sangsara.net

Tag: Apple Music

  • Week 22.23

    Yes, I made this with Midjourney

    Six years after I booted up my Nintendo Switch for the first time and slotted in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s cartridge, I finally took on the final boss this week and finished the game. Before you think this game is a monster (although it is), I effectively took a 5.5 year hiatus.

    My first experience with the game was both exhilarating and overwhelming — here was a non-linear open-world adventure designed to be an exercise in self determinism. Yes, the princess has been locked in a bubble, literally waiting 100 years for you to wake up and save the kingdom, but that didn’t mean you had to hurry. You could decide to be a chef and spend time gathering rare ingredients and experimenting with recipes. You could examine every curious crevice of the natural landscape to discover the Korok seeds deviously placed by the designers, or climb foreboding mountains just for the hell of it (you’d probably find Korok seeds for your trouble).

    This was a game that demanded longer play sessions — no dipping in for just five minutes — and frequent ones at that. You kind of had to remember what you were last doing and where you wanted to go next. So, faced with too much commitment and mental load, I started to distance myself from it and play other games instead.

    If you’ve been following along in recent weeks, you’d know that the release of the sequel, Tears of the Kingdom, spurred me to try completing it once and for all. And it’s been quite the journey: I had to re-familiarize myself with the game’s laws of physics, Link’s complicated powers, and in the process discovered that I’d spent those first 40 hours or so essentially mucking around in just one corner of the world.

    By last week, I’d finally uncovered the whole world’s layout, but with some places still unexplored and doubtlessly many secrets left to be found. I’d gotten good at fighting, and was told that I was ready for the final showdown with “Calamity Ganon”. Except… I wasn’t, not mentally.

    So I spent this week’s game time mucking about and doing inconsequential side quests, like helping a group of arguing scientists collect evidence of giant monster skeletons using my digital camera (yes). And then, on Friday night, I said ‘fuck it’ fought my way to the center of the map, took the big baddie out, and saw the credits roll. It was an absolute anticlimax, partly because I was in a hurry and took a bunch of sneaky shortcuts to the final fight, instead of exploring the giant castle like I suppose I was meant to do.

    So I guess the moral of the story is err… heh… it’s the journey, not the destination? And as I was telling Cien earlier that day, the game is designed so that it’s possible to start the game and simply walk a beeline straight to the final boss and kill him instantly, if you had the skills and weren’t interested in slowly unfolding the whole experience for yourself. So this implicit message was always present, and I’m glad I took the time this year to enjoy more of it.

    ===

    Speaking of picking up old games again, I re-subscribed to the New York Times in order to play their crosswords. The last time I played a lot of them was when they released a Nintendo DS game back in 2007. In recent weeks, a group of people at work starting playing them collaboratively, and I found the experience fun enough to give it a shot. The current promotional price is just $20 USD for the first year of All Access membership ($90 afterwards).

    With the installation of the NYT Games app, I’ve also got the main news app again, of course. It does a couple of things really well, namely it presents simple text and images beautifully with a handful of layout variations, and it has a personalized tab called “For You” that is finite and completable each day.

    I didn’t realize how much I’d missed having a primary source of news in my life, with its own Home Screen button, but of course I’m prioritizing it only because I paid for it. I’m still enjoying Artifact, and I’ve just told it that I have an NYT sub now and it promises to prioritize it for me. Artifact has a real chance here of being the winning news aggregator.

    It makes me upset how Apple Music’s personalized tab could be so much better, like an AI-compiled digest of what’s new in music that I’d be interested in. Fingers crossed for WWDC next week! (Disclaimer: I know nothing.)

    ===

    Friday was Vesak Day here and a public holiday, so I spent the afternoon with Peishan and Cien visiting two cafes, and let me just say I am disappointed that we are allowing so many Instagrammable cafes to flourish. They’re all variations of the same bare concrete interior, tables and stools placed closely together, serviceable coffee + $20 and up full English breakfast plates template of an F&B business. We managed to land in two that offered differented value: Acoustics on Neil Road, which understands that bare concrete is a terrible environment to have conversations or listen to music in, so they invested in sound dampening wall panels and impressive looking speakers; and the Allpress pop-up cafe down the street on on 73 Duxton Road which, well, offers Allpress beans.

    ===

    Back to AI, Jose pointed me at the Planet Money podcast which is currently producing a series of episodes about GPT. They’re using it to write and create a full actual episode, and documenting the process. Parts 1, 2, and 3 (the actual AI-produced episode). Listening to the first episode, I observed them going through the same cycle of revelations that I went through recently as I experimented with using AI to do elements of my own job. The initial curiosity and excitement, the sudden surprise at how good it is, the disbelief when it’s sometimes even better, and the slow acceptance of the chaos to come as you realize no one knows how this is gonna turn out. We live in interesting times.

    ===

    I watched the finale of Ted Lasso’s third and possibly final season. Season 1 is everyone’s pick for the strongest arc, but I think Season 3 is right behind it now. Season 2 was disjointed and strange to me, so quite a distant third place.

    I said of the episode in a group chat:

    The Ted Lasso finale is one of the best I’ve ever seen. On brand, unashamed, fan servicing, heavy-handed symbolic closure with all the love in the world. 5 stars.

    There’s a line in it about how absolute perfection is boring, and by being imperfect on its own terms, the final episode was effectively, truly perfect. They made some polarizing choices this year and didn’t give us what we wanted at times, but the last episode gives it all. It mirrors the beginning, it offers thematic and narrative closure, and it gives room for the satisfying character growth it nurtured to show itself off.

    Their choice of song to play over the final minutes was spot on, obvious, schmaltzy, perfect. It might have been better if they’d used my favorite version featuring Fiona Apple, but what do I know.

    ===

    A couple of weeks ago Michael pinged me to talk about Daft Punk, after I wrote about Random Access Memories, saying sheepishly that Discovery was probably his favorite album, as if RAM was a purer musical endeavor and Discovery was sonic candy for philistines. I was mostly surprised that anyone could fail to love RAM best, and admitted that I hadn’t heard Discovery in many years and hardly knew it well.

    Then I saw this YouTube video by “Digging The Greats”, in which they break down the achievements in sampling that Discovery contains. Absolute magic. I keep telling myself to spend more time on shows like Song Exploder and Watch The Sound on Apple TV+ and This Is Pop, but I never seem to make the time. What I love about this 15-minute video is they don’t just play the samples and show you what Daft Punk did; they load them up and perform the melodies live on an MPC to show you how the band did it.

    Then on Sunday night, the algorithms delivered me this endearingly old-fashioned 20-minute talk from Pearl Acoustics (they seem to make loudspeakers) in which their technical director, Harley Lovegrove, inducts RAM into his list of Great Recordings, and proceeds to discuss why he thinks the production and musicianship on it are noteworthy. He’s got a trained ear as you’d expect, and spends quite a bit of time talking about the incredible Giorgio by Moroder, pointing out things like how there are two different drummers on the track (I had no idea!). What makes it more fun is the fact that this is clearly not the kind of music he normally reviews — other Great Recordings include Jacqueline Du Pré’s Elgar Cello Concerto (this often moves me to tears on good headphones), and Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. Anyway, loved this video and it helped me appreciate a favorite album even more.

    ===

    A different sort of band, but I bought the 2023 Pride band for my Apple Watch. Rather than the heavy and vibrant rainbow bars of previous versions, this year’s design has a white base with scattered color pills. It looks like birthday cake sprinkles or confetti, which is a fun vibe you don’t see in any other official Apple Watch bands, almost like something Swatch would do.

    ===

    And now, for this week’s conclusion, brought to you by GPT:

    In wrapping up, there’s something uniquely human about picking up where we left off, be it a beloved video game, a trusted news source, or a favorite TV show. That’s the joy of life’s continuity, the pleasure in seeing where a journey takes us, especially when it’s one we didn’t quite finish the first time around. These past weeks, I’ve immersed myself in familiar worlds, marveled at the capabilities of AI, and watched characters grow, and it made me realize how we continuously strive for balance, exploration, and ultimately, an understanding of our own story. We may stumble, we may take detours, but isn’t that the beauty of life’s game?

  • Week 20.23

    • A correction: Last week I said that the the 10th Anniversary release of Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories would have been better if mixed in Dolby Atmos spatial audio. It actually IS! But the entire album isn’t labeled as such because the “second side” of outtakes and behind-the-scenes bits aren’t. With that knowledge, I’ve been enjoying it on headphones and need to put aside more time to hear it again. We regret the error!
    • There’s been a slight Korean bent to the week, in that I’ve had KBBQ and soju twice in four days, watched a lot of Jinny’s Kitchen on Amazon Prime Video, and am actually listening to BTS intentionally for the first time as I type this.
    • Jinny’s Kitchen is a reality TV show about a pop-up restaurant in Mexico run by five of Korea’s most recognizable stars, who go largely unnoticed by their customers. Each of its 10 episodes is 1.5 hours long, which is practically feature film length! They could be much shorter, but it focuses on a lot of mundane, repeated scenes like the staff rolling gimbaps, cooking noodles, and plating fried chicken. Perhaps that’s the point, giving fans a chance to watch them doing normal people things? Or maybe it’s normal for Korean reality TV? Is it designed to be left running in the background? Or was it an Amazon Prime Video decision to hit streaming time KPIs?
    • In any case, Korean soft power is wave after wave of these campaigns. The show should be boring but it kinda works, plus it has an unheard-of 9.2/10 score on IMDB. The best moments for me are when someone does recognize one of them, like when an incredulous customer sees V from BTS (59 million followers on Instagram) pop his head out from the back, and likens it to Drake running a restaurant in a country where no one knows who he is. Watching celebs do normal people things is straight out of the idol playbook and it works — I’m listening to their music with an open mind now, and we’re talking again about visiting the country someday.
    • The Anbernic RG35XX arrived and it’s a nice little device that really recalls the Game Boy series in spirit. It feels good in the hand and the screen is bright and beautiful — the community seems to recommend replacing its software with something called GarlicOS but it looks like wayyy too much trouble. The thing just works out of the box, and I’m not in the mood to start modding it. It still blows my mind you can have this for S$90 including shipping, and it does come with uhh lots of software loaded, so it’s great value if you’re looking for a gift.
    • I’m still going strong in Breath of the Wild on the Nintendo Switch, in the final stretch but honestly still in no shape to face some of the game’s stronger enemies. I’m now thinking that if/when I eventually finish this, I’ll probably have to take a break before starting the sequel, Tears of the Kingdom, given that it reuses the same world map and I won’t be in any mood to cover it all over again. Note to self: don’t pre-order any more games unless they comes with discounts or exclusive bonuses!
    • We had a nail painting team event at work, for which the turnout was more male than female because of scheduling conflicts and maybe even a bit of self selection, so I’m sporting gray/lilac nails at the moment. It’s probably been over 20 years since I’ve had colored nails, and I think I’ll keep this going now that I’m too old to be told off and it’s not such a big deal.

    I asked ChatGPT to analyze my post and it suggested I add a conclusion. I said “you do it, then”. Here’s what we agreed on:

    This week has been a whirlwind of diverse experiences and discoveries. From immersing myself in the captivating sounds of Random Access Memories in Dolby Atmos to exploring the world of Korean soft power through Jinny’s Kitchen, I’ve been on a journey of curiosity and appreciation.

    The Anbernic RG35XX has provided me with nostalgic gaming moments, while progressing in Breath of the Wild has been both thrilling and daunting. Even a simple nail painting team event at work has reminded me of the freedom to embrace self-expression.

    These experiences have sparked my curiosity and inspired me to share my thoughts as a writer. Life is full of opportunities to explore, connect, and find inspiration in unexpected places. So, whether it’s through music, cuisine, gaming, or the little joys, embrace the unknown and discover the stories and experiences that await.

    Thank you for joining me on this adventure, and until next time!

  • Week 14.23

    Ugh, the post-holiday period is the worst. I’ve struggled through the week, and it was only a short four-day work week because of the Easter/Good Friday holiday. I’m in the mood for another break now, and thankfully we have a week in Australia later this year to look forward to.

    I started off Monday with a client video call in which I got frustrated enough by my bad lighting situation (sitting in front of blinds — either too much light, too little, or visible horizontal shadows across my face) to finally do something about it. During my aimless ambles down the aisles of Japan’s electronic superstores, I saw many shelves dedicated to remote work equipment, presumably a big sales driver for them over Covid-19, and considered bringing a ring light home. I didn’t, but I found good looking ones on Shopee and ended up with a rectangular soft LED panel on a tabletop stand for just S$27! It does five color temperatures, but I’m sticking with Daylight, and overall it’s been an awesome purchase I should have made ages ago. And it arrived in 24 hours.

    No surprises, but I’ve taken far fewer photos since returning. I still open Hipstamatic regularly just to keep my streak going, and it’s forced me to try and snap something every day. That said, I wonder if this habit, and the product’s reboot, will last. As I was discussing with Michael, they needed to put some momentum behind the launch and sustain it with updates and quality posts in the global pool. But from how it looked in their updates, the founders were (also) on holiday in Japan on launch week? Perhaps they were there to boost some community events, but I looked at the Japan-only photo feed regularly and I was one of the most prolific posters. Not a great sign. They just released an update this weekend, at least, with a new Uji-inspired lens and film.

    A new fun thing to do with Midjourney emerged this week: a /describe command which takes a photo you upload and has the system describe it back to you in the form of Midjourney prompts, which you can then submit to generate a “broken telephone” remix of your original image.

    If you think computer vision/image recognition has gotten scarily good recently, you’d be right. AI is part of this chain somewhere, and look no further than this Memecam web app which blew my mind last night. Snap a photo of something, and it recognizes what the image contains, and uses GPT to create a joke and final meme, Impact font and all. It actually writes jokes about anything, instantly. That AI-generated Seinfeld stream could technically become good, viable (if not wholly original) comedy in the near future.

    ===

    Hey, two quick moments of consumer ecstasy I need to share!

    • We’ve got the HomePods in Singapore at long last. I don’t know what took Apple so long, but you can now officially buy them here, and the prices are slightly lower than I would have expected, at S$139 and S$429 for the mini and full-sized second-generation HomePods respectively. My Sonos speakers are now unplugged and we are a fully Siri-ed home. I’d previously bought two minis for the office and bedroom off the gray market, and those are now joined by two large ones in the living and dining areas. Reader, they sound glorious. It’s a rich, tangible, and emotionally satisfying experience for your favorite music. There was a point in time where Apple loved the word “magical” and used it liberally. Even for mundane things like keyboards that worked reliably. But these, these are kinda magical.
    • Nespresso launched a new kind of pod locally, one designed to approximate “filter-style” coffee, which in my mind is basically a pour over. They’ve been out for a few months in limited European markets, it seems, but still not widely available. They have a new design where you peel off a sticker to reveal an in-set dot grid which the liquid passes through — the foil is not punctured as a a result. You’re meant to press both the Lungo and Espresso buttons in sequence, resulting in a 150ml extraction, which they call a Gran Lungo. Lol. Anyway, it tastes pretty good. The longer cup is thinner and more delicate than if you used a regular pod to do an Americano or long black, with hardly any crema. This innovation allows for floral and fruity roasts to come through, if you like that sort of thing. I..I..I think it also results in more caffeine.
    • Boss coffee is now natively available in Singapore! Used to be you’d find imported cans in Don Don Donki (the local name for Don Quijote) and some other Japanese supermarkets, but it looks like Suntory is properly trying to bring “The No. 1 Ready To Drink Coffee Brand in Japan” to Singapore now. But I remain unconvinced these stubby plastic bottles and generic labels are the way. The little cans and their designs are iconic, and better for the environment since they can be recycled.
    Spotted in a 7-Eleven

    Last week I mentioned buying black tees from FamilyMart, and then got into a few brief discussions about fashion/luxury apparel this week, wherein I reflected that while I’m happy to pay high prices for technology and things crafted out of metal, I can’t feel that way about fabrics and leather. They wear down, so why not just embrace their replacement and buy cost-effective, expendable products from basic brands? Then the Twitter algorithm put a bit of trivia in front of me that the plain white tees worn by Carmy in The Bear got attention from viewers who wanted to buy them, and that they were actually pretty expensive ones made by Japanese brand, Whitesville.

    So… if you know me, you may know where this is going. Yup, this is the guy who loved PCs, hated Macs, and now has a house full of Apple products. To be clear, I wasn’t suddenly curious about the idea of buying ostentatious Veblen t-shirts with designer logos, just… better ones that would hold up longer and not look as cheap. So I now have an order of basic black tees coming in from Mr Porter that cost 5x what I normally pay for them. Gulp. I’ll work out if this actually makes sense and let you know.

    ===

    The Super Mario Bros. Movie is a fun trip in IMAX. We enjoyed it, and I’m looking forward to finally playing Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury and New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe (I have to look up these names every single time) on my Switch soon.

  • Week 8.23

    • I got a haircut, waheyyy
    • According to the Been Outside app I started using last week, I’ve been out of the house for a total of 34 hours. That seems like too much if you ask me.
    • Zane Lowe has an in-depth interview series on Apple Music that I’ve never watched before, until a clip with Damon Albarn started going viral (that term feels so old). In it, Damon demonstrates how almost the entire backing track of the Gorillaz’s single Clint Eastwood was lifted from a demo preset on his Omnichord plastic keyboard. You can see that moment and the whole interview here on YouTube. The show is not so easy to find in Apple Music’s app itself. It’s filed under “Radio”, and if you go to the Gorillaz artist page, it’s not shown with the other music videos, but through a separate tile for “The Zane Lowe Interview” which looks like it could be an audio podcast, but it’s actually video.
    • Anyway I’m usually not too excited about Gorillaz releases and I don’t think I’ve made it through one of their albums in years, but the interview made me curious about this latest one, Cracker Island, and it’s alright! Skinny Ape stood out on my last listen through.
    • This week also saw the release of the 20th anniversary edition of Jesse Malin’s The Fine Art of Self Destruction, which I’ve been waiting months for. On top of the original album, he’s recorded new versions of some songs, but sadly not all. I’d expected all-new interpretations of the whole suite, but well, maybe that didn’t make sense without a coherent theme to approach them with.
    • I’ve been on the waitlist for Artifact, the news app from the founders of Instagram, and in a nice surprise this week, they opened it up to everyone. It’s basically a successor to Flipboard, without the flipping, and with magic AI dust sprinkled on top of it to attract buyers? Too cynical? I don’t have a great way to surface personalized news at the moment since I’ve cut back on my Twitter use, so I’m hoping this fills the gap.
    • Back in the 90s when Event Horizon came out in theaters, I was too afraid to see it. It was billed as an extreme sci-fi horror film with demonic themes and mutilation, and I was probably like NOPE! I saw a screenshot of it a few months ago that made me want to download and see it, but I only got around to it now. Time has reduced it to (or maybe it always was) a campy, schlocky, gory fun afternoon watch that’s more a 90s CD-ROM FMV game than anything, but the design of the ill-fated spaceship’s interiors is seriously god-tier work. It evokes so much NOPE at a glance: Ancient Evil glyphs etched into walls, steel pillars with tight tiling like a prison bathhouse, and a rotating mechanical gateway to hell that is definitely not good news. 3.5/5 at best.
    • Whenever I see a movie, I try to log it on Letterboxd, which is like a Goodreads for films. Now I’m happy to have discovered Marathon, which is like a Letterboxd for television. It’s a good looking app and if a show has enough viewers, you can see their ratings not only for entire seasons but individual episodes. If nothing else, it’s a useful way to keep track of what you’ve seen, need to finish seeing, and how much time you’ve spent on shows. You can find me on all these services as “sangsara”, I think.
    • Setting up Marathon helped me remember we were halfway through For All Mankind on Apple TV+ and need to get back into it. We also started on the latest season of You on Netflix, which managed to be more terrible than ever and yet still left me interested enough to keep going at the end of episode 1.
    • Alright! We kept things short this week. Not a lot of Midjourneying done but I’ve got a couple to see you off.
    Sleeping in the clouds
    Boss Baby Boomer
    Inspired by Jewel Changi Airport

  • Week 6.23

    Tl;dr: I moved to a new Mastodon server and signed up for a fun omg.lol account. Plus some thoughts on AI after playing around with ChatGPT this week.

    The operator of my queer-friendly, anti-Nazi Mastodon server (mastodon.lol) decided to shut it down after receiving too much hate and harassment. I don’t blame him for prioritizing his own safety and peace, and any disappointment is aimed at humanity in general. But this episode highlights the problems with Mastodon that I’ve been thinking about since adopting it. Namely, ground-up decentralization creates weaker nodes, and the UX friction of asking new users to choose a great first server that they can stick with for life. I joined mastodon.lol a scant three months ago!

    I also only found out about the shutdown by pure luck, chancing upon his announcement toot as I scrolled the timeline. We have three months before it goes offline. Without a sorting algorithm and/or the time to read every single post, it’s more likely people are going to miss the message than see it.

    My new address is @sangsara@social.lol, a paid Mastodon instance run by the omg.lol service which I learned about from Michael who also uses it. If you were already following me, you should have been automatically shifted to the new address. But migration on Mastodon doesn’t carry over posts, only followers and bookmarks, so my 67 entries will be wiped when the old server shuts down.

    I could have gone with one of the big, semi-official servers like mastodon.social or mastodon.online, but as soon as I started exploring omg.lol, I kinda fell in love with its idea of a scrappy nerdy community built around a series of web tools. I used to buy silly domains and dream about turning them into useful services — but lacked all of the skills and vision to actually pull it off. But here for $20/yr, you get a bunch of things riding off that great domain name: a personal web address with a profile page, an email address, a blogging service and /now page if you want, a statuslog service, pastebin, a permanent URL tool, access to their IRC/Discord server, and now, Mastodon.

    Based on this experience, I also decided it was time to redesign the About page here, which is my one true profile page on the web.

    ===

    I had a conversation late last week about generative AI and how it can steal many creative jobs away, but also increase access to higher quality creative work. It reminded me of that Steve Jobs interview where he said the way we “ratchet up our species is to take the best and to spread it around to everybody, so everybody grows up with better things”. If you put copyright and capitalism aside for a minute, because illegally trained AI leads to a sort of creative socialism, you can imagine how this plays out. There’s a ton of top-notch, high-budget creative work out there, but it’s not evenly distributed. What happens when any dive bar can have a Wednesday night promotions poster on the front door that looks like it was designed by TBWA? There will be a chaotic leveling and raising of all boats, and then any humans left standing and still able to think will figure out what’s next.

    ChatGPT has gone incredibly mainstream in a short time, and while I’m usually one of the first in line to try this sort of thing, that wasn’t the case here. I read about it, saw the screenshots shared online, but never actually signed up to try it myself until this week. I was too engrossed in the imaging/Midjourney side of things, and maybe some part of me that identifies as a copywriter knew that this was going to be a threat and I wasn’t in a hurry to face it.

    Now that I’ve played with it, though, including some amusing and convincing conversations about the nature of design and intelligence, I’m more excited and concerned than ever. It’s not only that generative AI tools will replace skilled human jobs and force a rethink of ethics, ownership, and labor in society — it’s that we’re not ready for the pace at which it will happen. We have not had the time and space to discuss this as communities, families, and countries.

    Text runs the world, and a text genie is squeezing its way out of the bottle. Legal documents, performance reviews, applications for access, convincing arguments for sales and solutions, and professional emails (that are now just a style to be applied to quick bullet points) will be passed off and leveled off. And those are just the use cases I’ve tried this week! Powerful tools are being put into untrained hands overnight, and as we’ve been hearing everywhere, companies are rushing to irreversibly build them into the digital engines that run everything. From search and Microsoft Office to project management and customer service. Some of it is safe and logical, and some could do with a little more thought.

    Ted Chiang wrote an excellent piece on the subject that I need to read again.

    I did get a kick out of David Guetta’s enthusiasm, though. There is so much potential here for fun and creativity, if you’re also the kind of guy who can give an unironic shoutout to a murdered man’s family.

    ===

    One of the things I “trained” ChatGPT to do in one long session was help me to write better Midjourney prompts. Here’s a series we made of objects that look the way they sound. It was a difficult challenge to attempt, requiring an understanding of abstract synesthesia that was beyond either AI, but I’m not too upset about the results.

    Media:

    • If you can separate the art from the artist, Ryan Adams has yet another new album out. This one is a track-by-track cover of Blood on the Tracks (Apple Music), kinda like what he did with Taylor Swift’s 1989.
    • We are caught up to episode 5 of The Last of Us and it’s strikingly good. Jose asked if I noticed a key character in episode 3 was also the hotel manager in season 1 of The White Lotus and I had not. When they say an actor disappears into their role, I suppose this is what they mean.
    • I got started on Persona 5 Royal (Switch). I played the original version on the PS4 and abandoned it maybe three or more years ago, blaming a lack of time in front of the TV and the non-portable nature of the experience. No excuses now. Except… I have put it on hold after the tutorial because I’m not sure I want to spend the next 60 hours on this just yet. It’s a young person’s game and I need something a little more casual.
    • Despite probably seeing The Third Man many times over the years, I don’t remember it clearly at all. Here’s my Letterboxd review: “I have probably tried to see this film about three or four times. Tonight I succeeded, and it is the sum of all previous attempts, including vague memories of staying awake in film class in university. What a strange and meandering film, with intriguing technical aspects and unexpected emotional depth, and an ending scene for the ages. I thought four stars but I’ll be damned if I didn’t give it all five.” It has only strengthened my resolve to see more old folks and read more old books. This foray into the contemporary over the past decade has been a waste of time!
    • Do you think Seth MacFarlane has modeled himself on Orson Welles in some ways?! There’s a physical resemblance + the multihyphenatism.
    • I saw Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. What a crock of shit.

  • Week 5.23

    We got our fourth vaccine shots today. Based on historical results, I’m going to be ill tomorrow and she’ll be fine. It’s been about four hours and I’m already feeling a little lightheaded and tired.

    It feels like it’s been raining here almost continuously since late December — dark all the time, and practically every day we get storms that last most of the day or night. And so it feels unusually cool and damp indoors, and our dehumidifiers have been working overtime to get clothes dry and keep mold at bay.

    This Chinese/Lunar New Year period is often associated with blazing, cloudless skies, and sweating through one’s new red clothes while shuttling around to visit relatives, which makes this year an outlier. And it’s not just me saying it! Several taxi drivers have used this observation as a conversation starter these past few weeks.

    And every year, there’s an outsized “Hong Bao” lottery draw that generates long queues at betting outlets. I bought a single ticket for fun while in a convenience store one night, and in the process of getting the link above have discovered that I’m sadly not one of the three winners of the S$12M prize. Or a consolation prize, even.

    ===

    I generated some cityscape illustrations using a mix of anime and artwork keywords with Midjourney (no artist names), and got some surprisingly great compositions — good enough that I’m using one of them as my phone’s wallpaper now. And then just to mix things up, I asked it to put Godzilla in the cities, and that actually worked.

    ===

    TV
    We finished all 10 episodes of Echo 3 on Apple TV+, a quasi-action series involving a group of special forces types conducting some personal business in Columbia. It’s not a straightforward, fast-moving Jack Ryan sort of show, although it could have been. Its typographic title styles actually reminded me of 80s-era Golan–Globus films — a look and feel and attitude I wish Hollywood would unironically revive. But no, Echo 3 has arthouse ambitions and slows things down with gauzy dream images, flashbacks, and psychologically troubled characters. Which I can’t say I cared that much for! 3/5

    We’ve now been subscribed to HBO for a full week and only started using it yesterday. The Last of Us is good television after all, not leaning too much on the game beyond key pieces. My main complaint so far is that shots of the wider world look too much like how I remember the game: CGI rather than realism.

    Something odd is happening here in terms of anime licensing. SPY×FAMILY started out on Netflix, then new episodes appeared simultaneously on Amazon Prime Video. I thought this title sharing was a weird one-off, but now Chainsaw Man is no longer on Prime Video only; it’s also on Netflix. If only this disruption of exclusivity happened more so we didn’t have to subscribe to every service.

    Incidentally, I finished Chainsaw Man despite not really having any appetite for demon-hunting stories — this one is wild, weird, and really well done.

    Music
    Speaking of strange behavior, I discovered the #youngstar playlist on Apple Music at some point last year and enjoyed its focus: emerging J-Pop acts that have gained traction first on alternative channels like YouTube and TikTok. But when I checked it out today, I found an international version of the playlist, with English songs only.

    Checking in with Michael, I realized some localizing or geofencing was afoot because he still saw the Japanese version (with a US account, in Japan). Highly annoying that we aren’t given a choice which version we see; is it so difficult to just publish separate playlists like “#youngstar (Japan)”, “#youngstar (International)”? So we’ve done that, manually, for anyone else who wants them. You can send us the checks, Tim.

    The English-language #youngstar playlist still shows up on the J-Pop category page as a relevant item. I want to fix this, call me.

    Singling out one song off the Japanese playlist, I enjoyed XG’s Shooting Star and then found myself sucked into their YouTube channel for awhile. For a group that’s only put out about four full songs, they have a ton of content, from training sessions and mixtape-style demos to random behind-the-scenes videos like one where two members practice a rap segment for about seven minutes. The polish on the Shooting Star video reminds me of early Blackpink, and I think these girls are going to be huge (they have 1.1M YouTube subscribers now). It helps that they sing in English, Japanese, and Korean. How do you even source talent like that, and seven of them? Headhunters and recruiters in every other industry need to learn from the music business.

  • Week 1.23

    Creative Technologies’ founder and CEO Sim Wong Hoo suddenly passed away at the age of 67 this week, which was pretty big news locally. The Verge explained the significance of his career as creator of the Sound Blaster line of PC audio cards which put Singapore on the consumer tech map in the 1980s.

    My first PC was their homegrown Cubic CT, basically an IBM-compatible XT 8086 system, with a CGA (Color Graphics Array: just four colors) graphics card, 5.25” floppy disk drive, and no hard drive. I’m pretty sure my dad drove down to Sim Lim Square or somewhere like that and picked it up in person. After a few years, we upgraded to a non-Creative made system based on the Intel 386SX chip (how that SX suffix haunted me, making me feel like I had an inferior machine! The DX was the model you wanted; the SX lacked the dedicated math co-processor, not that I ever really knew which programs made use of it).

    Neither of these first two computers had proper audio capabilities, just the awful default “PC speaker”, as it was called back then. You could only get beeps and boops. One needed a dedicated audio card like an Adlib or Roland or Sound Blaster to hear proper music or sound clips. So every PC game I played had awful crude calculator music you wanted to turn off, but when I went over to play at my cousin Bryan’s house (he had a 286 with EGA graphics — 16 colors! — and a Sound Blaster), those very same games would have synthesized orchestral instruments and realistic sound effects. I wanted a Sound Blaster more than anything and wouldn’t have one until we upgraded to a Pentium system much later.

    The best quality image I could find of my old MP3 player, from the PDF manual

    Years before I got my first iPod and switched over to a Macintosh, my first MP3 player was a Creative-made device. The year was probably 1999 or 2000. I was looking to move on from the MiniDisc players I’d been using for years, and these new devices let you carry tons more music around without a folder full of discs in your backpack (this was really a thing we did). The model I chose was a Creative MuVo, a nondescript white plastic square with a tiny LCD screen and a soft joystick nub for control. It played WMA files as well as MP3s, which was a deciding factor for me as you could stuff more music in at an equivalent quality using the WMA format at the time. That little guy kept me company through two long years of mind-numbing administrative work during my national service.

    Years later, after graduating and stumbling into my first proper full-time job, the very first task they gave me was writing video treatments for a Creative Technologies product demo DVD. Creative happened to be one of the agency’s longtime clients, and the viral video above was one of the things that happened under their watch before I joined. I remember my partner and I excitedly pitching a direction to our bosses only to be shot down and told to try again. Weeks later, after going out west to Creative’s offices and getting their feedback, it turned out we had gotten it right the first time. That was probably the end of my journey with the brand, although I was intrigued by their attempts to bring a new version of their X-Fi surround audio tech to market in recent years. I almost bought a pair of their headphones to try it, but now Apple’s spatial audio on AirPods has one-upped their approach by delivering a massive library of professionally mixed Dolby Atmos music instead of relying on fake surround processing on stereo tracks.

    His death is a sad loss and I wonder what the company will do from here. Looking back on the various products I’ve owned or tried over the years, they offered unquestionable technical merit, above average build quality, and always great value for money.

    ===

    • The new year got off to a gluttonous start with an impromptu visit to one of my favorite buffets, followed by Chinese hotpot, and then an all you can eat Korean BBQ (these were three consecutive days). Then I rested for a day before hitting Mexican cocktails and an izakaya with 1-liter highballs on Friday, and then rounding off the weekend with a burger from Blooie’s Roadhouse on Sunday.
    • Incidentally, that last meal was my first time at The Rail Mall, which most Singaporeans are probably familiar with, and which I used to pass on the bus daily during the aforementioned two years of national service but never stopped at. There were a few other interesting places we’ll probably be back for, like a craft beer taproom and an all you can eat wagyu yakiniku (so, like, probably tomorrow).
    • I got into the hottest beta program around: Ivory, the new Mastodon client from Tapbots. It builds on their work for Tweetbot, and it makes using Mastodon as a primary social media platform very enjoyable. I’ve checked Twitter a lot less this week as a result.
    • I finished my first playthrough of Citizen Sleeper on the Switch and will probably not be back for more until a little later. So many games! I’ve started on Arcade Spirits, a Western visual novel about working in a video game arcade. Not to be confused with Arcade Paradise which is a business sim that lets you run an arcade cum laundromat. If Spirits doesn’t pick up soon, I’ll probably abandon it for Kathy Rain or the Monkey Island sequel.
    • In need of a new book, I picked up Eugene Lim’s Dear Cyborgs but it didn’t click. I cut my losses after about an hour.
    • King Princess’s Hold On Baby would probably have been my pick for Best Album of 2022, if I’d chosen an Album of the Year. I’ve played it through about four times this week and still can’t enough. As with quite a few things I really love, I kinda hated it at the start. I mean, I used to hate Macs and Korean food.
    • We did a deep clean of the fridge and freezer on Sunday. If you’re ever doing the same, Apple’s Cleaning The House playlist may help.

    Here’s some AI art I made this week:

  • Week 52.22: The end of year playlist edition

    Hey y’all. I worked three days this week (was crazy, back to back calls during the Christmas season wha…?) and then felt good enough during the next two days of vacation time to sit down and make a year-in-review playlist again. For some reason I skipped this tradition last year — probably having too much fun in my time off? Previous installments here for reference: 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020.

    So if you’re on Apple Music, here’s L–R 2022, featuring cover art made with Midjourney, in a year dominated by generative AI improvements.

    Quick liner notes:

    • I was happy to see Utada Hikaru returning with a new album, and such a good one at that. I went with Bad Mode as the featured song but there are many great cuts. Aside: we finished the First Love series on Netflix. It fumbled the ending after a pretty good buildup. The last three episodes should be deleted and replaced with a new take.
    • I discovered Stromae this year (I somehow missed the 2009 club mega hit Alors on danse) and what a singular talent he is. With his knack for melodies, writing (albeit translated for me) and intricate beats, and a great singing voice, he deserves to be so much bigger.
    • There was much to be thankful for in hip-hop, with new material from Black Thought, Kendrick, the RZA, Anderson .Paak, Stormzy!? If only Donda 2 were a real album on real channels, I would have included a track but oh well Ye does Ye.
    • Drake and 21 Savage stepped on a Daft Punk classic with Circo Loco but I can’t hate it. Another contender that didn’t make the list was DJ Khaled’s Staying Alive also with Drake, but if you’re gonna rip off a song at least sample it too.
    • Local band Sobs did an incredible cover of Gwen Stefani’s Cool which I thought rivaled the original in deserving to exist. I heard them play it live in October at the Esplanade too.
    • I cheated a little with the inclusion of Jens Lekman’s Black Cab but hey it’s a new recording! He’s deleted the originals and reworked a couple of albums (I still have the old MP3s thankfully). The song is one of my eternal favorites, firmly planted in the mental territory of my mid-20s.
    • It all ends with one of my favorite tracks from the new Taylor Swift and Jack Antonoff album, the most beautiful quiet evening at home vibe to ever be captured in a studio.
    A couple of alternative covers I didn’t use

    ===

    I sorta finished two games this week and started on a new one.

    Robotics;Notes was a real letdown of a visual novel: lots of filler writing to trudge through, and an opaque system of affecting outcomes. I won’t explain, but it’s basically impossible to play out the different paths without a walkthrough. For fans only. I abandoned it after completing the first ending.

    Indie darling Unpacking was a lot more fun, despite being literally a simulation of unpacking boxes after moving homes. It was satisfying to see how much narrative they managed to suggest just by having you handle a person’s belongings over a couple of decades.

    On Jose’s suggestion, I picked up Citizen Sleeper for the Switch (currently on 30% sale for the holidays) and was blown away by how immersive a text-driven RPG game can actually feel in 2022. It’s a sci-fi story set on a space station, if that helps you decide any.

    Related to gaming and growing up empowered and inspired by games, I started reading Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow after encountering a passionate mention of it in Dan Hon’s newsletter, and so far so great. If you grew up in the 80s and feel that games shaped your experience of the world, put it on your list.

    I later discovered that it won Goodreads’ user-voted best fiction work of the year award, which is astounding because no one else has mentioned it to me?!

    ===

    Merry Christmas!

    We had good Christmas Eve, Day, and Evening meals in various family configurations over the weekend with no accidents or cooking disasters, apart from several items of food getting forgotten in the fridge (beef brisket, gingerbread houses, etc.), which were probably signs of excessive ambition and unnecessary procurement anyway. I’m deathly full and ready to skip a few meals in the coming week (spoiler: we’ve got a staycation planned on Monday and it involves eating out).

    See you next week.