the office”. It’s akin to the loss of a ‘third place’, a social setting distinct from home and work. However, I don’t even have a second place these days!

    One thing that sitting still in front of an iPad for hours on end has highlighted is how important yet increasingly difficult it is to single-task. While thinking about my/our deteriorating attention span — that constant feeling of being pulled towards other tasks while in the middle of doing things I chose to do — I identified a root cause in myself: I have less trust in my memory these days. So when something occurs to me, say looking up a fact or sending someone a message, it’s harder to file it away for later follow-up, because I think I might forget. Past experience has probably taught me that I’ll forget.

    On one hand, I could make peace with that. So I’ll forget a thing or two; big deal! I don’t have to optimize every detail. Things can be allowed to slip and it’ll probably be fine. Or I could use the time-honored second brain productivity hack of… jotting thoughts down and then getting back to what I was doing? I may give that a go with the Quick Note button in my phone’s Control Center and see if it makes the distracted feeling go away.

    The filmmaker Lav Diaz is known for making extremely long movies. At 10 hours, his Evolution of a Filipino Family (2004) is probably only consumable in several sittings and is the ultimate test of patience and focus. Like Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (2014), it was shot over more than a decade, and you see the actors age for real.

    One could criticize its poor production values, shot in grainy and low-res black-and-white film and video, often with inadequate microphone coverage, or its loose editing and lack of action (its 10-hour runtime probably says something about Diaz’s attitude towards concision). But the message is in his medium, and I’ve found watching it to be a great meditative exercise; letting the mind alternately empty and gather and empty again as you watch the family slowly lead cattle from one end of the screen to the other or hold sparse conversations over meals, spread over minutes of near inaction. The first 2.5 hours passed effortlessly in a state of detached attention.

    I also managed to watch Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) on MUBI without much distraction. It’s a hell of a film, visually inventive and beautiful, with an opening sequence that you have to see to believe, going from sensual shots of skin to burned and scarred consequences of the atomic bomb. Which is the backdrop for this film about war, love, and memory.

    Having just visited Hiroshima for the first time last year, I was surprised to find so much of it familiar in this old work: the bombed-out dome, the peace museum, and its garden sculptures. It was also incredible to see its depiction of an interracial relationship between an Asian man and a white woman as equals. As far as I can tell, it was probably one of the first films to center such a couple.

    The first few Apple Intelligence features launched this week in iOS 18.1, and while many in the tech press seem unimpressed by these ‘basic’ capabilities, especially when compared to products from OpenAI, Google, and Meta, I’ve found them so impactful to the way I use my computing devices that I can’t imagine going back.

    • Apple also announced impressive M4 updates to the iMac, Mac mini, and MacBook Pro this week, but I don’t need to upgrade!

    For one, I can summarize long emails and webpages directly in Mail.app and Safari. My bank likes to send me long, jargon-filled market updates in its email newsletters, and now I can summon a quick paragraph that gets to the point.

    When I get back to my phone after some time away, I can see what would normally be stacks of messages and notifications summarized into a few lines. I’ll still read them anyway, but it’s great to get a preview so I can triage for urgency. This is also useful when getting Siri Announcements over AirPods. Say someone sends me a long string of messages, instead of having them all read out over my music, I can hear a summary and know whether it’s important enough to pull my phone out for.

    And coming back to the point about avoiding distractions, there’s a new focus mode called “Reduce Interruptions”, alongside others like “Work” and “Do Not Disturb”. This reads and assesses all your notifications with AI, and will only show you things that seem time-sensitive or important.

    There are also Writing Tools that I’ll be using to proofread this post before sending it out, and a Clean Up tool that can remove objects in photos using a generative model. It’s quite good, certainly enough for casual use, and I’ve seen online examples of it pitted against Adobe’s equivalent AI tools and actually coming out ahead in some situations. Plus, everything happens on device, which is great for data privacy reasons.

    A quick demo of the Clean Up feature in Photos.app

    One grumble I have, though, is that Apple appears to be reserving its upcoming Visual Intelligence feature (where you can point your camera at something and have the phone offer contextual information) for iPhone 16 models with the new Camera Control “button”. I hope they’ll make it work with the Action Button on iPhone 15 Pro models, but am preparing that I won’t have it until I upgrade to next year’s 17.

    In the meantime, I have found a new use for my Action Button: starting the Apple Music 1 radio station. This has proved super useful and convenient. If I’m anywhere with my AirPods in, getting some music going is now just a button press away, even without getting my iPhone out of my pocket.

    Take a minute to appreciate this ad that Apple made to celebrate the debut of this radio station back in 2015, back when it was called Beats 1 — a far better brand in my opinion. It was a simpler, more optimistic time. Watching this, I believed that a global internet radio station dedicated to great music, across all genres, could map differences in culture and unite us all.

    I must mention that Nintendo joined the music streaming app business this week. Nintendo Music is free for subscribers to the Nintendo Switch Online service (USD$19.99/yr), which I already am for purposes of playing games online and backing up saves from my Switch. However, the app is not available in Singapore as Nintendo’s online services are not officially available here — one has to create a US account instead. But complaining about Nintendo’s digital and worldwide strategy is a whole other post.

    So far, this music service is pure win. Classic first-party soundtracks from the best in the business, with curated playlists for different moods and activities, and the ability to “extend” some tracks to an hour’s length (it appears there’s more to this than just looping the songs) for use as background music? With more music continuously being added? It was enough to make me jump through the hoops of switching App Store accounts to get the app on my phone. And so I’ve been listening to the sounds of Animal Crossing: New Horizons again, feeling nostalgic for the early days of the pandemic when great music in a cozy game did unite the world during a very stressful time.

    • They should add Shortcuts support to the Nintendo Music app so I can start playing music via the Action Button.

    I may buy Nintendo’s upcoming Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp Complete smartphone app, which is their clever solution to keeping the live service mobile around after its servers shut down. You can buy a fully offline version for $10 (going up to $20 in January 2025), with all 7 years (!) of old in-app purchase content included. Current players with saves can resume their progress, but I will probably start over again. The new app launches on Dec 3, 2024.

    Remaining media activity

    • I’m halfway through reading Variable Star, a book by Spider Robinson based on an idea and notes left behind by Robert Heinlein. So, it’s a posthumous collaboration, and a very entertaining one at that.
    • We waited till all episodes were out and then binged Season 4 of Only Murders in the Building. This is not my preferred way of watching the show; I believe spacing them out lets the story breathe and be remembered better. But Kim is going away again for a couple of weeks, and neither of us wanted to wait that long to pick it back up.
    • I finished Season 2 of The Old Man and remain impressed. It’s one of the best ‘classic’ espionage shows in recent years, and if you have a better one to recommend I’d love to see it. I’m talking old-school, Tinker Tailor-type spy intrigue, which reminds me I should pick up a John le Carré book next, because I don’t think I’ve ever read one. Btw did you know Nick Harkaway is his son??
    • After six months, we caved and reactivated the Netflix subscription. Kim wanted to watch Culinary Class Wars on her flight, and I’m keen to check out some of the new anime series they’ve put out, like Ranma 1/2, Dan Da Dan, and Season 2 of Oshi no Ko. I watched 9 episodes of the latter on Sunday; it’s that addictive. It was always a great looking show but the artistry and animated flexing is on another level now: some of the kinetic montages and dramatic sequences jump through a dozen art styles in as many seconds, and feel inspired by the Spiderverse films and maybe even Satoshi Kon’s Millennium Actress (2001), which might be my favorite animated film of all time.
  • Week 25.24

    Week 25.24

    Monday was Hari Raya Haji, a public holiday, and we took an early walk along the nearby ‘park connector’, which I guess is the local government term for “paths beside rivers and canals linking the city’s green spaces”. I must admit, I prefer evening walks over morning ones.

    Mornings are best spent slowly booting up with a hot cup of tea and maybe exploring some new music. Although I started drinking black tea as a way to save money and smooth out the coffee jitters, it’s become my preferred drink throughout the day. Seinfeld’s new set includes a bit where he dismisses tea as weak and tasteless (“I hate it!”), claiming coffee is the only drink that understands “they’re trying to kill me out there!” Inspired by the insight, I tried reintroducing coffee into my routine: one cup in the morning, followed by tea for the rest of the day. It didn’t take. I didn’t need it! Maybe my tastes have changed, or maybe life doesn’t feel so painful right now. #blessed.

    One more thing about saving money to establish that I am trying, before we get to the next part where I might appear to not be: Kim found out that the restaurants under the Little Farms grocery brand offer wine at prices that seem like misprints in the menu. They’re essentially sold at the same retail prices you’ll find in the store. So we had a nice Malbec from Australia’s Gill Estate along with our dinner for S$35. That’s S$35 for the BOTTLE, not a glass. I think we’re going to be eating there a lot. (For comparison, I think the cheapest ones here typically start around S$60).

    I actually made this

    I pre-ordered an Apple Vision Pro for launch day. I wish I could call it a casual treat but it’s a fairly large purchase; certainly the most I’ve spent on a single computer in my adult life, and probably equivalent in inflation-adjusted terms to the 33mhz 386-DX my parents bought us in the late 80s. This thing probably has a trillion times the processing power of that PC, not to mention 30x the display resolution, in each eye. It’s amazing the difference three decades makes!

    I’ll save further thoughts for when I get it, but right now I’m planning to use it primarily as a personal theater, perhaps as a larger display for my Mac, and am very excited to try new spatial applications and games as they come out. So many of the things coming to visionOS 2 feel like essential launch features that I may even install the beta.

    If you’re looking to justify one to yourself, feel free to copy my notes.

    1. It’s the first VR/XR headset I’ll be owning, and Apple’s entry into the category is a sign that it’s nearly ready for mainstream adoption. This is probably the moment to start paying attention to new experience possibilities, new interaction conventions, and new consequences for behavior and preferences. Any later might be too late.
    2. These early days of a new platform are the most exciting. Hopefully, we’ll see creators trying out new ideas and innovating in the app space. If Apple made cheaper development units available to select indie studios, this might be helped along. Maybe they are?
    3. The unconfirmed cheaper and lighter model is rumored to be targeting a late-2025 release, and a second-generation Pro model perhaps a year after. That’s at least 18 months where this will have no competition. And if waiting means missing out on two years of watching this potential revolution unfold, then it’s clear to me I don’t want to.
    4. I’ve got the time on my hands now to make plentiful use of it.
    5. As a paying subscriber to all Apple services currently available in my country, I’d be leaving value on the table if I DIDN’T have access to all the exclusive Apple Vision content that’s coming. There are spatially enabled games in Apple Arcade, and Immersive Video features on Apple TV+. It’s not a stretch that Apple Music might add 3D video content in the future. I know it was Amazon Music that hosted Kendrick’s ‘Pop Out’ live event this week, but imagine being in the front row for something like that on a pay-per-view livestream!
    6. I had the opportunity to see a little of Alicia Keys’ Rehearsal Room feature for Apple Vision and it sold me. Maybe people who’ve dabbled in VR for awhile won’t find it as impressive as I did, but the feeling of her presence five feet away was magical. Just like with the Nintendo 3DS, it’s one of those things you have to see to believe.

    Speaking of Alicia Keys, I came across the cast recording for Hell’s Kitchen, a new Broadway musical she’s created, loosely based on her life. It features many of her hits and has been nominated for 13 Tony Awards this year. All that, and yet the album on Apple Music was how I found out about it. Now I wish I could painlessly fly to New York to see it. And while actually being there would be best, I’d love a world where I could buy or rent a front-row seat recording with a double-tap of my fingers in Vision Pro.

    Check out these videos of the cast performing the reimagined versions of No One and If I Ain’t Got You.

    ===

    Media Activity:

    • I signed up for MUBI at last, so the quality and/or pretentiousness of my film viewing is about to go up. If you’d like a free 30-day membership, please use my referral link.
    • I started posting post-film impressions on Threads throughout the week as I go, but don’t worry, I’m pasting and expanding on them here on my own platform.
    • Saw Baby Assassins (2021) because Hideo Kojima raved about the movie series in a tweet, and I found it a fun take on the ol’ high school assassin girls trope; more about their friendship and trying to cope with adult life than the (well-executed) fighting. 4/5 stars.
    • I then saw Baby Assassins 2 Babies (2023) the next day and it was a perfect sequel. The best thing it does is develop the girls’ relationship with more unserious conversational set pieces that feel like Quentin Tarantino took a course in Japanese comedy. Can’t wait for the third one out this year. 4/5 stars.
    • Saw The First Slam Dunk (2022), which is an animated film based on the long-running series. I’ve only seen the first episode of the original anime on Netflix, and it looked like it was made in the early 90s. This film takes the quality bar up a million times with some of the best 3D CG anime I’ve seen. 3.5/5 stars.
    • Saw Tom Cruise’s The Mummy (2017), thinking that his star power would make it okay despite the negative things I’ve heard. It started quite strong but was so so bad. 1.5/5 stars.
    • Saw The Breakfast Club (1985) all the way through for the first time and enjoyed it! It clearly influenced many other films, memes, and popular culture’s depictions of that entire retro/80s-era of American high school life. 4/5 stars.
    • Caught The Scent of Green Papaya (1993) on its last day on MUBI, which is a real shame because more people should see it. Hardly wasting a single frame of its gorgeous, luminous 100-min runtime, this immersive drama set in 1950s Vietnam is simply a masterpiece. Yes, there’s workplace harassment and ant cruelty, but that attitude is why they don’t make them like this anymore! 4.5/5 stars.
    • We are enjoying Presumed Innocent on Apple TV+, where Jake Gyllenhaal plays the kind of creepy protagonist you don’t know whether to trust that he does so well.
    • My song of the week has to be the Lorde remix of Charli XCX’s girl, so confusing. It’s amazing to hear them communicating through a song, and Ella’s verse is probably the most vulnerable from a superstar in recent memory; in a league of its own compared to ahem generic confessional love songs by some people.

  • Link: Blue Giant interview

    A Duet of Anime and Jazz: An Interview with Director Yuzuru Tachikawa

    I mentioned Blue Giant in last week’s post, and coincidentally just came across this new interview with its director. I wonder why it’s getting attention, a new home media release maybe?

  • Week 21.24

    Week 21.24

    Kim’s post-trip illness last Sunday turned out to be Covid, so we shuttered ourselves home all week and tried to sleep it off. Since it was our last test kit, I didn’t get a chance to test myself, but I assumed that the lingering illness I’ve had since returning from Hong Kong was probably it, or else I’d just get reinfected (which didn’t happen). We received new tests on Thursday and, thankfully, both tested negative.

    Games

    Being stuck at home allowed me to clock over 10 hours in Yakuza: Like A Dragon (#7 in the series) which, unlike its predecessors, is a turn-based RPG. Since Kiryu Kazuma rode off into the sunset in Yakuza 6: The Song of Life, this installment has a whole new cast, from ex-Yakuza henchmen to ex-detectives, ex-nurses, and ex-hostesses. It’s more ridiculous than any of the other entries: one side quest has your party fighting adult Yakuza men wearing diapers after you crash their bizarre infant roleplaying session. After beating them, you make up by sharing a milk toast from baby bottles. You get the idea.

    According to HowLongToBeat.com I’ve probably got another 40 hours to go, which puts my massive backlog even further back on the calendar and makes me a little impatient tbh. I should take on shorter games, like the slew of great-looking new indie titles that just dropped this month. Luke Plunkett at Aftermath asks how the hell we’re supposed to find the time for this embarrassment of riches. For my part, I’ve already bought 1000xRESIST and Little Kitty, Big City. Backlogs are a neverending to-do list, even for the unemployed.

    Film and TV

    There’s a new 6-part drama series on the UK’s Channel 4 called The Gathering, and some people involved in the excellent show Line of Duty are supposedly involved in it. It looks at the effects of ‘toxic ambition’, class lines, and online behaviors on the lives of some teens and their families in Merseyside. It was good enough for us to see the whole thing over the weekend.

    We also binged all available episodes of Dark Matter on Apple TV+, a show I’ve been looking forward to since it was announced. I’ve enjoyed Blake Crouch’s novels for awhile, and they are always conspicuously written as if selling their film rights is his real goal. That’s fine! They are fast-moving sci-fi action movies in book form. Unfortunately, the series gets off to a slower start than I’d like. I find it frustrating when characters in films behave as though sci-fi tropes don’t exist in their universe. Mild spoiler alert, but if I come home and find my house looks completely different and my wife is a different person, it wouldn’t take me days to deduce I’m in a parallel universe, especially if I’m a scientist who’s worked on the bloody idea before. Things do pick up after episode 2, though. It’s made me resolve to read more sci-fi in the next few weeks.

    I mentioned starting on Sugar last Sunday, the new Colin Farrell show that is best enjoyed with zero knowledge going in. It was so good we finished all episodes the next day. I am proud to say that I called the events of the final episodes very early on. But I want you to enjoy it, so I won’t say anything more. Except… its love for classic Hollywood cinema made me resolve to spend more time watching films in the next few weeks.

    Did you know that Singapore’s National Library Board (and I suspect many others globally) has a deal with a streaming video service called Kanopy that gives you unlimited access to their catalog? It even has an Apple TV app! See if your library card lets you in; they’ve got a ton of classics and indie films.

    We saw Woody Allen’s Wonder Wheel (2017), which was more remarkable for its cinematography by Vittorio Storaro (Apocalypse Now, The Last Emperor) — light and color saturation/tonality are constantly changing in the middle of scenes, making full use of this “channel” for communicating the story — than for the fact that Kate Winslet, Jim Belushi, and Justin Timberlake?! are in it. 3 stars.

    But wow was I wrecked by She Came to Me, a weird little film that I held at arms length but found myself fully embracing by its absurd and perfect operatic ending. I don’t know how to judge acting, if I’m honest, but Peter Dinklage, Marisa Tomei, and Anne Hathaway inhabit their characters effortlessly and subtly. I had to look up writer and director Rebecca Miller afterwards, and oh, she’s only Arthur Miller’s daughter and Daniel Day-Lewis’s partner and the author of several books that I will now read. 4 stars.

    I also resumed watching Blue Giant, the anime film about a trio of young men striving to make it as jazz musicians, and it perfectly captures the intensity and ecstasy of a great performance in a few superb animated sequences (at one point during a solo, the protagonist’s body soars through space past a black hole depicted in the style of Interstellar). It’s like the performance scenes from Whiplash rendered in the style of Into the Spider-Verse. It made me resolve to spend more time listening to great jazz albums on my headphones in the next few weeks. 4.5 stars.

    ===

    Channel News Asia, the Singapore-based er… news channel, puts out some good documentaries from time to time, but they’ve outdone themselves with the scope of their latest three-part series, Walk the Line.

    It follows a group of Chinese citizens eager to escape poor financial prospects and/or persecution in their country, as they make a dangerous journey through South America to become illegal immigrants in the US. It’s heartbreaking and insane how they persevere through the difficult journey, and how naively they think America will somehow be worth it.

    After arriving in Monterey Park, California, they join thousands of others vying for dishwashing jobs and so on. It’s a story that’s been told in other media before, but CNA’s team really did the field work and it’s worth a watch.

    ===

    Books

    I finished Jack Reacher #21, Night School (Jack goes to Europe and gets involved in something big that still feels as intimate as the usual conspiracies he deals with, 3 stars), and decided to try something different. Boy did I regret it.

    The chosen detour was Anxious People, by Swedish author Fredrik Backman, who I saw giving a jokey ‘I don’t normally give talks about being a writer but here goes’ kinda talk on social media that someone shared with me. I should have known from that video he would have a dad joke sense of humor, and it was excruciating in the novel. Covered in a layer of schmaltzy philosophizing about life that came off like a motivational quote poster in a school counselor’s office, the thing somehow has a Goodreads review average over 4 stars. I made it through about 37% before returning the ebook to the library and giving it a 1-star rating. Just reading it filled me with pure hatred.

    Now desperately in need of a palate cleanser, I decided to embark on R.F. Kuang’s Babel which Munz has been recommending to me for a year, and oh god it’s exactly what I needed. I never had the young adult experience of reading a Harry Potter book, but I imagine this is what that must have felt like, with ample magic and intrigue, but a more literary and historical take with colonial criticism and racial identity crises to round it out.

  • Week 20.24

    Week 20.24

    It’s been a full week since I fell ill but this virus seems to have booked a late checkout, so we have no choice but to wait. Once they’re gone, housekeeping can get to clearing out the sinuses and emptying the phlegm bins. Even worse, it’s now Kim’s turn on the back of some work travel to Bangkok, so maybe I’m headed for Round 2. Is/was it Covid? A test said no, but anything’s possible. The news is reporting a doubling of local cases last week, at a rather alarming 26,000 cases.

    Fortunately, I haven’t had much occasion to leave the house. I did go out to the nearby supermarket once to get some supplies, but despite leaving Kim a message that I’d gone grocery shopping, she also dropped by on her own way home and bought some. So now we have about 29 eggs knocking about the house. 😑

    The awards show shortlisting is going well and has become a regular afternoon activity, but there’s so much of it to do. I don’t know how anyone with a full-time job is managing this without giving up a weekend or two. Looking forward to sharing some of the more impressive work I’ve seen when this is over.

    Speaking of the industry, I saw an ad for Merge Mansion (a Candy Crush sorta mobile game) starring Pedro Pascal a few months back and downloaded the game, but forgot all about it without even playing. Well, I did this week and now I’m bloody hooked. It’s monetized on a timer and energy-based system, meaning you run out of moves and have to wait for more (or pay), so I’m constantly hitting that wall and checking the app several times a day to make a little progress. Games like these are cruelly designed to exploit those with a lot of free time throughout the day: children, homemakers, the jobless, me.

    Another gaming loose end is Lost Judgment , which I bought for the PS4 the last time I was on sabbatical but then I ran out of time and never started. The purchase included the PS5 version, so when I got the console last week I decided it would be my first game. After some 20+ hours, I’ve completed the main story and don’t feel excited enough to play through the DLC or remaining side quests. It might be because it repeats much of what was in Judgment, its predecessor, or because I’m anxious to get on with the rest of the ‘Like a Dragon’ series in my backlog (of which the Judgment games are a part).

    For reference, I’m planning to play

    • Yakuza: Like a Dragon (#7)
    • Like a Dragon Ishin! (a spin-off set in about the same era as the recent Shogun TV series)
    • Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name (#7.5)
    • Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth (#8).
    • And that’s skipping Yakuza 0, Yakuza 2 Kiwami, and the remastered fourth and fifth games! Those might have to wait for the next time.

    As if that wasn’t enough, I’m also committed to finishing Astral Chain on the Switch, which plays fine but looks like an Xbox 360 game in visual terms, and really can’t compare to the current generation. I don’t think it maintains 30fps and the characters’ faces don’t even move during in-game cutscenes. I need to play all these ancient action games before I get spoiled by the likes of Stellar Blade on the PS5, where every surface gleams in ray-traced splendor.

    If I had to describe the Switch’s value proposition in light of now owning a PS5, it’s a fantastic portable console better suited for indie games (and Nintendo exclusives, of course), especially 2D platformers and puzzlers. For example Animal Well, which just came out to overwhelmingly positive reviews; and the poker roguelike everyone says is digital crack, Balatro. Oh, and visual novels too. I powered through and finally completed an awful one this week that I’ve been “playing” for the last couple of months, which has prevented me from doing anything else on the Switch. I’m glad it’s finally over, and no, I don’t recommend it (Our World is Ended – 59% on Metacritic).

    ===

    Side note: OpenAI showed off an impressive demo of a new GPT-4 model that is omni-modal, smarter, and works in nearly real time. I’m also pleased that these features will supposedly be coming to free users too, along with the use of custom GPTs like the ones I’ve been making. I recently canceled my ChatGPT Plus subscription since I don’t have any regular jobs for it to do at this time, apart from helping me edit this blog, but now I may even be able to keep doing that.

    ===

    Media Activity:

    • Started on two episodes of Sugar on Apple TV+, and I’m locked into its modern LA noir mystery. There’s something weird going on beneath the surface with its meta-Hollywood thing, but what I immediately loved was how visually fresh and uninhibited it is.
    • After languishing unfinished for what feels like a year, we recently picked up season 1 of Acapulco again and can’t recall why we ever stopped. Just like its setting, it’s sunny, breezy, and takes your mind off everything — perfect end-of-day TV. The best part is there are two more seasons just waiting now.
    • I started watching the anime movie Blue Giant on Saturday and was halfway through before realizing I wasn’t in the right mood and should save it for later in the week. It’s based on a manga about an earnest guy who moves to Tokyo to be a jazz musician, and is just steeped in the jazz culture there with the kissas and live houses. I saw a bunch of promotional art for it in Tower Records a whole year ago when we were there, and I’ve been wanting to watch it since. It’s just that I’d read something about it not having a huge budget, and so wasn’t expecting too much from the animation. But it turned out well and sounds amazing!

    There’s so much new music out this weekend that I have to break the format.

    Let’s start with an album I enjoyed back in the day and have just rediscovered through Michael’s weeknotes, Tourist by St Germain. I didn’t even know it received a digital remastering and Deluxe Version re-release in 2012, but it sure sounds great. This could come out today and make waves, apart from having some light Cafe del Mar vibes.

    Billie Eilish’s new album HIT ME HARD AND SOFT is out now. I played it once through in the background and plan to give it some closer listening, but it’s already surpassed my expectations. I was afraid she’d settled into consistently making very samey music, but sonically this sounds fresh and does some interesting things.

    Apple Music is doing a list of their “100 Best Albums” (of all time), and I was happy/disappointed to see Portishead’s Dummy land at #67. There’s no overstating the impact of that band on my tastes, and Beth Gibbons’ voice is a huge part of that. So I’m really afraid to put her new (second) solo album on. Even the title, Lives Outgrown, gives me goosebumps of nervous anticipation.

    There’s also a new Kamasi Washington album, Fearless Movement! A new Andra Day album, CASSANDRA (cherith)! A new A.G. Cook TRIPLE album, Britpop! A new reworking of a 2020 Childish Gambino album that I never heard, Atavista! And a Deluxe version of the last self-titled Bleachers album that I didn’t like that much!

  • Week 18.24

    Week 18.24

    Last week marked the 200th installment of a blogging rhythm I wasn’t sure I could keep up for a year, let alone nearly four. I thank any readers I have, the makers of iA Writer, WordPress, and of course, my wife for graciously giving me space on Sunday mornings to engage in this act of reflection and blabbering.

    Except I’m not writing this on Sunday, no it’s currently Thursday and I’m getting a head start with some structure because we’ll be in Hong Kong for the weekend. It was a last-minute idea, driven by a primal craving for Chinese roast goose, a desire to escape the summer heatwave currently roasting all of SE Asia, and the realization that we won’t have a pocket of clear calendar space like this again for several months.

    I haven’t been back in the territory since May 2019, and so much has obviously happened since. Did you know that this very site was once blocked by the great Chinese firewall? I have no idea why, but I hope I don’t find myself unwelcome upon arrival. Anecdotally, I’ve heard the city doesn’t quite feel the same these days, and we’ve seen the numerous ChannelNewsAsia documentary features about people looking for fresh starts, emigrating to the UK and so on. But as an infrequent visitor with only superficial interactions to speak of, I don’t expect to sense any changes at all.

    What’s changed is that while I used to be excited about Hong Kong’s lack of sales tax and abundance of electronics and camera emporiums, not to mention official Apple Stores, those things are less interesting these days. I’ve got nothing on my shopping list (plus I’m in low-cost mode — see previous entries), I’m content with snapping photos on my iPhone and Ricoh GR III, and Singapore has so many Apple Stores these days I’ve started taking them for granted.

    (CW: some camera nerdery ahead)

    I am looking forward to photographing the city a little with Dmitri Novikov’s new camera app, Zerocam (in beta). The concept is an extremely simplified camera with one button; there’s not even a way to quickly look at the last photo you took. When you hit the shutter, a RAW image is captured with as little of the iPhone’s intelligent processing as possible, plus some specific settings that Novikov prefers (-0.5ev and some very light touch color grading, as far as I can tell), and then saved directly to a HEIF file.

    Unfortunately it only gives you photos at 12mp size, probably because third-party apps don’t have the option of 24mp and 24mp is a result of the computational photography processes that Zerocam avoids anyway. And while you can use Halide to capture similarly unprocessed photos (turn off “Enable Smartest Processing” in its settings), you can’t make it remember a lowered exposure setting between sessions.

    The intermediate solution I’ve landed on to retain 24mp files while getting better everyday photos is to set Apple’s stock camera app to remember a -0.7ev exposure, and tune Photographic Styles to -20 Tone and -7 Warmth. I really like the look of this “recipe” on iPhone 15, and it’s kinda like shooting with Highlight Priority exposure and the Negative Film effect on a Ricoh GR III (which I’ll also be doing).

    Actually in HK now:

    We’ve chosen a wet and gloomy weekend to stop by. Our flight was delayed by 2.5 hours, I suspect because of turbulent conditions at HK International Airport around our original arrival time. Just two days earlier, some Cathay Pacific passengers were tossed around and couldn’t land for six hours, with the descriptions of a vomit and scream-filled cabin in the news fulfilling the conditions of a personal nightmare.

    I take back a little of what I said — things do feel somewhat different. The city is grubbier than I remember; prices are higher and some people must be struggling to get by (well, HK isn’t alone in this); and there’s a hint of economic decline in the many empty shop units with ‘For Lease’ signs up.

    One tool that’s been super helpful all week has been the Arc Search app on iOS, which added a voice mode that you can assign to the Action Button on iPhone 15 Pros. When the app launched with an AI feature that summarizes search queries on custom-generated webpages, I was wary of this “browser that browses for you” concept, which gives users few reasons to visit the underlying pages being mined (thereby ruining the web), but maybe they’ve made some changes since. It’s easier to click through to the sources.

    I’ve been using it to answer questions like “what interesting art exhibitions are on in HK right now?” and it performs some light research, and I do end up visiting the linked websites for further details like location and pricing. It’s effectively a better way to present search results (albeit with the same bias and ranking concerns as search results). I hope iOS 18’s AI overhaul will see similar utility coming to Siri and Safari. Perhaps this is where the rumored Gemini partnership with Google comes in.

    ===

    Media activity:

    • I started on a new Jack Reacher book: Night School. It’s what I do when I can’t decide what to read next.
    • I’ve been watching the new-ish MF Ghost anime, which is a sort of sequel to Initial D. Some people seem to think it’s an insult to the original show, but I wouldn’t know — I might watch it after this? It’s got a funny premise: in a future Japan, electric vehicles are the norm and gas-powered cars are only allowed in a special racing tournament called MFG. But drifting has become a lost art! Enter Kanata Rivington, a hafu born in England who trained under a master who I presume is the main protagonist of Initial D, returning to Japan for the first time to find his lost father and school a nation on how to burn rubber while chucking a uey.
    • The Japanese saxophonist Sadao Watanabe is back with a new album at the insane age of 91. It’s called Peace, and I’m digging it. Speaking of, I first heard him as a child digging through my dad’s music collection.
    • I’m also loving Tigers Blood, by Waxahatchee, which I discovered on Pitchfork’s list of The Best Music of 2024 So Far. I’m aware that Anna Wintour fired a bunch of people from Pitchfork and it’s supposedly not the site it used to be, but this is a great pick. They say: “Recommended if you like — Indie-country; Sheryl Crow; Gillian Welch; that Brad Cook Sound; MJ Lenderman showing up; catchin’ skinks down by the creek; ice cream stand off the highway; letting your legs dangle off a pier”.
    • What a week in rap battle history! The beef between Drake and Kendrick Lamar has been giving us explosive drama and incredible diss tracks, sometimes more than one a day, and Kendrick’s the winner in my book but honestly I’m afraid just watching it unfold. It feels like someone’s going to get shot or jailed as a result of this.

    Oh one more thing! The Cannes Lions Festival announced the shortlisting juries for 2024’s awards, and I’m pleased to share that I’m on the panel for the Brand Experience & Activation Lions. That should keep me occupied for the next few weeks.