Just had my first ever “soup curry” in Shimokitazawa, which unbeknownst to me is also considered a curry town (like Jimbocho in last week’s update), albeit focused more on authentic “spice curry”, as opposed to the sweeter Japanese adaptations of British-adapted curries. It came with a whole chicken leg and an impressive 20 kinds of vegetables, costing about ¥2000. Thoroughly delicious and a healthy meal (I told myself), although we did have to wait over an hour in a virtual queue for it.
Taking a photo would have gotten you thrown out before
To pass the time, we stopped into Bear Pond Espresso for one of their famous Dirtys and a cup of their proprietary Flower Child blend. The coffee is still as good as it ever was, but the vibe has changed now that the famously surly owner isn’t behind the counter. The last time we came and saw him, his mood had brightened up tremendously; he was taking off early to walk his dog in the sun, and even stopped to tell us its name. Perhaps he’s now retired. Good for him.
Afterwards, an obligatory stop into Village Vanguard, a “bookshop” whose closest kin is probably Don Quijote (or as it’s known in Singapore, Don Don Donki), that self-described shopping jungle where haphazard aisle placement is intentional and designed to get you lost and overwhelmed in a good way. VV has books, media merch, stickers, physical music, gacha, plushies, clothing, you name it. If I could actually read Japanese, I’d never be able to leave.
Back to food for a minute. We booked a “katsu omakase” meal before coming out here, featuring multiple cuts of perfectly cooked Japanese pork, and separately had an impromptu sushi omakase in Roppongi, where we got in just after lunch hour and had the whole counter to ourselves.
We also tried some Mister Donut, which is known in Singapore for always selling out, but here in addition to the perpetual lines and wide selection of sweet bakes, it’s also a place you can sit down and have… fried rice!?
I haven’t stepped into either a McDonald’s or Burger King (and probably won’t), but for posterity’s sake, I will record that the former is currently selling a line of “New York-Style” burgers with , which sounds like bullshit to me because one of them has a prawn cutlet. The King is more on brand with a monstrous Yeti burger that has four quarter-pound patties dripping with creamy “white cheese”.
Most museums are closed on Mondays or Tuesdays, but you can’t always rely on their websites for accurate updates. We found that out the hard way on Tuesday, which was also a national holiday, when we traveled nearly an hour to Nerima Art Museum only to discover it was closed — their site said otherwise.
But we made up for that fail on Wednesday and Thursday with visits to the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT), and the Mori Art Museum, respectively.
MOT is hosting the extremely popular, TikTok-viral Ryuichi Sakamoto tribute: Seeing Sound, Hearing Time. We must have stood in line for 45 minutes to get in, but it was certainly worth it. The final room was probably the highlight, where you see an ethereal “hologram” of him playing on a real piano with keys synced to a MIDI performance he recorded. Spectral visualizations of each note rise from the piano as he plays, and it’s like watching his ghost play Guitar Hero in reverse. There’s also an outdoor portion that you might already have seen online: a dense “fog sculpture” you can wander through. Walking through it is disorienting and like being in a video game scene. You can barely see past your outstretched hand, and other people fade into view through the white mist. There’s a feeling that someone might come recklessly running and knock you over. All around us, Japanese people kept saying “Yabai!” out loud.
Thursday was opening day for Machine Love at Mori Art, and by going early in the morning, we caught the artist Beeple (famous for selling a $69M NFT at Christie’s) unveiling a new “software update” to his work HUMAN ONE, tailored to Tokyo and this exhibition in particular. In it, the eternally trudging humanoid AI robot was transported from a post-apocalyptic world to a new rainbow-colored cartoon world filled with derivative Asian imagery like pandas and pagodas. It was like a parody of Takeshi Murakami’s work, but he also attended the following day, so I guess he’s cool with it.
Then on Sunday, I visited the National Art Center in Roppongi, which is interesting for the fact that it’s more of a hosting ground for smaller organizations that want to hold exhibitions, and not a museum with its own collection. I saw a couple of calligraphy shows (admittedly hard for me to appreciate), a show featuring young and new artists, and the results of a couple more annual open competitions. I spend just $10 for an entire afternoon’s worth of interesting ideas, and am now thoroughly saturated with imagery.
I made the mistake of going to Akihabara over the weekend, after Kim had gone home (I’m staying on for a little bit), leaving me free to eat all the curry rice I want and spend hours in electronic stores. It was more crowded than I can ever remember seeing, and not in any positive way; people were lugging large suitcases around and blocking narrow aisles with them, among other inconsiderate acts. I left exhausted and feeling somewhat ill (the number of coughing and sneezing people around didn’t help). The place is a victim of its own reputation, I guess, and now tourists have ruined the place for everyone. Like Chernobyl, it might be 50 years before one can safely visit again.
Two weeks ago, I asked why no one has created an all-in-one vinyl/CD/cassette player yet. Yesterday, I saw one at Yodobashi Camera. Granted, it probably sounds terrible, and the ¥18,500 (S$163) price doesn’t inspire much confidence either. If someone makes a better version of this, though, I’d be up for it.
One thing I still love doing is browsing the video game sections at these large retailers. Although some of the physical games are region-free and contain English translations, I’m not really there to buy anything — my backlog is deep enough to last for years. The fun is in seeing games really thrive in the real world, with cartridges alongside plushies, keychains, and other accessories. There are sadly no such equivalents back home. Inevitably, I’ll see Japanese-specific box art and pick something new up to look up online, or be reminded of a title I’d heard of but forgot to wishlist, and by the end of it, become more inspired to head home and play more games. After a couple of such experiences, my wishlist is now deeper, and I’ve bought a few new digital titles as well.
Incidentally, Perplexity released a new “Deep Research” mode which has nothing to do with OpenAI’s Deep Research product, and I asked it to find me Nintendo Switch games set in Eastern Tokyo that I might play while living here, for greater immersion. Amazingly, it succeeded. It was able to find one game, PARANORMASIGHT, that was developed with the help of the Sumida city council and tourism board (why they agreed, I do not know, because the game involves at least one of the parks being haunted). It’s also available for iOS. Impressively, Perplexity was also able to extrapolate that the region is known for sumo wrestling, and identified games involving sumo that might be of interest. All in all, not a bad feature to have! Free users get five questions a day, paid users get hundreds more.
I realized almost too late that I had neglected to shoot more panoramic photos this trip, which are really great to view on Vision Pro and have the effect of transporting you back to places you want to remember. I’m trying to make up for that now.
Rainy season is reading season. After finishing There Is No Antimemetics Division for my book club, I also wrapped up Taylor Lorenz’s Extremely Online, which is sort of a brief history of social media and the influencer economy. I highly recommend the former for fans of SF stories involving time, unreliable memories, and the nature of reality; some members of the book club who are into Doctor Who likened it to that, but I wouldn’t know.
Then I decided to start getting into the mood for our holiday by reading some Japanese fiction. I began with Mieko Kawakami’s Heaven (a rough story about school bullying), which I thought would keep me occupied for a while, but before I knew it, I’d finished it along with Satoshi Yagisawa’s Days at the Morisaki Bookshop and More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, two entries in the cozy Asian fiction wave dominating the local charts. Other entrants include Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop and Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Hwang Bo-Reum and Toshikazu Kawaguchi, respectively. When the going gets tough, people start fantasizing about quitting their jobs and opening cafes or bookstores, and I think that explains the sudden popularity of this micro-genre. Incidentally, I bought a couple of these books for my mother on her recent birthday because I thought she’d enjoy the vibes, although already retired.
For the avoidance of doubt, all of the above books were three stars for me on Goodreads with the exception of Antimemetics, which got a 5-star rating. But the Morisaki Bookshop series makes reference to many great works of Japanese literature, and so I decided to try reading some Mishima on this trip. I’d read The Temple of the Golden Pavilion as a young adult, and it probably just glanced my frontal lobe at the time.
In a flash of pure coincidence soon after, I was scrolling through MUBI and came across Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985) by Paul Schrader (who wrote Taxi Driver), an American Zoetrope biopic executive produced by George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola. I watched it immediately, and it’s an incredible work of cinema — why isn’t this talked about more? It only covers the last phase of his life, up until his famous act of terrorism/suicide, which makes up only one of the four chapters. The other three are dramatizations of his work, literally staged on theatrical sets and shot with more care and inspiration than anything you could buy today with $100M in streaming service money.
In a further act of cosmic coincidence, I saw a Facebook post from Paul Schrader being shared on Twitter, having an AI moment of crisis when he found that ChatGPT outdoes him when prompted to provide “Paul Schrader script ideas”.
Writer of the legendary movie Taxi Driver is having an existential crisis about AI pic.twitter.com/5H89SWUKn9
Looking back on holiday photos from March 2023, I rediscovered my rediscovery of Hipstamatic, which had just launched its new subscription-based app at the time. Looking at those photos brings back fond memories; they are “ruined” in a good way — mundane everyday scenes somehow imprinted with the nostalgia of the moment through imperfect filters (it helps that I know that the original, normal photos lie underneath and can be accessed with a tap of the Revert button). My setup at the time was to use the Ricoh GR III as a main camera for all photos that needed to look good and accurate, and to reserve the iPhone + Hipstamatic for casual, silly snapshots. Otherwise, you have two tools competing for the same job. I’m now finding that idea attractive again, except both Hipstamatic apps are quite a pain to use, UI-wise.
I watched this video of “Best Apps in 2024” from the MKBHD Studio team, and decided to give Dazz Cam another try. It’s surprisingly powerful! Some of the vintage “cameras” you can choose from use RAW processes, and you can have it save both the original RAW file and the filtered results separately. So I may end up using this to “gimp” my iPhone rather than Hipstamatic. Plus, the subscription to unlock all its features is only $10/yr compared to Hipstamatic’s $40/yr. I don’t even think you need it as some of the free filters are good enough. I only wish it would use the underlying RAW and not the JPEG when importing an existing image from your library.
We had free tickets to the ART SG fair at the Marina Bay Sands over the weekend and dropped by for a quick look. It was crowded as hell and I was reminded why I don’t think these things are a great way for the general public to see art; it’s mostly a trade show geared towards buyers, and so the scale is too overwhelming for anything to really be appreciated. Not only that, but the selection this year didn’t really make much impact. I was looking out for more of the humor and playfulness I saw at the 2023 edition, something to make light and sense of the trauma we’ve normalized, but it was sorely lacking. I did like the pair in the featured image above, though, as they reminded me of some other works I’ve seen before, including the Act of Emotion digital series by Kelly Milligan.
Trump launched his own memecoin on Solana this weekend, days before the inauguration, and I believe it went up to a market cap of $70bn. That would qualify as a very funny and absurd art project, from ‘probably the greatest’ (scam) artist, if it wasn’t real and thereby depressing.
Just 10 days to Christmas, and I finally got a sense of it happening through my first gift exchange and a couple of meetups. The first was with a few workplace alums, after one suggested to me that it would be nice if we all caught up (and so I ended up getting the job of organizing, which I bumbled through). It was nice after all, and I got to spend time with some people I hadn’t seen in years. The second was last night at a friend’s home that impressively decorated for the season, complete with a playlist of Christmas classics greeting us at the door. I think that was the moment it became real for me.
I brought my Leica D-Lux 7 out of hibernation this week for a few photos, mostly to put its aging battery to the test. It fits in my new Bellroy sling (the Ricoh GR III is still significantly smaller and lighter, albeit without a zoom lens), so I’m entertaining the thought of bringing it on our next holiday. Oh, that’s right. We’ve just booked a trip to Tokyo next year, wayyy behind the trend, but hopefully everyone’s had their fill of Japan by now and it’ll be less crowded when we get there. If I do need a spare battery, I’ll pick up the Panasonic equivalent model from Yodobashi Camera or something.
Another reason for the renewed interest was an update to the Leica FOTOS app (which connects to cameras) that came out this week. For the uninitiated, ‘Leica Looks’ are essentially a series of live filters that can be installed onto newer cameras. Owners of older models have been out of luck, but with this new update they can be retroactively applied in the app to any JPEG taken with a Leica camera. While trying it out, I discovered that photos I’ve been taking with the Leica LUX camera app also qualify as “taken with a Leica camera”, meaning you can apply these Looks to iPhone photos for free as well.
So far, I’ve been surprised by how well photos from its Micro Four-Thirds sensor have turned out, especially in daylight. Low light photos are quite smudgy/noisy if you elect to use an ISO value over 3200. I’m fortunate that Leica’s updated D-Lux 8 model this year was such a relative disappointment: a surface-level redesign of the camera’s body and UI without any improvements to the lens, sensor, or processor. It’s good news for me since an uncompelling update is money saved. Ignoring the PS5 I got in May, NOT upgrading stuff has been a bit of a theme this year. I don’t even covet Fuji’s X100VI camera one bit, maybe because it’s been so (artificially?) rare and overpriced.
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Our new broadband line was finally activated, and it’s resulted in a doubling of accessible bandwidth. In one speed test, I got over 1.1 Gbps (symmetrical) on my iPhone. At this point, our fleet of un-upgraded hardware is holding us back more than the network. In a couple of years, when every device in the house actually supports WiFi 7, I’ll upgrade the router and unlock the full 10Gbps that we currently have.
How little use am I making of this plentiful bandwidth? Well, listening to a lot of Apple Music Radio.
You probably missed this because it hardly made the headlines, but Apple Music doubled the number of their live, hosted radio stations from three to six. Apple Music Club, Chill, and Música Uno now join Apple Music 1, Hits, and Country. In a world where personalized, algorithmic stations/playlists are plentiful and pedestrian, I think these human-led stations are a wonderful zig to Spotify DJ’s zag.
Some of the best artists I’ve discovered this year were serendipitous encounters while listening to Zane Lowe, Rebecca Judd, Matt Wilkinson, or Dotty taking listeners through their latest picks on Apple Music 1. I think receiving and interacting with other people’s passion and opinions is a key part of the cultural experience of music, so these DJs play an important role that is growing ever smaller. It’s so good to see Apple Music expanding their Radio offering rather than shutting it down.
I used to have a Shortcut on my phone to launch Apple Music 1, but with these new stations it seemed time to build a quick launcher. Now, I can start live stations and my personalized stations from the Control Center, Today Screen, or even with the Action Button.
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iOS 18.2 came out of beta, with new Apple Intelligence features like Genmoji and Image Playground. They are okay for a bit of fun, but definitely won’t cause any artists or illustrators to become unemployed. It’s interesting to ask if they ever will, because Apple could certainly get the models there with time, even with fully on-device inference, so it’s just a question of intention. But I don’t think there are any brakes on this train and every company is onboard, they’ve just bought different tickets.
People sometimes say that I’d make a good teacher if I ever tried it. I think good teachers are probably more patient than I am and love speaking in front of people a lot more than I do. But on reflection, those are both things I’ve gotten a little better at over the last decade, so maybe.
I got a little taste of it this week when I was given the chance to hear a class of college students make their final presentations for a design thinking course, and provide assistance in the assessment of their assignments. They were asked to identify a group with needs, understand them, and then design games that could be of help. They had to prototype and test their ideas before finalizing a working version. They all did pretty well, creating solutions that were surprisingly polished.
The general idea about deploying Generative AI tools in the workplace is that they don’t do much to enhance the work of already talented employees. But for the vast majority of average or below-average workers, LLMs elevate their productivity and quality of work to a consistently higher level, which is still a net positive for teams.
Apple’s current ad campaign for Apple Intelligence seems to take that tack too, resulting in a message that’s so far from the Macintosh’s promise of a “bicycle for the mind” that these ads are rightfully catching some flak. But in the classroom, I saw AI tools give students (with limited time and a lack of traditional design skills) the ability to execute their ideas at high fidelity. Making card games that look and feel almost like professional products, fully illustrated without the help of artists, is not something we could have pulled off when I was their age. I’m partly envious, but also afraid that on a wider scale, execution will be confused with education.
Earlier in the year, when I sat in on another class being taught by a friend, I was struck by how hard it is to control the chaos of a large room of modern students, and the same thing was true here. When you get over 40 laptop and iPad-equipped young adults in a room, having their attention is not a given. Side conversations are happening all the time, and listening to whoever’s speaking seems like a choice.
Maybe it was just my experience as an English student, but our class sizes were smaller, and discussions almost always followed a single track, led by a professor pacing around the room rather than anchored to a screen at the front. There were hardly any screens, come to think of it, just books and notepads. Now everyone’s on Figma, Canva, Miro, and a host of other infinite sheets of AI-enabled SaaS paper. I’m not saying we had it better, but I worry that the option to take things slowly and still excel is disappearing. When kids today say they’re stressed, it’s hard not to believe them, having seen the performative polish that’s now standard. We’re getting awfully close to expecting students to pop out fully formed and ready for the mines.
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Over the weekend, we decided to get our eyes tested at a Zeiss-approved optician’s, to order the official prescription inserts for Apple Vision Pro. This will let me use the device on days when I’m not wearing contact lenses. The need to have them on first has admittedly been only a very minor inconvenience, but now nothing will get in the way of hopping into the uh… spatialverse.
Of the three eye tests I’ve had this year, this was probably the most thorough one. The key seems to be patience (there’s that word again) on the part of the tester, in the sense that the testee should never feel hurried. They should be allowed to flip between options 1 and 2 as many times as they need to identify the sharpest and most comfortable images. As a result, I have a new prescription that shows my eyesight has slightly, but surely, deteriorated for the first time in over a decade.
My last test was in 2019, when I got my last pair of glasses from Zoff. Those were so comfortable that I stopped wearing contacts regularly and became a spectacles guy again. Now I wonder if wearing contacts actually helped arrest the decline of my eyes.
Anyway, armed with a new prescription and an appetite for vision correction, I went to the nearest Zoff outlet and ended up with a new pair of glasses. I learnt afterwards that the frames I chose were “trendy” and “perfectly suited for Gen Z styling”. Along with recent purchases of wide-leg pants and oversized tees, my fashion Bryan Johnsoning is complete.
Side note on Japanese express optical brands: I stopped considering Owndays because all their frames are small and narrow — they literally don’t have large options. Zoff at least stocks a few, and in general they overindex on “Boston” and “Wellington” shapes, so on both occasions I’ve been able to find something I like with almost no effort.
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Media activity
After taking a break for several months, I returned to Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name on the PS5 and finished it. And this was a short game by Yakuza standards. I expected to feel pretty over the series by this point, but the emotional ending to Kaz’s story has got me quite excited to get started on the next game, Like a Dragon: Infinity Wealth, sooner rather than later.
I also returned to Luigi’s Mansion 3 on the Switch, which I started (and stopped) playing when I first got the console back in 2017. This game has just sat there for 6 years waiting for me to get back in, and all credit to Nintendo’s designers, it was stunningly easy to pick up where I left off.
There’s a ton of movies on MUBI due to leave in the next two weeks, so I started with Toni Erdmann (2016), which was nominated that year for the Palme d’Or. On the surface, it’s about a jokey dad whose daughter has become a miserable management consultant, and he decides she/they are not doing so well and could use a little cheering up. And yet as a film it was like nothing I’ve ever seen before: I laughed, I cried, I was bewildered. It’s simply art. 4.5 stars.
Another film that is leaving is a 2011 documentary by the late Austrian filmmaker Michael Glawogger, Whore’s Glory, which examined the lives of sex workers in Thailand, Bangladesh, and Mexico. The film’s biggest problem is its inappropriately “cool” millennial-era Western music soundtrack featuring Cocorosie, Tricky, and PJ Harvey. My 3.5-star Letterboxd review: “If anyone asks why I look sad, from now on my answer is ‘I saw Whore’s Glory back in 2024’.”
I haven’t held space to experience the new suddenly released Kendrick Lamar album, GNX, the way it deserves. Hopefully by next weekend.
Kim Deal of the Pixies has a new album out at the age of 63 and I quite like it. It’s called Nobody Loves You More.
I discovered a Japanese singer by the name of Kaneko Ayano while looking for artists with a similar sound to Happy End. She has an awesome ‘gimmick’ where every album is recorded and released in two different ways: acoustic and with a full band.
But for the song/video of the week, it’s Hanumankind’s Big Dawgs. I was listening to Apple Music 1 when it came on, and had to look it up immediately. He’s an Indian rapper from Kerala by way of Texas, and he’s just broken out now with this song after years of making music. His lyrical game is considerable, and as evidence I offer the existence of a YouTube comment calling him “Lendrick Kumar”.
I’m also embedding an older video I like, a freestyle performance, and a recent interview on Apple Music where it’s clear he’s an articulate and very driven young musician who’s going to be huge.
I just got back from a Sunday night dinner date in the East at a newish place called Carlitos. It was new enough that it didn’t have a Swarm entry, so I made one. That reminded me that the Foursquare app is about to be shut down, and I’m choosing to be optimistic about Swarm’s future. We’ve been promised some meaningful changes in the coming year and I hope the rethink will bring check-ins back in vogue.
Vision Pro updates
Kim got back from her work trip and the first thing we did was head out to the Apple Orchard store to pick up the new Belkin Head Strap that everyone’s talking about. And not a day too soon, because it’s now backordered into mid-December!
It is what it looks like: the top bit of Apple’s own Dual Loop Band, which you can attach to your existing Solo Knit Band — a rare best-of-both-worlds occurrence where the comfort, adjustability, and non-hair-mussing qualities of the Solo are met with the weight-relieving structure of a top strap. It works well, and I’m never taking mine off. I was using the Dual Loop before, but its thin strap that pulls upwards near the base of the skull cannot compare to the quality, fit, and comfort of the Solo band, which is such a wonderful design and product that it belongs in a museum.
I haven’t tried Spigen’s slightly cheaper version, but having read many reviews of how poor its adjustment range is, I can’t recommend you take the risk. You’ll want to get the tightness just right, so Velcro is the right solution, and Belkin has rightly made it.
Belkin was never an accessory maker I took too seriously in the last two decades, I mean, they made alright cases and cables, but I’d never choose them over first-party versions. That seems to be changing. This new Travel Bag for Vision Pro is further proof; it’s significantly smaller than Apple’s own Travel Case, and half the price.
1) Should have been in the box instead of the dual strap
2) $50 is overpriced but you’ve already paid $3500 so hard to complain.
3) When Apple knows an accessory is needed but doesn’t want to put its brand on it, it turns to Belkin (owned by a Foxconn subsidiary) https://t.co/oKM5HSIVi5
Career leak publisher Mark Gurman implied in the tweet above that Belkin is Apple’s secret partner; the one they go to when they want an accessory on the market but don’t want to make it themselves. The fact that they stock Belkin’s products in Apple Stores is supposedly proof. In this world, Apple knows the practical flaws of their own form-over-function accessories, and nudges Belkin (which is connected to Foxconn) into making uglier but more effective alternatives to keep customers satisfied. I don’t know if I believe it works exactly like this, but it’s not a bad arrangement? Let’s see if Belkin makes some kludge to access the power button on the underside of the new Mac mini, then.
A new Apple Immersive Video (AIV) feature was released this week, and a music video at that. It’s the song Open Hearts by The Weeknd, and Apple’s own press release says it’s a limited time exclusive for Vision Pro. Interestingly, they’re inviting people to visit their nearest Apple Stores to watch it, which means we’re entering a phase where the retail arm is positioned as providing free public access to the Vision Pro experience, not unlike the ‘Today At Apple’ sessions where people can learn to draw or take better photos with Apple products, even if they don’t own any yet. This is fine, but the barrier to getting people off their butts to see something cool (for free!) is somehow extremely high these days. Is this because the culture promotes ownership hand-in-hand with enjoyment, and people don’t want to try a device they already know they can’t/won’t pay for? I can’t afford a bottle of 55-year-old Yamazaki but I’d sure as hell have a free taste if offered one.
The new Apple Immersive Video from The Weeknd is worth experiencing. For one, it features a lot of movement but none of it is nauseating. I’m not sure if they’ve just figured out ‘one weird trick’ to make that possible.
Anyway, the music video is very impressive, as I said on Bluesky after seeing it. There are a couple of magical moments, some achieved with special effects and some that are just beautiful to experience in immersive video. For some reason, it never feels disorienting or nauseating even though the camera travels at speed for a fair bit. I wonder if they’ve cracked the motion sickness code and are inserting buffer frames or using some other imperceptible technique, but this bodes well for future productions. Perhaps it’s just very smooth dollying and sticking to just one axis at any time.
Apps
Perplexity: Google continues to struggle with integrating its Gemini generative AI models with search results in a way that doesn’t spit out lies, but Perplexity has been working great for me since I started using it earlier this year. It could be the types of questions I ask it, or the default stance of skepticism I adopt when it answers them (the sources are there for you to check, if something feels off), but it’s been a net positive for me and I keep the widget on my iPhone’s Home Screen and use it several times each day. In fact, I thought everyone was using it, and was very surprised to learn while talking to Viv that she had never even tried it.
This week, I got access to a year of Perplexity Pro for absolutely no money, thanks to a giveaway in Kevin Rose’s newsletter, and it feels great to have virtually no daily limit for Pro requests. Standard requests basically use a simpler model, think OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 series, which parses search results and writes an answer to your question. Pro requests use the latest models including Claude 3.5 and GPT-4o, and break your question down into its components before processing results, all to have a better chance of understanding what it is you’re trying to learn and answer accordingly.
I’m aware of the icky implications of Gen AI scraping and that this mode of bypassing publishers will probably destroy the web as it currently works. Perplexity claims to be paying publishers that it sources answers from, on a per-query basis that sounds similar to music streaming services, so it might be a best-alternative model worth watching. It’s an analogy that makes sense because of how Napster upended that entire industry through theft and wanton disregard for copyright laws… kind of like what AI companies are doing now.
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Mattebox: Now here’s a name I never expected to hear again. I first mentioned Mattebox on this blog 13 years ago in December 2011, when I posted some photos I took on a holiday to Bintan. What I remember is that it was a camera app (as opposed to a photo editor), modeled on the ergonomics of the Konica Hexar camera (respect), and that its developer (Ben Syverson) cared enough to replicate a film-like response to clipped highlights. That torch is currently being carried by the upcoming Fig Camera app. It appears I even made/shared a filter for it called Velvius, which proves this has been a longer-standing hobby than I thought.
Anyway it disappeared off the App Store a decade ago for reasons I never knew, and then reappeared last week completely rebooted and redesigned. It’s now an editor, but still leans hard into the making and sharing of filters. It even lets you share a filter as an App Clip, which means people can apply your looks without even installing the app — probably a first in the photography app world.
I’ve played with it for a little while today and am quite impressed. It focuses on editing ProRAW files, even disabling tone mapping by default for a less HDR look (the trend these days), and a Pro subscription (S$40/yr) unlocks granular controls to dial in micro contrast, black levels, noise reduction, and so on. It even simulates physical diffusion filters, a feature that’s rare these days after the discontinuation of the Tiffen FX app around the same time Mattebox disappeared.
The UI is MUCH better than before, and although I already own the RAW Power app which includes all the same adjustments mentioned above, I would rather do them in Mattebox because of how neatly they are laid out. For a “first” release, Mattebox 3.0 gets so many essentials right, from having a double-tap gesture to reset values, to saving edits non-destructively over originals. You can even export your filters as LUT and Lightroom preset files. I’d like to try making filters for it but will 1) need to subscribe and 2) learn to use its HSL curve system, which is different from what I’m used to.
I’d love to see:
Undo/redo for adjustments
Indicators for RAW files in the photo picker
Using the system photo picker, actually, so you can view by media type, etc.
Grain tool
Media activity
I finished reading Variable Star after two weeks and gave it 4 stars on Goodreads.
I started on Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, just because it recently won the Nobel Prize in Literature. I’m 32% through it and I can’t say it’s anything terribly special yet. I saw that Sara reviewed it on Goodreads seven years ago and (I’m paraphrasing) said it was the kind of mediocre East Asian book that Western readers just lap up.
I watched Megalopolis (2024) in one straight sitting, in a giant virtual theater in Vision Pro, and it kinda rocked. What a Taj Mahal-grade vanity project, a pastiche of Shakespearean and Capital-C for Cinematic bombast. Watching this, you wouldn’t think that Coppola knows anything about urban design or architecture, they’re just metaphors for the story he wants to tell about great (and very pretentious) thinkers who change societies. They’re just MacGuffins for a crazy CGI movie that owes as much to Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004) as it does Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). I typed that and then searched to see if anyone else made the same connection, and indeed they have. 4 stars.
We watched Look Back (2024). It’s an anime adaptation of Tatsuki Fujimoto’s one-shot manga work of the same name. It recently had a successful theatrical run in Japan, and I’ve been dying to see it since seeing the reactions online. It also played here, but I missed it, and it seemed weird going to the cinema for a film that clocks in at just 58 minutes. Amazon Prime Video secured the worldwide streaming rights, thankfully, and the whole time watching it I wondered why it wasn’t acquired by Apple TV+. That would have been a great fit. I don’t want to say too much about it, but it’s brilliant, beautiful, and a showcase of how animation can express feelings that live action could never. 4.5 stars.
Can I just take a minute to show you this Labubu I saw hanging on someone’s bag on the train? It’s carrying a Chanel bag like the very one it’s attached to! That is just so super cute to me, I think I have a brain worm like the future American Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.
Monday got off to a good start when I finally landed one of the coveted booth seats at the co-working space. Up to then, they were always occupied by the time I got in, and it was a feat not repeated at any other point in the week. Because I’d only signed up for the month of October, and with Thursday the 31st being a public holiday (Deepavali, not Halloween), this chapter of drinking too much coffee and watching movies while surrounded by busy people has come to an end — let’s be honest, though, most of their screen time looks like chatting on Slack/WhatsApp and browsing the web.
I’m feeling a sense of loss about it, actually. For starters, the renovation noise is set to continue next week and might drive me out of the house still, now without a place to go. But more than that, I was just getting used to the routine and would jokingly say to Kim, “I’m going to the office”. It’s akin to the loss of a ‘third place’, a social setting distinct from home and work. However, I don’t even have a second place these days!
One thing that sitting still in front of an iPad for hours on end has highlighted is how important yet increasingly difficult it is to single-task. While thinking about my/our deteriorating attention span — that constant feeling of being pulled towards other tasks while in the middle of doing things I chose to do — I identified a root cause in myself: I have less trust in my memory these days. So when something occurs to me, say looking up a fact or sending someone a message, it’s harder to file it away for later follow-up, because I think I might forget. Past experience has probably taught me that I’ll forget.
On one hand, I could make peace with that. So I’ll forget a thing or two; big deal! I don’t have to optimize every detail. Things can be allowed to slip and it’ll probably be fine. Or I could use the time-honored second brain productivity hack of… jotting thoughts down and then getting back to what I was doing? I may give that a go with the Quick Note button in my phone’s Control Center and see if it makes the distracted feeling go away.
The filmmaker Lav Diaz is known for making extremely long movies. At 10 hours, his Evolution of a Filipino Family (2004) is probably only consumable in several sittings and is the ultimate test of patience and focus. Like Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (2014), it was shot over more than a decade, and you see the actors age for real.
One could criticize its poor production values, shot in grainy and low-res black-and-white film and video, often with inadequate microphone coverage, or its loose editing and lack of action (its 10-hour runtime probably says something about Diaz’s attitude towards concision). But the message is in his medium, and I’ve found watching it to be a great meditative exercise; letting the mind alternately empty and gather and empty again as you watch the family slowly lead cattle from one end of the screen to the other or hold sparse conversations over meals, spread over minutes of near inaction. The first 2.5 hours passed effortlessly in a state of detached attention.
I also managed to watch Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) on MUBI without much distraction. It’s a hell of a film, visually inventive and beautiful, with an opening sequence that you have to see to believe, going from sensual shots of skin to burned and scarred consequences of the atomic bomb. Which is the backdrop for this film about war, love, and memory.
Having just visited Hiroshima for the first time last year, I was surprised to find so much of it familiar in this old work: the bombed-out dome, the peace museum, and its garden sculptures. It was also incredible to see its depiction of an interracial relationship between an Asian man and a white woman as equals. As far as I can tell, it was probably one of the first films to center such a couple.
The first few Apple Intelligence features launched this week in iOS 18.1, and while many in the tech press seem unimpressed by these ‘basic’ capabilities, especially when compared to products from OpenAI, Google, and Meta, I’ve found them so impactful to the way I use my computing devices that I can’t imagine going back.
Apple also announced impressive M4 updates to the iMac, Mac mini, and MacBook Pro this week, but I don’t need to upgrade!
For one, I can summarize long emails and webpages directly in Mail.app and Safari. My bank likes to send me long, jargon-filled market updates in its email newsletters, and now I can summon a quick paragraph that gets to the point.
When I get back to my phone after some time away, I can see what would normally be stacks of messages and notifications summarized into a few lines. I’ll still read them anyway, but it’s great to get a preview so I can triage for urgency. This is also useful when getting Siri Announcements over AirPods. Say someone sends me a long string of messages, instead of having them all read out over my music, I can hear a summary and know whether it’s important enough to pull my phone out for.
And coming back to the point about avoiding distractions, there’s a new focus mode called “Reduce Interruptions”, alongside others like “Work” and “Do Not Disturb”. This reads and assesses all your notifications with AI, and will only show you things that seem time-sensitive or important.
There are also Writing Tools that I’ll be using to proofread this post before sending it out, and a Clean Up tool that can remove objects in photos using a generative model. It’s quite good, certainly enough for casual use, and I’ve seen online examples of it pitted against Adobe’s equivalent AI tools and actually coming out ahead in some situations. Plus, everything happens on device, which is great for data privacy reasons.
A quick demo of the Clean Up feature in Photos.app
One grumble I have, though, is that Apple appears to be reserving its upcoming Visual Intelligence feature (where you can point your camera at something and have the phone offer contextual information) for iPhone 16 models with the new Camera Control “button”. I hope they’ll make it work with the Action Button on iPhone 15 Pro models, but am preparing that I won’t have it until I upgrade to next year’s 17.
In the meantime, I have found a new use for my Action Button: starting the Apple Music 1 radio station. This has proved super useful and convenient. If I’m anywhere with my AirPods in, getting some music going is now just a button press away, even without getting my iPhone out of my pocket.
Take a minute to appreciate this ad that Apple made to celebrate the debut of this radio station back in 2015, back when it was called Beats 1 — a far better brand in my opinion. It was a simpler, more optimistic time. Watching this, I believed that a global internet radio station dedicated to great music, across all genres, could map differences in culture and unite us all.
I must mention that Nintendo joined the music streaming app business this week. Nintendo Music is free for subscribers to the Nintendo Switch Online service (USD$19.99/yr), which I already am for purposes of playing games online and backing up saves from my Switch. However, the app is not available in Singapore as Nintendo’s online services are not officially available here — one has to create a US account instead. But complaining about Nintendo’s digital and worldwide strategy is a whole other post.
So far, this music service is pure win. Classic first-party soundtracks from the best in the business, with curated playlists for different moods and activities, and the ability to “extend” some tracks to an hour’s length (it appears there’s more to this than just looping the songs) for use as background music? With more music continuously being added? It was enough to make me jump through the hoops of switching App Store accounts to get the app on my phone. And so I’ve been listening to the sounds of Animal Crossing: New Horizons again, feeling nostalgic for the early days of the pandemic when great music in a cozy game did unite the world during a very stressful time.
They should add Shortcuts support to the Nintendo Music app so I can start playing music via the Action Button.
I may buy Nintendo’s upcoming Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp Complete smartphone app, which is their clever solution to keeping the live service mobile around after its servers shut down. You can buy a fully offline version for $10 (going up to $20 in January 2025), with all 7 years (!) of old in-app purchase content included. Current players with saves can resume their progress, but I will probably start over again. The new app launches on Dec 3, 2024.
Remaining media activity
I’m halfway through reading Variable Star, a book by Spider Robinson based on an idea and notes left behind by Robert Heinlein. So, it’s a posthumous collaboration, and a very entertaining one at that.
We waited till all episodes were out and then binged Season 4 of Only Murders in the Building. This is not my preferred way of watching the show; I believe spacing them out lets the story breathe and be remembered better. But Kim is going away again for a couple of weeks, and neither of us wanted to wait that long to pick it back up.
I finished Season 2 of The Old Man and remain impressed. It’s one of the best ‘classic’ espionage shows in recent years, and if you have a better one to recommend I’d love to see it. I’m talking old-school, Tinker Tailor-type spy intrigue, which reminds me I should pick up a John le Carré book next, because I don’t think I’ve ever read one. Btw did you know Nick Harkaway is his son??
After six months, we caved and reactivated the Netflix subscription. Kim wanted to watch Culinary Class Wars on her flight, and I’m keen to check out some of the new anime series they’ve put out, like Ranma 1/2, Dan Da Dan, and Season 2 of Oshi no Ko. I watched 9 episodes of the latter on Sunday; it’s that addictive. It was always a great looking show but the artistry and animated flexing is on another level now: some of the kinetic montages and dramatic sequences jump through a dozen art styles in as many seconds, and feel inspired by the Spiderverse films and maybe even Satoshi Kon’s Millennium Actress (2001), which might be my favorite animated film of all time.
The week seemed to slip by with not too much to show for it until Friday, as I waited for the delivery of my Apple Vision Pro. I watched a couple of films, subscribed to the New York Times again, and made some plans for a personal creative project.
In the meantime, I also made some memes for Instagram.
I also resumed wearing contact lenses daily after years of relying on glasses, because I didn’t want the Zeiss lens inserts for Vison Pro. It will take a little adjustment; I definitely don’t miss the end-of-day dryness and irritation.
Okay, so!
The unboxing experience for this high-end device is suitably premium, despite being made from predominantly recyclable paper materials. You lift the cover — it releases with the usual deliberate, satisfying motion — and there it is, positioned as if on display in a museum, supported by a molded rest. All the accessories are neatly organized in a compartment underneath. There is an indulgent amount of unused space in this box; no squashing of the Vision Pro into egg carton cutouts like with some Sony products!
A nice Quick Start book instead of the leaflet you get with iPhones
Side note: I think I may have gotten measured for the wrong size of light seal (21W) as the sides feel narrower and less comfortable than 33W for me. I have an appointment at the Apple Store next week to hopefully get it swapped.
First encounters
I’ve already mentioned the magical and immersive experience of using it. Knowing that, it was still a shock when I ran the pre-installed Encounter Dinosaurs app (directed by Jon Favreau) for the first time.
Some U.S. reviewers reported actually feeling the virtual butterfly land on their outstretched fingers at the start of the experience, to which I thought, “no way”. And yet when it happened to me, I swear I felt four distinct little pricks on my skin as its little legs shifted. That unfortunately primed me to feel what happened next even more acutely. The dinosaurs appeared on screen, with a fluidity and resolution that was greater than I expected, making the PS5 look like “video games”. I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say they were lifelike.
You are warned at the start that the animals can “see you” and will react to your actions. As the largest dinosaur stepped out of its frame and stalked towards me, towered over my seated body, then stared me in the face while exhaling through its nostrils, I felt my body go into a fight-or-flight mode. No joke. I started to sweat. I avoided making eye contact, and turned my head away hoping it would back off. The presence you feel is unbelievably tangible, and I know I will NOT be attempting any horror games in the future.
Art of the future
A much calmer experience I can recommend is Museas, which is a completely free journey through art history made by a single person (Miguel Garcia Gonzalez, who calls himself “a supply chain professional by day and spatial computing engineer by night”). You can see landmark artworks at phenomenal scale right in your home, or in “immersive environments”. These suddenly float your body in massive virtual spaces, surrounded by complementary imagery, with the original artwork in front of you. Think of them as frames, just 360º ones. For example, when viewing Hokusai’s The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, you see a florid Japanese garden scene all around, while a narrator explains the artwork.
I suspect they’ve used generative AI to create these descriptions of the artworks’ history and meaning, the voice that reads them (it sounds to me like the actor Jared Harris, who plays Hari Seldon in Foundation), as well as the 360º immersive scenes. If so, the technology has clearly allowed a single person to achieve something that feels professional beyond their means. The voice is natural and doesn’t feel off to me at all. The immersive environments aren’t perfect, but they’re for your peripheral vision — you’re meant to focus on the original art. The wall text is accurate as far as I can tell. Was this labor that could have paid the salaries of a few more people? In theory, but it’s more likely this project wouldn’t have gotten made at all without AI.
When I think about you I shush myself
Apart from these new experiences that weren’t possible before, I think the primary application of the Vision Pro for me will be a personal cinema hall. I sat down with the Theater app to watch Adam Lisagor’s 3D recording of John Gruber interviewing Apple executives Joz, Craig, and J.G. at WWDC (regular 2D recording here), and for nearly two hours I was immersed and focused in its virtual space, surrounded by faintly illuminated empty seats and aisles. I felt notifications come in on my wrist, my phone was across the room, and I ignored all of it the same way I would watching a film in a real theater.
I think the Vision Pro is the antidote to the iPhone that some thought the Apple Watch would be. Turns out the answer to destroyed attention spans, multi-screening, and screen addiction wasn’t to make it easier to leave your phone in your pocket by redirecting things to a watch, it was the skeuomorphic recreation of a giant screen in a dark room. I think this is the ideal way to watch Important Films. And as nice as our new TV is, I don’t think it compares in visceral terms. Tradeoff: focus and immersion vs. comfort and the ability to drink beverages.
Media activity
Finished watching Constellations starring Noomi Rapace on Apple TV+. Mild spoiler: I complained on Threads about the way it handled a plot device thusly: “Sci-fi shows where science-literate people find themselves trapped in parallel universes, and literally don’t know the words “parallel universe” to explain to other people what’s happening, please gtfo”
Season 3 of The Bear is out this weekend and like most people (I did a poll on Instagram), we’re getting through it. That first episode? Wow, really special television.
Saw Aloners (2021), a film that tackles modern nowhere lives built around go-nowhere jobs, where even if you meet people worth connecting with, your social muscles may already have atrophied too far. Starts strong but doesn’t land the character development at the end for me. Also: is this a chaotic opposite world version of Perfect Days? I said on Letterboxd: “Say less” is the unofficial motto of Korean arthouse cinema. 3/5 stars.
Saw Zero Fucks Given (2021). It follows a young woman escaping grief and complexity by going headfirst into the soul-sucking worker bee life of a budget airline attendant, taking each day as it comes, never looking a day ahead as much as she can help it. Lovely work, and Adele Exarchopoulos is a talent. 3.5 stars.
Saw Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Oast Lives (2010) through MUBI’s visionOS app, and I chose to watch it on the dark side of the moon. It was incredible to look up and see stars, look around and see a desolate rocky surface, and then at a giant floating screen ahead of me. The movie was also strange, unreal, and disorienting like being on the moon — it won a Palme d’Or when it came out, cynically I think because a Thai film like this was exotique. I enjoyed its atmosphere and ideas a lot, just not the stilted acting. 3.5 stars.
I don’t know where else to mention that I fulfilled a personal goal by minting a McDonalds Singapore NFT after Jose alerted me (with two hours to spare) that they were releasing a new Chicken McNuggets series. Their first release last year was of Grimace, and holders enjoy a stream of special perks. Interestingly, they are ‘soulbound’ NFTs, meaning they cannot be sold or transferred from the initial wallet that received them. Don’t ask me why McDonald’s Singapore is doing this (I doubt they do either), but I want it and I got it.
I’ve been long Camila Cabello since 2019 when I called her “possibly the most competent pop star and the new Rihanna”, but I have to admit I was nervous about her new album C,XOXO after recent racism accusations and piggybacking on Charli XCX’s party girl image and Brat aesthetic on social media. Thankfully, I’m on my third listen and it’s an enjoyable record apart from Drake appearing on two tracks (putting on his Jamaican accent, for chrissakes). She’s a big Drake defender, but even if she wanted to cut him after recent events, the album is only 32 minutes long and wouldn’t have survived it.
His 2024 tour had just one Asian stop, here, before heading to several Australian cities. We decided to splurge on S$300 tickets late last year for the one-night-only show on June 14. After all, when are you ever going to see Jerry Seinfeld again? It’s a once-in-a-lifetime, bucket list opportunity.
And he was pretty good! I can’t believe he’s 70 and still working the circuit. Although the face says he’s aged, the material suggests he’s still the same unserious, childish complainer we love. Some bits on modern subjects like AI and smartphone addiction screamed ‘boomer!’, but his timeless takes on marriage, the lack of innovation at the Sun-Maid Raisin Company, and putting old dish sponges out of their misery, were solid gold.
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I attended an inspiring memorial service for my uncle, who passed away a few weeks ago. It was a large and well-attended affair, on account of him having been a prominent member of the local medical community.
Relatives are usually these distant figures we only see during Chinese New Year reunions. But under the surface, there’s a lifetime of stories we never hear, and it’s a pity. If not for the history lesson and stories that his son shared, I would never have known about how he was born in China 90 years ago, arrived in Singapore at the age of 10, suffered tragedy at the hands of the Japanese, and became an award-winning multihyphenate equally accomplished in matters of art and science. That generation really was built different; the risks they took seem unreal when compared to our modern lives (but tbh they couldn’t handle a zillion social notifications destroying their mental health either).
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It was WWDC week and while I don’t have to comment on Apple stuff, I kinda always do, so let’s keep traditions alive. They unveiled a slew of software features coming to every platform, and I was most excited to see that Journal, Notes, and Freeform are still being improved and haven’t become forgotten hobbies. As a word-centric computer user, they’re the ones I rely on most — the Math Notes demo on iPad was super cool but I couldn’t begin to use it.
I’m not convinced the Photos app redesign was necessary or an improvement for most users. Its single-page design seems like a conceptual simplification that might add more complexity in real-life use. I haven’t lived with it yet, so I hope I’m wrong.
I’m convinced Messages will continue to absorb all popular chat features until it eventually catches up to where Telegram was about four years ago. And that’s all it needs to do, really.
They announced that Apple Vision Pro will finally be sold outside the US, with Singapore as one of the first countries to get it, alongside Japan and China. Wow, that’s a hell of an upgrade to our starting lineup position. Back in Week 5, I correctly predicted that the global rollout would start in June, but I also said that the product would see annual updates — the consensus on tech Twitter now is that there won’t be a new model until 2026. Which… makes me think that I could get one after all? Getting two years of use out of a S$5,500 device is a lot more palatable than getting just one. Once you add the cost of AppleCare+ (S$749), a travel case (S$299), and prescription inserts/contact lenses though. Hmm.
On Apple Intelligence: I was happy to see them begin by laying out their design principles (we do this on a lot of my projects, but they are rarely communicated to the public), which are critical for this particularly suspicious and misunderstood technology, for which Apple needs to differentiate their approach and model. Some, like Google, already have access to your data but can’t be trusted not to monetize it with ad targeting. Others, like OpenAI, may only have what data you choose to share but can’t be trusted not to train their models on it. Apple is unique in that it doesn’t seem to want to do either.
Finally, we’re getting a smarter Siri that’s an actual agent, i.e. able to string together various tasks in pursuit of a goal, and take action on behalf of users. So much for the Rabbit and all that bullshit. Doing as much locally as possible is the only responsible way to do AI agents. And Apple’s private cloud compute solution, which looks to be yet another privacy engineering breakthrough, is probably the second-best way.
The image generation stuff was probably the most contentious part. I’ve seen upset takes from artists but no one can put this stuff back in the bottle. The only way to stop AI art is a full-scale public revolt, and that requires everyone getting a good look at it first. It’s the four packs of cigarettes your dad forces you to smoke after he catches you sneaking one. When we’re all tired of seeing gross AI styles, human-created art might be appropriately valued.
But I don’t think Apple is on this exact mission, so I was surprised at the examples they chose to showcase. The Genmoji of a surfing dinosaur looked terribly similar to Meta’s own AI chat stickers in style and quality (cheap). But being able to create Genmojis and illustration-style images for documents all across the OS, for free, is no doubt a big deal. I think many people will generate their first AI images with Apple Intelligence.
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Media activity:
I just finished R.F. Kuang’s Babel and loved every page. If you’re into university-set adventures, deep dives into language and literature, the aftershocks of British colonialism, and tales of the Chinese diaspora, this one’s for you. I had no idea that she also wrote Yellowface, which I’ve heard many people rave about. Props to Kuang, she gets a lot more out of being Chinese than me. 5/5 stars.
Bought Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name for S$31 on PlayStation’s summer sale, and immediately started playing it. I thought I’d had enough of this series for awhile, but I’m six hours in and having so much more fun than in the preceding game. Part of it is even set in the same Yokohama map as Yakuza: Like a Dragon, but running around here is so much better without the annoying turn-based combat. Recommended if you like absurd storylines played with the straightest of faces.
Started watching Constellations on Apple TV+, which has sadly been canceled after one season. The first two episodes lean into a space horror vibe which had me seriously tense, but it’s lightened up a bit now in episode three. Recommended for fans of Noomi Rapace, Dead Space, sci-fi mysteries.
Watched A Quiet Place Part II and was let down because I remember enjoying the first one, but this sequel is a much lesser use of mostly the same ingredients. Plus that annoying post-apocalyptic trope about how the human survivors are worse than the monsters. PUHLEASE. 1.5/5 stars.
Watched Hit Man on Netflix, the first Richard Linklater film I’ve caught in years. It kept me guessing (and I had a lot of wrong guesses where it was heading), and has a lot of fun with the concept. Glen Powell is going to be a huge star, isn’t he? 4/5 stars.
Alex Garland’s Civil War was like most of his films: plenty to look at, not much to say. It shows what a civil war in the US might look like, but doesn’t care to fill anything in, mirroring the photojournalists it follows. Early on, Kirsten Dunst says “we just shoot the pictures, others can ask why”, or something to that effect. Well, isn’t that convenient for you, Alex Garland. 2.5/5 stars.
Discovered the band Fantastic Cat after seeing a vertical video somewhere of them inviting Adam Duritz of Counting Crows to be on their new song. It may have been a clip of the video for the song, actually. Following that I checked out Now That’s What I Call Fantastic Cat and really enjoy its pre-my-birth country rock sound. A quick internet search revealed that they’re a supergroup of four singer-songwriters that I unfortunately have never heard of.
Am listening to Charli XCX’s very popular new album, BRAT, and it might be her best work yet. I’m also listening to A.G. Cook’s new Britpop album and since he produced half of her album, it can get confusing.
Have also been following the drama of Taylor Swift allegedly releasing numerous editions of her albums on the eve of other female artists’ album releases to block them from the top spot on charts. She apparently tried it with Billie Eilish’s album, and now she’s done it to Charli with a UK-only release of two new editions of The Tortured Poets Department, each with different demos or live versions tacked on. She’s free to defend the throne but there are apparently 34 different versions of that album out now. Even The Guardian has weighed in and declared Charli the winner on artistic grounds. This releasing of multiple variants to milk fans feels gross to me. Back in my day, musicians just released one version of an album (okay, plus maybe a Japan-only one with bonus tracks) and it had to fend for itself on the charts for years!
sangsara.net 