sangsara.net

Tag: Art/Culture

  • Week 13.23

    • We traveled from Kobe to Hiroshima via Shinkansen, then went back to Tokyo for a few days until a red eye flight back to Singapore on Saturday. As with most holidays, it didn’t feel long enough; I could have used another week. But I’m thoroughly pooped from all the walking and general lack of sleep. It was wonderful to see Japan again after five years, and our chat with the old taxi driver who spoke English with us on the way to Haneda Airport indicated that Japan might almost be as happy to have us tourists back. I fantasize about dropping in for another week within the next year, but who knows how long it’ll be again.
    • Hiroshima felt very different from Kobe, partly because of its terrible history, and the gravity of it which pulls every experience towards a discussion about peace, awareness, and suffering. It has quite a few museums, and they all inevitably address the atomic bomb in some way. I had bad dreams each night. I’m not normally one to believe in this sort of thing, but there is so much death there and so recently, that my first thought was “bad vibes”.
    • While we were there, though, the sakura bloomed fully across the city and it was beautiful to see.
    • We visited a Picasso exhibition at the Hiroshima Museum of Art (beautiful building, galleries were a bit dingy though in the basement), and also lots of art and exhibitions dedicated to remembering the atomic bomb at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). We didn’t have energy or syllables left for the Hiroshima Prefectural Art Museum. MOCA was wonderful though, newly renovated after two and a half years and opened for less than two weeks when we visited.
    • Did you know Picasso created a series dedicated to the horrors of the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima? No? What are these then, AI-generated photos from Midjourney v5?
    • After many years of being a Go Go Curry fan curious about Champion’s Curry, the Kanazawa-style curry franchise that Go Go supposedly ripped off down to the signature yellow, I finally got a taste of it. And… it was sadly disappointing. It’s soundly beaten by Go Go’s richer flavor and dedication to excess — there’s no preset that comes with the works. On this trip, if I had to rank curries, Hinoya might come first, followed by Coco Ichibanya, closely followed by Go Go in third and Champion’s in last place.
    • I saw a Japanese toothpaste ad of some sort that demonstrated people brushing their teeth in a curious way: holding their brushes like pens or chopsticks. Is that how everyone does it? I’ve never seen it. Perhaps it’s time for a new Japanese Wisdom Fad to go global: the secret art of teeth cleaning. Anyway I tried it out for a laugh and was surprised by the ergonomic improvement! Holding the toothbrush in pen grip means your elbow stays close to the body rather than sticking out, and your forearm is perpendicular to the ground. This gives you more power in the up-down motion by moving your entire arm rather than your wrist. Combine that with the added directional precision from being able to move your fingers, and it feels easier to do those small away-from-the-gumline strokes you’re meant to do, versus holding in an overhand grip.
    Please excuse the iPhone finger sketch
    • You may remember that I became quite fond of watching a live street webcam in Shinjuku about a year ago, leaving it up on the bedroom projector as a sort of video wallpaper or magic window into another world while I read or did other things. Well, we finally got to stand on that very street and see ourselves on the screen! With tourism back, the street is much busier than it was a year ago, uncomfortably so, but now I finally know what the inside of the ramen restaurant looks like, and confirmed my suspicions that there’s a gap under the steps of the KBBQ place where the rats probably hang out. We waved at the camera and tooks a couple of photos from a street-level POV. What’s great was that there were many other people obviously there to see the cameras too… my weird little Kabukicho webcam community!
    • I ended up not finding very much to buy in terms of electronic souvenirs. I don’t need another camera or headphones, as mentioned a couple of weeks back, and I couldn’t even bring myself to buy a phone case that I don’t need and that will be obsolete in half a year when the iPhone 15 comes out. I did however get a little $12 plastic robot at Don Quijote that plays their unforgettable jingle with the push of a button. It’s going to get a lot of use in my home, I think.
    • Wait that’s not correct, we got a portable massage gun called an Exagun Hyper from the Doctor Air brand. Not an insignificant factor in this decision was the advertising campaign featuring Ryoko Yonekura, also known as Doctor-X in the TV series of the same name. She was clearly hired for that reference alone and seems to relish it. I’m kinda sure they even pronounce Doctor Air with the same flourish that “Doctor-X” is usually delivered with.
    • If anyone in Singapore is wondering why Netflix removed the first six seasons of Doctor-X and now only has Season 7, it may be a licensing issue with Amazon. Seasons 1–5 are now on Prime Video locally, so you have a chance to catch up and hopefully Season 6 will turn up someday. Be warned though, this is not strictly speaking good TV. It’s a cheesy, overly dramatic manga-style live action show about a doctor with miraculous surgery skills and no social ones. Like House but turned up even further.
    • I also got some tees and socks from FamilyMart, because I’m always on the lookout for good black t-shirts and their white/green/blue brand socks were an internet sensation a year or so ago. Oh, and some sake straight from their Kobe breweries. That’s about it for physical souvenirs.
    • What I have brought back intangibly, though, is a renewed enthusiasm for gaming on mobile and the Nintendo Switch — I didn’t bring my Switch along and now I’m dying to play through my backlog. It’s hard to explain but the media and cultural environment there for gamers is immersive. You see giant ads for Splatoon 3 in the subway. Billboards and TV spots for mobile games like Dislyte and Genshin Impact. Late night shows on TV where people play trading card games. Most of these games aren’t even Japanese in origin, but they’re part of the landscape and it’s encouraging? Inspiring? To feel your hobby validated as a visible part of society. Nearly none of that is the case in Singapore, the irl city.

    A selection of (sakura-centric) photos from this week follows. Please rotate your iPhone to landscape because WordPress’s masonry layout somehow doesn’t work on narrow screens!

  • Week 3.23

    • This post is delayed on account of the Lunar New Year weekend; hope you had a good one if you celebrate!
    • After two years of restrictions and fear (not to mention peace and quiet), we returned to the old chaos with a few family gatherings and house visits. Unfortunately, one of my favorite parts of the whole thing, a large reunion dinner on the Eve with some of our most senior relatives, was still off the table on account of their mounting health issues. I wonder if we’ll ever get a chance to see everyone on that side of the family all together again.
    • I brought my GR III out to capture some of these moments, and fortunately Ricoh released their previously mentioned new Diary Edition model just the day before, which meant the firmware update for older models to get their new Negative film-inspired “Image Control” mode was also released. After some experimentation, I’ve settled on these settings: Saturation +1, High Key +2, Contrast +1, Shadow Exposure -1. Am looking forward to using it for more everyday snaps in 2023.
    • While hanging around with some relatives in the afternoon of Day 1, a few of us downloaded the Dimensional personality test app and began answering its slew of profiling questions to compare our toxic traits, love languages, and all that. It co-opts a bunch of well-known existing frameworks like the MBTI and so on into one gigantic pile of traits. Does that constitute a unique and proprietary offering? I don’t know, but it’s fun enough and free. Be warned, completing all available questions can take over an hour.
    • Speaking of apps, my advance pick for 2023’s game of the year launched this week on Apple Arcade: Pocket Card Jockey Ride On. It’s a remake of the Nintendo 3DS eShop exclusive now fixed up with better graphics and subtle gameplay tweaks. If you never played the original, do yourself a favor and give it a try. It’s an addictive solitaire-based game; the main downside (for me) is it’s time-based and needs some concentration and so isn’t something you can play while in a noisy environment.
    • My Mastodon use has fallen off a little. I actually prefer Twitter’s algorithmic timeline to a chronological one because I tend to follow too many people to keep up, and need some help sifting out the “best” content from the rest. Mastodon is beginning to give me the uncomfortable feeling of a full inbox, but perhaps I should simply follow fewer people.
    • The general rule around here is to avoid talking about work — although it is usually such a big cost center for my time — but we had a new colleague relocate from Shanghai, and it was nice welcoming them to town and having a couple of impromptu beers on a weekday night.
    • Last episode, I mentioned seeing some Tezos NFT art at Singapore Art Week. Well I came across one of the pieces for sale (entitled D-909 Groove Arcade) and decided to go through the trouble of creating a Tezos wallet and getting some funds in so I could buy it. It’s one edition out of 167, and so was only like USD$20, but I’m super happy to have it. Can art be absolutely adorable and funky at the same time? Provably yes!
    D-909 Groove Arcade
    • I also continued generating non-existent videogame screenshots using Midjourney, expanding the fictional timeline to include modern-day remakes of old games. I should spend more time pushing this idea further but so far I’ve only done it in spare moments or when I should really be doing something else.
    Civilization: Flat Earth
    Duck Hunt Remake, PS4 (2018)
    Drone Hunt, NES (1984)
    Theme Hospital: COVID Edition
    Need For Speed: Self-Driving Edition
    • Everything But The Girl is back after what feels like decades, and the video for their new single is an incredible piece of choreography and one-take execution. I could only think of the immense pressure on each person not to fuck up. Dimensional seems to concur, reporting that my main motivation is Security.

  • Week 2.23

    We kind of started planning our trip to Japan later this year, but there’s still a lot to figure out in terms of what to do, and where to spend our time. It seems a lot of the popular hotels and destinations are selling out fast, if not already sold out, because of the resumption of travel out of China. I’m going to use this as a test of two new collaboration features in iOS and macOS: shared Safari Tab Groups, and the new Freeform whiteboarding app. In theory this should allow us to gather links to interesting ideas and plot them out together across our devices over several days.

    On Friday afternoon, I was excited to see an article saying that one of the best bowls of ramen I’ve ever had was finally coming to Singapore. In fact, it was their opening day, and we decided to just go down right after work to try and get a seat. After about 20 minutes of queuing (which was nothing compared to the maybe three hours we spent in line for the main restaurant in Tokyo), we got into Nakiryu at Plaza Singapura, and were sorely disappointed. For starters, their signature Szechuan-style Tan Tan/Dan Dan noodles were sold out. We ordered shio and shoyu ramen instead, and they were roundly mediocre. The service was also spotty and uncoordinated.

    It’s a pattern that the local franchisee Japan Food Holdings (who’ve done the same thing with Afuri and others) seems to be repeating: bring in a brand people are excited for, then do nothing to capture the original taste and quality. I suspect if you did a side-by-side comparison of the ramen from several of their brands, you’d find they’re just selling the same product under different names. Sadly, they’ve probably got the connections to get these deals and as long as the money flows in, the original companies don’t care how badly it’s done outside of Japan.

    ===

    SEA Focus NFTs: Art by @ykhaamelz, music by @discokid909

    Singapore Art Week is back and we attended two events: SEA Focus and the creatively named Art SG. The former’s at Keppel Distripark where the Singapore Art Museum’s temporary spot is, and features a little NFT art corner sponsored by Tezos. In contrast to the other exhibits, I found the work in there refreshingly playful, modern, vibey.

    Art SG

    At Art SG (a large and mostly serious gallery fair over two floors at Marina Bay Sands), I also found myself reacting more to the digital or digitally inspired work. There was a large print of a CloneX pfp, attributed to Murakami, mounted on a wall that I saw from across the hall and made a beeline towards. The Pace gallery (which I only happen to know because of their collaborations with Art Blocks) space featured teamLab’s NFT project, and a James Turrell projection. The teamLab one is cool: anyone can download and run the artwork (an app) on their PC or Mac. These are regarded as authentic and valid copies of the work. However, one can also own an NFT of the work (there are only 7), and these collectors can change the text seen in the art for everyone else. Oh, and they’re $200,000 each.

    Unknown work at Art SG (forgot to take notes!)

    Elsewhere, I saw a work that was a white flag printed with a surrender message that I’d read before but didn’t know where. I googled the text but nothing came up. Later, I found a tweet from early 2022 referencing it: an on-chain exchange between two MEV… “searchers”? The tweets only have between a couple hundred and a couple thousand likes, so it’s probably not a widely known thing. But I definitely saw and remembered it from last year, which means I’ve spent too much time spectating in a very small fringe community. And my time spent appreciating generative art has definitely ruined traditional abstract art for me.

    The Field #290

    Speaking of which, I was excited to add an edition of The Field by Beer van Geer to my collection this week. It’s an interesting (animated) work in that all 369 pieces are different views of the same “territory”, starting at random points, zoom levels, and rendered with different palettes, but viewers of any section can move away from those starting points and explore. As I understand it, the field itself was created from noise data created by aggregating hundreds of images from the artist’s body of work, trying to derive a sort of pattern map or artistic fingerprint from their ouevre. Isn’t that so much more exciting than static paint on canvas??

    ===

    Ricoh announced a new special edition of the GR III compact camera, called the “Diary Edition”. Yeah it sounds like one of those translated-from-Japanese names that sounds slightly awkward in English, but I like it. As a name, you can’t get much clearer about the concept of a camera that you’re meant to carry around to intentionally document everyday life, and it even comes with a new “negative film” look that will also come to older GR III models via a firmware update. Whether or not this behavior is one that users will actually embrace when they already have smartphones, I don’t know. I suspect not, outside for a few glorious weirdos. But the atmosphere and quality of these photos could hardly be more different than your smartphone snaps, unless you go the film route.

    As a new colorway, I also love the look of the Diary Edition.

    Here are a couple of photos I took with my GR III on the way to the art fair:

    ===

    • We watched a couple of spy TV shows, of which Jack Ryan’s season 2 was the undisputed best. We’ll start on season 3 soon.
    • Miyachi’s second album, Crows, is out. I heard it through once and it’s a bop. I don’t know what he’s rapping about but I’m sure it’s slightly problematic.
    • I finished Arcade Spirits but can’t recommend it if you’ve got many great games in your Switch backlog. To recap, it’s a Western visual novel about running a video game arcade. Some of the background art is basic and not very polished. I was struck several times by the thought that a game creator today could create far better generic bar/beach/arcade interior background art in seconds using AI. And they probably will/are already. So as an artifact of our pre-AI phase, Arcade Spirits stands out as a bit lacking in the production quality department.

    Here’s a tweet showing a game prototype someone purportedly threw together using AI tools to create the graphics, icons, and voice acting!

    • Quite coincidentally, I started experimenting with Midjourney prompts on Monday trying to get the EGA/VGA PC game look of the Sierra games I played in the 80s and 90s. I found a good solution and started using it to visualize screenshots of #fictionalgames from the golden era of PC games, ones that never existed, or that might be made today with modern concepts.
    Police Quest 5: Capitol Invasion
    Quest For Glory 6: So You Want To Be A Private Military Contractor
    Where in the Bahamas is Carmen Sandiego?
    Leisure Suit Harvey: In the Land of the Casting Agents
    Command & Conquer 2022

  • Week 48.22

    Hey reader, I hope you’re doing alright. I’ve had a pretty tough and unpleasant week, dealing with a personal crisis that I’m not particularly well equipped to handle, owing to… I don’t know, OCD? Control issues? Mild autism? Vestigial childhood hang ups?

    Life comes at you fast: a couple of days ago I made a crack about how everyone seemed to be in therapy but me, and by the end of the week I was ready to seek professional help. In the grand scheme of things, the problem is/was minor; it just happened to stray into a zone beyond my tolerance — youngers would call it being triggered.

    Talking to several people certainly helped: some who’ve been in a similar situation, others who I know have the same issue on occasion. Maybe I’ll embark on some longer plan of action to reduce my anxiety around this topic, but I’m doing better for the moment.

    ===

    Photo from my lowly CL

    I mentioned Rosalynn Tay’s images at the Leica exhibition, A Celebration of Photography, last week. On Thursday we made it down again to hear her presentation about how she works. Amazingly, she only started taking photos eight years ago, when she decided to do it seriously and was recommended by a friend to walk into a Leica store and ask for an M camera with a 35mm Summilux as her first camera. I was stunned by the privilege, of course, imagine starting with an M and learning the craft on that. But nice work if you can get it, and if you get it, it shows real dedication to learning the physics and mechanics of photography!

    She then admitted that she left the camera aside for the first two months, too intimidated to use it. Until she signed up for an introductory course offered by the store, which I used to find a strange service: why would new Leica buyers need to be taught photography basics? Surely all of them had already cut their teeth on lesser cameras and were now upgrading to the gold standard? And then I understood Leica’s customer base to be somewhat similar to any luxury performance brand. Not every Lambo buyer actually makes the most of them.

    But not her, in any case. After that false start, she put in the time and curiosity and now has an incredible professional body of work to show for it.

    ===

    Oh and we got this year’s Christmas tree! Some years we end up with trees that don’t smell particularly piney but this one has filled the place with a lovely scent already. Cubie seems to like chewing at its leaves so I’ve gotta watch out for that. One more worry on the pile.

    Not a lot of music listening but I discovered dvsn’s new album Working On My Karma and it’s modern R&B I actually want to listen to for a second time. It’s on the OVO label if that helps convince you.

    I didn’t buy any new gadgets on Black Friday but got quite a few Switch games on sale, including Persona 5 Royal. I never finished the original version on PS4, but perhaps I might now? (Who am I kidding)

  • Week 36.22

    Further COVID measures were lifted here this week: masks are no longer required indoors with the exception of medical facilities and public transport. I’m not sure this is entirely a good idea, but The Rest of the World apparently demands it so we’ll have to see what happens now.

    Coincidentally, but so quickly that it can’t be related to the above, someone from work tested positive the day after they were at the office with a bunch of other people (I was home that day). That understandably got some worried and we made plans to work remotely for the rest of the week.

    I was meant to meet Rob one final time before he went home to the UK, but then his whole family came down with something and we had to cancel. Thankfully, not Covid. Note to self: get a flu shot soon.

    ===

    Kim left on Sunday for a work trip, which gave me time to try out Ooblets, a cozy new indie game on the Switch which has you moving to start a new life on an island called Oob (definite Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing influences here), but throws in cute creatures (the titular Ooblets), card-based dance battles, and a lovely low-poly pastel style that recalls Untitled Goose Game. So far so fun; it’s very light hearted and the busywork doesn’t feel like a chore yet.

    The introductory price of $20 (down from $30) and their very nice FAQ sealed the deal for me:

    Q. Will Ooblets be a phone app or free to play?
    No, it’s just a normal game you buy with money, like you might buy a vacuum cleaner or a kebab

    Can I submit ooblet designs for you to use in the game?
    Unfortunately we can’t use any designs you send in due to intellectual property stuff we don’t really understand.

    I also started playing Wolfenstein: The New Colossus which I also got on sale, and boy are the Switch and its Pro Controller not ideal for FPS games. It’s a quality production underneath, if overly violent and depressing, but the low detail and sluggish response time simulates having cataracts and about 30 extra years of age. When I found a YouTube clip recorded from the PC version, the quality difference was shocking.

    ===

    The reading slump is over! I returned to Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves, which I started back in May (over three months ago!!) and made some very enjoyable progress. I’m now about halfway through and at the end of Act 2, where the book’s title is finally explained. Since I’ll have quite a bit of alone time next week, I hope to keep going and maybe catch up on my annual reading challenge. Stephenson’s books should really count as three each, at least.

    ===

    I minted my first artwork from Art Blocks in quite some time: The Inner World by Dominikus appeals to the part of me that likes glitchy abstract pieces, especially with the pseudo-3D shading that appears in roughly of these. I might be mostly alone in my appreciation though, as only 88 out of 400 have found owners so far.

    The Inner World #44

    ===

    My MidJourney use this week was limited to playing with their new photorealism-centric beta model (–testp). I generated a ton of portrait photos trying to make someone who looked like me, with no success, but the improvements are stunning. Where we used to be afraid of how faces would ruin an otherwise beautiful image — almost all of them were distorted and unnatural — they are now really coherent.

  • Week 35.22

    I met up with Rob again to talk side projects, debate the existence of meaningful work, and see some free art at the National Gallery. The children’s biennale was on and offered the most impressive sight of the entire visit, a massive work called Head/Home by Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan.

    It’s a sprawling installation pieced together from cardboard houses and elements, many customized and signed by visiting children. There’s also an online component on the above-linked site, where you can pick a space to “move into”. I was immediately struck by its resemblance to the Bidonville NFT project I bought into a few weeks ago; the drab uniformity of the cardboard and the haphazard placement of everything atop everything else recalls the appearance of a slum, but like in Bidonville, it’s presented with childlike wonder instead of judgment.

    In the pursuit of more creative escapes, Rob’s also committed to blogging again, supposedly inspired by this weekly update. He’s put out a banger of a post already. We also started a game of doodle/caption tennis, where he draws something and I write the caption, with neither of us knowing what the other is doing. So far we’re four for four, and the combinations have made a sort of sense! Might start a blog or an account somewhere to put them if this exercise has legs.

    Otherwise it’s been a somewhat physically exhausting week: my injured legs have made getting around more tedious and painful than normal; good sleep has eluded me; I’ve had a higher-than-acceptable number of frustrating “conversations”; my introvert’s social savings account went into overdraft with the number of people I’ve met, talked to, had dinner with; and the weekend has not felt very restful at all.

    ===

    • I played zero video games but managed to read a fair bit more of Seveneves. I may yet finish it this year.
    • We watched Five Days At Memorial, the new Apple TV+ series set in a hospital during Hurricane Katrina, and it’s one of those stories you can’t believe took place in recent history. Not only for the scale of the tragedy and how comparatively little we (me, anyway) remember of it, but the failure of government to prepare for something they should have known about from past experiences? Scratch that. It’s not surprising at all.
    • There’s a bit where someone says, “this is supposed to happen in third-world countries, not here”, and it just made me wanna go “oh, honey. I’ve got news for you…” at the TV.
    • I came up with the name Man-Sized Vase for a band I might like to be in one day. Shortly after that, I saw a man-sized vase on the Raffles Hotel’s grounds.
    • MidJourney briefly enabled a new beta model, for like a day, which made all outputs more realistic. It was reportedly a combination of their engine with the newly open-sourced Stable Diffusion model. Before they closed it down for “improvements”, I managed to make this masterpiece of a golden retriever drooling an entire river in the Amazon rainforest.

  • Week 34.22

    I fell down. It happened walking right in the middle of the sidewalk, where someone had decided to place stone benches, a civic design decision made nowhere else in the entire country that I know of. I’d just been avoiding its siblings in the moment before, most of them brightly painted, but the one that got me was dark gray, and it was 9pm and dim, and I was looking at a giant mural to the side while talking about it with my companions. We’d been out all day to see art, ending up at the ongoing Singapore Night Festival.

    I stubbed my right big toe first, I think. Then my right shin. Then I toppled over the bench, knees first, palms outstretched. Smashed both knees down onto the concrete sidewalk from seating height, and thankfully avoided a broken face with my hands. Everything still hurts now, the day after. Maybe I’ve fractured the toe. It doesn’t want to bend. I think I’ll be okay, but any sympathy is welcome.

    I got up quite quickly and felt the burn, but was alright to keep going. My friends said, “sit down for a minute and catch a breath, you’re over 40 now. Take it easy. It’s too late for parkour.” This is good advice in general.

    ===

    Earlier that day with Rob (he’s back in town again, hence I took some time off), we saw the strange work of Australian artist Patricia Piccinini at the ArtScience Museum: We Are Connected. I suppose you could describe them as grotesque, body horror explorations of biological variety, mostly in the form of human-animal chimeras. Kim found the exhibition for us, saying “It’s weird. I think you’d both like it.” For the record, she would have hated it.

    B&W photos are straight out of the Ricoh GR III’s signature high-contrast mode

    Rob said they reminded him of the work of Ron Mueck, so afterwards we dropped his name into a MidJourney prompt and created something not too far from what we’d seen.

    Later in the evening, we visited another exhibition of AI-generated art, pieces clearly composited from MidJourney outputs — scenes similar to what we’ve also created playing with these tools. What happens to art some day when viewers can engage, challenge, and remix on equal footing with artists? When execution counts for nothing, and only what you’re saying matters (RIP the massive teams of studio interns)? Will you walk into a gallery and see a textual prompt and seed number in a frame? Hmm… gimme a minute!

    Prompt Art #1

    I also put up an AI art explainer as an Instagram story, so if you’ve been wondering what MidJourney is and what this is all about, this may help.

    One of the better things from that afternoon: a crude 3D animation about viruses, played across seven screens, with a shot of a man licking an android’s eyeball.

    This was at the Singapore Art Museum’s temporary outpost at Keppel Distripark. Which is a pretty stark middle-of-nowhere-feeling industrial space, interesting in itself. We saw an old sign that said “climb the stairs to the fifth floor for more artwork”, which turned out to be a cruel exaggeration on a very hot afternoon. There was but one lonely birdhouse-sized installation, a sort of wind-powered music box based on structures we’d already seen on the first floor. But the view sort of made up for it, and watching shipping containers being loaded onto trucks is not bad at all.

    ===

    I finally leveled up my deca.art Decagon to L30. Left with nothing else to shoot for, I bought a basic one and started leveling it up too.

    This week’s been a good reminder that you’ve gotta have fun/meaningful things going on a regular basis, otherwise you’ll be left talking about LEVELING UP AN NFT as the most exciting thing that happened outside of taking an afternoon off and getting injured.

    ===

    Last week I mentioned the MusicHarbour app and started talking to Michael about music recommendation engines. He mentioned Apple Music’s “For You” playlists, and I realized I hadn’t used any of them in weeks, maybe months. Today I tried my New Music Mix and discovered the RZA has put out new stuff both as himself and his Bobby Digital persona. Two album/EPs, actually! Saturday Afternoon Kung Fu Theater with DJ Scratch, and RZA presents: Bobby Digital and the Pit of Snakes. I also wanted to correct my earlier opinion of King Princess’s Hold On Baby: it’s grown on me and I love it now. The same thing happened with her previous single Pain. It sounded absolutely crap the first time I heard it, and then it absolutely slapped. How does she do it?

  • Week 33.22

    It was National Day week. I half-watched the parade on TV, hoping it might stray from the usual formula. Nope, same old military parade. The COVID years were more interesting — in the same way Apple had to make expensive and polished presentation videos to replace their in-person events, we got a mix of prerecorded material and ‘live’ small-scale performances beamed from venues across the country. I liked that much better than watching thousands of people waving flags in the heat.

    We’ve obviously heard the reports of brutal heatwaves everywhere, but it’s probably not any hotter here than it usually is in August (too damned hot). I had to go out most days this week and I figure 10 minutes of walking outdoors is the limit. Any more and the sweatiness would border on socially unacceptable.

    It’s worse on men and fat people, and on that note… we continued on from last week’s birthday-related celebrations with too much eating out again. In a single day: an unagi lunch with my parents at Uya, an omakase-type dinner at an izakaya called Kamoshita that I saw Hunn checking into, and then cocktails at The Tippling Club. Later in the week, Beauty in the Pot, which never leaves you feeling very healthy.

    Inspired by our viewing of Groundhog Day last week, I decided to buy Loopers for the Nintendo Switch. It’s a Japanese “kinetic novel” which promises a similar premise. Kinetic novels are a subgenre of visual novels, but ones where there are no choices to be made; essentially there’s no “gameplay”. You just click through and experience a written story with accompanying illustrations and voiceovers. I expected a long and convoluted time travel narrative but it was over in about three hours. Hard to recommend at $25 USD but not the worst idea if it ever goes on sale. 3/5 stars if you already like this sort of thing, 1/5 for everyone else.

    On TV, we caught up to the second season of Only Murders In The Building (still ongoing), which starts off worryingly weak but begins to get some of its mojo back from episode 3. I spent most of the time wondering why Selena Gomez’s speaking voice sounds strange and strained, and it turns out it’s a question others online have also asked. One suggestion is it’s related to her lupus, but it sounds like an armchair diagnosis from people who get paid for clicks.

    We also watched The Bear, an 8-episode drama about running a restaurant/burnout/addiction/family/team management/craft. Several real life friends recommended it, but surprisingly I never saw a single tweet. The filter bubble needs adjustment. The first few episodes are like if Uncut Gems was set in the food service industry: stressfully fast and overlapping conversations (shouting matches?) and general chaotic energy, but it’s worth it. It’s all worth it.

    I used my AirPods Max for the first time in many months. Turns out having to take them in and out of the floppy carrying case (which turns them on/off) is a major usability obstacle for me. It’s not as carefree and seamless as popping open the case for my AirPods Pro or Beats Fit Pro, so I just never reach for them on a regular day. Probably the best way is to never use the case, lay them ready to go on the desk all the time, and charge frequently.

    Thanks to a scene in The Bear in which Van Morrison’s Saint Dominic’s Preview song plays, I checked out the album of the same name for the first time. It was good but not really what I needed at the time, which led me back to his Astral Weeks album which I heard through twice while commuting.

    I was very excited to accidentally learn that Danger Mouse and Black Thought just released an album together: Cheat Codes. According to YouTube, a couple of songs came out awhile ago, but I had no idea. Despite many discovery features in Spotify and Apple Music, there’s a gap in letting us know about new/upcoming music from artists we might like. Seems like a basic thing but there must be commercial, label-related reasons why this still doesn’t work in customers’ favor.

    In the meantime, there’s the MusicHarbour app which I don’t use enough because of how long it takes to sync new data on start up, but does actually do the job of tracking new releases based on artists you have in your library. It didn’t alert me to Cheat Codes because I didn’t have music by “Black Thought” in my library, only “The Roots”.

    Hah, did you think I’d let a week go by without more AI-generated imagery?!

    I’ve set up an OpenSea collection called Blee+ where I’m minting some of my better experiments so far as 1/1 NFTs, priced in ETH. You can buy one for about 40 bucks in today’s money.

    In addition to MidJourney, I’ve also started using Stable Diffusion and have been very impressed with what it can do. I suppose the model is closer to Dall-E, as it’s better at visualizing literal concepts such as “a poster” or “a page from a graphic novel”, whereas MidJourney would just kind of grok the style but not necessarily the format and conventions of the medium.

    Here are some abstract typographic prints I’ve generated, which are far and away more beautiful to my eye than the generative art attempts to do the same that I’ve seen, e.g. Para Bellum on Art Blocks.