After spending more time experimenting with ChatGPT’s latest capabilities — refining my poetry-writing prompts, especially with the supposedly more creative GPT-4.5 model; testing how well it could profile and target me with product advertising using its consolidated ‘Memory’ of our chats (the answer is ‘too well’, and it was even able to guess my SAT scores from decades ago); inferring people’s personalities from their appearances (maybe the most unnerving ability); more image generation; and coming up with a plausible prediction of how our upcoming general elections will turn out — I decided that I’m sufficiently caught up with most of the AI stuff I missed, and have canceled my Plus subscription for the time being. I remain concerned about the risks of OpenAI and other companies providing such powerful and habit-forming surveillance tools, but I can see there’s no stopping this train.
Yes, the date of Singapore’s next national elections was announced this week. Saturday, May 3rd, is when we’ll be going to the polls. Some people expressed surprise at how little notice we’re being given, but it might be the Mandela Effect at work because I think this is how it is every time.
I finished reading Reacher book #25, The Sentinel, and it was a rather weak entry I don’t think Amazon will be adapting to TV. This leaves me with about two or three more books to go before I run out, so I think I’ll stop here for a few months at least.
My book club is now reading the first book in ‘The Murderbot Diaries’ series, entitled All Systems Red, which I’d already read a few weeks back because Brian said 1) I would like it, and 2) the character reminded him of me (old-school profiling). I wasn’t sure I saw the resemblance, so I asked ChatGPT for its “opinion” and got strong agreement: Murderbot’s entire character is basically what happens when someone with high intelligence, ultra-sharp pattern recognition, zero patience for social performance, a deep, low-key emotional life, and an obsessive need for autonomy …is forced to interact with an inefficient, irrational world full of emotionally needy humans and corporate bureaucracy. Sound familiar?
Like I said, profiling people across hundreds of different conversations, questions, tasks, and confessions is really creepy tech.
Speaking of Brian, we went out for a drink and ended up eating at Five Guys. I haven’t been in a long time, and at the risk of sounding like an old man who hasn’t gone into the city since 2016, the prices were kinda shocking? $20 for a cheeseburger, fries for like another $10 if you want them, and $6 for a refillable soft drink. Jesus wept into greaseproof paper.
But anyway, since I have some time off from mandatory book club readings, I went back to give Lyn Alden’s Broken Money another try. I started this giant tome over a year ago but found myself unable to focus and get excited about the history of debt and the workings of the American economy. But wait long enough, and like a broken clock, any book will become topically relevant. It might be that I’m in the right headspace now. Or the hundreds of hours of Bloomberg TV I’ve watched since have given me the landmarks needed to make sense of it. But this time I’m finding it much easier to stay on the horse and should be done with it soon.
After finishing I Parry Everything, I tried to find other anime with a similar premise but both —deep inhale— Failure Frame: I Became the Strongest and Annihilated Everything with Low-Level Spells and Chillin’ in Another World with Level 2 Super Cheat Powers did not nail the comedy/power tension as well as I Parry Everything.
We watched Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag, and it was an excellent low-key, nearly chamber drama of a spy flick. I say ‘we’ but Kim fell asleep near the end through no fault of the film and will have to catch up later. It’s evident that Michael Fassbender could have been a great Bond if he’d been cast a decade ago and aged into it.
Let’s end with some music. While asking ChatGPT to guess my Enneagram type, Big Five personality traits, IQ, SATs, primary school exam results, and other traits, it offered to make a playlist that would represent me. Not a playlist of songs that I would like, mind you, but a playlist as representation, as metaphor. I took its suggestions and assembled the songs in Apple Music, including cover art it made, and played it out loud on the HomePod. Earlier gen AI chatbots would just chuck songs together without any sign of understanding that a playlist should flow, but this one works so well that I’m not sure it’s coincidental. It’s also music that I wouldn’t have chosen myself, but I enjoyed it without qualifications. Here it is if you’d like “an ambient-leaning, melancholy-smart, emotionally layered playlist. Meant for headphones, twilight hours, and slow revelations.” The first track is a little challenging for a cold start imo, then it gets good.
I read All Systems Red, the first book in Martha Wells’ Murderbot series. It’s about a security robot that’s hacked its own governor module, secretly sentient but pretending not to be, and mostly just wants to be left alone to binge-watch serials. Deeply relatable. Apple TV+ has made a show from it that’s meant to come out soon, and I can’t wait. Thankfully there are six more books (plus some novellas), so this could be their next Silo or Slow Horses: a long-running fan favorite franchise they get to keep making more of. If you like introverted robots with trust issues getting into some space shootouts, it’s a fun time.
Still on AI bots, since I paid for ChatGPT Plus again last week, I decided to update a custom GPT I made to serve as my personal editor and proofreader. It’s trained on a bunch of these very blog posts and now incorporates a detailed summary of my writing style into its prompt. It’s shockingly fun to work with and makes half-decent suggestions. If you’d like to try this, give ChatGPT access to a bunch of your writing, get it to codify your style as a JSON profile, then refine it by reviewing examples together.
It actually managed to write me a half-decent LinkedIn post from a premise I provided, not that I care to post on LinkedIn at all. After some editing and joint revisions, it’s now in a shape that wouldn’t make me cringe if I read it from someone else on LinkedIn. Wait, that’s not true. Everything on LinkedIn is cringe.
I’m not going to say a lot about Trump’s tariffs and the mess they’ve made of the stock market, but boy am I seeing red in my finance apps. I don’t know how Americans will be able to afford anything, and I’m kinda mad that this will affect the rest of us too.
Caught in the blast is Nintendo’s new Switch 2, which was detailed this week in a series of live broadcasts I’ve been anticipating for the past couple of months. The new GameChat and GameShare features they showed are very welcome, especially if we’re ever locked down in a future pandemic. They’ve done a lot to make playing with friends online feel like hanging out on the same couch. Unfortunately, the announcement was marred by a higher than expected price, something of an unforced error on their part, and people flooded the Treehouse livestream chat with calls to “DROP THE PRICE”. To make matters worse, the already unwelcome US price of $449 is now set to rise once they calculate the impact of tariffs.
We’ll be missing the June 5 launch in any case, with the official site saying “July–September in Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines”. As for price, the original Switch launched at $299 USD, which should’ve meant about S$400 — but we ended up paying S$650 here, bundled with Breath of the Wild, because of limited supply and some greedy local distribution. I don’t expect the same kind of scalping this time, but I also wouldn’t be shocked to see it land at S$800. Can’t wait.
I still have so much to play on my old Switch OLED anyway, and this week I got started on Ace Attorney Investigations Collection. It’s a remastered version of the two Miles Edgeworth games from the Nintendo DS, the latter of which was never released internationally. Also in my backlog are Kirby and the Forgotten Land and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, both of which are getting Switch 2 enhancement patches — higher frame rates, HDR, all that good stuff — if you’re willing to pay for the upgrade. Which means I now have a perfectly valid excuse to keep ignoring them until summer.
Michael pinged me out of the blue to ask if I knew anything about the origins of using the × symbol in Japanese to mean “and” or “plus”. It’s something I’ve long wondered about too, especially with anime titles like Hunter × Hunter and Spy × Family. So I outsourced the research to Perplexity (an AI search engine), and found that this usage came out of Japanese fashion subculture in the 1990s. Turns out it’s a Japanese invention, possibly inspired by its use in botany to denote crossbreeding. In modern use, the × stands in for “with”, “versus”, “of”, or “intersection”. It’s also not pronounced aloud, which is why the show is just called “Spy Family”. I like how the symbol invites layered meanings — it implies both conflict and connection. In Spy × Family, it’s the tension between the fake family setup and their hidden identities, but also how those roles merge into something real. A simple little mark doing a lot of work.
I watched a new anime on Netflix called I Parry Everything. Following the isekai wave a couple years back, the new trend seems to be fantasy stories about “weak” characters who go all-in on training one obscure skill — to the point of accidentally attaining god-tier strength. Jose reminded me of another in the same vein, with the glorious title I Don’t Want to Get Hurt, So I’ll Max Out My Defense. In Parry, the main guy is told early on he has no future as a swordsman — so he just spends the next 14 years practicing how to block. Now he’s practically unkillable. But the show’s comedy hinges on him not realizing this, while everyone else assumes he’s the savior of their kingdom. It’s extremely stupid, extremely fun, and yeah I binged the whole thing in a weekend.
We’ve also been watching The Pitt on Max and it’s a great hospital drama (starring Noah Wyle of ER) that leans more towards realism than the likes of New Amsterdam. Everything takes place over 15 hours in 15 episodes, which takes me back to watching 24 in absolute awe as a young man.
Pulse on Netflix is everything The Pitt is not. It’s cheesy, everyone’s more model than medic, and there’s no urgency or realism. Even the surgeries are shot in crispy iPhone-like HDR and cinematic lighting. It does have Willa Fitzgerald (aka Reacher’s partner in S1) and Néstor Carbonell (Yanko from The Morning Show) but even they can’t lift this to greatness. It’s fine background TV though.
What’s up with this image? I went for dinner with Peishan and Cien, who decided it would be funny to tell HaiDiLao (a massive Chinese hotpot chain) that it was my birthday month, so the staff came round and sang/blasted out of a Bluetooth speaker a proprietary and very Chinese birthday song, that apparently everyone around us knew because they joined in and clapped along. I tried to stop them, but in the end had to endure it with a pained smile.
Btw one legitimate use case of AI is transforming images into drawings to get around the problem of publicly sharing people’s faces.
Before diving into the deeper end of Japanese literature as previously mentioned, I thought I should warm up with at least one Haruki Murakami novel first. My gut said that it’d been maybe a year or two since the last one I’d read, but no, Goodreads informs me that I finished 1Q84 in May 2020! So I picked up Norwegian Wood from the library and finished it in a few days. I now want to watch the 2010 film adaptation because there’s so much spicy dialogue in this that I can’t imagine them using. Also, Rinko Kikuchi and Kiko Mizuhara play the two female leads, and that is the most 2010 Japanese casting ever.
My new Kobo Clara Color started acting up during this, freezing and needing to be rebooted, losing my current progress, and draining its battery rapidly overnight. I have a post from 2013 about how I fixed similar battery issues on my Kindle, and it’s one of the most visited pages on this site. Sadly, I didn’t find any tips online about battery problems with this Kobo model, so I just did a factory reset and things seem to be going okay so far. I suspect it has something to do with using Calibre to load EPUB files on it, if said files were not perfectly formatted.
My friend Cong is always saying Singapore lacks authentic Vietnamese food, specifically pho, but he recently found a place that he found good enough and that’s generous with the herbs and vegetables that are hard to find here. I went with him, Mavis, and Jose to check it out for lunch on Friday, and I can say that it was a fine bowl of noodles (but can’t speak to its authenticity). No gatekeeping; it’s called Lang Nuong 1980’s on Hamilton Road near Jalan Besar.
I’ve never put in the time to get good at shooting video and mastering all the techniques that go into making little films, so I rarely post video ‘stories’ on social media and vacations are only documented through stills in my photo library — isn’t it funny that we still call them photo libraries (e.g. iCloud Photo Library, Google Photos) even though they contain videos? This week I found myself experimenting a little with the form, thinking I might try to make myself what people used to call a “home movie” (before sharing your life with strangers was a thing) during my time in Japan.
When it comes to shooting footage, I’ve found Kino and Blackmagic Cam to be the best. They let you record 4K video in Apple Log, process the video in real-time using color-grading LUTs, and save them in a standard color space in compressed HEVC files. This is much better for almost anyone than using the default iPhone camera which saves Apple Log videos using ProRes, which results in massive files. I prefer Kino a little bit more because it includes a bunch of LUTs out of the box. It also has a more beginner-friendly UI, and takes care of most things automatically to get you more cinematic results.
One thing it doesn’t do, that I don’t think any app does, is use your location to influence your video settings. What do I mean? I may be oversimplifying, but here in Singapore (where PAL is the broadcast standard), you get flickering lights when shooting at the common 24/30 FPS speeds because our electricity grid operates at 50hz instead of 60hz. This causes lightbulbs to pulse at 100 times a second, and you see it happening at 24fps because 100 does not divide as cleanly by 24 as it does by 25. You can apparently counteract this through some combination of shutter speed/angle, but that’s beyond me. I just know I shot a bunch of footage at 24 FPS and there was flicker all over it. It’s 2025 and it sure would be nice if an app just knew what to do!
When it comes to editing, I played with a bunch of the most popular apps, including the super popular CapCut by ByteDance that I believe most IG/TikTok influencers use. It’s definitely a comprehensive tool, but wants you to pay a subscription for many of its most useful features — S$105.98/yr is a little steep for amateur dabblers like me imo.
I hadn’t fired up iMovie in a long while, and was surprised to discover a “Magic Movie” mode was added two years ago, and it’s not bad if you’re happy to give up fine-grained control. Just select a heap of clips, and it’ll string them together with a dynamic soundtrack (the music ends naturally when your video does), transitions, and a smattering of fonts and title styles you can choose from. Being a free Apple app, I think this is probably enough for most amateur dabblers… except it doesn’t support 9:16 videos. It’s an app for boomers.
That restriction probably won’t affect me as I intend to shoot my videos in traditional landscape orientation anyway, but it’s nice to have options. That’s when I discovered LightCut, a completely free Chinese app that looks suspiciously like CapCut and tries to opt you into a data-sharing program (you can say no, and also deny it Bluetooth permissions while you’re at it), but is otherwise a very attractive and powerful tool for the price! Like with CapCut’s paid AI features, it can drop your clips into suitable pre-made templates and make a pretty professional-looking video with little effort on your part. I think it’s a good alternative to iMovie if you need the flexibility of freely placing text on screen, adjusting the brightness/color of individual scenes, and so on.
On Wednesday, I decided to visit the National Gallery again and see the special exhibitions leaving next week. Here’s a low-effort “Magic Movie” of my visit, just a heap of random clips shot with Kino and assembled by iMovie. I finished the whole thing on my phone over a cup of tea at the café afterwards.
One thing I don’t like about being in a ‘video mode’ while walking around is that it takes you out of being in ‘photo mode’. I probably took just three photos that day, and don’t know if there’s any way around it except practice.
I still can’t decide what the best way to shoot photos on an iPhone is right now. I vacillate between shooting Bayer RAW with an app like Halide, shooting ProRAW with the Leica LUX app, ProRAW with the default camera app, and just embracing the iPhone’s “Photonic Engine” and getting 24MP HEIF files with the default camera app.
Bear with the neurosis, but as part of obsessing over the above question, I’ve been testing Nitro Photo, the new-ish pro photo editing app by former Apple Photo Apps group CTO Nik Bhatt. His last app was RAW Power, which I’ve owned for years but haven’t used that much, partly because I rarely shot RAW and partly because its UI is a little clunky. Nitro is a re-imagining of RAW Power, built from the ground up with modern frameworks and a redesigned UI. From a functional and technical perspective, I think it offers a level of control that no other app, short of Adobe Lightroom, does on iOS. Neither Darkroom nor the recently acquired-by-Apple Photomator have the ability to tune RAW/ProRAW images like Nitro. You can do things like adjust the tone mapping on ProRAW photos, for instance, to get a more natural look without Smart HDR effects, or control how the Apple RAW engine renders sharpness. I’ve ported over a few of my own presets over as LUTs, and am getting into it to the point that I might plonk down $100 and make it my main photo editor. The worst thing about it is still the UI, which I must stress is not bad; just a tad dated as touch UI conventions go. Darkroom is much more pleasant to use on a small screen, but the broken state of preset syncing there has really turned me off lately.
This is where you say, “But Brandon, if you shoot everything in ProRAW, doesn’t that take up a ton of storage? Especially if you don’t have an iPhone 16 Pro that can employ JPEG XL compression?” Well, yes, and that does bother me. So imagine my excitement when I discovered the NO RAW app, which claims to strip out the RAW data from photos that are RAW+JPEG bundles in the iOS file system, once you’re done with editing and know you won’t go back again. I knew deep down that it’s not possible for an app to do that on iOS, but had to pay S$3 to find out how it worked. The answer? It’s essentially a solution you can build on your own in Shortcuts.app: make a new copy of your image as a HEIC file (retaining metadata), and then delete the original bundled file. Boooo! My free HEIFer shortcut does exactly this, but for JPEGs. And NO RAW has the same “flaw” as my shortcut. Namely, that the correct chronological order will only be retained if you sort your photos by Date Captured. If you sort by Recently Added, then all of these former-RAW photos will appear at the bottom. I should have known, but I’ll still use NO RAW as it gets the job done and has a date picker UI that beats any shortcut, but I might update HEIFer to do the same if anyone wants it.
Media activity:
I finished watching the anime series Dead Dead Demon’s Dededede Destruction. I’d heard about it before, and then when Dandadan came out, I mistook it for this and only realized they were separate shows like many episodes later. They are eerily similar in name and synopsis: school kids dealing with an alien invasion. But Dededede is much less kinetic/comedic/wacky. 3.5/5 stars.
We finished Squid Game 2 and despite initially liking how it was handled, I got a little bored towards the end as the slow, dramatic deaths started to pile up. When will we get a third season, and will I care? Probably not.
I watched The Gleaners and I (2000) Because it’s leaving MUBI. It’s the kind of documentary you get when an experienced director picks up a novel tool (a digital video camera, in this case), and starts messing about around a topic that interests them. Here, Agnès Varda starts by interviewing people who still practice the lost art of gleaning — picking through recently harvested fields for uncollected produce — and ends up doing a cross-country investigation of waste and poverty. 4/5 stars.
I discovered the American YouTuber and illustrator Linh Truong aka @withlovelinh through a Japan travel/haul video she made last spring and found myself binging the last couple years of her content creator journey. She started doing vlogs in high school and has kept going with cozy life updates that interior decoration tips and other sorts of young adult life-hacking. She recently graduated from college, and it’s extremely sweet how many of her commenters say they’ve grown up with her over the years and are proud that she’s making it (1.2M subscribers and making sponsored content for Nintendo, Notion, et al).
I’ll try for a shorter bullet point update this week.
It’s hard to believe we’re already done with the first week of December. Every year, I say Christmas crept up on me and I don’t feel it coming at all. Now I accept that it’s just the nature of Christmas in the tropics (without winter), and if I don’t surround myself with visual signifiers of the season, the mind forgets what the body doesn’t feel.
Nintendo released Animal Crossing Pocket Camp Complete, the offline, self-contained, definitive version of their mobile AC game, and I decided to buy it after all. I played the live service version briefly when it came out, but soon decided I didn’t like the in-app purchase model. This is much better. So much better, in fact, that I have spent several hours this weekend fishing and harvesting fruit.
The game was actually mentioned in my first-ever weekly post back in July 2020. After 7 years of iteration, it now feels like a massive game with tons of content (clothing and furniture to buy and craft) and new functionality bolted on. Currently, it’s snowing in the world and the seasonal events have got my campsite decorated with sleighs and piles of gifts and I’m wearing a reindeer hat… and dare I say? It kind of feels like Christmas is coming.
If you’re playing too, add me to your world with the Camper Card below! I believe it’s just a one-way thing, and we won’t get to interact for real since there are no servers involved. And don’t forget, the game is half price now and will go up to $20 at the end of January 2025.
We collected our Zeiss Optical Inserts for Vision Pro (prescription lenses that click in magnetically), and the setup experience was pretty cool. The device detects that they’re in, and makes you redo the eye setup process. Then it registers the new lenses on your profile by having you look at a QR code printed inside the box. Given that my contact lenses are “weaker” than my regular glasses, I’m now seeing everything in the Vision Pro with even more clarity than I was before.
Leica fixed a deal-breaking bug in Leica LUX where your preference of ProRAW or HEIF file format wasn’t remembered between sessions. They also fixed some other small things that bothered me but aren’t worth mentioning. This makes it a viable camera app for everyday use because it gets you HEIF files with the gentler/less sharpened look of shooting in ProRAW. Plus you can choose a “Leica Look” color profile to start from, and non-destructively try others or revert to the underlying original photo afterwards. I like it enough to put a shortcut on my Lock Screen.
Our home broadband plan was up for renewal, and I got a call from the company to that effect. They wanted me to give the last 4 digits of my national ID number over the phone for verification before they would even tell me anything. “How do I verify you’re really from the company?”, I asked. “Can you tell me something you know about me?”, I offered, to which they said “We can’t share any customer information”, and agreed when I asked if I was just supposed to trust them. I said that didn’t work for me, and so they could just send me whatever special offers they wanted via email instead.
The offer was fine, and I decided to stick with them for another two years because it’s the best price I’ve seen anywhere. And as a bonus, we’ll be getting an upgrade to a 10gbps line. We’ll only be utilizing a maximum of 2.5gbps though, because that’s the maximum supported wired input on the WiFi 6E router I just got a few months ago.
Renovation noises at home continued, and someone lodged a complaint with the housing board against our new neighbor’s contractors. It wasn’t us, but I can see how this might not be the warm welcome anyone would hope for. There are also reports from other residents that they’ve been seeing ceiling leaks during the recent storms, and mysteriously, these are people lower down in the building! Fingers crossed this doesn’t grow to affect us, because I can’t take any more drama.
One noisy afternoon, I decided to finally pay a visit to my local library branch after talking about it for the last six months, and… it’s not much to write home about. Lots of retirees sitting around playing Pokémon Go and reading magazines. Afterwards I decided to eat at Yakiniku Like, a place that seems well designed for solo diners. I got my own little personal grill, and ate 200g of beef short plate with 300g of rice (and a huge mound of shredded cabbage) for a little over $20 and went home very happy.
We went out for a much nicer dinner on Thursday, checking out Hayop on Jose’s recommendation. It’s affiliated with the Manam restaurant in Manila, a fact that only landed as I was looking at the menu — I ate there a couple of times back in 2019 when I was there for work. The prices here have been proportionately raised, but the food is nearly as good as I remembered, so that’s fair. I like Filipino food because it respects the power of pork fat.
Testing the Leica Lux app with these
It turns out that writing bullet points ≠ shorter updates when you’re a typer-yapper like me.
I wanted to binge an entire anime series in a week and decided to go with Summertime Rendering. It’s a time loop story that feels like a visual novel game adaptation, but actually started as a manga series. I was hoping more for sci-fi but it’s really a supernatural thing. At 25 episodes, it became a bit of a slog near the end as the multiple timelines became too convoluted to follow. Don’t really recommend.
Netflix released a new 6-part spy series called Black Doves, starring Keira Knightley and Ben Whislaw (aka Q in recent James Bond films, and the voice of Paddington). I was optimistic, but while it’s not as bad as most Netflix shows, it still suffers from the Marvel-ization of popular culture where any seriousness or suspense is immediately undercut by comic relief before it can mean anything. That’s not the only problem with it, but the result is a show that feels like background fodder for phone fiddling.
Months after the Katseye moment, we watched the Pop Star Academy show that shows their formation and training over two years. It was interesting to see non-Asian idols like Lexie chafe against unethical manipulation in light of HYBE’s recent troubles with NewJeans. I don’t think the industry’s current models will hold up well as talent starts to realize they hold the keys to their fandoms and can stream online on their own. It’s like K-Pop’s In Rainbows moment.
I also think HYBE made a strategic error in greenlighting this behind-the-scenes show with Netflix, and it’s translated into Katseye’s failure to take off with an international (beyond K-Pop) audience. Fans of J-Pop and K-Pop aren’t surprised to see the rough training and emotional abuse their idols go through, but people seeing that shit for the first time probably feel terrible about supporting the whole business, especially when adult music execs gleefully admit on camera that they fucked with the teenaged girls’ trust in each other to create more drama.
Yiwen shared her Spotify Wrapped on IG and I learnt about the artist known as Night Tempo, a self-proclaimed “retro culture curator” who puts out city pop-inflected music that sounds exactly like how the perfect night drive must feel. Check out his latest album, Connection on Apple Music.
For something less weeby and more eclectic, Jean Dawson’s new album Glimmer of God is worth a playthrough. I’m going to be putting the opening song Darlin’ on playlists for quite awhile, I’m sure.
ROSÉ’s debut album rosie dropped, and what I’ve heard so far sounds like competent pop with a teenaged guitar girl’s poetry notebook slant. That’s not a knock; it’s as satisfying a sub-genre as a sad man’s whiskey-soaked heartbreak blues. I’m still feeling good about my prediction that she’ll turn out to be the most musically interesting Blackpink alum.
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.
1) Should have been in the box instead of the dual strap
2) $50 is overpriced but you’ve already paid $3500 so hard to complain.
3) When Apple knows an accessory is needed but doesn’t want to put its brand on it, it turns to Belkin (owned by a Foxconn subsidiary) https://t.co/oKM5HSIVi5
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.
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.
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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.
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?
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I’ve got the time on my hands now to make plentiful use of it.
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!
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.
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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.
sangsara.net 