I was sold on an LED bulb future where they all last for years and don’t need regular replacement. That’s not been the case for quite a few of the fixtures in our apartment. This week, a new kind of bulb gave out, and I went on Lazada to get more. Thanks to the shittiness of their search engine, some bulbs with a different connector type got mixed in with the right ones I asked for, and I missed it because the Philips box designs for both are nearly identical. Their search is inexcusably bad. How can an item that doesn’t contain one of my two keywords appear on the first page of results? So now I have $25 of bulbs that useless to me, and their return policy doesn’t allow for “user error”.
The feeling of being depressed continues. I went on two walks after work this week because it supposedly helps to get some air and exercise. The second one helped tremendously because it ended at a new craft beer bar in our neighborhood. They’re not at the rock bottom prices of TAP, but few places can do that. Afterwards, a double cheeseburger and fries. Self-care is hard on the arteries.
Mogwai have a new album out. I’ve ignored them this whole time but gave it a try after seeing some praise on Twitter. Have also been listening to the very chill debut album from Pink Sweat$. I can recommend both and won’t be deleting them from my library.
An old episode of Begin Japanology (NHK) on YouTube taught me a couple of things I didn’t know about conveyor belt sushi. For instance, eating raw salmon was not historically a thing in Japan because locally caught salmon had parasites and had to be cooked before eating. When safer Norwegian salmon became available, it was conveyor belt sushi joints that started selling it first. The traditional joints followed later.
As the weekend drew down into nothingness, I became adamant that I should check the “Play videogames” box. I got Persona 5 Strikers on the Switch, paying an extra $10 for the Digital Deluxe edition which is available now unlike the regular edition which comes out Tuesday. Hell of a sales tactic, that. So far so good. It’s an interesting blend of turn-based RPG battle decisions with real-time musou battles, with the likeable characters and story-driven interludes of the original. Walking around the environments, I can see no technical reason why Persona 5 can’t run on the Switch. I’d bet on it being released by next year.
Found on Twitter, an epic NYC A-train sax battle from like six years ago. This version cuts together angles of the impromptu event from multiple cellphone videographers.
It’s like the ants around here have gone crazy. I noticed them swarming in the kitchen one morning, carting off bits of a granola bar whose wrapper had a corner mysteriously torn off. Did they do it with their teeth? One colony cleansing later, I saw them reappear in another cupboard trying to get into a packet of dates. Wondering if there was something seasonal or lunar about this behavior, I asked some friends if they’d noticed anything similar lately and got “YES!” for an answer.
I joked that it was as if the ant leaders had announced that they weren’t going to make their food targets for the quarter, so everyone needed to get out there and collect goddammit!
Stonks. This week was noteworthy just because everyone now knows what a GameStop is, even though we don’t have any. I saw the headlines but didn’t poke into it until it was too late to get rich. Buut I bought a single overpriced share anyway, in solidarity with the people out to make predatory short-sellers suffer. I can’t even begin to guess if this is as big a deal as some make it out to be, or just a blip the system will painlessly absorb. I can’t intuit if it’s the beginning of a sea change in money, or just a January news story. My longstanding ignorance of market matters doesn’t help. But it is exciting to watch.
If it turns out to be a big deal though, many smart people seem to think it will accelerate adoption of decentralized finance platforms. A couple of weeks ago I wrote about getting my feet wet with PoolTogether, which was just buying lottery tickets with play money. This week I actually used Uniswap, and bought into an index fund governed by smart contracts. So… progress. Maybe next week I’ll quit my job and yield farm for a living.
It wouldn’t be an update without some Apple-related anecdote. My wife got one of the new iPad Airs for work purposes, and it’s nice enough that I actually questioned needing the next iPad Pro. Better screen technology and an A14X would be great, but if they raise the price for miniLED then I might just settle for an Air. My current iPad Pro, the one-off 10.5” model (2017), is such a weirdo. It’s like they had to cut a bunch of corners on it while waiting for the redesigned third-generation (2018). It doesn’t support spatial audio with AirPods, even though older devices like the iPhone 7 do. It’s got a white spot on the screen that I’ve seen others complain about. And graphically it’s so weak that most games seem to run in 480p.
Before bed each night, we started watching random YouTube videos of food being prepared, with no narration or music. Just street food kitchens and stalls in Korea and Taiwan frying up stuff at scale, with tons of oil. It’s beautiful, horrifying, and sleep inducing all at once.
As a result, I didn’t use my Netflix account until Sunday, when I started to watch Alice in Borderland, which is a truly not-bad Japanese live action series based on a manga. I recommend giving the first episode a go, just to see an impressive shot of Shibuya that will make you go “wait, what?!”. I’m up to Episode 3, which unfortunately goes into one of those time-wasting sequences where people scream/shout each other’s names for about three minutes. That’s still my number one pet peeve about Japanese shows. Nevertheless, I can recommend it on production values alone.
What a week for music, though. New albums from Rhye and Weezer, and the long-awaited debut albums from Arlo Parks and Celeste.
Through the serendipity of my personalized Apple Music radio station, I also discovered Instant Karma, an Amnesty International project from back in 2007 to “Save Dafur”. It’s 61(!) John Lennon covers by various artists, including R.E.M., Willie Nelson, The Cure, a-ha, Lenny Kravitz, and The Postal Service. Avril Lavigne even covers Imagine! I haven’t had the time for it all, but Regina Spektor’s version of Real Love might be my pick already.
It’s now been a year of living with the pandemic. I remember hearing about it and wondering how serious it could be; not having been around for SARS when it happened here, I had no frame of reference for how daily life could change with hand sanitizing, mask wearing, and all that. I certainly did not entertain that it could be even worse. By March, I think it was much clearer that this would not be over in a matter of months, and here we are.
I read some opinions that with the new strains emerging and the efficacy of current vaccines in question, it might easily be 2023 before developed countries are really free of it, while poorer countries may never get there. That may turn out to be overly pessimistic, but on the other hand I worry that without definitive information and leadership, people are only too happy to assume it’ll be okay instead of making drastic life-changing plans, like getting out of a tourism-dependent career, for instance.
I spent more time trying to improve my financial literacy by reading up on things like how to safely draw down on your investments in the unlikely event of retirement, and how it can be more valuable to reduce your monthly expenses than to invest in exactly the right things.
That prompted me to inspect what I’ve been spending on, and to think about why my monthly expenditure varies so wildly. But when I started to imagine giving up little things (starting with swapping Nespressos for tea bags), it started to feel a little miserly/miserable. If I’m going to be working hard, I want to push hot water through grounds in an aluminum pod goddammit! So the answer I came up with was… mindfulness. Instead of taking so many things for granted, I’m going to try and consciously enjoy them more.
Yeah the pods get recycled.
Bicep’s Apricots was on my list of top songs in 2020, and now the full album, Isles, is out. I wouldn’t normally sit through an entire LP of “electronic music” but this is a good one. Stream it on Apple Music, and you’ll see animated cover art. Paul McCartney’s McCartney III is the only other album I’ve seen with an animated cover, but many of Apple’s own playlists now have really expensive-looking animations.
I considered not making one of these playlists this year, but someone said that traditions are most worth protecting when everything else has changed. My instinct with traditions is sometimes just to snap old things off and find something new to do. Maybe a couple of years of therapy will tell me why, but until then, I figured it was pretty low stakes to just make one.
And to my surprise (happens every time), it was an enjoyable exercise and I’m reasonably happy with the result, even though it contains some really basic hits and I probably left out a whole lot of other great stuff.
One thing I noticed as I was pulling in favorites I’d saved throughout the year: there was a tendency towards quiet or mid-tempo songs this time around. Probably a reflection of staying home amidst an apocalypse unfolding in slow motion. In trying to balance that out, I rediscovered a few songs I’d saved but never got back to, like the opening song Don’t Die. As usual, I tried to build in continuity of themes and good transitions, and there are a few intentional jokes in the sequencing of titles.
Edit: Looking back, I discovered many of these songs serendipitously outside of recommendation engines and so on. Apple Music does offer personalized weekly new music picks, but I tend to find new songs by tuning in to the Apple Music 1 live radio station (née Beats 1), or checking in on their curated genre playlists. Algorithms, don’t trust them.
I Dunno (feat. Dutchavelli & Stormzy) — Tion Wayne
Apricots — Bicep
The Hill — Model Man
People, I’ve been sad — Christine and the Queens
Kids Again — Sam Smith
Eugene — Arlo Parks
Lover — G Flip
Young Americans — Durand Jones & The Indications
Lockdown — Anderson .Paak
It’s Hard (feat. Email Sandé) — Giggs
Show Me Love (feat. Miguel) — Alicia Keys
snow jam — Rinne
Holy (feat. Chance the Rapper) — Justin Bieber
death bed (feat. beabadoobee) — Powfu
Devil That I Know — Jacob Banks
Believe — Anna of the North
the 1 — Taylor Swift
You’re Still the One — Okay Kaya
Good News — Mac Miller
Comment section
Don’t Die — NOBRO Not only a fun song with a great animated video, but an obvious message to open with? Don’t die!
Shook Shook — Awich I don’t understand why someone whose husband died from being shot would make a song that appears to glorify gun violence, but it’s a banger.
Last episode, I promised a return to Animal Crossing this week. I did manage to keep my word, but just barely. Upon opening the front door to my house, my character jumped in shock at the sight of… cockroaches. At least Nintendo made them sorta cute. You have to chase them down and when you step on one, a little ghost cockroach rises up from the ground I shit you not. It’s a little hard getting back in the swing of things on the island, but it was nice and I think I’ll continue.
One of the bottles of bourbon I got last week is already on its last dregs. Has that joke been made before? It’s been about six years since his name came up on this blog, but Jussi came over for a chat and to suffer some untested drink combinations. There were no side effects or complaints, so we’ll have to try harder next time.
In 2017, I attended my company’s annual training/alignment/social conference, held in Berlin that year, and posted a short video of the experience. It’s now obviously impossible to do these in person, so they attempted a virtual event over two days. It was better than I expected, helped by the fact that Zoom now supports setting up many parallel “breakout rooms”, with a menu that lets people choose which they want to join. Just like a real conference, we were forced to think hard about which talk or workshop to attend, and weigh popular, oversubscribed events against smaller ones with niche topics but more chance of meaningful interaction. But unlike the old days, you can now access recordings of every event and watch them on your own time afterwards.
Does anyone remember the singer Katie Melua? One of her new songs popped up on a playlist and I struggled to place the name. Then I looked her up, and of course, she came out back when I was in university and would have been everywhere on TV and on the shelves at HMV (I spent a lot of time there). According to Wikipedia, she was the UK’s best-selling female artist in 2004–2005, and has a comet named after her. Just surprised me that I would completely forget her; I mean, I remember Peter Andre.
The 2020 Apple Music Awards were also announced, and four out of five recognitions went to hip-hop artists (Taylor Swift won Songwriter of the Year). I gave the Album of the Year a try: Roddy Ricch’s “Please excuse me for being antisocial”, but am unlikely to ever play it again. A lot of contemporary, trappy, woozy American hip-hop just doesn’t do it for me.
In contrast, I’ve been enjoying UK grime and drill, and discovered Dutchavelli’s Dutch from the 5th album on Apple Music’s great radio program, The Dotty Show.
My App of the Week has been Guitar Girl (iOS) — It’s an idle clicker where you follow a high schooler who livestreams herself playing the guitar in her free time. You can imagine the rest. Tapping equals likes, and you can add followers who will auto-tap when you’re not around. As her presence grows, a bunch of relationship stories unfold behind the scenes through text messages.
Some weeks don’t feel like very much at all, even if they kept you busy at time. Taking stock on a Sunday and realizing this is a bit like how your brain sorts experiences into Keep/Forget piles while you sleep, I think. Many things happened, few of them really mattered. Forward, onward.
I’ve now twice experienced cocktail bars that are taking reservations and then telling you you’ve got between 90–120 mins before they turn your table over to the next group. This is definitely new to pandemic times and odd to me. If you’re sitting down at 8pm with some friends, you’re just getting started at 90 mins, and very likely to spend a lot more in the 90 minutes after that.
I think it’s related to the current regulation that says they have to stop serving alcohol at 10:30pm. I thought restaurants had to stop serving in general, so we can all go home and drive the chances of spreading infections down just that little bit more, but no! They can keep on serving you food and dessert into the night; it’s just alcohol that has to stop at 10:30pm. Don’t get it. On the other hand, there’s a business opportunity here to just run very nice pop-up mocktail bars that feel like proper nice bars to have a chat, for people who are already well buzzed and ahead by the time 10:30 comes about.
I just bought Cocktail Party, an iPhone cocktail recipe app that hooked me by having a generous attitude. I was searching for some info and came across their website, which has all the recipes out there in the open. If you want the convenience of an app, and the ability to enter what ingredients you have so they can tell you what drinks you might make next, you drop $4 USD. I did it without a second thought, which I RARELY do. I just really liked their business model and approach.
I think this may be related to a certain emotional state I’m in after having watched all 10 episodes in the first season of Ted Lasso (Apple TV+). Everything about this show repelled me when I scrolled by it in the catalog: the fact that it’s an American comedy sitcom, that it involves football (soccer), the name that says nothing, his mustache, the promise of being a feel-good something. But @hondanhon rated it on Twitter a few days ago, calling it “a hundred thousand dollars of therapy that every person needs” and “a striking show for our time”. Now after bingeing the whole thing in a night and a morning, I concur. They’ve succeeded in crafting an uplifting show that doesn’t make you want to gag, around a positive hero who tries harder than anyone possibly could — but inspiringly so.
I must mention the release of Gimme Some Truth, a new compilation of John Lennon’s “greatest hits” on the occasion of his 80th birthday. I spent the weekend playing it any time music was desired, and they simultaneously don’t make them like this anymore and didn’t back then either. The whole affair has been completely remixed and remastered from the original tapes, on all-analog equipment to boot. It sounds impeccable: so much cleaner than the recordings we already had, and some people will have the pleasure of playing Blu-Ray audio discs with Dolby Atmos. I don’t know why Apple Music doesn’t provide surround mixes of select albums that work with the new spatial audio feature of the AirPods Pro. Anyway, read about the album (JohnLennon.com) and give it a listen (Apple Music).
