sangsara.net

Tag: Anime

  • 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.

  • Week 13.24

    Week 13.24

    During a chat on Good Friday — a public holiday here that I’d always assumed was less common than Easter Monday, but it turns out that’s not the case! — I realized Michael was in the middle of his workday in Tokyo and I was probably being a distraction. Our conversation started with him asking what I knew about Ethereum these days, and ended with how scaling leadership and quality in large organizations is hard, which might be related topics when you think about it. When a blockchain becomes too costly and congested, the solution is to spin off nimble L2 side-chains, just like how companies try to establish secret skunkworks teams that operate outside the rules. Both of these are an admission that we’re really bad at handling complexity.

    I put the long weekend to good use by sitting down to do some adulting with a semi-thorough look at finances, lifestyle, and possible futures. The process that works best for me is one I only realized later in life (and often forget and have to rediscover again): thinking aloud in writing. It looks like a long bullet list, occasional paragraphs, and maybe a table in Apple Notes.

    As I formed a loose decision-making framework, I asked ChatGPT to think it through with me and find any gaps in my logic or assumptions. It justified its monthly fee by calling out things I had failed to consider on more than one occasion. By the time a picture emerged, I was in disbelief. When did I start spending (or expecting to spend) so much? What idiot signed up for so many monthly subscriptions? Shockingly, ChatGPT did not suggest that I cancel it.

    It was at this point that my daily Co—Star notification popped up with an enigmatic line: “Shatter your old intellectual loops.” Hmm! What could that mean? “What you do with your money is your choice,” the detailed horoscope reassured me. While I don’t believe in this stuff, I respect how it can add randomness to one’s internal monologues. Harder still to do is read from the other perspective and see if it still says what you want to hear. It seemed to pass the sniff test this time.

    >> Sidenote: I’ve found myself using ChatGPT less lately because Perplexity is so damned convenient. It beats ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot (née Bing) for combining AI and search to answer questions. Arc Search is alright if you have a “web research” kinda job to be done, but if I just want to ask “What is X?”, Perplexity is fast and offers sources and links for further reading. A big part of this convenience is the availability of widgets and Lock Screen complications on iOS. Yes, I do know this shit is destroying the web and I hope somebody stops/solves it soon. Still, I need answers!

    After making some progress, I went out for a walk that felt great despite the insane heat and humidity we’ve been experiencing over the past few weeks. It’s impossible to step out and not immediately be sweaty; in fact you’ve probably been sweating indoors already. Strangely, at one point, with nothing nearby except water on one side of me and a forested patch on the other, I felt waves of cool air blowing past me, close to the ground. This continued for several good minutes, and it felt like when someone leaves the door to an air-conditioned room open and it flows out. Perhaps it was so hot above that even air just 1ºC cooler coming off the river felt remarkable? I thought to myself, “Am I injured and bleeding out? How is it cold?”

    Speaking of sudden shifts in temperature and bleeding, are we really ‘still early’ when more than one person in a week starts a conversation about crypto? I had drink plans the evening before Good Friday, which made for a Pleasant Thursday, and a lot of the chat was about NFTs and memecoins. I have shifted my stance on the latter from ‘not touching that nonsense’ to ‘everybody needs a little casino time’, and so currently own some “Jeo Boden” coin, a little “Dog Wif Hat”, and as of yesterday, some “Costco Hot Dog”. The last one is funny and so might do very well: you know how their hot dogs are famously pegged at $1.50 no matter what the economy does? Well the coin is about 9 cents now, and the idea is that it’ll pump to hit $1.50, because it must! (Disclaimer: I’m in for insignificant amounts of money, please don’t go nuts.)

    My overall outlook on web3 has moderated a little since the last cycle and can probably be summed up like this: We know Computing is good, we’re quite sure Decentralization is good, and we’ve seen interesting ideas around Tokenization, but all the “crypto” solutions built on those three ideas today have got something wonky and unstable about them. It’s hard to see most alts having any lasting value.

    ===

    Media activity:

    • We’re halfway through Season 2 of Below Deck Down Under (SPOILER) and the infamous sexual assault incident that was kinda viral on Twitter when it happened has now happened. Awful stuff, and I think Laura’s reaction afterwards was just as bad. I’m glad that was taken care of. Captain Jason is the goat.
    • I’ve been watching a little Jujutsu Kaisen after seeing an incredible fight scene clip online. This was a shonen show I’d long ago decided I didn’t care for, like Demon Slayer and all that shit, but seeing the quality of animation in that clip changed my mind. Sadly, I think it was actually from the movie, and the regular TV show hasn’t gone that hard yet. I think I’m up to episode 10 and I’ll keep at it.
    • I started Netflix’s adaptation of Three Body Problem while Kim was out for a couple of nights. It’s much better than I’ve come to expect from Netflix, and it’s moving fast from my vague recollection of the first book (the only one of the series I read). I can see myself finishing it over the next few weeks.
    • I came across Adrianne Lenker’s new album, Bright Future, in my Apple Music recommendations and decided to hear it even though I couldn’t recall her name at all. It was really good, and if I had to say, it’s indie folk rock? Emotionally, although not so much musically, it reminded me of Gillian Welch’s Americana alt-country. Then Perplexity informed me that Lenker has a band called Big Thief, which sounded kinda familiar? Did I dismiss them out of hand at some point because I didn’t like the name? I put their debut album, Masterpiece, on during my aforementioned walk and was blown away.
    • It turns out I heard Big Thief’s latest album, the annoyingly named Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You, back in 2022 but never went back to it. It’s a title you could use as a password.
  • Week 4.24

    Week 4.24

    A little while ago, I learnt that an ex-colleague of mine has received a stage 4 cancer diagnosis, and he’s only a few years older than me. Despite the fact that more “young” people seem to be getting cancer, it was still a deep shock because Tony was always incredibly fit and dedicated to his health. He’s been writing openly about his thoughts and experience on his Medium account, which I read before meeting him for lunch with some other former colleagues this week. It was tough seeing him in poorer shape, but true to his personal brand, he seemed extremely pragmatic and matter-of-fact about it all.

    We worked on the same team for about a year back in 2018, but were only on one project together as peers, leading design activities and client workshops together over a few months. I count myself fortunate to have had that experience, and learnt a lot from his confidence and wealth of technical knowledge when it came to UX matters — which was not my area of focus. Even then it was clear he had a knack for facing reality, and a passion for making sure the younger generation had their eyes open to the inequities of working life. Not always a popular topic, but life sucks. He mentioned that whenever he finds the strength these days, he works on his own design education materials that prepare students for non-ideal situations, and I thought that made perfect sense for him.

    Many of the things we talked about over lunch echoed other conversations I’ve been having with other friends. Maybe it’s the return of tech layoffs in the news, but negative sentiments seem as high as they were during Covid, with the questioning of boundaries and priorities taking place again. Tony understandably tried to impress upon us that some things aren’t worth having as regrets, and that we should make better choices while we still can. When I asked him what else he does now on days that aren’t lost to medical interventions, the answer was surprisingly similar to how I spent most of my year off work: reading, writing, and drawing.

    Peishan shared this Guardian article about people with cancer who’ve found the clarity to spend their remaining time meaningfully, and I thought Mark Edmondson landed the point that some people have trouble getting: the work that gives you purpose today isn’t the only purpose you’ll have.

    People (usually millennials) also mention the difficulty they have switching off from work. On a daily basis, but also when they go on vacation — taking half the holiday to get into holiday mode is a terrible inefficiency. I recall it took me months to unwind from a state of nearly burning out and to stop worrying about my “sabbatical ROI”. We should be like newer hybrid vehicles that can shut their engines down when idling at traffic lights and spring back to life quickly when needed, but instead us older cars only know how to burn gas all the time. I want to be a disused school bus just rusting in a field, bright yellow and unbothered.

    ===

    • I visited the Prix Pictet photo exhibition that’s part of Singapore Art Week (maybe it’ll be the only event I attend from this year’s edition) and found it beautiful but gosh it was mostly depressing. The theme was “Human” but it may as well have been “Human Suffering” — from communities devastated by the effects of mining and metal poisoning, to the plight of illegal refugees trekking 66 miles through jungle in search of better opportunities, they seemed to comment that there’s not much joy in being human these days. I joked halfway through that I hoped there would be a series of mundane birthday party photos at the end. There wasn’t.
    • Kim spent most of her week preparing an elaborate, successful Indian dinner from the Dishoom cookbook, but that’s really a story for her own weeknotes if they ever happen. The takeaway for me has been that, after seeing how the proverbial samosa is made, the Indian takeaways we usually get are probably quite unhealthy and we need to cut down.
    • Nintendo is having a January sale on the Switch eShop and I considered getting the remake of an apparent classic time loop visual novel, YU-NO: A girl who chants love at the bound of this world, yes, that is its title. It’s apparently the spiritual forebear of games such as Steins;gate, but after watching a short gameplay video on YouTube, I decided that since life is too short, I really didn’t want to punish myself. An anime adaptation was made a few years ago, so I will simply watch that instead.
    • We are enjoying the new British police drama Criminal Record on Apple TV+. Peter Capaldi is really good in it, although all the police work and cornering of baddies with their secrets is carried out really incompetently.
    • Can you believe that The Smile dropped a new album a couple of days ago and I had to find out from YouTube instead of Apple Music? Seriously, I’m looking at my For You page and it’s not mentioned under New Releases. This music video, where the band plays a new song for an auditorium full of young children — most of them bewildered or bored out of their minds, but with a couple really into it — is such a simple and charming concept I can’t believe I can’t name another time it’s been done.
  • Week 50.23

    Week 50.23

    Christmas is creeping closer, but the Goodreads Challenge angel won’t be darkening my doorstep as I’ve redeemed myself with two weeks to go! James Hogan’s Thrice Upon A Time was the twelfth book of my year, and definitely one of the better ones. It’s a 1980s time travel story where no time travel takes place, but it grapples with ideas about how timelines are rewritten, plus some other global topics that seem quite prescient when read today. Stylistically, it’s aged, but in that classic sci-fi way I love, which takes me back to reading books in the library after school. I think those hours, that precious access back then to a ton of books I couldn’t wait to read, were the part of going to school I looked forward to most. Anyway I’ve started a dumb new book that I should be finishing this year for bonus credit: The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley.

    If you’re looking for reading material, it may interest you to hear that I somehow managed to finish B’Fast, the AI-generated breakfast zine project I mentioned last week. The InstaZine GPT I made to create the content is also available through the same link (I updated the page with some additional usage tips today). Now that it’s done, I’m planning to make a companion breakfast-themed zine called “B’Fast (Brandon’s Version)” which will be made entirely by me, in a way that an AI presumably would not. But probably not straight away.

    ===

    Earlier this year, Hipstamatic redesigned and relaunched their Hipstamatic X app. The “X” was dropped, and they added a new social feed. It was the official replacement for their original app which became Hipstamatic Classic. Where the original was funded by in-app purchases for new filters (at a pace of roughly one new 99c release each month), the new Hipstamatic charges a $30/year subscription, doubling their income from faithful fans.

    I used the new app for some photos during my trip to Japan and mostly enjoyed the experience, but it was too buggy and the UI was still too cluttered and confusing (a longstanding problem with the original Hipstamatic app as well) for me to consider continuing with a paid subscription.

    Their main problem is that there are now over 300 filters in the forms of “films” and “lenses” and “flashes” that you can combine to make infinite looks, and no good way to make the attractive human-curated combinations they recommend accessible and discoverable. In the last version, they tried to give a few of these combinations the tangible metaphor of being unique “cameras”, each one with a different skeuomorphic body you picked off a shelf, but essentially they were presets you could call up. But you can keep, what, ten of these aside in a little drawer before you couldn’t tell them apart? And so many of the other combinations were left out of sight and out of mind.

    Now, after a week of teasing social media posts, wherein a “physical camera” was shown in videos — quite obviously a 3D model rendered in AR, but some people believed they were going to release a hardware product anyway — they’ve released a major update (v10) that tries to untangle the Gordian knot of their UX issues.

    In this new version, they’ve tried to marry what worked in the original app with a new info architecture and set of metaphors to manage the library of looks they’ve accumulated over the last 14 years. You get just ONE skeuomorphic camera to call your own and customize the look of, and this camera is capable of loading up many presets. You can either let the camera detect the scene and choose a suitable preset for it (Auto mode), or specify the preset yourself (Manual mode). There are 9 possible scenes, such as Travel, People, and Still Life, but in a puzzling and unfortunate move, when you start using the app, each of these scenes has just one or two associated presets. That means you’re going to see the same looks over and over, when there are over a hundred more hidden away in a long list. This was presumably done to allow you, the user, to customize your experience and assign your favorite presets to the scenes.

    There are two major problems at this point. One: leaving it up to the user to gain their own understanding of all the pre-existing “good combos” and assign them to 9 scene categories is insane. It’s a lot of work to hand off to a customer you hope will pay you money. The team should be doing the work of tagging each preset combo with a recommended use case, AND making it easy to assign them. It’s not currently easy. I had to move back and forth between two sections of the app looking at presets and memorizing their names to go assign to a scene, because these things aren’t placed together. Off the top of my head, it just needs an in-line list of suggested presets (from the aforementioned tagging exercise) on the same screen where you customize a scene’s presets. Perhaps this is coming. I’d argue it should have been in the MVP release of such a big redesign.

    Two: as I mentioned, there are infinite possible presets given the number of ingredients they’ve accumulated. You can make your own combos, but there’s no great way to experiment and do this — there should be a sandbox where you can explore each lens/film/flash’s characteristics and try them out in real time to find a good combo. There used to be a section of the app called the “Hipstamatic Supply Catalog” where you could browse all these effects (it was only like a static magazine, but they could have made it interactive), and this now seems to be gone or I can’t find it anymore in the maze of menus and buttons. Perhaps they’re okay with most users just using the curated “good presets” and never making their own, but it seems like a missed opportunity.

    I was feeling a mix of optimistic and bored, so I paid for an annual subscription anyway and will be trying to take lots of everyday silly snaps with this, and maybe even use it on my upcoming trip to Thailand. But if you know someone who works at Hipstamatic, please talk to them about taking on some external advice.

    ===

    • I finished watching Pluto on Netflix. It’s still a strong recommendation for me; a modern anime made with classic sensibilities and a story that really keeps you guessing. It’s also a very different Astro Boy story, suitable for people who hear “Astro Boy” and think it’s stuff for kids.
    • We started watching A Murder at the End of the World and I’m really liking it so far. Especially its star, Emma Corrin, who I’ve never seen in anything else before. They’ve got the most strikingly similar face to Jodie Foster, I was sure they were related.
    • New playlist! BLixTape #3 is done, made up of mostly new songs that I’ve been listening to since mid-October. Add it here on Apple Music.
  • Week 47.23

    Week 47.23

    Oof, this was a tiring week. Navigating change, physically recovering from a vaccine’s side effects, and having conversations about Christmas gifts, that shit will wear a blogger out. Helping me navigate all this was my astrology GPT, Co—Sign, who would tell me how to deal with challenging situations and to trust in my own nature, even if some decisions felt like bad ideas by other people’s standards.

    Of course, the week started off with more twists in the OpenAI management saga, which seems to have ended now with Sam and Greg back at the company, not at Microsoft, and the formation of a new board underway. This pleases me because OpenAI was a company/brand with significant momentum and destroying value of that sort for no good reason doesn’t sit well with me (this may or may not be a reference to something else happening in my life). I’m glad I won’t have to port my collection of GPTs to another product like Poe or whatever.

    I used Gen AI to bone up on Silicon Valley mind viruses like EA (effective altruism) and e/acc (effective accelerationism), which I’d kinda grokked in passing but not spent any time specifically reading up on. I have to say I feel myself falling in the accelerationist camp — given current world events, we’re not exactly proving ourselves a worthy species, so we may as well hasten our demise or salvation in every aspect from the upheaval of labor to economic principles. Incidentally bitcoin hit a new high for the year this week, going over $38,000 for a brief period.

    I’ve buried the lede, but AI voice recognition and synthesis technology has enabled my favorite gag of the year: this Chinese dubbing of Van Morrison performing Caravan with The Band. It’s sublime; a French chef’s French kiss. It caught me in a moment of weakness and I couldn’t watch the whole thing through because I was dying of laughter. Van shouting “turn your radio up” in Mandarin will live rent free in my head from this week forth. This video is so precious to me I’ve saved a copy on personal cloud storage just in case the tweet goes down.

    ===

    I was excited to hear that the Muji store in Plaza Singapura had reopened after an extensive renovation, now twice its original size and the largest in South-East Asia. We went down on the weekend to take a look, and it had things normally seen only in Japan: plants, bicycles, an embroidery service, renovation services, a wider range of furnishings, frozen food, and regional specialty goods (including $350 silk scarves). Not your average Muji! In fact, it’s billed as a “Global Flagship Store”, and I hope their gamble pays off and Singaporeans vote for more of this with their wallets.

    ===

    • Up to episode 4 of Pluto on Netflix now and it’s really the best anime series of the year for me. Just on those late 90s cybernoir SF mystery vibes. This is what the Ghost in the Shell Standalone Complex reboots should have been like.
    • Also up to episode 4 of Blue Eye Samurai and I’ll admit it’s gotten better. More complexity, somewhat interesting stakes, but the CG anime look with fake low-fps stuttering is getting a little annoying. If I had a modern TV I might actually turn on motion smoothing just to make it a more authentic experience.
    • I tried real hard to avoid buying a 4K HDR TV during the Black Friday sales and succeeded. Gotta save up funds for the dark days ahead.
    • Speaking of premonitions, we saw episode 2 of Lessons in Chemistry on Apple TV+ (mild spoiler alert) and let me tell you, my cinematic Spidey sense tingled and I called the event that happens at the end of the episode minutes before it happened. I’m usually quite bad at anticipating TV twists, but something about the atmosphere and pacing and shots just told me what was coming.
    • We also saw the first two episodes of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters on Apple TV+ and were left impressed. It’s the new series involving Godzilla and other monsters that either belong to Toho or Warner Bros now? Really, the monster custody is unclear to me. But halfway through, as new characters were being introduced in flashbacks, Kim assumed an Asian woman was the mother of a younger Asian woman we’d already seen. And I said, “maybe it’s just an unrelated Asian woman”, to which she laughed, “there are never unrelated Asians”. Which I took to mean in American shows, not the real world, and sadly she’s right.
    • Many people have been raving about Andre 3000’s new instrumental album with flutes, New Blue Sun, and I’ve tried to get into it, I have. But it’s literally put me to sleep a couple of times, so I’m assuming it’s just not for me.

    (This week’s Featured Image is a Dall•E representation of a Chinese Van Morrison impersonator performing in a Muji store.)

  • Week 46.23

    Week 46.23

    Album of the week: Daft Punk released a “drumless” edition of Random Access Memories and the simple act of removing elements adds an unexpected amount of value. The album strikes a delicate balance between novelty and nostalgia. By removing the drum tracks, it reveals intricate instrumental interplays once masked by robust beats, offering new perspective on familiar melodies. Within minutes, you’ll be surprised at how different this feels. I don’t know how many other albums have been rereleased like this, but it’s a great idea — one made less cynical by the streaming model, as Michael observed in a chat. In the old days, this would just look like trying to sell you a CD you already bought.

    Speaking of cynical purchases avoided, I saw and held the Leica Sofort 2 in person this weekend while attending a talk and exhibition at their annual Celebration of Photography event. The glossy front plastic was not as fingerprint prone as I’d feared, and overall build quality felt a touch better than on the Fujifilm Instax mini Evo: the rocker button on the back panel had more click resistance, the “film advance” lever that prints photos was sturdier and more satisfying to activate, and the flimsy USB port cover on the bottom was slightly firmer and seemed to stay in place. For me, those were the top 3 basic problems that needed to be addressed. The software menus were simply reskinned and not redesigned, as expected. All in all, Leica did the minimum they had to do to make the Fujifilm product a little more premium, but without improvements to image quality, it’s still a very odd product to bear a red dot. I did not feel the urge to replace my mini Evo on the spot.

    Shot on iPhone, edited with looks by ✨PixelGenius

    With Leica’s latest attempt at opening my wallet rejected, my week was free to absorb excesses of a different kind when I met up with Jianjia for a farewell lunch. She decided we would eat Mala at some place called YGF. It turns out that she schedules every meet-up she can there, because she’s addicted to their high sodium spice blend. When I pointed out how salty it was (after she had drunk all her soup, and for the record I couldn’t finish my massive bowl), she was like “huh, maybe that’s why I like it so much. I never had much salt in my food growing up”.

    We are all the products of our childhoods, each messed up in our own special ways, which is something I was discussing with a colleague in a work-related conversation one day when I thought, “ooh, I should make a GPT therapist!” Which I called Doctor Talkabout, and tried to bias it towards exploring barriers to happiness that originated in childhood. On the whole, the unlicensed doctor is now quite good at discussing all manner of problems, and I hope it gives better perspectives than vanilla ChatGPT. And just in case psychology and psychoanalysis are a little too… “real” for you? I also made a GPT therapist based on astrology, inspired by Co—Star. I honestly get a kick out of both, and discussing my problems with them has been more effective at managing my feelings than just going in circles on my own.

    The number of GPTs I’ve made this past week is now in the double digits (including one for work and a private one for editing text), and so I’ve had to make a category page to see them all on this site. Please check them out.

    And yes, some shit is afoot at OpenAI, after CEO Sam Altman was ousted early Saturday morning. Too early to say why, but ChatGPT has noticeably struggled to perform quickly of late, and they’ve both turned off new signups for ChatGPT Plus AND reduced the rate for paying members from 50 to 40 messages every three hours. I have a feeling they might renege on their commitment to open a GPT App Store and share revenue with creators. Time will tell. I wasn’t going to quit my day job for this anyway. And as of Sunday afternoon, he’s supposedly been asked to come back and the board of directors will resign? Pure insanity.

    I watched the first episode of Netflix’s acclaimed Blue Eye Samurai Western anime series, and it felt like something an AI wrote. I don’t get the rave reviews just yet; two people described it to me using Kill Bill as a reference point, and you’ll see why in the super derivative first episode. It even uses the same Tomoyasu Hotei song, Battle Without Honor or Humanity, in a cliche sword-forging and training montage sequence. I mean, Kill Bill itself was a pastiche of samurai movie tropes, but this warms them over without any shame. It also has a dash of Afro Samurai to it, however both of these are examples of how to do homage without feeling like copies. Netflix shows are like cloud kitchen-brand versions of fast food items that were inspired by restaurant dishes.

    Somehow the show has some talent signed up to it: George Takei, Ming Na-Wen, and Kenneth Branagh provide voices. Its writer and co-creator, Michael Green, was involved in Blade Runner 2049 (but also Branagh’s trilogy of Hercule Poirot films which I do not love). But I’ll give it a second chance anyway; there may be other themes at play here beyond the Othered protagonist seeking revenge. But having seen this, I feel like I have a pretty good idea of what AI-generated mass entertainment would look like, and I’m not down for it anymore. I’d like for AGI to come and take away all the other jobs in the world, leaving us humans free to come up with new and more creative ways to show sword fights.

    So imagine my surprise when I started up Pluto (also on Netflix) after two episodes of Blue Eye Samurai, and found it the total opposite in terms of quality. You don’t know where the story is going even if some ideas, like androids that grapple with unexplained dreams from a past life, are familiar and were explored before in other works. It takes its time with characterizations, and aims for a timeless beauty that goes beyond slow-motion action scenes. Polygon has a nice piece about it, but don’t read anything before you’ve seen the first episode, just trust me on that.

  • Week 42.23

    Week 42.23

    I used to (sporadically) log my mood and mental state in a great free app called How We Feel, but ever since iOS 17 came out with a similar feature in the Health.app, I’ve been doing it there. It’s nowhere as good, though, and the act of recording how you feel is (surprise!) so much better in How We Feel. Apple’s version makes you scroll a list of feelings like Anxious, Content, and Sad, sorted in alphabetical order.

    The other app arranges feelings in a colorful 2×2 grid, from high to low energy, from unpleasant to pleasant. An example of a high-energy unpleasant feeling is Terrified, while a low-energy pleasant feeling might be Serene. This grid is a much more logical and visual way to find the right word and quickly record your feelings throughout the day. Anyway, the rumor is that iOS 17.1 will be out next week, and I’m hoping the new Journal app is part of it, because I want better ways to record and look back on my state of mind.

    ===

    We attended the local premiere of Martin Scorsese’s new film that everyone’s talking about online: Killers of the Flower Moon. In a theater, no less! It’s an Apple Original Film, and will be coming to Apple TV+ after this irl run is over. I can’t remember the last 3.5 hour film I saw under such circumstances, unable to take a break, forced to focus. If I’d seen it at home I’d probably have paused it no less than five times, and so I’m glad that I couldn’t, because it’s the kind of film that quietly spends its budget building a world so absolutely intact and complete that you’re left to focus on the people, the time, and the weight of its historical crimes. As a true story, it’s devastating. “People are the worst” is pretty much my 4-star Letterboxd review.

    On the flip side, we saw disgraced filmmaker Woody Allen’s 2019 film, A Rainy Day in New York, which has pretty poor ratings online, and really enjoyed it. I’m aware that he has approximately, oh… one style? And a hallmark of it is neurotic, pretentious characters in awkward romantic situations who spout smart alecky jokes in an artificial, stage performance cadence… but I like it. It’s also amusing to see current generation stars like Timothée Chalamet and Elle Fanning as his stars, but playing their roles exactly like Woody. Is it because they’ve seen his old films and think they have to? Or do the scripts just demand that delivery? Also, Selena Gomez is in it, and I can’t help but see this performance as a superior version of what she does in Only Murders in the Building.

    ===

    I got jabbed for Hepatitis A & B on Friday, and it was a doozy. I felt lightheaded and weird all afternoon afterwards, and I have to go back for two more boosters over the next few months.

    Contributing to the feeling all weekend has been my new contact lenses, the first ones I’ve worn in maybe 8 years? The right eye prescription is a little underpowered and so I’m suffering with blurry images that are driving me crazy. I’ll need to try and get them exchanged next week.

    Why am I wearing them at all? I got an annoying pimple/scratch behind one ear, exactly where the arm of my glasses sit, and so I decided on some disposable dailies while it heals. On one hand, the feeling of freedom is amazing — I really miss this about wearing contacts, which I did regularly in my younger days. Just things like being able to do a spontaneous facepalm! But now everyone has learnt that “my look” is “guy with glasses”, and suddenly my normal face looks weird, even to me gazing in the mirror, and I don’t need to freak people out any more than necessary.

    The blurriness has had a slight impact on my enjoyment of Super Mario Wonder, the latest and greatest Mario game which just came out. I wasn’t planning to buy it, because I wasn’t planning to play it any time soon, being still in the middle of another old Mario game on the Switch, Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Revenge. But peer pressure got to me, and talking to Jussi got me justifying it to myself that playing a 2D and 3D Mario game at the same time isn’t a problem — it’s like reading a fiction and non-fiction book at the same time!

    Super Mario Wonder is the 2D one, for the uninitiated. It’s a modern take on the classic Mario games, far more inventive and deep-reaching than even the New Super Mario Bros. series of games that tried to breathe new life into the side-scrolling platforming formula. Wonder has incredibly detailed and expressive animations all throughout: Mario and friends move and react to things like characters in a proper animated movie (was this planned to coincide with this year’s film? I don’t know), bursting with character, while the levels and events are literally psychedelic festivals of invention. This is a blockbuster game that spends its budget conspicuously, gleefully.

    ===

    In playing with DALL•E 3 some more (within ChatGPT Plus), I discovered that it goes a great job of replicating the look of classic 80s anime. You literally just have to ask it for that. I tried some classic scenes, and then asked for couples hanging out near a 7-Eleven drinking Strong Zero, and then for screenshots from a movie about a female detective investigating a case of financial fraud, and it’s that last one that made me think this thing is a new milestone in tools for visualizing stories.

    There was a period about a year ago when quite a few new moms all had ideas for children’s books, and wanted to use DALL•E or Midjourney to illustrate them. I got questions about whether it was feasible to do this, and if you’ve been talking everyone’s head off about this stuff too, you probably had the same conversations.

    I think this level of natural language interface with GPT-4 and DALL•E 3 coming together is finally making it possible for anyone to direct images with consistent settings and characters. I read somewhere that Midjourney v6 is going to make prompting easier as well, so perhaps we’ll get a flood of storybooks next year.

    There was also a thing going around on Threads that basically asked participants to “paste your Threads bio into an AI art tool” and see what comes out. I saw a few people doing this, all floored by the accuracy of the people they saw gazing back through the black mirror, I suspect afraid of how accurately they were seen from just a few keywords — one lady said “I own all of those tops”.

    I think this is a pretty strong signal for the mainstreaming of generative AI, that a meme like this can spread without instructions attached. Everyone who is online enough knows what it means to invoke an electronic genie that grants image wishes, knows very well how to go find one and get the deed done. Next year is going to be wild.

    But anyway I wanted to try it out, although my bio isn’t like “Founder/CEO (he/him), hustling 24/7 🇸🇬, new book out 20/12, always up for coffee ☕️ and meetups 🤝”; it’s currently “Designer, sense-maker, aesthete, imposter, garbage, scum.” which gives you results like this: