sangsara.net

Tag: Apple Music

  • Week 41.23

    Week 41.23

    Trying to keep things short again.

    • First, a correction to last week: I believed that the Leica Sofort 2 will offer little functional advantages over the Fujifilm Instax mini Evo camera that it’s based on. But I missed that the Sofort 2’s design favors a landscape orientation; its camera strap connection points and tripod mount are placed with that in mind, whereas the mini Evo seems intended to be used in portrait. This is another point of annoyance because the Fujifilm’s design visually indicates it should be used in landscape. Well, it also visually indicates its a vintage analog camera, but we’ll ignore that.
    • Cameras are for capturing memories anyhow, so on Friday night when we had a team barbecue for the first time in years, I brought my Instax mini Evo out to get some lo-fi, low-res, flash-enabled snaps. A camera never gets as much use as it does in the days just before its replacement is due to arrive — if that isn’t a camera addict’s maxim, it ought to be. But I wonder if Leica is ready for the backlash when the photos from this low-grade 5mp sensor start being associated with their premium brand. It’ll be the worst digital camera they’ve ever made. At least with the fully analog Sofort 1, the results were just little Instax prints. But now some really questionable digital files are gonna come from a Leica camera and start circulating.
    These were the only ones without faces in them
    • Anyway, in a big coincidence, the last time I remember having a work barbecue was when Oya left in 2019 to return home, and I met her this week for the first time since as she passed through town for a day. A bunch of us who were around back then met up for Mexican food, margaritas, and refried memories.
    • I finally got access to ChatGPT’s new features (these couple of weeks felt like forever): image uploads for multimodal chats, a voice-driven mode, and DALL•E 3. I’ve yet to make proper use of the first feature, apart from a few tests. I gave it a photo I took at Toa Payoh Hub (what can you infer about my location from this photo? And it correctly guessed Singapore from some visible shop names); a receipt (split this bill, and would I be an asshole if I asked for this money back as a billionaire?); and a photo of a dying plant at home (how do I nurse this withered thing back to life?).
    • I wish the voice mode could listen out for your interruptions, which would make it much more conversational. Right now you have to tap the screen to stop it talking first. The synthesized voices are really good, and enhance the illusion of talking to a trustworthy intelligence. Using Siri Shortcuts, you can now just start talking to ChatGPT on your phone at any time, but I still hope Apple finds a way to design a more responsible, private version of this with a future Siri.
    • The ability to interface with an image generator with natural language is a big deal — in theory, ChatGPT can break down your detailed, context-laden instructions into the right prompts for DALL•E to work with — and affirms my belief that “prompt engineering” will be designed out of relevance for the majority of users. It can’t do photorealistic images as well as Midjourney, but it may be close for illustrations.

    I made a new playlist on Apple Music, mostly made up of recent releases I’ve been enjoying, with a few oldies thrown in there: BLixTape #2

    iOS 17 introduces crossfading, and I think it works great for mixtapes, making the intentional juxtapositions even clearer and jam-mier. Crossfading is when one song fades out just as the next one fades in. It’s like having a budget DJ. (Edit: AI suggested I explain it for those who might be unfamiliar, but Kim says this is mansplaining. I guess this is an explainer for the explainer.)

    I played with this cover art idea for awhile in Midjourney over the past few weeks, but wasn’t super happy with any of it. I gave the same brief to ChatGPT + DALL•E 3 and decided to use its version. It came up with a more interesting composition than all the other centered, literally middle-of-the-road shots, and it was able to follow my instructions that the headphones should be Beats Studios.

    Some unused Midjourney versions
  • Week 39.23

    Week 39.23

    Kim returned from a business trip to Vietnam on Thursday with a nasty bug, which as of this moment I’ve still avoided. We also had a medical checkup done and I got a double vaccination out of it (one in each arm, both of which are SORE) for tetanus and the flu. Firstly, why doesn’t anybody talk about tetanus jabs for adults? I don’t think I’ve had one since I was a kid but apparently adults are meant to every 10 years. Secondly, I’m not sure if the flu jab is going to make me more susceptible or more resilient to her germs right now. I guess I’ll find out as the work week starts!

    If I do wind up too sick for work, I hope to still have the strength to do some gaming on my new iPhone and Backbone One controller. The USB-C one I ordered on September 13 (the day after the iPhone announcement) was supposed to come with a new firmware version on it that would work with both iPhones and Android phones, but it didn’t! And so nothing happened when I plugged it in. I complained online through various channels, and they sent me a free replacement within a few days.

    FWIW, the first one can be made to work if I plug it into an Android phone and use their app to update the firmware. For some reason, they can’t do the same through an iOS app, which seems… weird? I’m sure I’ve owned hardware that updated itself through an iOS app, but maybe it can’t do that over the USB port. So they have to ship out replacements to people without access to Android, and going by Reddit, it seems there are quite a few of us, which is unfortunate for their business.

    Gris is a beautiful indie game that I bought years ago on the App Store and never played, and if you’re an Apple Arcade subscriber you’re in luck — Gris+ is now available in the catalog. I finally started on it awhile back on my iPhone 14 Pro and Lightning-ported Backbone, and finished it on the new equipment this week. The larger screen definitely adds to the experience, and probably comes close enough to the Switch experience to justify this new “console gaming handheld” positioning. I really can’t wait to see how Death Stranding will play (and be priced) on it.

    Japanese Rural Life Adventure is another new chill title on Apple Arcade I’ve enjoyed checking out. It’s played in portrait orientation, so no room for a Backbone controller here. But it’s exactly what it says on the tin. A game where you move to the countryside and clean up a busted old house, start planting vegetables, and getting to know the town.

    ===

    • The musical highlight of my week was the long-awaited release of XG’s first mini-album, New DNA. We’ve heard most of it by now except for the last single to be released, Puppet Show (YouTube), which I didn’t quite love at first but is slowly growing on me.
    • We’ve been watching the new season of The Morning Show on Apple TV+ and it’s getting good. I barely remember the second season somehow, but after a bit of a warmup, things in Season 3 get quite satisfying in episodes 2 and 3.
    • Also on the service is a new songwriting rom-com called Flora And Son, by the director of songwriting rom-com Begin Again and Once (haven’t seen this one myself). I enjoyed it, even after finding out that the lead actress is Bono’s daughter. 4 stars.
    • I also watched an entire episode of Foundation on the iPhone 15 Pro Max, which was quite enjoyable! As we don’t have an HDR-capable TV at home — the 8-year-old HDTV refuses to die — this is probably the best screen I have for watching video. The whole time I felt like a “real” character in a show, the kind who watches TV on their phone with dead eyes while eating lunch before getting back to their dead-end job. There’s a scene or two of that in Flora And Son.
    • But the most unexpected, most time- consuming, most addictive new media we encountered had to be Below Deck, which I reluctantly started over the weekend and ended up binging an entire season of. Local Netflix only has seasons 5 and 6 of this nautical reality tv show which follows the crews of pleasure yachts as they take on “charters” — several-day trips booked by rich people who leave tips of at least $15,000. It’s a different kind of workplace drama, and the screwups, often obnoxious guests, and interpersonal relations are just so easy to keep watching.
  • Week 36.23

    Week 36.23

    This week was a slog, like slowly pushing through a muddy swamp. I don’t know why, but maybe grinding through palaces in Persona 5 Royal and PowerPoint decks in real life had something to do with it. I thought I was nearing the end of the former, but nope, still have many hours ahead. I had to double check my last post to make sure I didn’t miss a week here; the presidential election felt so long ago it couldn’t possibly have been last Friday.

    I went into work twice and discovered a new free snacks/drinks initiative, the kind that large companies everywhere once generously offered. I thought free food incentives were a low-interest rate phenomenon, but the return-to-office movement needs new soldiers. So there I was at my desk eating banana cake and trail mix, drinking VitaminWater, and getting calories I would normally have avoided.

    The real work benefits are the friends we make along the way, though. This week an ex-colleague now based in Tokyo came back for a visit. That led to a three-hour Taiwanese hotpot catch-up last night, the effects of which I’m still feeling this morning. The chief reason is probably sodium, a thing I’ve become more acutely aware of since I wrote about eating Korean instant noodles.

    Fun fact: Most Korean ramyeon contains between 1,800–2,000mg of sodium per serving, which is the recommended amount for an entire day. But Singaporeans tend to average 3,900mg daily, probably because of our proximity to hotpot restaurants.

    ===

    I’m currently enjoying Yo-Yo Ma’s new release, Nature at Play: J.S. Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 (Live from the Great Smoky Mountains) on Apple Music. It was recorded outdoors in Dolby Atmos, near running water and singing birds, which means hearing it in Spatial Audio is a truly transportational experience.

    And it’s a brilliant concept! You get a relaxing forest soundscape (the kind I put on sometimes anyway while working) along with a stirring piece of music performed by a master. I hope he does more like this.

    The Rolling Stones put out a new single, Angry, and it seemed like all the old men on my timelines fell instantly in love with it. Eh, it’s okay at best? I didn’t get the hype, and the single-idea video with Sydney Sweeney on a car for four minutes didn’t do much to redeem it.

    Imagine putting out something that mediocre in the same week as Olivia Rodrigo’s new album, GUTS. I believe it was the New York Times’ review that drew parallels to Lorde’s Melodrama, not stylistically but as a brilliant sophomore album from a 20-year-old breakthrough artist under immense pressure to deliver again. It’s so good, just give it a go.

    ===

    Next week is new iPhone week, so I’ll just say for now that if the rumors are true and the periscope zoom feature is only coming to the iPhone Pro Max, I think I’m going to be slightly torn. Apple hasn’t given the larger iPhones better cameras than the smaller ones in several years — that trend meaningfully ended with the iPhone 8 series, where the Plus model had two cameras and the regular had just one. The 12 Pro Max had a 2.5x zoom compared to 2x on the Pro, but that’s minor.

    I think I’ve owned six larger iPhones: the 6 Plus, 6S Plus, 7 Plus, 8 Plus, XS Max, and the 11 Pro Max. And that one year in between when we had the iPhone X, which only came in one (small) size, felt like a relief because you didn’t have to choose a trade off.

    The question will be how much more useful they can make this longer zoom seem. I’m quite happy with the 3x range on my 14 Pro. While the image quality could be better, the actual zoom range is fine! Do I want to put up with a cumbersome phone just to have a not-great-looking 5–10x zoom I’ll only use when visiting the zoo? If you’re currently using a larger phone and regret it, let me know!

  • Week 35.23

    Week 35.23

    The nation voted for a new president this weekend and the winner was Mr. Tharman Shanmugaratnam, which autocorrect changes to “That Man” (a tad disrespectful in my opinion). He got 70% of the vote which is pretty solid, but nobody’s surprised on account of how well liked and competent he is. It’s worth mentioning how painless the process was: my vote was in the ballot box less than three minutes after I showed up, and I was back home watching TV in 15.

    Appropriately, we started Jury Duty on Amazon Prime Video and I think it’s gonna be great. It’s a pseudo-reality show where one man thinks he’s on the jury for an actual case but the whole thing is staged and everyone else is an actor. I’m watching this and wondering if everyone’s following a tight script or just improvising based on their characters, because there are events happening all the time whether the mark witnesses them or not.

    That real-time play concept always makes me think of The Last Express, a classic but underplayed PC game by Jordan Mechner set on the Orient Express. It kicks off with a murder onboard and you have to move around the train investigating and staying alive amidst political intrigue and wartime spy stuff. Events are always happening, and if you’re not in the right place at the right time, you’ll miss crucial conversations. You can experience this for yourself on iOS but the app hasn’t been updated in five years and may be removed by Apple soon if they stick to their controversial plans.

    A lot of other TV was seen. We finally finished season 3 of For All Mankind, an extremely strong show on Apple TV+. I binged all of the anime Oshi no Ko which is as great as everyone says; I don’t think I’ve ever seen a stronger (or longer) first episode. It’s a 90-minute movie in itself. I’m now midway through another highly rated anime: last year’s Lycoris Recoil, on Netflix. And on Michael’s recommendation we started on a Japanese drama, My Dear Exes, which is very enjoyable so far, maybe because it doesn’t feel like typical Japanese TV. It’s snappier and funnier somehow.

    Oh, if Jordan Mechner sounded familiar earlier, it’s because he’s the man who created Karateka and Prince of Persia. And if you want to experience the making of a gaming classic, a new playable history lesson on The Making of Karateka is now out. And in a case of lovely things cosmically coming together, it was helmed by former Wired games editor Chris Kohler, who also wrote the article on Japanese curry that probably changed my life.

    Staying on topic, we went down to the Japan Rail Cafe (operated by the actual JR East railway company from Japan, for some reason) in Tanjong Pagar because I’d heard they were doing a tie-up with the Kanazawa style Japanese chain, Champion Curry, for one month only. I had my first Champion Curry back in March, after meaning to check it out for years, and while it didn’t unseat my current favorites, it was still decent by Japanese standards and incredible by Singaporean ones. They sold a small sized plate here for S$19.90 including a drink, but it was sadly inauthentic. The curry’s consistency and deployment over the rice is not going to qualify for a Kanazawa cultural medallion any time soon, but I guess it was good enough that I’d take it any day over most local competition. But I still hope they open a proper operation locally someday and accomplish what Go Go Curry failed to do.

    Champion Curry in Japan
    Champion Curry in Singapore

    ===

    I was suddenly inspired to make a new series of playlists, which will periodically capture what I’m listening to, sequenced like a proper mixtape. If I had the skills to make a DJ mix of them, I would! Here’s BLixTape #1 for my Apple Music fam.

    And the tracklist for people still on *ahem* lesser services:

    1. Gold -Mata Au Hi Made- (Taku’s Twice Upon A Time Remix) — Hikaru Utada (I said I wasn’t a fan of the regular version but this remix works!)
    2. TGIF — XG
    3. bad idea right? — Olivia Rodrigo
    4. You Are Not My Friend — Tessa Violet
    5. Dancing In The Courthouse — Dominic Fike
    6. For Granted — Yaeji
    7. Bittersweet Goodbye — Issey Cross
    8. To be honest (SG Lewis Remix) — Christine and the Queens
    9. Sprinter — Dave & Central Cee
    10. DON’T EVER DISRESPECT ME — NEMS, Scram Jones, & Ghostface Killah
    11. Iceman (feat. Morvasu) — Earth Patravee
    12. ETA — NewJeans
    13. Silent Running (feat. Adeleye Omotayo) — Gorillaz
    14. Kill Bill (feat. Doja Cat) — SZA
    15. a little more time — ROLE MODEL
    16. happy im — UMI
    17. Rainy Days — V
    18. Memory — Sezairi

    Making this involved a detour into the world of NewJeans’ music videos, which are pretty conceptually twisted and seem to comment on the parasocial relationships fans have with them. For example, in the mostly sunny poppy video for ETA, the girls might only be hallucinations seen by a sick fan, telling her that her boyfriend is cheating on her with someone at a party. So she ends up murdering him and the girl with her car! I guess this is what it takes to stand out now.

    Let’s end on a nice note with another video I came across on YouTube while checking out more electronic music. This guy Don Whiting also does a great job killing it on the road — performing a two-hour drum & bass set on a bike, accompanied by a huge entourage of other cyclists. It looks like an awesome day out, at a pace even I could probably handle.

  • Week 32.23

    Week 32.23

    Vacation update

    I survived the island. Their warnings of limited internet access were exaggerated, and it turned out that we did have wi-fi in our villa, albeit quite slow; I did not feel completely disconnected, but I managed to avoid being “online”. I did not, however, get a chance to play Hello Kitty Adventure Island, nor finish the book I was reading until I got back to Singapore. That will have to be remedied in the coming week.

    We mostly spent our time sitting by the pool, or the beach, or eating, or walking around and exploring the “private island”, which is incidentally a marvel of self-sufficient sustainability. All water used in showers and bathrooms is collected rainwater and natural well water. Wastewater is processed and filtered on-site and used on plants. Food waste is composted and broken down by black soldier flies bred for this purpose, not shipped back to the mainland and incinerated.

    I managed to get a tan, and now I’m sporting a ‘just healthy enough to look like a living human’ shade. I also need to shed my lizard skin this weekend and head out to a wedding, so there was a shopping trip as soon as we got back to pick up a decent shirt. Putting on a suit stresses me out more than wearing shorts and sandals on the beach, tbh. There’s a Goldilocks zone of comfort somewhere in between and it looks exactly like a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, which is where I plan to stay for life, thanks very much.

    Island photography and phones

    Speaking of being indoors and online, I took a bunch of panoramas on this trip with the express intent of viewing them on the Apple Vision Pro when it comes out next year. Enjoy this one, and a vertical video of some gentle waves if you need to take a little mental break.

    The majority of other photos were taken with the Halide app as is now my usual practice, and in comparison to photos of, say, the sunsets taken with the camera app on my iPhone, they came out much more natural and aesthetically pleasing. It still boggles my mind that Apple shipped the Photonic Engine on the iPhone 14 Pro the way they did because it looks so overprocessed by default.

    I can’t wait to see if the 15 Pro will resolve this, and if I’m honest I’m also keen to replace the ailing battery on my 14 Pro — online anecdotes suggest many of us are suffering from accelerated battery aging this year. I’ve watched mine fall from 88% to 86% maximum capacity over the last two weeks. Some people believe the combination of using a case + MagSafe charging is the cause, because of the heat generated. I don’t know what’s going on, but I don’t want to avoid useful features or stop doing normal phone things just because of this.

    Blue skies

    I finally got into Bluesky this week, and I don’t dislike it! Threads is unfortunately a place where I’m visible to everyone who knows me on Facebook/Instagram, which is to a large degree my real-life social graph. And what I liked about Twitter was that it was an online place for my online identity and my online people. I’m hopeful that Bluesky can be more of a Twitter replacement, and its relatively smaller size could be a strength, as long as the people I want to follow are on there. At this point, I’m rarely even checking Mastodon.

    Follow me at @sangsara.bsky.social if you’re on there.

    Crypto/web3 interlude

    Coinbase launched their new Ethereum L2 chain, called Base, and its stated purpose is to be a more user-friendly blockchain that could go mainstream and be used by the next billion people (ambitious). They say (and I like this positioning) that “online” was the first revolution, and “onchain” will be the next.

    I’ve been playing with it within their Coinbase Wallet app, and enjoying their “Onchain Summer” campaign which focuses on minting a bunch of free/very cheap NFTs. It’s a good demo of how low gas fees are on Base compared to regular ol’ Ethereum; most transactions cost just pennies. There’s still a lot of work to be done to make this more understandable, and arguably the entire user experience of creating and funding a new wallet needs to be rethought.

    The main launch event was Cozomo de’ Medici (who I thought everyone agreed was Snoop Dogg but now may not be?) partnering with the Friends with Benefits (FWB) DAO and the Korean animator DeeKay to launch a pair of Open Edition artworks depicting a cryptocurrency future. Importantly, people could buy them with a credit card, instead of fumbling with wiring money to Coinbase and then buying ethereum and then sending it to their self-custodied wallets on the Base chain.

    Did I lose you in crypto-jargon land? Don’t worry, I can’t keep up either. Think of Open Editions like an all-you-can-eat buffet, but with a closing time. The intent is to encourage access over the usual scarcity and price speculation. In this case, the NFTs were only available to be minted for 24 hours, and apparently some 70,000 were snapped up at a cost of 0.01 eth each (around $20 USD, I think). That’s still a cool $1.4M made!

    Sounds of summer

    We enjoyed this summer vibes playlist compiled by XG (Apple Music) while lazing in the pool this week. I still can’t get their housey new song, TGIF, out of my head.

    Speaking of Apple Music, I noticed a new personalized radio option appeared on my “For You” tab this week, called Discovery Station. 9to5Mac.com reports that this feature has been in testing for awhile, with people spotting it on and off over the past year (how do I get into these betas?!) — in any case I’m glad to see new features and am hoping for more improvements around the launch of iOS 17.

  • Week 27.23

    I’ve thus far neglected to mention that I’ve become slightly obsessed with Korean instant noodles, which they specifically call ramyeon/ramyun, and have been buying and eating too many of them in recent weeks. I never went to ramyeon town before because I have a low tolerance for spicy food, but watching Jinny’s Kitchen might have set me off, and I’ve found that there are mild versions and that even the hot ones are sometimes worth suffering through.

    A few notes:

    • Nongshim’s Shin Ramyun is the original, the classic, the Nissin chikin ramen of Korea. The company’s English website says it’s always been a pork-based broth, but the export versions I’ve seen here in Singapore and Australia seem to be based on soy and mushrooms. There’s a new shrimp flavored version that was previously only available in China, but I have no interest in trying that.
    • I was able to find a pack of Shin Black imported from Korea, a premium version that adds beef to the pork base, and it’s certainly tastier and unexpectedly less spicy.
    • The Samyang company’s Buldak range of noodles are of course the notorious super spicy “fire chicken” ones you see in those YouTube challenge videos. I can’t eat more than a bite or two of the original (there’s also a 2x spicier one in red), but there are milder versions like jjajangmyeon and “carbonara”. Still, not for me.
    • I learnt in a video that people don’t think you should add eggs to Nongshim’s Neoguri spicy seafood noodles, which I have been doing, along with sliced cheese, kimchi, and sometimes a sausage. Oops.
    • Yeah I was not keen on this adding of sliced cheese to soup noodles, but now I don’t even think about it.
    • Of all the “Korean style” (basically red chilli and soy sauce?) noodles so far, I think my favorite might actually be Ottogi’s Jin series, which comes in Mild and Spicy versions. The Spicy one is about as spicy as regular Shin Ramyun (export), nowhere as crazy as Buldak.

    ===

    It’s not all sunshine and noodles; my increased consumption is partly due to a demanding work schedule filled with late nights and skipped meals. In general, I don’t believe these circumstances get the best out of anyone, but I’m told it’s the norm in China these days. I’d heard of 9-9-6 (working from 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week), but apparently people joke 0-0-7 is more accurate. If nothing else, you’ve now learnt a lame new way to say 24/7 today.

    I keep thinking it’ll get better soon, but it hasn’t yet. Around the same time, I tried asking ChatGPT to write some funny posts that could go viral on a new social network called Threads, but it only returned some reheated tweets. One of them hit the mark though: “Is being an adult just perpetually saying ‘after this week things will slow down’ until you die?”

    So, Threads!

    Facebook/Meta/Instagram’s Twitter clone was rumored for awhile but I guess I wasn’t expecting a global launch of this scale — normally they roll stuff out haphazardly? But I think we’re now at over 70 million sign ups in two days, for a separate app that you need to download! It seems they rushed this out to take advantage of Twitter’s shambolic state, and even then, everything has been running smoothly.

    They made the choice to go algorithmic feed only, and to populate yours at the start with suggested content. Maybe it’s because I’ve been using adblocking tools for the past few years (who am I kidding), but my recommendations have been terrible.

    It’s been giving me Singaporeans influencers, sports, beauty and fashion, and positive lifecoachy shit. I’ve since found and followed many of my sort of people, and muted over a hundred accounts I do not want. That should be enough data for it to start improving, so I’ll just have to wait until they do something with it.

    But of course, we don’t have to be on Threads. And maybe we shouldn’t, given Facebook’s reputation and past actions. Much has been made of how Elon has managed to make Mark look like the good guy here; a sizeble feat. I’m still getting a lot of specific tech and financial content on Twitter, and I enjoy the quality on Mastodon, which comes from strictly following only accounts that don’t annoy me given the lack of an algorithmic feed.

    I suspect the majority of people on Threads so far aren’t posting, just lurking and figuring out what it’s for. I’ve been followed by a few people but I don’t follow back if they have zero posts or want to have private accounts. Meanwhile, successful IG content creators are either using it exactly like they do on IG (posting memes, photos, and videos) or writing inane things to try and get engagement.

    I don’t want any of these things on a text-centric platform. It’ll take awhile to settle, and maybe it’ll just become a lame sort of normie place like Facebook.

    ===

    I’ve also been utterly captivated by George Harrison’s My Sweet Lord out of nowhere, and have probably listened to it a hundred times and sung it to myself a hundred times more this week.

    It must have come up on my Apple Music at some point and resonated in the midst of my terrible week — the intentional, sutra chanting-like repetition is brilliant, hypnotic, soothing. How can you not be crazy for a song that goes from Hallelujah to Hare Krishna and back again? That declares such pure desire to know an unknowable god, that acknowledges how life is simultaneously too long and too short, that love is all you need?

    So I made a playlist collecting all the different versions and covers I’ve been listening to: My Sweet Lords. It has 23 tracks so far, and I hope you like it and join me in this obsession.

    ===

    We started watching season 2 of The Bear and it’s truly excellent so far, as was season 1. Episode 6 is something else. It’s the television equivalent of Uncut Gems and Kendrick Lamar’s We Cry Together on the Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers album: extremely chaotic and uncomfortable, and not something you’ll rush to re-experience soon.

    We also saw Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part 1 and it feels a little off. Still a good time, but some of the writing feels stilted and theatrical, and overall it doesn’t feel consistent with the others (okay, one can argue MI:2 felt nothing like the rest too, but that was when we were cycling through different directors; Christopher McQuarrie has no excuse). The challenge the team faces here is like nothing they’ve been up against before, but that veil of otherworldliness is distracting, and I didn’t get to appreciate it as much during the film. 4/5, I think.

    ===

    But we can’t end the week without some AI experiments, so I went back to my GPT-4 poetrybot and gave it my thoughts on the themes in My Sweet Lord, and it returned a pretty good poem, albeit several stanzas too long and not quite right in places. A bit of snipping and human co-creation later, we have this:

    Life is long,
    Life is brief,
    In joy, a song,
    In pain, grief.

    Love is low,
    Love is high,
    In knowing, grows,
    In doubting, dies.

    God in the small,
    In the leaf, the bird’s call,
    In the rise, the fall,
    In all the all.

    Seek the divine,
    In the day, the night,
    In the yours, the mine,
    In the dark, the light.

  • Week 26.23

    There was a massive thunderstorm Wednesday morning, and we woke up to water leaking across our living room floor, dangerously close to some power sockets, which would have totally ruined the not-on-fire vibe I’m going for in this apartment. It seemed that some fault on the rooftop was letting water into an unused cable housing that runs through the entire building. Once upon a time, this “pipe” used to carry terrestrial TV signals from the antenna above, and it’s definitely not supposed to have water in it.

    The storm continued all morning, and I was mopping up water and wringing towels every 10 minutes while trying to be on work calls and contacting the authorities and arranging for our own contractor to do something about it. Although the town council sent someone down within a few hours, he turned out to be not so useful, firstly by not understanding the size of the problem (it was already sunny and dry by then), and then by trying to tell me there wasn’t really a problem on the roof. There was no other possible ingress point for the water.

    Because the next day was a public holiday, I was pretty anxious to get it resolved ASAP as staying up 24/7 to be a squeegee operator was not acceptable. By the end of the day, thanks to some prompt private sector assistance — albeit at my own cost — I had the issue resolved (and I was right about the source).

    The leak added unnecessary stress to an already difficult week, exacerbated by the tough transition back to work after my holiday. As if on cue, I came across this piece in the New Yorker on “The Case Against Travel” which I won’t try to summarize. It ends with a sobering observation that holidays are a salve for the grind of working life, and that first-world people just live looking forward to the next trip and the next, each time believing in some life-changing outcome of travel that never actually materializes. This reliance is something I never believed applied to me before, because I’m quite alright not traveling for long stretches — dear god, I just want more time left to my own devices — yet, startlingly, the absence of any further planned trips and the abyss now facing me feels… depressing?

    It’s definitely about being tired. I also read this article (a book plug) about the “cost of traditional masculinity”, mainly centered on the role of providing, which powers economic growth but maybe not happiness. What would the world look like if every socially enforced achievement target was replaced with an appreciation for “enough”? Human progress would be hindered, I can hear you say, but the human-driven damage would be too, and that seems worth it.

    I took a couch break one afternoon and read this other article in the New Yorker about quack surgery for a certain masculine insecurity, which was very, very disturbing. It’s about as graphic a piece of writing as I can ever recall reading. I am still trying to forget some details! Ah, modern life is closing one’s eyes to tragedy.

    ===

    Other bits:

    • We went out for dinner Friday at a Sri Lankan restaurant called Kotuwa in Little India. I don’t remember half of what I ate, but it was very enjoyable. Since Peishan and James were there to enforce vegetable eating, I was able to try the cashew curry — literally a little bowl of boiled cashews in a sweet gravy, which worked.
    • We finished Silo on Apple TV+ and enjoyed the season overall. I’m told the books are light and not very good, so it seems this was an adaptation that took a good central idea and nailed the execution. I’m pretty sure a second season will be coming.
    • I chanced upon an Apple Music page of DJ mixes made to celebrate two Tokyo clubs that closed last year, and I’ve been enjoying a few of them. I don’t think I’ve been inside a club in years, but I remember the feeling of often being disappointed in the music and thinking, “I’m gonna get home and listen to XYZ instead”. But I think I would have loved hearing some of these mixes irl.
    • I started using Vibes, the latest app in the (Not Boring) series by Andy Works. These functional apps (calculator, weather, etc.) borrow video game aesthetics and interactions to offer an appealing alternative to Apple’s flat design, and they’re winning — they won an Apple Design Award last year, and the standard Weather.app has grown increasingly rich and playful of late. Anyway, Vibes generates a real-time videogamey soundtrack for your life, based on your sleep and movement patterns, helping you to rest and focus throughout the day. I usually use Brain.fm or lo-fi music for this, but Vibes is simple: just hit Play and it’ll do what it thinks you need.
    • After watching some Bob Ross on Twitch one night, I fooled around on the iPad and drew a landscape in ProCreate. It’s nothing great, but then I tossed it into Midjourney and said ‘do this like Bob Ross’ and oh my lord. It makes me both want to improve and to never draw again — like, what’s the point?

  • Week 24.23

    • A tough and tiring week under dispiriting circumstances. But in the grand scheme of things, the worry is optional and the problems are irrelevant. So I remind myself!
    • It’s Thursday night as I write some of this in advance and we fly for Melbourne tomorrow night. I am ungraciously unpacked, a rarity. I’m hoping to fit everything into a single cabin bag for the first time. I’m traveling light. No cameras, no gear, and no plans to bring any shopping home. The mission seems to be merely spending a week on another continent. Okay maybe I’ll bring my Switch.
    • At work, I started doing team updates as a newsletter. I ask everyone to send me what they’ve been up to, and they’re free to write a few lines or a bullet list. I chuck all of it into ChatGPT using a fairly specific prompt, and out pops an entertaining roundup of the week that reads like a news radio show.
    • It strikes me that I could easily do the same for these weeknotes right here, except for the times I go off and end up writing 1,000 words on something (which is quite often). I hope the act of a human spending their valuable human life minutes every week to write these updates by hand makes them more valuable than if I just ask an AI to elaborate. Lord knows the quality is close.
    • I came across this story about the potential for AI models to collapse as they’re trained on increasingly reflexive information generated by AIs, decaying like analog copies of a tape. This is of course what we’ve been wondering about: can AI keep learning to create new things in the absence of new original inputs from humans?
    • And it might be inevitable, because there’s as yet no way to separate content that’s AI generated, and it’s going to be invisibly and thoroughly mixed into every pool of data. Even Amazon’s Mechanical Turk workers are using ChatGPT to do their work, which is explicitly meant to be human work. It’ll be interesting if years from now we look back at this moment in time when it looked like AI was going to take over everything but then suddenly fell apart and became unviable like seedlings in poisoned soil. Like HG Wells’ invaders succumbing to the common cold.
    • It took awhile but I finished reading Matt Alt’s Pure Invention: How Japan’s Pop Culture Conquered the World. My Goodreads count for the year so far is a pitiful TWO. Anyway the book is enjoyable and well done. It promised previously untold stories about the invention of karaoke, the Walkman, the Game Boy, and others, which I doubted heading in — don’t we all know these stories? Would there really be anything new here? But I definitely learnt some new details here, and Alt does a great job of stitching it all together into a decade-spanning thesis about innovation, globalization, and the power of culture.
    • In Melbourne now after a couple of nights of bad sleep, after a miserable red eye flight where I got maybe an hour of sleep, after staying awake most of Saturday. Finally rested on Sunday. Listening to Apple Music’s excellent playlist of songs produced by MIKE DEAN. Looking forward to a chill week of Nintendo, coffee, reading, a visit to my favorite museum of screen culture, and no expectations of doing much more.
    • Amongst last week’s music releases, I missed a new album from Bob Dylan. And from Ben Folds. If I’m out to shift blame, it’s more like Apple Music neglected to inform me about them. The algorithms could use some work.
    Melbourne

    I started generating Midjourney images for a conceptual series and am in the process of curating the collection. Maybe I’ll put it up in a separate post at some point next week. It’s called Strange Beach, and I’m shooting for “wrong”, trying to prompt my way to pictures that are subtly unsettling or unhinged, yet set on a sunny Hawaiian beach. Some not so subtly.