After listening to ROSALÍA so much last week, I decided I wanted to experience LUX closer to the reality it was conceived in. So I reinstalled Duolingo, which I haven’t touched since maybe 2017? After several days, I’m now at Level 9 in Spanish, whatever that means. The biggest obstacle to Español perfecto is my inability to roll my ‘R’s, which I will simply need to practice out loud until it clicks. I can only do this while alone because Kim tells me to please stop por el amor de dios.
I met up with some old friends and acquaintances this week: one about to have their second child in the midst of questioning their career trajectory (aren’t we all?) and another who’s just come off living on a boat with their family for the past seven years, sailing from port to port in an unusual nautical retirement. Their youngest child practically grew up on water but will now have to stay in one place, join a normal school, and get accustomed to land life. In thinking about both situations, I reflected that personal freedom might be the most valuable asset to have when dealing with difficult times.
Later, I mentioned the old D&D character alignment framework to Cien and Peishan, and how it related to our personalities which I thought were evenly spread across Lawful to Chaotic. It hadn’t crossed my mind that Chaotic was actually about valuing freedom, but it kinda is — freedom to follow your whims instead of rules and expectations?
Then I visited the Artscience Museum on a weekday afternoon for a futurism exhibition called Another World Is Possible – a hopeful title promising alternative models for living, maybe even freedom from our current constraints. My expectations were high because it was yet another collaboration with ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image) out of Melbourne. Alas, I left feeling rather annoyed and unfulfilled.
The space itself is inadequate for multimedia shows. There’s not enough surface area, and the adjacent rooms without doors bleed sound into each other at an atrocious level. Near the end, there were some screens with a peaceful computer-generated nature scene meant for reflection, but all you can hear is music blaring from another video installation.
But regarding the actual show, several of the items presented were clearly AI-generated slop, unlabeled. The wall text just says things like “12-minute audio/video presentation” or “14-inch giclée print.” I don’t want our institutions of culture to charge $20 for mediocre renderings one could Midjourney at home. Hard to feel like ‘another world is possible’ when the medium represents what’s wrong with the present one.
Racism came up during my book club meeting this week, which gave me a chance to traumatize the Americans with “Darkie” toothpaste. It’s a brand that’s been ubiquitous in these parts since I was a kid. The name is bad enough, but they also put a minstrel on the box, highlighting the contrast between black skin and white teeth. It rebranded to “Darlie” at some point and made it somewhat arguable that the man wasn’t black, but we all know. It was only in late-2021 that its Chinese name changed from 黑人牙膏 “Black Person Toothpaste” to 好來 “Bright Future” (my translation). Reading the Wikipedia page, I was surprised to learn that it had a market share as high as 50% in Singapore in the 80s!
But hey, cultural theft isn’t just about race. Kill Bill is getting a theatrical re-release next month — both volumes cut together with unseen footage into the 4hr 40min epic Tarantino originally intended. Maybe no cinema in Singapore will take it up, but this means there’s hope for an updated digital release at some point.
That iconic siren when the camera zooms into Uma Thurman’s rage-filled eyes? Sampled from the Shaw Brothers film Five Fingers of Death aka King Boxer (1972), which I saw for the first time this week on MUBI. The Chinese title 天下第一拳 translates to “The Greatest Fist Under Heaven” — not “in the world” but “under heaven,” which is somehow more evocative and poetic.
A bunch of these old Shaw Brothers wuxia flicks are leaving MUBI in the next few days so I’ll be on a little martial arts marathon in the coming week.
And since we were talking about cultural appropriation last week (I’m cool with it), you know who else loves sampling kung-fu movies and helped Tarantino put the sound of Kill Bill together? That’s right, the RZA aka the Abbott, who resurfaced this week with the release of Japanese rapper Awich’s new album Okinawan Wuman, which he produced.
Apart from a little cringey self-caricaturing from Awich — the usual “we say arigato” shit, not unlike Utada Hikaru singing “You’re easy breezy and I’m Japanesey” back in 2005 — it’s a solid album on first listen. Maybe I’m being too critical about someone trying to break into another market by dumbing down their own culture, but she’s already got the RZA in her corner. She doesn’t need to prove anything. Feel free to switch up languages and drop the most obscure Okinawan slang! ROSALÍA’s success has proven that you can trust listeners to find their way to you.
Awich’s promotional video has a Japanese hip-hop expert explain, by way of establishing how monumental it is that RZA has produced this Japanese lady’s album, that the two most important acts in history were the Wu-Tang Clan and De La Soul. What good fortune for us, then, that this week saw the latter’s first new album in 9 years, Cabin In The Sky! We eating good, mi familia.
I saw a doctor about last week’s vertigo episode, and they concurred with my internet research that it was most likely a case of BPPV. Apparently, it really does “just happen” to anyone and they see quite a few cases of it. I was told to watch my salt intake and blood pressure, and see if the vertigo occurs “too often”, which might indicate a need for further scans.
The doctor was surprised when I explained that we’d performed the Epley maneuver at home with a YouTube video, and said that it was probably what they’d be doing for me now if I’d still had symptoms. I didn’t explain that it had essentially been an AI consultation, because I didn’t want to get lectured about how they can be wrong. Not saying it’s a good idea, but it helped until I could get an appointment with a real doctor.
After the doctor’s visit, I decided to have breakfast at Starbucks, a thing I used to do too often when I went in to the office. But in light of the advice I’d just been given about eating less sodium and watching my blood pressure, I opted for an egg white wrap instead of the rosemary chicken croissant that I really wanted, and it was unsatisfying. Is that what I have to look forward to now in old age? Just healthy compromises and remembering the good old days of eating crap?
As if eating in revenge, we had a huge dinner with Alex at a place called “La Vache!” the following night. They run a simple concept: S$68/person for a salad, ribeye steak, and unlimited French fries. Cocktails are S$26 and pretty substantial. There are also desserts if you have room, including gelato from Messina down the road. Reader, I had a lot of fries and thereby a lot of sodium. So much so I’ve spent the rest of the week trying to up my water intake to make up for it.
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The MOFT brand iPhone case I got a few weeks ago has been impressing me so much with its soft material and quality construction that I blinked and found that I’ve now bought more products in their MagSafe-compatible lineup.
The Snap Phone Tripod Wallet folds out into an adjustable stand that could be useful for anyone needing to shoot photos, make video calls, or watch media handsfree. Like I said, I’m barely conscious of why/how I bought these things, because that doesn’t describe me. I suppose I’ll just have to become a content creator then! It also holds up to 2 cards, although in hindsight I should have gone with the thinner version that doesn’t.
That’s because a few days later, I also ordered their Snap Field Wallet which holds 8 cards and even some folded bills, coins, and a SIM card tool. There’s a version of this that includes a built-in stand, but I decided against it since I already have the “tripod” for stand-related needs.
Happily, this shopping spree concludes my search for a new minimal wallet to replace my worn and aging Bellroy. Every bearable option I’ve found has been over S$120, and because carrying a wallet is such an antiquated concept for me these days with everything on the phone, I wasn’t thrilled to spend the money. But the MOFT Field Wallet’s low price and novel origami design made for an easier and less risky decision. It’ll mainly stay in my bag, but the option of attaching via MagSafe is a nice bonus.
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I haven’t seen many films lately, so this week was a corrective period. I saw a Korean arthouse film on MUBI that I don’t regret but can’t recommend, called Woman Is the Future of Man (2004), and a more mainstream Korean thriller called The Old Woman With the Knife (2025). The titular trifecta was pure coincidence, but I also saw the new Keira Knightley vehicle, The Woman in Cabin 10 (2025). None of the above are really worth your limited time on Earth, if we’re being honest.
Usually, whenever a three-hour film pops up in the queue, I push it down to the bottom. But this time when I saw Martin Scorsese’s Casino (1995) was leaving Netflix, it seemed like a sign to just sit down and do it. I can’t believe I waited so long though, because it’s something of a masterpiece despite the gangland tropes, and I don’t normally even like these kind of stories.
I subscribed to Disney+ Premium to watch Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) in 3D on the Vision Pro, another three-hour movie. While the story isn’t worth the time, the immersive experience and quirky filmmaking tech was absolutely worth my money. My Letterboxd review: “The story of a Saturday morning cartoon with the technical complexity and execution of a space mission. Big failure on the part of our entire species that we can’t produce a director who can do both parts equally well. Not a film I want to see again.”
As an example of how this is a film that you can’t really watch traditionally, it constantly switches between 24fps and 48fps shots, often within a single scene. It feels like a videogame, where you’re watching a cinematic cutscene and then it suddenly transitions into ultra-smooth gameplay. The 3D also pops in HDR clarity on the Vision Pro, where it would be dimmer on an IMAX screen. Sitting at home with Disney+ in a headset is oddly the definitive way to experience James Cameron’s shallow deep sea epic, which probably wasn’t what he envisioned.
I swore I wouldn’t read or watch any of the Dan Brown/Robert Langdon stories, but it’s been almost 20 years so I put The Da Vinci Code (2006, only 149 mins) on one night and it wasn’t terrible. It helps that it’s a Ron Howard film, and I think I might actually see the next two films, Angels & Demons (2009) and Inferno (2016), before they leave Netflix. There was also some positive press for the new Dan Brown book in this series, The Secret of Secrets, so I’ve added it to my reading list. Younger me would be so disappointed.
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It wasn’t just me that visited the doctor this week — I brought my 2021 iPad Pro (M1) down to the Apple Store over the weekend. When the Apple Genius came up to me and asked, “So what’s wrong with your iPad?”, I answered “It‘s just old.” For a while now, I’ve suspected it of falling short of Apple’s promised “all-day battery life”, but sending it in for a replacement felt like such a hassle that I kept putting it off.
Because this iPad model doesn’t report battery health in Settings, I figured it was easily below 80% capacity, and was prepared to pay maybe $120–150 for a new battery. So they ran their diagnostics app on it, and told me it’s actually at 86%. Huh. That’s pretty good for 4.5 years! I asked how much it would cost to replace anyway, and was told just shy of S$200, but it would be a full unit swap rather than just a new battery.
If the battery health had been 70%, I would probably have paid the money and then had to use this for at least another two years. But at 86%, I can probably make this work for another year and then see what the new models look like. So by building a product that actually ages well, Apple has… increased the likelihood of me upgrading even sooner. That’s the 4D chess game that Tim Cook plays, folks.
Vertigo (1958) is a great film, because Hitchcock was a master. It’s also the title of a mediocre stadium rock song, because I love hating on U2.
Unfortunately, vertigo is also something I experienced for the first time this week — I’m fairly sure I jinxed myself at some point earlier this year by saying out loud “I don’t have any problems”. It hit me on Friday night in the form of extreme dizziness and nausea, and even the walk to bed to sleep it off was difficult without support. It got better the next morning with the help of something called the Epley Maneuver, which I found online.
Asking around, I discovered that this is a more common human experience than you’d think, with several people I know having suffered episodes. Some of them had dizziness lasting days, and yet it’s strangely not discussed like, all the time? From what I can tell, it’s probably something called benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV), where calcium deposits in your inner ear become dislodged and move around, screwing with your balance. I’ll be seeing a doctor next week to confirm it, but in any case there’s no known cure and it might keep happening for the rest of my life. It’s crazy that so many are just quietly living with this.
Have I been self-diagnosing with the help of AI? Maybe? I did just sign up for Claude Pro after all, which I’ve mentioned finding more agreeable than ChatGPT. I made vibe-coded two little apps before being laid low: a primitive prototype of my long-gestating stealth game, Cat Creeper, and a tool for my book club to figure out how many chapters of any given book we should read in the coming week. That one is called Book Splitter, and I offer it here for any book clubs out there with a similar need to figure out stopping points conveniently near chapter breaks.
It’s been a unique experience using Claude’s impressive capabilities alongside reading Asimov’s I, Robot, which foresaw many of our modern discourse around AI safety, and The Optimist at the same time, which has finally begun to chronicle some of Sam Altman’s questionable and unethical moves both at OpenAI and in his private life. The sections detailing his gaslighty, ungenerous, and cruel interactions with his sister Annie ironically reminded me of reading about Steve Jobs’s treatment of his daughter Lisa, in her memoir Small Fry.
I just passed the part where Dario Amodei and other employees left to start Anthropic. Just as I try to avoid Meta and Google products because of their comparatively weaker stance on privacy versus Apple, it makes sense that some prefer Anthropic over OpenAI for a more cautious approach to AI.
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My mother-in-law stayed with us this week, which meant getting the newspaper in for her because that’s how some people still get their news. I was shocked to see how thin the physical Straits Times is these days — almost completely devoid of advertising, and on the whole maybe having 20% of the heft I remember from the 90s. It’s also S$1.10 now, up from the 50 to 80 cents I thought it was. Still, it was kinda nice (nostalgic) to sit at the dining table and read the paper in the morning.
It was also the week where my favorite retro-game-hunting IRL streamer, 4amlaundry, went on a 5-day trip to Kansai, checking out thrift stores and exploring Osaka and Nara. I didn’t want to miss watching it live, so I tried explaining the whole concept of streamers to said mother-in-law, and got her to watch him with me for awhile on the TV, the whole time silently praying that he wouldn’t go look at the display cases of half-naked anime figurines that he sometimes checks out in those stores.
Thankfully, that didn’t happen, and instead we watched him walk down countryside roads, eat at chain restaurants, and get knocked down by the aggressive deer in Nara. All of that made for some good conversation, so if you get the chance to introduce an elder to Twitch, it’s not the worst idea if you can avoid the NSFW aspects.
Speaking of shows that you would hope won’t be awkward to watch with your parents or in-laws BUT ACTUALLY ARE, add the latest season of The Diplomat to the list. There’s a lot of cursing (I kinda expected that), and some sex scenes that maybe the producers thought were hot and their audience wanted, but are so unnecessary and desperate that they come across as unintentional comedy. Apart from that, it’s still a fun series that leans into unrealistic political drama, with some unexpectedly good writing (for a Netflix show). Just watch it on your own.
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I somehow forgot to mention the slate of new Apple products announced last week: M5-powered iPad Pros, a 14” basic MacBook Pro, and a spec-bumped Apple Vision Pro. The product lineup is designed to lead you to the conclusion that you should buy everything, because how do you choose between an 11” and 13” iPad Pro, and a 14” MacBook Pro?
The 11” iPad size is portable for couch use, but the 13” becomes an advanced desk computer for creative work when paired with the Magic Keyboard and Pencil Pro. But if you’re going to be using it while deskbound, why not get a MacBook Pro with 24 hours of battery life (versus just 10 on the iPad), and the possibility of running local AI models and all kinds of other software that isn’t allowed on iPad?
Making things harder is the fact that a 13” iPad Pro with accessories costs more than an “equivalent” 14” MacBook Pro, and they’re too costly for an average user like me to justify buying both. So the final decision was to hold out a little longer with my current M1-generation gear, and see what upgrades the 13” iPad Air gets next year — hopefully an M4 or M5 processor, ProMotion, and the aluminum Magic Keyboard currently exclusive to iPad Pro models.
But bringing the M5 to the Apple Vision Pro makes it a better system to use and own for the next two years, while we wait for the next big leap forward in miniaturization. However as a casual user who only clocks a few hours a week, I couldn’t see myself upgrading for a faster chip alone. The more compelling improvement is a new “Dual Knit Band” that comes as standard, which sorta combines the previous Solo Knit Band and Dual Loop Band into one much-improved design.
The best part is that this new band is also available as a standalone accessory, so I ordered one immediately for my first-gen AVP. It’s simply a marvel of engineering and feels incredibly premium. The build quality is off the charts, and the Fit Dial they’ve created to independently adjust both the back and top straps might be the most Apple-y thing they’ve shipped on an accessory since the Stainless Link Bracelet for the original Apple Watch.
Thanks to this more comfortable and ergonomic band, I’d planned to spend more time with the AVP this week, until the vertigo and unusual weekly routine got in the way. Not gonna lie, my first thought during the vertigo attack, after “What if this never goes away and I’m disabled for life?” was “Does this mean I can’t use the Vision Pro anymore?”
I woke up from one of those dreams where you need to go to the bathroom, so you visit a bathroom (in your dream) but it’s very unpleasant and almost in a state of dilapidation. For example, the sinks and toilets might be taped up to say “out of service”, or the tiles and floors are all ruined, and it’s clearly not a functioning toilet — but you gotta go! And then later that same day, someone mentioned having a recurring dream about a gross “squat toilet” in their childhood home, and a light clicked on in my head. Maybe everyone has these dreams, and it’s the brain’s way of saying “don’t pee now!” I’d bet this is a universal experience.
I learnt on Instagram that the singer D’Angelo passed away. He was only 51, and they say it was cancer, maybe pancreatic. That would make it at least two world-changing visionaries to go that way. Voodoo remains one of my favorite albums of all time, one of those that exists fully as a complete work — there’s nothing that can be added or removed, and even the idea of a super deluxe edition with remixes or outtakes feels unnecessary. It’s so loose and hard to pin down in terms of genre and style (he reportedly hated the “neo-soul” label and said he simply played Black music), that I don’t think I knew what I was listening to as I played it the first hundred times. He brought together everything I love about hip-hop, jazz, funk, soul, R&B, Prince’s ecstatic falsetto… into a single masterpiece. What’s also tragic is that he never released the promised follow-up to 2014’s Black Messiah and I don’t know how to feel about it being dug out of the vault and released someday.
Speaking of deaths, I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki has moved to the top of my reading list after its author Baek Se-Hee passed away this week at 35. News reports only say she died, but everyone is surely wondering if it was suicide on account of the book being about her journey with depression. It makes me wonder why suicides are often sidestepped in the news these days. They could at least say that it wasn’t? It just seems very weird to not address the question. Maybe they’re afraid of copycats, or there’s some assumption about shame on the side of the surviving family. I think for anyone who was so open in struggling with the decision, letting people know that they did what they wanted is actually kinda respectful.
Speaking of existential questions, my book club has elected to read Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot, which I was reluctant to revisit. The last time I read it was in secondary school — I read just about every science fiction novel, and probably all the Asimov ones, they had in the school library. As I feared, it doesn’t entirely hold up to the lofty memories I had of encountering The Three Laws of Robotics for the first time. The writing is a little, shall we say, 1940s? But that’s not to say this isn’t an absolute miracle, because it was written in the 1940s. It’s a compilation of short stories, each concerned with testing the boundaries and interpretation of the Laws in different ways, and basically highlighting the importance of rigorous prompt engineering! Reading this in 2025 is a trip. Asimov holds up a mirror to humanity more than anything, and we see people behaving rudely to AIs as if they were slaves or farm animals, but also others becoming attached to them as if they were “real”.
I’m also halfway through The Optimist, a biography of Sam Altman and his path to leading OpenAI. It’s as much about the Valley as it is about Altman, to be fair, and I’m learning a lot about the history of Y-Combinator and other companies along the way. I might have been influenced by all the hit pieces on Altman’s character, but I’m mostly skeptical about him being a force for good. An analyst’s note I heard on Bloomberg the other day went something like, “Sam has the power to destroy the global economy for the next decade, or to lead us to the promised land”. And as a mad prophet once said: “no one man should have all that power”.
Over the weekend we visited the National Museum where I saw a kid playing RealSports Volleyball on an Atari 2600. Way to make a guy feel old — I played that myself at his age and now it’s in a museum! He looked to be enjoying it, which just goes to show ancient software can still hold power over the lizard brain (as long as it hasn’t been exposed to Fortnite).
Then as we headed to the last stop, a new permanent exhibition called Singapore Odyssea, we discovered that we were too late and it had closed for the day (at 6pm). I wasn’t even particularly interested in it, but felt pretty bummed out that we missed it anyway. Then Kim pointed at a family and noted that I was having the same reaction as their kid, who was being consoled by his parents, “it’s not that we don’t want to go sweetheart, but it’s closed.” Hmph. People are always like, ‘stay young at heart’ and ‘don’t lose your childlike wonder’, but then they don’t want the grumpy tantrums that come with it!
The results from last week’s health screening came back clear of all major issues, so I’ll sleep soundly on that front for a little while at least! The only note was that I could cut back a little on the carbs and saturated fats, which makes me wonder what I’ve done differently since the last test. Could it be… that I was eating more healthily when I went to the office more often? Those downtown mall lunches were more expensive than the kopitiam/hawker fare I get more frequently now, but I didn’t expect them to be healthier. I’ll have to look into this a little more.
It’s no secret that one of the more reliable indicators we’re in a frothy bull market is a rising number of people mistakenly believing they can quit their jobs and live off day trading, and while that wasn’t my plan, I’ve certainly done a touch of it this year. What can I say? Gambling is fun! But then Trump declared another tariff war on China this Friday, troubling markets and triggering major liquidations on some altcoins. I know it was bad out there because my feeds were full of people urging others not to kill themselves. The coming week is probably going to be a very interesting one on Bloomberg, which I expect to have on the TV in the background all day.
That is, if the internet is even working. Our ISP has been struggling with at least two outages this week during waking/working hours. The connection is down right now as I write this bit on Saturday evening, which is surely an unpopular time for the net to go down. I’ll bet someone’s been called in to reboot a server rack somewhere right now. In times like these, I’m thankful for my irrationally large mobile data plan and our local NAS media server. There’s some kind of strategic error being made by governments here. Centralizing all the angry-mob-placating media on the cloud where it can go down in the middle of a crisis? The kind where you tell people to stay indoors and wait? I’ll bet DVDs actually played a role in maintaining law and order in the old days.
Speaking of shutting down a digital grid, I had the opportunity to see the new Tron: Ares film with Brian the night it premiered and had a great time despite Jared Leto taking the titular role. It’s not a franchise that aims to make sense, or be scrutinized for narrative integrity — it’s about the neon lights, banging electronic music, and videogame-ish eye candy, and this new one delivered on all counts. I can’t even get mad; it really is just a good time as long as the volume’s way up.
Quick aside: I’ve been using Claude more than ChatGPT recently to give it a fair shake, mostly spurred by curiosity after their recent marketing campaign, and honestly? The outputs seem more insightful, more strategic, and it’s a better writer. It feels more my speed, and I’m a new fan.
Still on the topic of digital networks, I got roped into helping start and moderate an online alumni group for the design agency I used to be part of, and we quietly launched it this week. What set this one workplace apart was the feeling of being a truly connected team where, for a brief period in time, absent any territorial agendas or business borders, people could share knowledge across (and even move freely around) the different global offices. And it’s been really nice to see many people say as they join the #introductions channel on our Slack that it remains the best job they ever had. Where does it go from here? I think that depends on how many atypically extroverted designers we can get to foster some sort of social infrastructure.
Coincidentally, I met one of those ex-colleagues for an overdue breakfast: our first intern and proper employee in Singapore, who’s also a regular reader of this blog. Hi Xin! I hadn’t seen her in a year, so even after 90 minutes of catching up it still felt like there was lots we didn’t get into. Anyway, you wouldn’t have known it was a random weekday morning from the line waiting to get into the suburban cafe/bakery we chose. Every table was occupied by both foreign and local-looking unemployed bums alike, all enjoying $28 breakfast plates and $18 slices of toasted sourdough topped with avocado. We’re constantly being told local restaurants are barely hanging on, but then you see the brunch scam still going strong and it’s like wha…?
More counterdata was encountered while celebrating a very belated birthday dinner for Kim at Cudo, a South-American-ish sort of restaurant in the Amoy Street area. It was fully packed out (albeit on a Friday night), and I highly recommend them on account of solid tropical cocktails (Bourbon! Coconut! Pineapple!), a really nice selection of starters (Romaine lettuce with blue cheese and anchovies; warm crab queso with tortilla chips; truffley torched yellowtail), and even better mains (wagyu rump; chorizo and ricotta pasta) at pretty palatable prices.
I can afford this baller dining-out lifestyle because I saved a ton of money on the Amazon Prime sales this week (yup it’s #girlmath). I bought replacement razor blades, a physical copy of The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, dental floss, a 1TB microSD Express card (finally!) for my Switch 2, protein bars, LED bulbs, LEUCHTTURM1917 notebooks, and a lifetime supply of Uni-ball Jetstream RT pens — only the best pens ever according to The Wirecutter.
I wasn’t planning to get any of this stuff soon — they’re all things I might have bought eventually. Like the 1TB card to replace the 256GB one in my Switch 2, for example, which I thought I’d upgrade to in maybe a year’s time. This made me realize that on top of driving impulse purchases, these sale events are actually about pulling forward purchases and recording future sales today to juice numbers (at slightly lower margins). Businesses are valued based on expected profits, individuals buy based on expected needs, and I guess I’ve been binging carbs and fat based on expected hunger!
We lost a grand aunt at the close of last week, and attended her funeral and cremation on Tuesday. It got me thinking about qing ming, which is a day in early April (I had to look this up) where Chinese families traditionally visit their ancestors’ graves and do some neatening up. I have vague memories of being dragged along to do this as a kid, and even being allowed by my parents to skip school for it. I mostly remember the smell of burning joss sticks mixed with the dewy morning air and damp soil. For some reason we stopped going by the time I was a teen.
I talked about this with Cien and Peishan and they seemed to still be in touch with the practice of visiting graves, or in these days of diminishing real estate, a columbarium. If you asked me where my family members are buried or stored as ashes, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. I assume many of them have been scattered, either into local waters or some faraway favorite destination. Honestly, I like the idea of not being tethered to a single spot. If your spouse is still alive, maybe they’d like to keep you near, in some vessel at home. But if too many, or too few, people are sharing you then it’s better to be everywhere. A memory triggered by some food, place, or figure of speech. An algorithmically assembled photo collage tossed up by a personal computing companion one morning. A mention in some dusty book on a top shelf in a library, waiting to be seen by a future student or recycled into a supermarket receipt. I’d be fine with any of that.
Back to the funeral: it was held at the Mandai Crematorium and Columbarium, one of only three cremation facilities serving the whole of Singapore, and I was upset by how much it is in need of some design intervention. I wonder if any of the people managing the place have tried to look at the process with fresh eyes, or at least through the tired and grieving eyes of the people passing through it. Because they’d see so many moments that could be made kinder, more understanding, more dignified. The script could use a rewrite. Playing ‘Amazing Grace’ out of tinny $40 Bluetooth speakers in the final viewing halls is not it. For Chrissakes, please also remove the ugly MS Word-designed notices plastered on the viewing room windows, they obstruct the view of the caskets as they’re delivered (by industrial forklifts!) into the flames. I’m not exaggerating.
My shoes fell apart. They were the second pair of New Balance 990s to do so, doing nothing more strenuous than supporting my occasional walking about town. The last pair lasted three years; these only made it to two. At around S$300, these are supposed to be the best shoes that NB makes, but I’m beginning to think their ‘Made in the USA’ label is more a statement of liability than superiority these days. The Chinese-made models could probably survive a decade. Alas, with my big feet and aversion to swooshes, the 990s are some of the only shoes I’m comfortable in, so I’ll be buying yet another pair — online, too, since they stopped local distribution of the wide sizes.
Google upgraded Gemini with the Nano Banana image model that’s been trending on Twitter, and the bar for impressive generative AI has been raised again. It’s extraordinarily capable (and fast) at combining images with accuracy, as well as reimagining them in different styles and from different perspectives. A few months ago, Gemini was an also-ran, but maybe something’s shifted at Google and they’re an actual contender again. As much as I try to avoid Google services, I suppose I find them preferable to OpenAI and Meta. Take a look at the example above where I asked it to redraw a scene I photographed last month in Melbourne, but from above.
On Thursday I met two friend-couples, who I’ll call Mong and Jogina because it sounds amusing, for a rare weekday afternoon lunch where it was made abundantly clear that I’m behind the times for not having seen K-Pop Demon Hunters yet. Circumstantially, we’ve all got the time and flexibility to do these weekday catchups more often than once or twice a year, and maybe we should.
Aside: I did see the movie later, and it’s really good! My main gripe is the use of stuttering frames for the character animation, which worked fine in Sony’s Spiderverse films but break immersion here. The frame rates also seem uneven from scene to scene? Speaking of Sony, I’d hate to be the person who decided to sell this to Netflix for just $100M.
Afterwards, some of us went on to check out a nearby Crocs store (hear me out!) because a new collaboration had just launched: Animal Crossing! I just tagged along for a look, but became increasingly afraid as we got nearer that I would end up buying a pair. Kinda like how I bought the first iPad at Funan mall in 2010, that I absolutely wasn’t interested in… until I joined the line. Thankfully, my senses returned, and they only carried the smaller women’s sizes. God bless my big feet!
The book club is still reading Cloud Atlas, and at one point, a character mentions Carole King’s Tapestry album playing at a low volume in the background. I realized that I’ve known about this album forever but never heard it. So I put it on while reading. And boy did I know half the songs on this. I was beginning to wonder if it was a covers album, that’s how familiar they were. Incredible work, and a deserving #38 on Apple Music’s Top 100 Best Albums list.
And finally, a little gaming episode:
As previously mentioned, I’ve been playing the first Shinchan game on Nintendo Switch as a way of marking the summer — never mind that it’s always summer here in Singapore. It started well but I found it increasingly repetitive and uninteresting, and have been trying to just get it over with. The game features a time loop, where you replay the same week over. I spoke to Evan about it while I was on the second week, and he told me to hang on until the fourth week.
>> I was like, “there’s four fucking weeks??”
>> He said, “the real game BEGINS after week four!”
>> “How is that possible?”
Reader, I’ll tell you, I was ready to delete the game then. At the end of the third week, it seemed that I had all but completed the game. All my tasks were done. Then as the credits rolled, I texted him back:
>> “Dude, I’ve finished the game, what’s going on?”
>> And he says, “You haven’t, that’s just the beginning, get ready.”
>> “I don’t believe you, don’t mess with me!”
By this point, I had put in about 7.5 hours and couldn’t take it any more if this was just an extended prologue. There was just no way. The game was surely done! Then he asks me if I’ve done a certain thing yet, and I’m like:
>> “Uh yeah… long ago? In the first week?!”
Suddenly, I realized he’d spent the first three weeks mucking around and not doing any of the main game’s tasks, and only got started on the story just before time ran out. So yes, I had finished the game. Thank fuck for that.
Checking in now from the first row of a Boeing Dreamliner — a plane that has probably been in the news recently for the wrong reasons. But if you’re reading this post, it means we made it back safely.
There was a moment early in the week where we were telling our Melbourne-based friends about last year’s trip to New Zealand and for some reason we both blanked on some key details and took awhile to align on what exactly happened. Maybe we were just tired, but then I had another theory: what if planning that trip with the help of AI meant the details didn’t form strong memories? Normally, planning a trip forces you to do research and make choices, with the resulting success or failure of your trip all on you. Those actions burn the memories in. But when ChatGPT spoon-feeds you an itinerary, maybe the details just float in and out of your mind. I wonder if this will really rot our lazy brains like no technology has before.
We dropped in on a French Impressionism exhibit at the National Gallery Victoria, and I should say “yet another”, because every time we come by there seems to be something either French or impressionistic on. It was fine, but the $50+ ticket prices are surprising in contrast to exhibition prices in Singapore. I was also really hoping to see something new at ACMI, but sadly their new ‘Game Worlds’ videogame exhibition won’t open till September. Maybe I’ll have to come back.
And then I fell ill and had to take it easy for a couple of days! If I had to guess, I probably picked up a flu bug from the airport or on the flight out. Still, I spent a large chunk of the week in bed or otherwise resting while Kim ran shopping errands for her mom and so on.
As I got steadily better, we went out a bit for a nice dinner, lunch at a winery, and a visit to this bookstore, The Paperback, in the CBD that I always buy something from. This time I got a collection of Louise Glück’s poems that I’ve been wanting for awhile. Just taking it slow and enjoying a change of scenery. Normally getting sick on holiday would be a disaster, but having no expectations or plans means no disappointments either.
I also went to my first Costco and had their famous hotdog, which was just $1.99 AUD with a soda. The financial engineering is strong at this company because it was a good and sizable pork sausage that I would have bought at thrice the price. We bought some other things there not worth mentioning except for a physical copy of Donkey Kong Bananza for the Switch 2 that’s S$20 cheaper in Australia than in Singapore. We really are getting ripped off out here; even buying it off the US eShop is S$5 cheaper than the local physical price.
Another thing I discovered was how nice it can be to watch a fire and sit in front of a fireplace for a few hours. This is something that I maybe understood before but forgot. Continually tending to a fire — rearranging logs, blowing on embers, adding more fuel — it’s like a mindfulness retreat no one has yet packaged up for Singaporeans without winter experience. I cleared my inbox one evening while doing that and warming my feet by the flames.
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.
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