Despite a brief setback, we ended up going to Bangkok for a few days as planned.
After spending hours in traffic the last time, I stayed within a smaller radius this time and walked a bit more. There wasn’t any agenda, really; Kim had some things to do and I wanted a change of scenery.
There was a jam coming in from the airport, of course, but we were thankfully in a very comfortable ride provided by the hotel. Ours was one of many cars squeezing down the narrow side lanes on the freeway — those buffer zones you don’t normally think cars should (or could) be using. Other cars in the ‘proper lanes’ skooch over to make way for this to happen, and it struck me as a neat metaphor for designing permissive, flexible systems with a normal mode but hiding ample bandwidth to accommodate emergencies.
Amidst more news of layoffs and economic rockiness, I think using AI in design (or most things, maybe) should be the side lane to ‘proper lanes’ of humans doing work, but we’re trying to do the opposite. Someone showed me a new customer research platform called GetWhy, where AI personalities conduct interviews over video calls with people, and synthesize some manner of insights automatically. They call it “human depth at survey speed”, which I knew AI would eventually enable: a merging of qualitative methods with quantitative scale. I saw it coming a couple of years ago but didn’t have the strength to look at it directly and figure out the pros and cons. At a gut level, I think it’s a shame that companies will now be able to insert another artificial layer between the people working on services and the people they’re supposed to be serving (or, more cynically, extracting profit from).
Anyway back to Bangkok. I saw three films to pass free time in the afternoons. Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning for a second time; Jurassic World Rebirth, which was so terrible and completely lacking in the magic of the original film, the lasting fumes of which this franchise is still somehow able to sustain itself on; and James Gunn’s Superman, which I accidentally saw in Thai, without subtitles. I decided to sit through the whole thing and get by on just the visual language of it, and I think the experiment went okay! I probably couldn’t watch Tenet (2020) this way, though. 3/5 stars with the above qualification.
On Brian’s suggestion, I visited the Thailand Creative & Design Center (TCDC) which is a government office in a historic postal service building, mostly notable for its extensive resource library. You have to be a member to enter, although day passes are available for about S$4. It was a good way to pass a couple of hours, and I flipped through some interestingbooks that are now on my Amazon wishlist.
One of them was For the Love of Peanuts, by Elizabeth Anne Hartman, which covers the Peanuts Global Artist Collective — a project where seven artists reimagined Schulz’s characters through public art and exhibitions. There’s more information and photos through the link above. I was coincidentally thinking about learning to draw Snoopy recently, the “correct” way, and seeing this book was such a jolt to my narrow way of thinking — it had simply never occurred to me that I was free to recreate Snoopy however I wanted. Lots of new synapses to build here.
At the last minute, I decided not to bring my Switch 2 and it was fine. I always imagine hours of downtime on vacation where I might actually want to play a game, but it never happens. I did use my iPad Pro and am going through a sort of second wave of love for it. I recently got a third-party Smart Folio-type case, for just $12 off Amazon, which makes it much thinner and lighter than Apple’s Magic Keyboard case. The original Smart Cover (launched with iPad 2) is/was such a brilliant and minimal design, giving the device a perfect midpoint between versatility and portability, and having it again with this case is great for traveling.
It’s worth mentioning that each night back at the hotel I’d get into a trashy reality tv cable channel dedicated to “courtroom cases”. The quote marks are because I don’t know if you’d call these actual legal courts (but with the US, who knows?), but the two series I saw were awful and entertaining. Paternity Court sees couples come in and argue about their children, usually born on the side with another man or woman, culminating in the results of a DNA test revealing whether the man really is their father. Divorce Court is better, because you get other sorts of relationship issues being worked out, and the judges are sassier and give out strong advice. The name is a misnomer; some of these couples aren’t even married or looking for a divorce, they’re just airing their shit on TV. You can watch full episodes on their YouTube channel.
On the flight home, I caught Doctor-X: The Movie Final (2024), the supposed concluding chapter to the long-running Japanese medical drama that’s so bad I fell in love with it. Back in February, I spent an absurdly cost-inefficient chunk of my Tokyo trip watching Seasons 4 and 5 on local Netflix. Seasons 6 and 7 don’t have English subs, so I don’t know when I’ll get to see them — unlike Superman, this is too important to risk rawdogging in a foreign language. The movie… well, they went for higher stakes: explosions, AI, helicopters, the works. But that also meant less of the dumb fun and weird humor that makes the regular show a cult favorite. Or maybe not so cult at all — maybe it’s unironically loved in Japan. I kinda hope so.
It’s getting hot down here, and reluctant as I am to use air-conditioning during the day while just sitting indoors, I’ve had to have it on in short spurts to bring the temperature down at times. Depending on the fates, I might be off to Bangkok again next week, where the heat’s reportedly even more brutal. Let’s see.
It was Apple Music’s 10th anniversary, and they’re doing some things like opening a new studio in LA, releasing a Top 500 list of the most-streamed songs, and — this one I especially enjoyed — a two-hour show with Zane Lowe and Ebro Darden, founding DJs of the Beats 1 (now Apple Music 1) radio station. It’s mostly Zane reflecting on their experience and telling behind-the-scenes stories from the frantic early days, backed by some all-time great tunes. For example, how they had just three months to find studio spaces around the world and go live, how the first song to be played on-air was chosen, and how the difficulty of recruiting DJs led to them having artists host their own shows (the best things usually start as hacks).
The show reminded me why I still love Apple Music, flaws and all: it’s here for the culture. It’s the one streaming service where passion for music is clearly evident, and it comes from the people helming the shows, both the DJs and the artists as mentioned, like Elton John, FKA twigs, Anderson .Paak, Jamie xx, and The Weeknd, to name a few. Shows and playlists put together by artists are such a cool (and obvious!) way to connect with fans, it’s hard to believe they weren’t really a thing before Apple Music.
I remember exactly where I was (Reykjavik) the day Apple Music launched, and how absolutely furious I was that the Beats 1 radio station wasn’t available in Singapore. It’s just goddamn internet radio, so why!? It was only after a year that it finally launched for us. I never found out the reason, but I assumed censorship and broadcast licensing hoops had to be jumped through, and welp I guess that’s the cost of being Singaporean. Still, I switched over from Spotify on day one and haven’t looked back. While looking through the archives, I found this post in 2014 before the acquisition, where I was pretty sure Apple would keep the Beats brand on their headphones but turn Beats Music into the backend of an “iTunes Unlimited” service. I sorta called it.
A Japanese mobile game I’ve been waiting for had its global launch on July 3: Persona 5 X (P5X). When you hear that, you might expect a gacha-based Persona 5 spinoff, based on some crappy mobile game squad battle mechanics. So I was surprised by how close it is to an actual Persona game, despite the necessary gacha and mobile elements. The graphics look and feel so close to the mainline titles that I’m convinced they could port them to iPhone if they wanted. However it’s mostly a solo adventure game, and I would love to see a different, massively multiplayer social game design uniting the world to fight shadows in the “metaverse” (don’t blame me, it’s the actual term they use).
However, the Japanese mobile game recently launched globally in English that’s been blowing up on my timeline is Umamusume: Pretty Derby, which is a horse racing game based on actual legendary champion horses, except they’re personified as idol girls who perform in full-blown concerts after winning. I’ve downloaded it for kicks, but I think it’s a neigh for me.
I came across a new drawing app for iPhone/iPad called Graintouch, and instantly bought it for S$15 after seeing its lovely Risograph aesthetics (a sort of Japanese photocopier from the 80s). It’s wonderfully minimal, to the point of restricting you to just 18 predefined colors, and simulates the look of paper prints. You can even hit a “misalignment” button that offsets the layers at random. It’s a welcome change from the overly powerful Procreate, which makes me feel like a learner driver at the wheel of a Ferrari.
I decided I might use this for the drawings I’d planned on doing, and started doodling around to get a feel for it. The result is a bunch of silly characters with googly eyes, and I kinda like them! Maybe I’ll do more and try to improve them.
“Valentine”
I took my parents out to see F1 The Movie in a cinema, and found that senior citizens only pay S$5 per ticket on weekdays. If I had that benefit, I’d see every movie. Anyway, the film was great, and I say that as someone who doesn’t give a damn about F1 (my dad, on the other hand, is a total fanatic who watches every season). Apple did the right thing putting this out in theaters properly before streaming; it really deserves the big screen and too-loud speakers. An incredible popcorn movie, so good that for two hours you’ll find Brad Pitt likable despite everything we’ve heard about how he’s fallen out with his kids and maybe isn’t such a great guy. 4.5 / 5 stars.
We binged Season 4 of The Bear over the weekend. It made me wonder if there really are people out there like these characters, raised in so much chaos that their primary mode of communication is shouting and clashing with increasing intensity. I love watching it happen in 30-minute bouts, but by god it’s tiring. Overall, I think this was a slightly stronger season than the last one, and while I still love the directors swinging for the fences with concept episodes, they are becoming a little too expected. The best thing they could do in Season 5 would be to subvert those expectations and deliver a full-heartedly commercial happy ending.
My Switch 2 finally arrived on Monday, praise be. It turned out to be an imported European unit, so it has the right kind of power plugs, but the included download code for Mario Kart World would only work with an EU eShop account. It didn’t take long to make one, but it’s yet another needless fragmentation of my digital footprint.
It’s a fantastic improvement on the original Switch. It feels more solidly built, and the magnetic Joy-Cons don’t creak and give as much when supporting the console’s weight. The screen is enormous but since the original wasn’t exactly pocketable anyway, who cares? It seems powerful enough to keep up with game requirements for easily another five years. The only regression is battery life, which they’ll surely fix with a new model two years from now.
I have yet to play anything on it that graphically pushes into PS5 territory with ray tracing and photorealism; although running Mario Kart World at 60fps in 4K is definitely not something the old Switch could do. That same smoothness extends to Splatoon 3, which got a Switch 2 upgrade patch on Thursday for the franchise’s 10th anniversary, and it feels amazingly fast and fluid on the new hardware. The once painful load times have been reduced to almost nothing, which is nearly worth the price of admission all by itself. At the very least, reviewers agree it’s more powerful than a Steam Deck.
Bert was back in town on a last-minute trip, so we met up with some of the old gang for beers and the kind of talk that middle-aged people will get up to if you let them: aging parents, how everything was much better before, and how we’d like to retire voluntarily before AI forces us to. Jussi was once again unable to make it, but he had the acceptable reason of being out of the country.
It was WWDC week, and with the comprehensive OS updates that were announced, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that every Apple product experience will be changing this fall. I’ve had several conversations about the new cross-platform design language system they unveiled, which doesn’t have a name but is anchored by a new digital material called Liquid Glass, so people have just been calling it that. I wrote last week that I hoped the new look wouldn’t come with regressions in usability, specifically thinking about legibility and interaction clarity, but those are exactly the issues that everyone has been pointing out in the first developer beta. I’m hopeful that they’ll be able to moderate some of the more extreme decisions before the launch, but there’s no turning back. Like it or not, this is just how things are going to be for us users. What are you going to do, move to Android?
While talking to Michael again, one of us offered that Liquid Glass is simply a flex. It’s Apple building a visible moat with their superior silicon. Every iPhone, iPad, and Mac made in the last five years possesses power-efficient cycles to spare, which can’t be said of Android devices, save for a minority of the highest-end flagship phones. So when you look over someone’s shoulder in public and see morphing glass buttons accurately refracting the light coming off other elements on their screen at 60 to 120 fps, you’re looking at the digital equivalent of fine stitched leather. Luxury pixels. Veblen UI. Android manufacturers can’t follow Apple down this road without bifurcating the experience into cheap and premium versions, or forcing tradeoffs like reduced battery life and jankier animation.
The iPad got the most extreme makeover of all the platforms, and I’m a mixture of relieved, disappointed, and excited. Relieved that they’ve given up on trying to define some new paradigm for managing multiple apps on a screen; turns out the answer is just the same overlapping windows we’ve had since the first Mac. Mildly disappointed that if they couldn’t crack it after some 15 years, then maybe there just isn’t a better way. The universe might be more constrained than we’d hoped. And excited that the iPad will now be a truer laptop replacement for the majority of people, and with that increase in adoption perhaps we’ll get developers excited to build new kinds of experiences for it.
Screenshot from Apple.com
As a Vision Pro owner, I can’t wait for the improved Personas, sharing virtual spaces with people nearby, and the new “spatial scene” rendering from 2D photos. I’ve already spoken to some people in inSpaze who are rocking the new Personas, and they look 10x better and more realistic than the old ones. In fact, it’s given rise to a weird social dilemma that can only exist in this age. I’ve known these people for a while and we’ve talked with each other quite a bit, but suddenly overnight, their faces have changed and it feels like I’m meeting them for the first time — or realizing I never really had. One person in the group chat looked younger now that his Persona got more accurate. Another person looked older and more intense than his previous Pixar-esque Persona suggested he was. They mentioned feeling slightly uncomfortable with how realistically they’re now presenting — the opposite of the safety that I described back in August last year: “the use of Personas creates psychological distance; it’s you, but it’s also more a puppet that looks like you.” Well, now it’s just your real face for everyone to see. I apologize in advance.
I’ll leave you with two videos from Pulp, whose comeback album More continues to surprise me by being actually good, as if the band hadn’t gone anywhere for the last two decades. The first single has a great video (above) that uses generative AI in the best way possible. The second video below is a live performance of an old favorite, one of many appearances they’ve been making in support of the new stuff.
Last week when I said ‘God willing, my Switch 2 will be delivered on Friday’, I actually meant to say ‘inshallah’, and so, as punishment, it didn’t arrive. And because Saturday was a Muslim public holiday, the postal service didn’t deliver it over the weekend either. Why didn’t it come as promised? The seller made a real mess of things, opting for Standard instead of Express delivery (one working day vs. two hours), but that wasn’t even the worst part. They canceled one of my two orders at the very last minute, one I’d made for a friend, and offered no apologies apart from saying it would come at the end of the month when it’s officially released locally. They obviously took more orders than they had supply for! The name of the vendor is “Unrival SG” on Amazon, so use that knowledge how you will.
Ironically, I ordered a Japanese import Pro Controller 2 off Shopee on Thursday, and that arrived on Friday with no issues. As everyone has reported, it feels amazing — possibly the best-feeling controller I’ve ever used, especially its buttons and thumbsticks. Everything is dampened and silent; the amount of tension seems just right. The only thing that could improve this (for me, with my big hands) would be making it more like the PS5’s DualSense in size and hand feel.
I’m hoping it’ll come on Monday instead, which would make that a jam-packed day what with WWDC after midnight. I’m not expecting any new hardware or life-changing software features, so the main thing for most people will probably be the unified redesign. I really hope they smash it, and not ship a visual refresh that turns out to be a regression in usability.
Without a new console in hand, I thought I’d pass the weekend by starting on Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth (PS5), the 8th game in the Yakuza series. It’s one of the highest rated RPGs of all time, sprawling in scope and packed with too many things to do, including “minigames” that are basically full-on Animal Crossing and Pokémon parodies.
But it turns out I still like the idea of console gaming more than the reality. Within an hour, I’d quit and gone back to reading manga and watching a guy hunt for retro games in Book-Off.
Kim is/was away for work again, and the weather has been rough (forecasted to touch 35ºC at some point this month), so I’ve mainly stayed in most days. Exceptions were made for a Korean chicken meetup and a couple of evening walks. The Vision Pro got an above average amount of use this week as I’ve woken up early enough to meet the American users I know on inSpaze, and because I wanted to watch a bunch of films in a theatrical environment.
The first I should mention was Sinners (2025), which was probably overhyped because I didn’t think it was the greatest film of the last decade or anything, although it was very good. What took me out of the moment was thinking about how it’s so structurally and thematically similar to From Dusk Till Dawn (1996), another film that delightfully switches gears halfway to become a vampire story out of nowhere. When I saw that as a teenager, my mind was blown. I didn’t think they put money behind films with premises that audacious. I suppose Sinners is that for a new generation.
The next was The Zone of Interest (2023), an A24 Jonathan Glazer film that got a lot of buzz at Cannes the year it came out, but I put it off because the subject matter seemed too heavy. It shows the unnervingly normal family life of the commandant at Auschwitz, with wife, kids, and servants in a home just outside the camp’s walls. As screams and gunfire are heard in the background throughout the day, and the ovens pump out smoke and fire at night, they just pretend like nothing’s wrong and it’s probably a more effective horror than setting vampires loose.
I was primed to finally confront it because I watched Alain Resnais’s concentration camp documentary Night and Fog (1956) on MUBI last Sunday — I didn’t mention it at the time because I was honestly too traumatized. For a 30 minute film, it packs a lot of unspeakable horror, images of brutality on a scale that you’ll desperately want to believe are a one-time aberration in history. Sadly, while the efficiency and nature of the gas chambers were perhaps unique to Nazi Germany, you just know that this is no different from any of the genocides that have taken/continue to take place. Watching it, you’ll believe that something is intrinsically broken in human nature, because even the victims of such crimes can’t even be counted on not to do the same to others.
I’ve been enjoying three new albums. The new Counting Crows which I’d been saving, Butter Miracle, actually might be a return to form based on my few spins so far. Its main issue is the difference in vocal sounds between the two halves, maybe owing to the fact that the latter half was recorded and first released as an EP a couple of years ago. But I’d say it’s their strongest work since Hard Candy.
Pulp is also back with their first album in 23 years, More, and it’s also a very strong comeback. The kind you don’t expect from an old band putting something out in the post-Covid era: they’re usually forgettable and anaemic, you know, like U2 albums after the 90s. But More might be classic Pulp — playful, raunchy, cynical yet open-hearted — with just a couple more decades on top.
Shura is also back with a new one, I Got Too Sad For My Friends, and it’s got some lovely songs as usual, recalling Fleetwood Mac (and by extension, recent Clairo) and even a little bit of Prince, with her use of synths.
This week’s installment is update #256! That’s a big deal for fans of computationally significant numbers.
Oddly, just as Michael blogged that his family was down with gastroenteritis last week, a similar bug hit our household. Kim got a bad case of what we thought was food poisoning, and then, of course, I came down with it two days later. It’s a weird one: the stomach trouble comes with headaches and fatigue. Fearing that it was contagious, plus being all tired out, I had to skip one meetup and a wedding dinner over the weekend.
So not that much happened with me this week, but I suppose we can talk about the mess out there?
Google held their annual I/O event and showed off their latest AI achievements. Tl;dr, some of this stuff is just gross. From a technical standpoint, yes it’s remarkable that pretty realistic video (with sound) can be generated from text, and Google can now use your personal context from documents and emails to help with tasks — similar to what Apple promised (but has yet to deliver), with the important distinction that one centers privacy and on-device computation while the other will do it on their servers. I don’t know if I trust Google to let an AI crawl all my documents, and for that reason, minimized my exposure to Google years ago.
I remember when Gmail first came out and pioneered showing contextual ads next to your emails. There was an uproar, and the company had to calm people by saying ‘no one is reading your emails, it’s just automated keyword matching’. Well, with LLMs, it’s much, much worse. No human would be able to go through all your messages, photos, location data, and search history to piece together an invasive psychological profile about your vulnerabilities, and make it actionable for advertisers. Trust that an AI will. Just look at how a version of Claude 4 Opus in testing tried to blackmail an Anthropic engineer over an affair it believed they were having.
Beyond the business model of Google’s AI products, it’s their designed intent that feels particularly bleak. One example they proudly demoed: a friend emails asking for holiday recommendations at a place you’ve visited. Instead of writing them a thoughtful reply, you let Google AI scour your photos, emails, documents, and receipts to auto-generate a message, using words chosen to sound like you. Sundar Pichai even had the nerve to say, “With personal smart replies, I can be a better friend”. With friends like these, don’t even bother writing. Just ask Google directly and it can snoop the inboxes of a billion other customers to give you the statistically “best” itinerary.
And this is where a company’s lack of imagination and care makes itself plainly apparent. Instead of designing an AI system that writes replies in your place, they could have made one that recaps your holiday with a little presentation showing you where you went, what you did, and what you enjoyed most. Then, memory suitably refreshed, you could sit down and write your friend a reply that shows you actually give a shit about them, and both of your lives would be richer for it. I’m beginning to think that Apple, by failing to ship their AI features on time, might be saving us from a future I don’t want to live in. Maybe they’ll never ship. Maybe that was the plan all along.
Then a man who many would expect to know better — who sits on stages and professes the importance of values in technology, and is arguably the most famous designer of this century — announced a new venture (also called io) with Sam Altman and OpenAI. And the vibes, my friends, were off. The 9-minute launch video came across as a thin PR exercise to polish Altman’s spotty public image and reassure OpenAI’s investors. It struck an uncharacteristically self-congratulatory tone for the usually humble Ive while announcing, essentially, nothing. Sterling Crispin tweeted a biting Marxist read of the video in the style of Slavoj Zizek. Many saw it as Altman angling for a Steve Jobs comparison, with critics pointing out that he’s not enough of a product person to be a true partner (and necessary editor) to Ive. In any case, I have no doubt that the io team will deliver some beautifully designed hardware. But I fear even they can’t summon enough thoughtfulness or optimism to divert AI from its current trajectory, or prevent the cultural and societal wreckage it’s likely to create.
Speaking of nice devices, one of my fondest gaming memories involves my last year at university, when I switched from my PC to a Mac that was relatively useless for playing games. I couldn’t imagine not having any games (this was before smartphones, mind you), so I bought myself a Game Boy Advance SP — the pinnacle of the series, in my opinion. It’s hard to imagine a more perfect form factor for a handheld console. The clamshell design protects the screen; the vertical layout keeps your arms and hands close together, even when squeezed into an economy flight seat; the screen was sharp and self-lit, which was not a given in those days. I would lie in bed in the dark on cold nights and play Final Fantasy I until I was bored to sleep. To this day, I still fall asleep during boring turn-based battles — one of the reasons why I want to try Clair Obscur Expedition 33, since it blends turns with real-time actions. Pretty sure I traded in my GBA SP for store credit to buy the Nintendo DS (DS Phat) when it came out later that year, and I regret it.
Anbernic, the China-based maker of retro emulation handhelds, released a clone of the GBA SP last year, the wonderfully named RG35XXSP. It runs a Linux-based operating system and may or may not come preloaded with thousands of classic gaming ROMs from the NES to the PS1 — you should only play the ones you actually own, of course. I didn’t get one because Anbernic doesn’t have the best rep when it comes to build quality, and I wasn’t sure they’d get it right the first time. Fast forward to today, and the new RG34XXSP (yes, it went back a model number) looks to be the one to get, even over the competing Miyoo Flip V2. DYOR (do your own research) though! They made it slightly smaller, dampened the button clicks, added two analog thumbsticks for wider compatibility, and came up with some better colorways. Now that it finally sounds more like a product than a prototype, mine’s on its way in the mail, and I can’t wait to relive some old games while waiting for the Switch 2 to arrive.
Meanwhile in Japan, Fujifilm decided to get in on the nostalgia cash grab game with a new camera release, the long-teased “X half”. Many expected this to be based on the X100 or GFX series, that is to say, employing an APS-C or medium format sensor. But no, it’s a 1-inch sensor, vertically oriented to resemble 35mm half-frame photos. A major selling point is the ability to shoot “in-camera” diptychs (a two-photo collage). The overall camera concept is fantastic: it has a 32mm lens, is very small, and features a “film camera mode” that is basically a physical version of those iPhone apps that try to simulate the fun limitations of analog photography. When activated, you are locked into a chosen film simulation look until you’ve used up a virtual roll of film, ranging from 36–72 half-frame shots. You can’t see any photos until you finish, and you can’t even use the digital screen to compose shots, only the optical viewfinder.
I would be down for this, except that early reviews show many corners were cut between concept on paper and the final product. Firstly, it’s made of plastic painted to look like metal. There are no words for how much I hate this when done badly. There’s also a visible seam on the front face that ruins the look. Then the processor seems to be slow, and it ruins the illusion of the film advance lever which you need to crank before taking the next shot; it’s reportedly unresponsive until the last photo has saved. If you’re going to fake analog mechanisms then it has to be perfect! The flash unit, a big part of the analog film camera look, is a weak LED rather than a xenon bulb. Then there are the cheesy overlay effects, like light leaks and “expired film” color casts, which seem borrowed from the company’s Instax evo cameras rather than its premium X series. The camera costs S$999, which many are calling too high, but honestly if they had to charge S$200 more to actually do the concept justice, I’d be on board. If some random startup made this for half the price, the flaws would be forgivable. But this is Fujifilm, and if you’re going to carry this faux film camera around and look like an old douchebag with more money than sense, it had better be good.
Until they do a better job, I’ll get by with the Diptic app I bought in 2010 which makes similar collages with just my iPhone (see featured image above), which also shoots vertical orientation photos by default!
The Murderbot series debuted on Apple TV+ and it’s a pretty straightforward adaptation of the first book, All Systems Red, with a bit of a plasticky comedic sheen that undercuts any sense of stakes, at least in the first two episodes I’ve seen. My main gripe is that Alexander Skarsgård feels wrong in the titular role (to me, obviously, versus how I read it), and has a strangely dorky, trembling quality to his voice that I didn’t think the SecUnit would. And that’s not just because someone said the robot reminded them of me.
Meanwhile I finished the fourth book in the series, Exit Strategy, and found it better but still pretty flawed. Ranked in order from best to worst: Book 2 > 1 > 4 > 3. I’m going to stop here for a few months, I think, and just watch the show as it comes out.
In need of a new Jack Reacher type of story, while not actually wanting to read a Reacher book because I’m almost running out, I started on Fearless by M.W. Craven. It features an ex-special forces type guy, the kind who’s had all the deadly training and whose records have been wiped clean, with the additional gimmick of a rare neurological condition that makes him literally incapable of fear. I’m about a third of the way through and so far they haven’t really made much use of this “power”, mainly saying that it makes him susceptible to making tactical errors, rather than imparting any advantage. Or perhaps it’s just that I’ve already read so much Jack Reacher — a man who doesn’t need a brain injury to be fearless. So far there are two books featuring this guy Ben Koenig, so maybe it’ll be a TV show someday.
Gamers may know Coffee Talk, a visual novel sorta game where you play a barista in a world where humans and mythical creatures co-exist, and the main game mechanic is making drinks to get the conversation going. I finished it a couple of years ago and thought it was okay, nothing mind-blowing. I’ve now started on the sequel, Coffee Talk Episode 2: Hibiscus & Butterfly. With the rainy mornings we’ve had this week, it turned out to be a great game to have on (even paused in the background while I did other things), because it often rains in the game world and the thunder mixed with its lo-fi beats soundtrack is pretty good. The game… more of the same. Cosy vibes, looks great, but the story doesn’t really grab me.
We often grade locally or regionally made things on a curve when they compete on a global stage, like if you see a game or song or movie made in Singapore and it isn’t a disaster, the relief you feel immediately gives it extra points. That’s sort of what’s happening with Coffee Talk, I think, because knowing it’s Indonesian earns it a little extra goodwill.
Since I chat with someone who’s actually in Indonesia, I asked Evan if he’d played these games yet and we ended up talking about the Nintendo Switch 2. Background: it launches globally on June 5, but no release date has been set for Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines beyond “July to September”. Of course, there will be imported units sold as soon as it’s out overseas. On Shopee, one large local retailer has already listed the bundle with Mario Kart World ($500 USD) for S$849 ($650 USD). And it’s the European edition, with a download code for Mario Kart that might not work without an EU eShop account. I thought this markup was obscene, but Evan informed me the gray market price in Indonesia was even worse, at around $800 USD! That’s more expensive than a PS5 Pro, by the way. Nintendo’s global distribution game is so unbelievably weak that customers out here are being bled dry.
A little later on, I got a pop-up from Amazon Singapore saying Switch 2 pre-orders had opened. I tapped through and immediately bought myself the Mario Kart World bundle at S$769, with delivery on June 6, which is only a S$60 markup after tax and conversion at the current rate of 1.3 SGD-USD. BUT, you know they’re not going to sell it here at that rate, it’ll probably be closer to 1.4, which would make the official local price about S$750–760. So it was an easy decision, and Evan asked me to grab him one too (even after pricing in a plane ticket to collect it from me, still cheaper than the Indonesian price).
But you know what else Indonesia has gotten great at apart from indie games and scalping? Pop idols! 88rising debuted their new girl group, “no na”, and I saw them via a YouTube recommendation. Their videos feature lush green Indonesian landscapes (think Balinese rice fields), and their sound invokes 90s R&B (like XG) and retro dance pop — I think I heard 808s on one of the new songs. I hope they go places!
Speaking of XG, they just wrapped a successful tour that involved going viral for actually singing live at Coachella, and capped it off with a pretty great new song, Million Places. It’s a reflection on their experiences traveling the world and getting to see their fans, and it’s weird that I can’t think of many other songs like this; they seem to be more common in K-Pop. I think it would be considered kinda corny in Western music these days if not cut through with something “hard” or self-deprecating. I think it comes off as sweet and sincere here because they’re experiencing this kind of success for the first time.
Usually after an artist gets past this breakthrough phase, they get accustomed to fame and become insufferable. At least, that’s what you see in countless musical biopics. A Complete Unknown (2024) is no different, and boy does Timothée Chalamet nail the annoying twerp of a genius that young Bob Dylan (likely) was. The movie is by-the-numbers, the musical numbers are by-god-this-boy-is-good. Between this role and his war rally scene as Muad’Dib in Dune: Part Two (2024), I’m beginning to think Timmy C can play anything. Can Christopher Nolan please direct him alongside Robert Pattinson and Tom Hardy — as three brothers with wildly different accents and mannerisms? I think that would be amazing.
Still thinking about John Woo’s Mission: Impossible 2 (2000), I watched his recent comeback film, The Killer (2024), a remake of his 1989 film of the same name. It has some really absurd but satisfyingly built action scenes, and I enjoyed the whole thing. Especially Nathalie Emmanuel’s extremely physical performance: all the typical John Woo stuff — throwing yourself sideways while shooting, sliding on your knees, getting smashed into walls… and she looked incredible doing it. Francis Ford Coppola clearly saw her talent, but sadly no one watched her in Megalopolis (2024) beyond that one “Entitles me?” clip that went around.
We went to see Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning this weekend because I couldn’t wait anymore. So that meant we didn’t rewatch movies 5–7, just recaps on YouTube. Tom Cruise and McQ keep saying this film was “designed and built” to be experienced in a theater, but at several points I found myself thinking I’d rather be seeing it on my Vision Pro. I wouldn’t have to hear other people’s noises, and I’d be able to move my seat further back in the room and higher off the floor. I’d probably make the screen even bigger too. I’m now looking forward to buying it off the iTunes Store and watching it again “properly” when it comes out.
No spoilers: About the film itself… I gave it a 4/5 on Letterboxd. I want to give it a 4.5, but there are just too many weird gaps in the storytelling and some of it felt contrived. It might be a case of the action concepts coming before the dramatic ones. Starting from the first film, the franchise has steadily morphed from behind-the-scenes, twisty espionage thrillers to high-stakes save-the-world blockbusters — not unlike the trajectory of the Fast and Furious franchise. My take is that this escalation of stakes is neither necessary nor sustainable (much like last week’s questioning of doing ever more work with new technology). I’d gladly keep paying to watch Ethan Hunt and team take down spies threatening an oil pipeline or the life of a valuable undercover agent. The threat doesn’t have to be nuclear annihilation, and the bad guys don’t need to form an entire Rogue Nation or Syndicate to be taken seriously! But that’s how Hollywood rolls, so here we are, having to market this as the end of the series (although the stars are saying it might not be) because we’ve run out of threat headroom.
I saw someone say that Mission: Impossible ended just fine with Fallout (2018), and I think that might be the way. Look at Dead Reckoning and The Final Reckoning as two bonus movies, made years after the originals at the behest of some streaming giant with millions to spend. Kinda like what Netflix did with Gilmore Girls. They don’t have to be canon; they’re fun fever dreams in an alternate universe. Ultimately this is a very good popcorn flick, and at several times I caught myself with my fingers curled in front of my mouth, holding my breath — I just wished it were under different circumstances.
In an effort to extend my financial prudence, I downgraded our Netflix plan to the lowest level (from Standard to Basic) but before the change even kicked in, they raised its price from S$14 to S$16. Everyone online seems pissed about these latest hikes but I’m sure very few will actually cancel. The Basic plan is limited to 720p (“HD” instead of 1080p’s “Full HD”), but the Apple TV 4K box does a pretty okay job at upscaling it so while the picture is noticeably softer, it’s not actually terrible, at least not for watching the crappy fare on Netflix anyway. I expected the Sony Bravia TV with its “Cognitive XR Processor” to do a better job upscaling but it doesn’t!
I also felt much better about not giving into the urge to buy a Snoopy camera last week, thanks to this PetaPixel review of the new Yashica City 100 “scamera”. It confirms what I’d suspected, that Yashica is now nothing more than a nostalgia brand owned by a soulless holding company that slaps it onto OEM Chinese junk for a quick buck. That pretty much applies to any legacy CE brand like Polaroid, RCA, Nakamichi, or Toshiba. I briefly handled the Hello Kitty version of the same Snoopy Yashica camera in a Japanese electronics store in February and found it more or less what you’d expect a $100 camera to feel like, and probably the only acceptable reason to buy one is if a very small, phoneless child needs a camera that no one will mind losing.
After doing an annual report of my finances last week in Numbers, I decided to ask various AI tools to read the last year of updates on this blog and tell me what I’ve been up to in the form of trends or insights that I might not be aware of myself. A qualitative annual report of the sabbatical soul, if you will.
Microsoft Copilot surprised me, doing better than DeepSeek and ChatGPT by surfacing some events that I’d forgotten about, calling my life a “deliberate, well-curated blend of sensory and intellectual pursuits.” I challenged it by asking if that was just a kind framing of someone wasting time without doing any ‘meaningful work’, and it acted as my enabler with statements like, “you’re starting to honor your intrinsic motivations—the subtle joys, the unexpected moments of creativity, and the experiences that forge your unique narrative. In a way, this period of introspection, though it might seem like “wasted time” from one perspective, is actually a profound investment in self-discovery.”
That sounds awfully waffly, but to be fair, we had a good conversation about what meaning looks like when your values are in a state of flux, and then it offered a novel observation: the Numbers exercise and this blog review, as acts of going over collected data to synthesize meaning and review progress, are simply me “doing ethnographic studies of my own life”, which suggests I’m still doing the work, just for a different client (me).
Singapore voted, and the result was the People’s Action Party staying in power with 65.5% of the popular vote (I guessed this exactly in a group chat, down to the decimal point). I was disappointed to see the independent candidate for Mountbatten, Jeremy Tan, ‘only’ get 37% or so of the vote — an incredible result for an independent, but still short of a victory. That’s a shame, because he had some interesting policy positions and is the only local politician I’ve ever heard talking about Bitcoin as a consideration for the future. It’s a monetary development we could be discussing in public, without outdated FUD like calling it ‘gambling’, ‘not backed by anything’, and so on.
It’s a good thing I have free time, because an old GarageBand file decided to split itself into 38,000 zero-byte files and clogged up my iCloud Drive. Trying to delete them from a synced Mac and empty the Recycle Bin was extremely painful, as the device tried to download each one first; you’d think syncing a zero-byte file would be instantaneous, but you’d be wrong about how iCloud Drive works. I had to manually kill the Finder several times and resume the entire process, clicking “Continue” every few minutes in a dialog box. 10 hours later, I had successfully deleted nothing. A person less technical than me would have thought it was broken and lugged the thing down to a Genius Bar.
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Palate cleansing photo break!
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Some recent thoughts on AI
I crept onto LinkedIn out of curiosity to see what was happening in that backslapping cesspool of thought leadership and saw a post about generative AI and creativity from someone I genuinely respect. They talked about being asked to make up unique bedtime stories for their kid each night (incidentally, a similar ritual was the genesis of Guy Immega’s sci-fi novel, Super Earth Mother, which I enjoyed last year, as told to my book club when the author dropped in for a chat), and how although it was tiring at times, it was worthwhile in a way that indicated creativity would always be a domain that humans stay involved in and not completely outsource to AI.
I wanted to leave a comment, but 1) hadn’t really thought enough about it, and 2) didn’t want to add neither signal nor noise to that platform.
Later on, I scribbled the following in my Notes app.
Creativity is fun. In a capitalist world, making money with creativity is even more fun. And I think this is where our wires have become crossed: getting a new tool to spit out artwork/content that someone usually pays for feels like discovering a vending machine for cash. That’s clearly what business owners see when they look at AI — a vending machine for infinite workers — but the conflicted horror that creative professionals experience is unique. On one hand, excitement that it works and an inkling it can be used to do either more or better work (more profit); and on the other hand, despair as they realize the market value of all work stands to be destroyed by infinite supply.
But if you remove making money from the equation, I’m sure 100% of creative people would still rather do all the making themselves than let an AI do it. People are always gonna draw, tell stories, and record moments because it’s just fun. It’s only the market that’s disappearing, not the joy of creating. Outside of companies generating assets to use in actual business, I believe individuals playing with AI today aren’t engaged in creation — it’s consumption! I might ask my poetry GPT for a poem about a sentient toilet, not because I want to write one, but because I want to read one and nobody has done it yet. It doesn’t displace the desire to create, it just dispenses empty, throwaway satisfaction on demand. Unfortunately, that describes the majority of entertainment. The ‘Basic’ kind you can safely watch in 720p for half the money. Art is not in danger, only the day jobs of artists.
Edit: I forgot about the use of generative AI to create scammy/spammy and otherwise harmful content.
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Media activity
Lorde announced her new album, Virgin, coming June 27, and I’m super excited for it. No Jack Antonoff credits in sight, this one’s all her and Jim-E Stack, and from the sounds of the first single, it’s the essence of her old Pure Heroine/Melodrama sound refined with a more minimal and electronic approach.
We saw the new MCU movie, Thunderbolts*, at a premiere screening, the first one I’ve seen in a theater in many years. I’ve actually missed the last few Marvel outings out of sheer fatigue and the realization that they actively bore me now. I tried to remember the excitement we all had for comic book movies when they were rarities; that euphoria that our interests were finally going mainstream, our culture was being brought to life on the big screen. Congrats guys, it’s now so mainstream it hurts.
On the lookout for a low stakes network TV show with tons of episodes that I could watch any time I have an hour to kill, I decided to try the pilot for Suits and hey it was fun! Now I know who Meghan Markle is. I don’t know why I never gave it a go before, probably because I’m allergic to that word in all its forms: the clothes, the jobs, the people.
I read the hit Japanese novel, Before the Coffee Gets Cold, which has spawned numerous sequels now and dominates the bookstore charts locally, and was completely underwhelmed. It’s the literary equivalent of a cheap Netflix drama. 2 stars.
I also read the third Murderbot book, Rogue Protocol, and this was probably the weakest one yet. I’m still excited for the show based on the first book, debuting on Apple TV+ this May 16. This book just had the kind of claustrophobic setting you dread encountering in a first-person video game. You know the cave and sewer levels I’m talking about. It felt like a necessary interstitial story to get us to the next one, which promises an event that many readers would have been waiting for since the end of the first book. 3 stars.
When I discovered a fix for an annoying iOS photo date/time saving bug last month, it required a reset of all my phone’s settings. Which means that many of my apps still can’t send notifications or use my location — these are being restored ad hoc, as the apps only get to ask for permission whenever I reopen them.
As a consequence of this, it wasn’t until recently that I suddenly noticed I wasn’t getting the twice-daily ‘State of Mind’ check in reminders from Apple Health anymore, and went to turn them back on. These are quite useful for being able to look back and see how happy/depressed I was at any point in time, and it sucks that I now have a big hole in this dataset.
I’m taking this opportunity to change the way I approach this exercise: literally being more positive. For those unfamiliar with it, you’re meant to rate how you’re feeling from Very Unpleasant, Slightly Unpleasant, Neutral, and so on. I never used to go up all the way to “Very Pleasant”. Like, I could win a million dollars and wonder if even that warranted using such strong language. But now I’m giving myself permission to be more generous with my feelings. I can feel “Very Pleasant” more often and nothing will get broken.
In other recalibration news, I spent half a day in Numbers (Apple’s spreadsheet software) and did a personal annual report of sorts to inspect how I’ve been managing my money in the last year. Now that I have enough data, I was able to build some graphs and breakdowns of what a realistic budget looks like. I’ve always recorded my expenses on a daily basis with an app, but never crunched the numbers before; I was happy just knowing that I could. Naturally, now that I have, I wish I’d done it years ago.
At several points during the above activity, I wanted to upload my file into ChatGPT and have it analyze my spending patterns and offer up some money-saving strategies for me to consider. But of course, giving OpenAI that data would be a terrible idea. I wondered if Apple Intelligence in Numbers could do anything with it, but nope. It’s just the same old Writing Tools that make more sense in a word processor document than a spreadsheet.
I spent most of my time reading this week, although the temptation to jump on the Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 bandwagon is very strong — at this point in time, it’s the highest-rated game of 2025 and the 13th best game of all time on the PS5. Maybe next week?
On top of finishing Broken Money as scheduled, I read Meditations by Marcus Aurelius and rated it just three stars on Goodreads. It’s absurd that one can even humble the great emperor with a thumbs down on the internet, but his journals are in dire need of an editor! Yes I know these were never meant to be published, but he repeats the same handful of principles over and over (which I largely agree with), and this could have been cut down to be a podcast or self-help PDF on Etsy?
I also read the second book in the Murderbot series, Artificial Condition, and found it even more fun than the first. At this point, I’m kinda desperate to watch the Apple TV+ show and not sure I can wait for weekly drops over the next few months.
While looking for a manga with some colored pages to try out on my Kobo Clara Color, I started reading the oddly titled I Want to Eat Your Pancreas (trust me, there’s a mostly acceptable explanation for this), and enjoyed it enough to finish everything in a day. Unfortunately, while experiencing color on an ereader is real nice, the Clara’s screen is too small and I read most of it in black & white on my old Kobo Libra. Irony!
I’m now close to finishing Erik Olin Wright’s How to Be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-First Century, not because I dare dream that this world could ever abandon capitalism, but it wouldn’t hurt to have some alternatives. I’ve now begun to think of capitalism and its systems as a spectrum rather than as absolutes.
Coincidentally, it’s election season here in Singapore and we go to the polls next Saturday. I’ve been watching the political rallies live-streamed on YouTube over the last few evenings, and have mostly been annoyed at the complaints and vague promises to do better (to say nothing of the insanity that sometimes shows through in racist, antivax, and xenophobic ad libs). Singapore already enjoys some of the best quality-of-life outcomes possible under a hybrid capitalist/social democracy, but it seems people want more. They want a hands-off government, but also want it to protect them from job-stealing AIs and foreigners. They want everyone to be paid more, but don’t want to spend more on services in return. It’s so exhausting.
I was looking to spend some money on a birthday present for myself since I’ve been such a good little budgeter, but the best thing I could find were these new Yashica Peanuts cameras featuring Snoopy, who I’m still kinda obsessed with. The idea was quickly abandoned because I do not need another digital camera, especially not an intentionally mediocre one.
Still in the mood for a photo-related splurge, I went back to the Lampa camera app (first mentioned last September), which got three new ‘film-inspired’ color profiles in a major update this week. That brings the number of available looks up to six, which better justifies the high asking price (S$40/yr or S$90/forever) which was previously out of the question. I’ve been using the free trial while looking for cheaper alternatives, but Lampa just does what it does so well.
In terms of UX design, it’s super focused and perfectly walks the line between too simple (Zerocam) and too complicated (almost every competitor I’ve looked at). There’s just enough control, and few enough options that you can actually make decisions. In that way, it out-Leicas the official Leica app, which does not have a great UI and asks for S$100/yr. Technically, it uses a bayer RAW image pipeline for more natural captures, keeps those RAW files so you can “redevelop” photos if you didn’t get the right filter or exposure the first time, AND deletes those RAWs automatically after 30 days to save space. Hats off to great work, but man, the cost is uncomfortably close to buying an actual Snoopy camera.
sangsara.net 