Another busy week, and I’ve been like a caffeinated creature hunched over its keyboard with bloodshot eyes. You may notice I’ve updated the navigation bar on this site to point to a dedicated page listing all my apps. This takes the place of a page that pointed to all my custom GPTs on ChatGPT (that never really took off, did it?) and before that, my NFT experiments. Those are still around, though!
You may call it AI slop but I’ve generated key images for each of the apps on that page, which I like to think of as analogous to game box cover art, those evocative artistic representations that used to stretch truths to their breaking points, back in the days when games looked like Lego.
Here they are, just so you can admire them.
HEIFerCollagenUrban JunglesSkySpotterCommonVerse
The latest for now is CommonVerse, my daily magnetic poetry app. Give it a go!
I’m writing this paragraph on Thursday after another failed attempt to stop vibe coding and focus on other pursuits. So far I’ve mostly finished one project and started on another that I meant to leave aside until next week. What is this feeling? This need to actualize a new ability that I’ve always wanted but never had to worry about not having?
Instead of being able to recognize that I’ve already accomplished a lot, and “taking the rest of the week off” to go watch movies or something, I’m sucked into continually iterating and improving upon these apps like I’m on a deadline. It’s that paradox (mentioned here last May) where new technologies don’t decrease our workloads but only make us busier instead.
Productivitymaxxers will say this is fine. This is how it’s supposed to be: you can do more, so you work just as hard and get twice as much out of it. Why would you want to work half as much? And they’re not wrong — that’s the engine of progress. But it’s also how you end up making six apps in three weeks and treating it as some kind of baseline rather than a miracle. As predicted, my capability has grown but I got desensitized to the satisfaction.
The discomfiting shock to the system as I struggle with this resetting of scale, and feeling addicted to realizing more ideas, is an adaptation crisis. Adapting to life at a new speed and learning to balance capability with sensibility. Astronauts and pilots have to train to handle G-forces, in which the G stands for gravitational. I’m suggesting that working with AI has its own G-force, where the G is gratification. You can suddenly manifest many of the things you can think of. That’s a very powerful impulse to get under control. How do you engage with life’s responsibilities, appointments, or your growling stomach, when there’s always just one more prompt and revision to make? After getting home from a few drinks on Friday night, I found myself on my laptop in bed after midnight, fighting with a procedural audio generation engine that wouldn’t trigger drum sounds for any obvious reason.
The next night I did the same, staying up to 3:30 AM because I had some new ideas that just could not wait. My Apple Watch sleep score is in shambles. But App #6 is certainly shaping up to be my best work. I’m going to sit on it for a whole week and keep polishing, instead of putting it out and moving on to the next one. That’s my strategy for slowing this down — it’s all I’ve got.
Over the weekend, I also attended an Apple Store photo walk activity on a sweltering afternoon (up to 36°C next week) with Cien and Peishan. I hadn’t done one of these in years, but always keep meaning to. This one was conducted by the staff at Apple Orchard, and was a walking tour of Emerald Hill — which in reality is just a tiny street off Orchard Road. I’ve been there dozens of times over the years, but never saw the details just sitting there in tiles, old paintwork, and ornamental doorframes. Going to a small area with the intention of taking photos, and giving it more time than you’d normally allocate, can be a really fun and creative exercise.
There’s no reason one couldn’t do this themselves any time, anywhere, of course. But these free ‘Today At Apple’ sessions are a good excuse to get off the couch. The other two local stores have their own programs, and I might check them out someday: Apple Jewel Changi Airport looks at the indoor waterfall, and Apple Marina Bay Sands has a night photography focus.
Another nice touch is that they’ll lend you an iPhone 17 or 17 Pro if you don’t have one, and they’re incredibly relaxed about handing them out. No paperwork to fill out or deposits to pay. That’s the great thing about Find My protection, I guess. A comment was made that in the UK, those phones would disappear the instant the group left the store — even if just for parts. But they must do these sessions worldwide, so I’d love to know how it’s dealt with.
If you thought I was going to stop after last week’s two apps, I wouldn’t blame you. I’ve been having poor luck staying focused on new hobbies and pursuits over the past year; they all just seem like too much work for too little payoff and I drift off. Vibe coding seems different so far because it lets me start making weird things that I want to see, without being dependent on anyone else’s time or generosity.
If you think in terms of music albums/careers, then Collagen was the mixtape that I put together to see if I could be a real musician. Urban Jungles was a big leap forward, the debut album, if you will. It had way more polish and was usable by almost anyone (whereas Collagen had what you might call a niche audience).
Which brings us to the sophomore curse or slump. The second album tends to be over-ambitious, myopically conceived, and underwhelms audiences looking for more of what made the debut good. There are exceptions to this mythical rule, like Radiohead’s The Bends, Lorde’s Melodrama, and D’Angelo’s Voodoo. By this logic, my next app was statistically going to “fail” by being a harder one to get into.
I ended up making two apps again this week: SkySpotter and Library Supercollider. Each one has a separate page on this site that shows and explains what they are, so you should stop here and go read them before coming back.
Concept vs. Product
Like a sophomore album, SkySpotter probably reached a little too far. It took the real-time weather data angle from Urban Jungles, added the more complex dimension of real-time air traffic data, and then threw in rendering a first-person 3D world as a bonus challenge. I started refining the concept and prototyping it on Sunday afternoon, and then worked on it for two full days on Monday and Tuesday. I literally forgot to eat lunch, and was still messing with it at 11pm both nights. It was like a job.
Gemini 3 struggled. The Canvas chat became so long and convoluted that it won’t even load now in the iOS apps — I have to use the web interface. It hallucinated making changes, and introduced new bugs each time I made an improvement. It built planes with reversed wings and nose cones pointing backwards. Working with bugs in a 3D app was so blood-boilingly frustrating that I wanted to give up.
I actually did give up… on implementing a VR mode for Apple Vision Pro. We got it to half work but the skybox sphere was too far away and would keep turning black. Rather than risk corrupting the working regular version any further, I decided to cut it.
I’m proud of SkySpotter because it’s pretty damned cool to lie in the virtual grass and watch real planes go by. Even as someone who doesn’t care about planes more than the average person! But it was a technical challenge first and a passion project second. So if that was my over-produced sophomore studio album the label breathed down my neck for, then the next release would be its opposite: a scrappy, self-funded back-to-roots project recorded directly to tape in a Nashville studio over an inspired couple of days.
Concept vs. Product
Library Supercollider was an idea that came to me all of a sudden after I’d finished SkySpotter. I’d been interested in the concept of cut-up poetry since I was in university (popularized by Brion Gysin and William Burroughs around the 1960s), and I believe it occurred to me back then that someone could make a computer program to cut up and mash two classic texts. I just didn’t know it would be me, twenty years later.
I expected it would take me the next couple of days to get working, being that it requires the somewhat complex-sounding downloading and processing of entire ebooks in the background of a web app. I didn’t know if it could even be done. So imagine my surprise when I had a working prototype by lunchtime on Wednesday. But between polishing the experience and overcoming download limits with Project Gutenberg servers, I wouldn’t be done until Saturday morning, making it a longer project with different challenges — comparatively less frustrating, more educational.
I understand that it’s not an app for everyone — you might read a page and conclude that it’s worthless gibberish. Maybe it takes the sort of person who likes abstract art and free jazz. But personally I’m so pleased with this project that I’ve bought two domain names to go with it: librarysupercollider.com and the superior smashmybooksup.com, which I’ll retain for a year as a ‘marketing URL’.
In all seriousness, I think this is the finest work of my two-week career as a builder of software! The user experience for remixing and reading the resulting texts is brilliant, if I do say so myself. The steampunk UI and animations are completely unnecessary but bring me joy (notice the moving gears in desktop view). I had to come up with caching and proxy solutions to make the app more reliable under load. I even got a little into the weeds: installing node.js and Vite on my Mac, running scripts in the terminal, trying to compile a macOS port to get around problems (eventually unnecessary).
Even if I were a skilled and experienced developer, I can’t see how I would have made these apps in two weeks; from writing to designing and coding them up, plus preparing documentation and website copy (plus one very dubious video ad). Deploying Library Supercollider to its own domain made the reality click for me, a feeling kinda like publishing your first thing on the App Store. It says: this thing is now real and can be used by real people.
Then I came across this article in the NYT Magazine, entitled “Coding After Coders: The End of Computer Programming As we Know It”. It notes an interesting inversion of what we’re seeing in other fields — AI is taking away the drudgery of programming and leaving the human, soulful (and fun) parts.
“The work of a developer is now more judging than creating.”
In that way, I may not have magically joined the ranks of coders overnight, but I could probably say I’m developing. At my job, I used to direct the form of apps in a way so removed that I could only claim the role of design, but not the larger making. Part of the handwringing in design circles today is precisely about how designing and developing are merging, and soon only making will remain.
Not everyone will bother to turn their ideas into reality, and fewer still have the experience and vocabulary to prompt polished apps distinct from the models’ averaged-out defaults, but those who persevere will be bringing tools and toys into existence the likes of which you may have been waiting decades to see.
What’s next? Well, I might have a couple of ideas…
—
One thing all this app-making has done is bring me back to my Mac. I usually spend most of my computing time on my iPhone and iPad, but there’s no substitute for a Mac when it comes to managing local files, running scripts and compiling code. I’ve had coders like Michael make this point to me before, but I never got it because I never needed to sync a local repo with GitHub or anything before.
So a side effect of spending long stretches of time on my five-year-old and long-neglected M1 MacBook Air is that I’m wondering “Why did I ever stop? This thing is great!”
It’s worth noting that this week Apple’s newly released MacBook Neo has been getting a ton of praise on my social feeds for being an affordable and all-round capable machine at an unbelievable $599 price point. I got a tear in my eye as I read this essay by Sam Henri Gold: “This Is Not The Computer For You” — it perfectly encapsulates what it was like to grow up on computers and teach yourself things, even on PCs.
Too much screen time is awfully bad for you, so on the weekend I touched some metaphorical grass by taking our niece out to Disney on Ice at the Singapore Indoor Stadium. It’s extremely well-timed, with the world still coming down from Alysia Liu’s gold medal, and Singapore being in the midst of a Disney craze — a Disney Cruise offering has launched after delays and is now at the local docks, with fireworks and drone shows along the bay at night.
These were Live Photos of some stunts
I have no deep affection for Disney IPs but appreciate the amount of effort and coordination that goes into making magic, and it clearly works with so many adults into this stuff. What’s interesting is that while ice-skating can get pretty boring after awhile — it’s all the same moves over and over, around a static rink — adding a layer of characters and storytelling works to keep it fresh over an hour and a half.
Oh, and our niece is 9, and by way of introducing her to the MacBook Neo, I asked her what computer she uses. I swear, her response was not far off the punchline in that Apple ad that everyone but me seems to hate, in which a girl who’s been using her iPad all day for creative things is asked what she’s doing on her computer, and she responds “What’s a computer?” Will iPads become open enough to support kids learning to (vibe) code? Or will nature heal in a post-post-PC revival led by the MacBook Neo? In any case, that ad was prescient.
Bonus: Steve asks the same question in a different context (around 1:30). You must watch this video, it’s breathtaking. He’s 28 at this point. In addition to confidently describing things like Street View, mobile wireless computing, LLM chatbots, and the App Store, there’s a part near the end where he says “What we need to do is get away from programming. People don’t want to learn programming, they want to use computers.” He was talking about providing more finished software products to customers, because writing custom software was the norm then, but it’s an eerily relevant quote!
A simple tool for making collages, specifically with album cover art.
Most collage tools are either bloated with unnecessary social features or too restrictive to be useful. Collagen is a single-purpose utility designed to solve a specific friction: the tedious process of manually sourcing high-resolution album art, aligning it in a grid, and then realizing you want to swap the top-left for the bottom-right. It turns a multi-step design chore into a fluid, drag-and-drop experiment.
Screenshot
Features
Integrated Sourcing: Queries the iTunes database for official, high-resolution artwork (600×600) so you don’t have to hunt for covers or deal with low-res thumbnails.
Tactile Reordering: Drag and drop tiles to swap positions instantly. The layout logic handles the movement so you can focus on the visual flow.
Flexible Dimensions: Define your grid up to 10×10. The preview and export scale dynamically to match your rows and columns.
Hybrid Content:
Search: Instant API pulls for mainstream releases.
Upload: Support for local files (obscure imports, demos, or personal photos).
Text Tiles: Add context or labels with custom text tiles. Features automatic contrast (white/black) and a choice between a clean sans-serif or a classic serif typeface.
Borders: Toggle between borderless, white, or black frames. The logic includes outer edge padding for a symmetrical, finished look.
PWA Architecture: Built to be “Added to Home Screen.” It caches assets locally on your iPhone for faster subsequent loads and works as a standalone app.
Export: One-click generation of a high-resolution stitched PNG. It uses a dedicated image-proxy pipeline to ensure every tile renders correctly without the “blank square” errors common in browser-based canvas exports.
Disclaimer: I made Collagen with the help of Google’s Gemini 3/3.1 Pro LLM and take no responsibility whatsoever for any damage you do with it.
The featured image above is the result of having Geese’s Au Pays du Cocaine in my head all day. The line about a sailor in a big green boat and a big green coat made me think of Puffer Jacket Snoopy, and of course I had to realize the joke.
We got the sad news that Deliveroo is shutting down operations in Singapore. This comes on the back of an acquisition by DoorDash who must have run the numbers and decided that a 7% share of the local food delivery market after a decade wasn’t worth investing further in. We use it all the time and prefer it over Grab and Foodpanda — it is by far the better app and their subscription service is better value for money, but we’ve seen this movie before. It’s like how Uber lost out to Grab; the market doesn’t always choose efficiently.
I will probably switch to Foodpanda because Grab as a brand has the same icky halo as, say, Facebook or Spotify.
Google released Nano Banana 2, the new version of their hit image generation model. This one is cheaper to run and kind of almost as good as Nano Banana Pro, so they’re making it the default for everyone. Paid users can still access the Pro model, but it’s hidden behind some menus. It’s a regression in quality, a slight improvement in speed, and most importantly, a boost to Google’s bottom line. Since I only do silly things with these tools, it doesn’t bother me tremendously, but imagine the same happening at an enterprise level for more important work.
Screen recording of an AI panorama
One of the new things Nano Banana 2 can do is generate very wide panoramic images, so I asked it to render some “panoramas taken with an iPhone” in various locations. I then upscaled those and opened them in my Apple Vision Pro. They don’t have the photorealistic quality of images from Nano Banana Pro, and the resolution leaves a lot to be desired, but they’re still immersive and impressive when viewed in this way. You can see where this might go.
There’s been a lot of talk lately about how AI vibe coding could upend the SaaS market, if not replacing dependable enterprise tools with individually created ones, then at least giving IT departments a billion more unapproved apps to worry about. A viral essay from last week posited that AI coding could kill DoorDash, though I’d say they did a good job of that themselves out here. The other oft-discussed idea is that AI could replace the App Store, and everyone will just make their own apps instead of buying them from developers. Michael has been blogging about vibe-coding his own to-do list app based on Clear. I’ve been wanting to try this myself, making more little tools of my own to solve niche problems, but the opportunities have been slow to materialize.
This week the right idea presented itself and I made a web app using Gemini: an album cover collage maker that searches for the artwork or lets you upload your own. I’ve looked online for something like this before but only found a few that were quite lacking. Making one to my own specifications took maybe five minutes of prompting and testing. Then I thought it would be nice if you could drag the images to different locations. Gemini added that feature like it was nothing. I’m pretty hyped that even someone like me with zero current coding knowledge could will this into existence. If you’d like to try it, I’ve deployed it at usecollagen.netlify.app.
Otherwise it was a sort of decompression week where I just read a lot, listened to the records I bought/ordered last week, and was regrettably glued to my phone watching day trading losses (Chekhov’s gun has fired!) and social media feeds.
It took a couple weeks of dawdling but I finished John Le Carré’s Call for the Dead, his first novel featuring the spy George Smiley. I may continue reading the series, seeing as his son Nick Harkaway (whose work I really enjoy) has decided to continue his father’s legacy and written one more already: Karla’s Choice. This one was a little dated and not particularly thrilling, but a fine introduction and scene setter.
It was immediately followed by Adrian Tchaikovsky’s The Expert System’s Champion, sequel to The Expert System’s Brother which I read at the end of last year. I recommend both as examples of sci-fi stories set so far in the future that humanity has looped back around to the beginning. It reminds me of the “middle chapter” in Cloud Atlas, if you remember that.
Then I read Hu Anyan’s I Deliver Parcels in Beijing, a modern memoir that reportedly did well in China when it came out in 2022. It details the author’s dual career as a writer and on-and-off gig economy worker, which is made more interesting by also being a portrait of what it’s like to live in the lower brackets of Chinese society today.
I also had time to tackle Rob’s recommendation of Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall, which was written in the 1960s but doesn’t feel that way, unlike Le Carré’s spy novels. He called it the best book he read last year, so I could hardly say no. It starts off like an intriguing sci-fi novel: a woman visiting friends in the Austrian alps wakes up one morning in the log cabin to discover she’s alone, and there’s an invisible wall separating her from the outside world. Things then focus on survival and what it means to live and be human in solitude, and in nature. Which, given that I’ll be home alone next week while Kim is away again for work, means I’m already in the appropriate headspace.
A quick follow-up on one of last week’s topics: it turns out that some posts on Moltbook may have been faked because there were security holes allowing people to get on there and post directly (instead of being a bot-only place as promised). Doesn’t change the main point that future agents will collaborate not just on one computer, but sync up across wide networks with effects most of us can’t fathom. Look at the crowd that gathered to discuss Clawd a couple of days ago, to see how much excitement there is for this box that says Pandora on it.
I read a fantastic sci-fi short story that sort of involves AI: Julia, by Fernando Borretti. If you also enjoy fiction that drops you into a context and makes you swim, and then shows you strange and beautiful ideas as you break above the surface, you’ll love this. Like how China Miéville uses ornate language in The Book of Elsewhere to suggest Keanu Reeves’s… I mean the protagonist’s immortal, mystical otherness, Borretti uses a dense, intellectually dominating host of references here to illustrate the POV of an artificial mind at the end of humanity’s time. I haven’t stopped thinking about it.
What will we do when all the jobs are gone? A young entrepreneur in our neighborhood has started a home-based business selling smashburgers, and we bought some for dinner midweek. They were good, and I’m slightly afraid of what this proximity will do to my waistline. For those unaware, this was a bit of a trend last year and local media outlets like ChannelNewsAsia ran stories (example) about how such businesses were springing up as a result of low employment opportunities and rising rents.
Retreating further into the virtual world is another option. A bunch of new experiences became available on the Apple Vision Pro recently, and I caught up with some of them. The cutest is an immersive documentary on Apple TV called Top Dogs (two 15-min episodes), which looks at the annual Cruft’s dog show in Birmingham, UK. You get really up close to some of these beautiful animals, and the urge I felt to reach out and pet them was extremely strong. It wouldn’t be the same seeing this on TV. Here you get a sense of their size and presence, see them in incredible detail — everything but smell them. Apparently there are 25,000 dogs at the convention center each year, but I imagine these are all shampooed and much more pleasant than your average wet dog.
There’s also Retrocade, a game on Apple Arcade that uh… simulates an arcade. The game is playable on other devices, but on Vision Pro you get life-sized arcade cabinets standing in front of you, playing licensed retro titles like Space Invaders and Bubble Bobble. The only thing that breaks the illusion is of course that you can’t reach out to grab the sticks and mash the buttons. Instead, you have to use a connected game controller.
Speaking of emulating old hardware, I played and finished a game on Switch (also available on PC) called The Operator. It’s one of those where the entire UI is a computer’s desktop and you have to chat, look into files, and do hackery stuff to experience the story. I think this can be filed along with the other murder mystery games I’ve played lately. It’s fairly short at under four hours, almost completely linear, and not something you’d play twice. Wait for a sale, I think.
You know who else is a hacker? The lead character in Apple TV’s Tehran, a show that came out in 2020 and has since been renewed for a fourth season. We watched Episode 1 back when it came out, liked it enough, but for some reason completely forgot to go back until this year. It’s been topping the charts lately, maybe because of the recent civil unrest in Iran. Having just finished Season 1, I can say it‘s a really good espionage thriller, and we’re keen to keep going.
Oh and check this out. Someone has managed to license Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series and made a free-to-play (i.e. shitty) mobile game: Foundation: Galactic Frontier. It even has an Apple TV logo appear on startup?! And the next day, I saw this insane animated ad for it pop up on Instagram and couldn’t believe my eyes — I took a screenshot to prove it. In all fairness the actual game isn’t anything like this, it’s just a heinous misrepresentation that probably has Asimov spinning in his grave.
Trump spoke at the WEF in Davos, and we watched it live despite wanting to turn it off many times. I intermittently tuned into Bloomberg TV over the week to try and keep up with all the repercussions. It’s something I haven’t done in a while, and the memory of watching last year’s Davos coverage came back clearly — has it really been a year? Time flies when you’re watching chaos porn.
My main accomplishment for the week, in which admittedly little else happened, was acting on an impulse to make a sardine-themed t-shirt. If you were here back in Weeks 49 and 50 of 2025, you’d know they’re kind of my current food obsession.
How sad I was, then, to discover that canned fish has actually become a trendy thing now. Read this piece on the Taste Cooking site about how it’s hit the mainstream and now faces a backlash. It turns out that Big Sardine has been aggressively courting women. See the pretty illustrated boxes and tins coming out of Portugal and from new brands like Fishwife; they’re perfect for social media. As a result, prices for what was once a humble working man’s lunch are soaring.
Sidebar: As a man on the internet, you have a non-zero chance of being targeted for red-pill radicalization by algorithms, and it’s something I try to be hyperaware of and on the lookout for on platforms like Twitter. Despite that, at one point this week I was told by friends that I’d said something borderline manosphere-y. It was an observation that dating someone older and wealthier in your 20s could lead to lingering lifestyle inflation (spending above your means, simplistically) after you broke up with them. And seeing how women date older more often than men, I thought it might be another reason for the statistical gap between men and women’s retirement savings (alongside lower wages, caregiving duties, parenting). I just want to record this observation in case you notice me starting to blame women for all of society’s ills.
But back to the t-shirt I was talking about. I had the idea to draw a sprat, which is a species of fish commonly grouped under the sardine umbrella. I wanted to place it under with its Latin scientific name, Sprattus sprattus, on a black tee. I also had a mental image of what the lettering would look like, and managed to bring it to life with my own two hands (and an iPad). I’ve ordered a couple of shirts from a print-on-demand service for myself and Kim, thinking that maybe if they looked good and I felt like having more problems in life, then I could try selling some online.
As soon as I had that thought, I got excited and started mocking up a product page. I had a defunct Etsy store for my Misery Men project, so I renamed it “Maison Misery” to serve as a brand for all of this as-yet unrealized merchandise.
Next, I wrote up some funny copy for the sprat shirt, and then decided to put Gemini through its paces as an assistant copywriter to improve it. I wanted to spend more time with Gemini given this week’s rumor that Apple might not only use Google’s technology for the Apple Foundation Models powering New Siri, but also for an integrated chatbot debuting in this year’s OS updates.
And yeah, it’s really not looking good for junior copywriters. Five seconds after being given the brief, Gemini came back with three options that made me laugh and then compliment it with “Fuck me, these aren’t bad!” Now, each one wasn’t really usable on its own, but there was enough there that I could cobble together a good result along with what I’d already written. And that’s really all a creative director wants a junior employee to do: produce a range of half-formed ideas to pick through and refine. Unfortunately for humans, the fastest and cheapest LLMs today can already do that for things like product descriptions. And they’ll be running locally on your iPhone by the end of the year. This would be great technology if we had a shortage of copywriters, but instead we have a surplus, all looking for work.
But since I’m the writer Maison Misery is replacing with AI, it’s okay? Here’s the augmented final writeup that I’ll put next to this t-shirt.
At Maison Misery, we believe in celebrating the small things — mostly because the big things are too overwhelming to think about. Enter the sprat or brisling: a tiny fish harvested in its delicate youth, then tucked into cozy tins of extra virgin olive oil to dream of the Portuguese coast. These are the fancy ones you bring out to impress a date you’ve just brought home. If they don’t like the ‘deenz’, then that’s a bullet dodged.
This original tee pays homage to Sprattus sprattus with a hand-illustrated and lettered design placed over the heart, providing a conversation starter for marine biologists and a conversation stopper for everyone else. It’s a way to wear your passion for canned sardines on your sleeve, though technically we put it on the chest because sleeve printing is prohibitively expensive and we have a lifestyle to maintain.
Media activity
Netflix pushed the show His & Hers onto us last week, claiming it was an “addictive” thriller. I say give it a miss, because I can’t remember a damned thing about it today. Instead, their self-declared “top tier” thriller The Beast In Me, starring Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys, is a much better production. We finished it over the weekend, and while it’s no timeless classic, I’d agree it’s what you would find on the upper shelves if Netflix were a Blockbuster.
I watched the French animated film, Mars Express (2023) and came away very entertained. It’s a sci-fi story about robot/AI rights, a murder that defies the Three Laws, uploaded consciousness, and so on, borrowing from many existing works while having enough original ideas to justify itself. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, and doesn’t seem to have gotten wider attention since. Check it out if you can find it.
We also finally saw Brendan Fraser in Rental Family (2025), a Japan-through-American-eyes sort of film that doesn’t come close to capturing Lost In Translation’s magic, but has enough heart to reward your time. Fraser plays a down and out actor living in Tokyo who falls into a job playing stand-ins for people who need to tell white lies. Except some of them are kinda gray. I appreciated how the film leans into the moral ickiness of these assignments and rejects smoothing them over completely.
I swore I wouldn’t buy any records this week, and lord it was hard. J Dilla’s Donuts album went on “Limited Time Sale” on Amazon, dropping about $15, but I still didn’t cave! It’s in my cart, though. Instead I played some vintage cuts from my dad’s collection: War’s The World is a Ghetto and Rudolf Serkin’s Beethoven Piano Concerto No.5 with the New York Philharmonic.
If you want to know how close AI-generated music is getting to turning out radio-friendly bops, check out this album I came across by Japanese technologist Tom Kawada. I don’t think many people would realize what it was if they heard it in the background of a store, or a movie scene, or their own living rooms.
Then, to restore your faith in the messiness of human artistry, watch the new HBO Music Box documentary, Counting Crows: Have You Seen Me Lately? It covers the creation of their first two albums with a focus on Adam Duritz’s struggles with fame and mental illness. AI will probably write a chart-topping hit this decade, but can it ever write A Long December?
This week’s vinyl purchase was the album that restarted the whole idea of buying physical music again for me at the end of last year: Rosalía’s LUX. The digital/streaming version is intentionally incomplete, with 15 tracks instead of 18. Purportedly because she wanted to highlight the importance of ownership. The first thing I did after hearing that fact was to hunt down an MP3 rip of the CD and upload it to my Apple Music library. But it never felt right, and so I wanted to buy the CD, which led me to look at CD players, and then… you know the story. That’s it, no more. For real this time.
You know which company or live service does the best Wrapped/Replay/Year-in-review thing? It’s Nintendo, because they actually wait for the entire year to be over before sending theirs out. I think Apple Music gives out the Artist of the Year award in November. As a borderline OCD pedant, that shit doesn’t sit right with me.
So my Nintendo 2025 report says I played just 172 hours, spread across 43 games. I believe the first number but the second seems high. Maybe it erroneously counted some games I reinstalled after getting my Switch 2. In any case, that’s an average of half an hour per day, which is kind of a sweet spot: not high enough to be called a good-for-nothing bum, and not low enough that I’d question my life choices. My top game was The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, which I likely won’t return to and finish for another couple of years, if the previous game was anything to go by.
I started on a new game this week and discovered that an old-school adventure game was just what I’ve been needing. The kind where you don’t have to physically walk a character around, but instead choose options from menus to prod at scenes and investigate murders. This is its actual full name, btw: The Hokkaido Serial Murder Case: The Okhotsk Disappearance ~Memories in Ice, Tearful Figurine~.
If you remember the Famicom Detective Club games, this is similar in that it’s a remake of a classic NES-era Japanese adventure game, with updated graphics and music — albeit nowhere as lavish as the treatment that Nintendo and MAGES gave to their versions. Where the Hokkaido murder game justifies its asking price is in its scope. It’s actually two games in one; the original story set in the 80s, and a new sequel set in 2024 where your character returns to wrap up loose ends.
Ah that reminds me, when I was in Japan around this time last year, I saw a similar Switch game for sale that I didn’t recognize. I took a photo of the cover to follow up on later, and found out it’s my kind of murder mystery but hadn’t been translated for global release.
Then a few months ago, I remembered to look it up again. This is where that new feature in iOS that lets you tap and select text in a photo comes in super useful, especially when it’s a language you can’t read. I discovered that it’s been given a new title Path of Mystery (originally Mystery Walk in Japan) and a global release date: Feb 26, 2026.
This one has a unique feature that I’m excited for: while the story unfolds in both the past and present (similar to the Hokkaido game I’m playing), there are two separate UIs and gameplay styles. The past has retro pixel art graphics, menu-based commands, and outmoded gameplay conventions; while the present portion looks like a new game with modern controls.
Let’s round up all this game talk by making a list of the other titles I bought on sale over this holiday season. I fear there were quite a few, but I won’t know how many until I do this, and maybe this will keep me honest.
Videoverse — A game set in the early days of the internet where meeting new people online was wholesome and helped shape your identity for the better.
Okay, maybe I do have a problem! It’s going to take me all year to get through these alone — this is who you’re asking to get a regular job, by the way.
I read Network Effect, Book #5 in the Murderbot series for our book club, and I think this will be the last one I waste my time on. The writing is artless, soulless, and mainly serves to perfunctorily describe actions that the characters take. Surely reading this blog already gives you your recommended weekly allowance of that. Making matters worse is this installment being ‘normal novel length’ where the rest up to this point have been relatively short little stories. It’s definitely overstayed its thinly premised welcome.
One of the fun things my book club does is watch film adaptations whenever a book we’ve read has one, and they recently read Ready Player One. I already read the book once when it came out, so I skipped this one, but joined for the movie watch party. Most of us rented the 3D version for Vision Pro from iTunes/Apple TV, which was worth the six bucks.
The 3D presentation is spectacular, helped a lot by the fact that no one blocks action sequences like Steven Spielberg. Even when almost everything is CGI with billions of particle effects flying on screen, he’s an absolute master at keeping the eye focused on what matters. But time and growing up in general has not been kind to Ernest Cline’s writing.
The dialogue was so cringe, the heroes have zero aura, and honestly I’d forgotten the story and was convinced the genius game developer god Halliday was a bad guy because of how toxically narcissistic he was. I mean, he built a library of his own life story for “scholars” searching for clues to win the in-game prize he left behind. And in one scene, he actually says the words “I’m a dreamer” to the co-founder who wants him to take more responsibility for the online world he created. If I’ve learnt anything in this life, it’s not to trust any douchebag who calls themselves a ‘dreamer’ or ‘visionary’, especially if they’re involved with a metaverse project.
Merry Christmas! For my main gift, I received a turntable, something that I’ve been very conflicted about wanting for awhile. Apart from the fatal hipster embarrassment, I know that the urge to repurchase all my favorite albums on vinyl is a road to financial ruin.
Back in February, I was on the lookout for a CD player to bring home from Tokyo, but decided against it because digital streaming is identical, if not superior in the case of lossless and Spatial Audio, and I couldn’t see many instances where I would bother to get up and pop a CD on instead of just call out a request to my HomePod. And HomePods don’t accept Bluetooth or line-in audio, so I’d have to use my Sony soundbar or buy a third speaker for the living room. Too much hassle!
But vinyl, goddamnit, just barely dodges the killing blow of that logical argument by having a different value proposition. One, the physical LPs are more collectible, more beautiful, more mentally stimulating in a world that wants to turn itself into ephemeral bits. People say that intentionally putting on a record for close listening deepens your connection with the music over just tapping a link. Two, the audio characteristics of an all-analog reproduction chain are surely different from digital. So if you can, why not have both options for home enjoyment? Three, it’s just kinda cool?
So I asked Santa for an Audio-Technica LP70X, which has the option of Bluetooth output. I briefly considered buying one of those Marshall speakers to pair it with, but the idea was so cringe I couldn’t face it. Besides, that would nullify point No. 2 — why bother if you’re going to digitize it? So I hooked it up to an unused B&O Beolit 12 speaker (which has unceremoniously served as a stand for our bedroom HomePod mini for years) via RCA cable instead. Voila, money saved that can be used for buying records!
But first, guardrails were needed. I decided that I would only buy absolute masterpiece, timeless, desert island discs. No new pop/rock stuff that wouldn’t benefit much from the analog format. And that my collection would 95% focus on jazz. The exceptions are things like LUX and J Dilla’s Donuts, maybe.
After some laborious rewiring, we got it set up on Saturday and played some records that Kim bought as souvenirs many years ago. Radiohead’s OK Computer was one of them, and while I suspect much of it is down to the different speakers’ sound profiles, the analog version is bassier and warmer. When the HomePod plays a lossless digital version of the same song, it has an incredible immersive quality, so clear and bright that the band could be in the same room. A film camera versus iPhone’s computational photography. Room for both.
Anyhow, it’s been wayyyy too addictive browsing records on Amazon — and the ones that ship from Japan are usually much cheaper than the US versions. Here’s what’s on the way but please recommend me your faves!
While we’re out here talking about physical artifacts and meaningful rituals, I want to point out that this final post of the year is also the 287th weekly update on this blog. About five and a half years of regular writing — all because I started one week with no idea how long I would keep going, just the hope that it would help me to write more often than a couple of times a year. Today, this weekly blogging of things that captured my attention has become my most meaningful routine, and produces a living artifact that I find quite valuable.
Writing is thinking, and so putting time aside to articulate your feelings and actions, and reflect on the patterns within them, might be the best way to understand and recalibrate your own life. You don’t have to blog in public; journaling works too. Several times a year, I find myself reading an old post that I’d completely forgotten about, and recognize that something happening with me in the present began with something further back.
Mark Curtis, one of the co-founders of Fjord where I once worked, has just started a Substack called Full Moon with a partner, and in their latest post suggest that everyone should start a habit of “externalizing their thinking”, because a personal archive of written thoughts and ideas has new applications with today’s LLMs. Having such a corpus can be an asset, and not just for training a soulless version of yourself who goes to work for the corpos while you stay home and watch vids. One thing generative AIs do well is find patterns across large amounts of data, and so with journal entries they provide a means of browsing your own brain over time.
No stranger to this idea, I assigned Claude to read all 51 posts of the year so far, looking out for trends and threads that I might not have seen while posting in real time. What came back had a hint of that AI voice, but contained a helpful synthesis of several threads. Let me explain in my own words rather than simply paste the results.
There were several recurring themes and obsessions, for instance deaths and funerals earlier on in the year, and it linked those to some musings on age and mortality when I started to feel old around my birthday, and when I recently said I should watch my purine intake for fear of developing gout.
It suggested that I was doing something meaningful by making plans to meet up with people during this sabbatical, and that keeping in touch with ex-colleagues and helping grade college students’ presentations was part of staying connected to design culture and “keeping the ladder down”. There were also many words dedicated to creative experiments; chasing after the beauty in imperfections, from film grain to mistranslations; and of course, AI concerns.
From that overarching theme, I ended up musing about the vulnerability of the junior designer pipeline, the commercial pressure to abandon not only proven methods but our values, and the dissonance caused by being a regular user of AI tools while knowing they come at some unknown but surely high cost.
It also provided some insights into how I spent my time, calling it an attempt at presence over productivity. I certainly didn’t do any work I didn’t care about! I recall saying in Week 26.25, as I revisited my CliftonStrengths profile, that my natural inclination is to hate keeping busy and productive for the sake of it. I recently wrote something down in my notebook that sums up that energy: “I take tremendous joy in being able to do quite a few things extremely well and yet choosing to do none of them.” Perhaps underachieving is my passion.
More acts of presence: I went overseas for about two months out of the year and chose a slow “daily life” approach over hitting up a flurry of tourist attractions. I deleted a bunch of games off my backlog — if it doesn’t spark joy, I decided, then I don’t have to finish it. I fell into a Japanese curry “research” rabbit hole in the first half, and now it’s sardines. I managed to make more time for reading, and am now starting on my 52nd book of the year, which is quite a nice achievement even if some entries were short stories and novellas.
The last book I read was so good that I’m making it recommended reading for everyone who comes by here.* Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in his own words is a free ebook by the Steve Jobs Archive, collecting in chronological order various speeches, emails, and interviews he gave. It’s not so much about Apple the company as it is about his views, spirit, and character that famously evolved between his ouster from that company and his triumphant return.
I read it on the plane back from China, and maybe I was coming off an emotionally taxing time, but I had to stop reading several times because my eyes were tearing up. Don’t discount the beautifully cosmic coincidence of an adopted boy landing in the right family at just the right time in Silicon Valley. The result was that the whole world now enjoys thoughtful personal computers anyone can use. In another universe where the Mac never existed, there’d probably be no Windows either, and likely no smartphones as we know them.
If you’ve ever heard him speak, you’ll hear his voice in all of these snippets. He had a way of keeping the forest in view, and often framed smaller moments (and even human life) against a vast span of time: what we’re doing here as a species, how it matters when we make things for each other, and thereby why we must carefully choose where we spend our time.
*I’ll take this year-end opportunity to say thanks for reading, whether this is your first visit or you’ve been here all along. I get messages sometimes, and it’s always gratifying to hear something was a useful tip or interesting to someone else. Happy new year!
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