sangsara.net

Tag: Artificial Intelligence

  • Week 13.25

    Week 13.25

    A massive 7.7 quake hit Myanmar and Thailand on Friday, causing several hundred deaths so far. It was chilling to pull up the news and see reports of buildings swaying in Bangkok and having to be shut down for safety inspections, buildings that I had just been in a week ago. Thankfully, everyone we know is unhurt, but I’ve heard accounts of the traffic becoming even more unworkable (someone spent over 5 hours getting to the airport), and with some having to walk miles home instead.

    It was my Apple Watch that alerted me to this earthquake, via a notification from the environment ministry’s MyENV app, which usually likes to tell me about quakes in places so far away I don’t see what possible need there could be for an alert. I was in the middle of watching Jason Statham’s film, A Working Man (2025), in an almost empty theater with Peishan, and was about to swipe it away when I saw that it was actually kind of nearby. And then afterwards, the feeds were full of videos showing swimming pools at the tops of condominiums raining their contents down onto the streets below. Who decided we should start putting pools up there, anyway?

    The movie is terrible, by the way, and makes the mistake of trying to NOT be the predictable vengeance-by-numbers Statham vehicle that the trailer makes it out to be. It looks like our man Jason is just your regular ex-military deadly killer who’s decided to take on an unassuming identity and retire to a life of normalcy as a construction worker when one of his new friends falls afoul of the mob and needs rescuing. This is a setup rooted in at least a little realism, which is needed for the audience to suspend disbelief when the righteous murdering starts. However, this film is co-written by Sylvester Stallone, who is now at a stage in life where he writes really ridiculous scenes, silly and clichéd to the point of surrealism, as evidenced in the last installments of his Rambo and Expendables franchises.

    The latest season of Reacher, a series on freaking Amazon Prime Video, is more believable and enjoyable in almost every way, which is a hell of a red flag for whoever produced A Working Man. When reading any of Lee Child’s novels, Reacher comes across as a stoic avatar of justice, almost featureless in terms of personality. But as played on TV by Alan Ritchson, he’s endearingly a bit of an awkward and pedantic weirdo, as you would expect someone with his physicality to be after moving through a world that he doesn’t comfortably fit into. I like that change.

    We also watched the critically acclaimed show Adolescence on Netflix, and it’s an absolute marvel of filmmaking and acting. I’ve never seen a British TV production with this level of craft; it just leaves you wondering how they pulled it off — how they had the energy, even. Each episode is an hour-long performance that often involves moving between multiple locations, with the actors having to ramp up the emotions from anger to fear and the sorrow in between, and they did this how many times? For the final episode, they apparently used Take #16. It’s unfathomable talent. Stephen Graham and his co—stars deserve awards for this.

    ===

    This week will also be remembered for the wave of Studio Ghibli-styled images that washed up on social media after the release of ChatGPT’s new image generation capabilities in their 4o model. People turned personal photos, memes, and historic images alike into ripoffs of Miyazaki’s instantly recognizable style, and I have to say I enjoyed many of them whilst simultaneously feeling uneasy about what this means.

    The new model seems to be a milestone that’s arriving a little sooner than I expected. It can render text with good enough quality and aesthetic precision. It can process a multi-step prompt such as “create a print ad for the product in this picture”, and it will write some pretty workable ad copy, re-imagine the object you’ve given it, and merge them into a single image that looks right at a glance. There may be minor imperfections, or it may fail to nail a critical detail depending on your object. But the fact that it can be completely right some of the time is startling. I’d say it’s most of the way to fucking the creative industry over, but who knows if the last mile will take a quarter, a year, or a decade to close.

    While discussing the possible outcomes of this development with some people, specifically whether this would retard the growth and success of any new visual ideas — take for example the iconic look of Studio Ghibli, or Peanuts and Snoopy — why/how could any new artist launch and evolve their style if it can be snatched away from them early on and proliferated across the web in ways they haven’t even thought of yet — I wondered aloud if the only way forward left for them will be to use AI to scale their work, to generate more variations of it themselves, and to speed it to its logical conclusion (or demise) before anyone else does.

    At this point, I remembered an abandoned “art project” of mine (if it could be called that) from a few years ago, and got very excited about enlisting ChatGPT’s help with it.

    In late 2019, just before COVID hit, I had the idea to draw a series of cute animal characters and make some products. They would be called the Fluffy Hearts Club, and the story was that they were all research animals who were having horrible tests done on them, but who banded together and escaped from the lab. So they’d all have little scars and visible reminders of humanity’s awfulness on their bodies, but they’d be extremely happy and positive in their freedom eras.

    I drew the first one with great difficulty, a rabbit with a scar on his chest, printed him on something like 50 tote bags, and gave them away to friends that Christmas. I started to draw the next one, a cat, along with some other angles of the rabbit, but eventually shelved it… owing to COVID or lack of skill, I don’t know. As you can see they are pretty rough.

    But when I realized that I could use ChatGPT to “learn” this style and concept to help me finish the rest of it, I got excited enough to plonk down $30 and upgrade my account to Plus. Ethics check: Would I have paid a human artist to do this for me? Unlikely. I’m not made of money, and it’s just a silly side project. Should I have? I can’t see how; I want to explore this on my own without another human in the mix.

    I’ve spent a little time on it so far, and it’s grasped the core idea and even brainstormed other animals and their visual signatures with me — it felt eerily like collaborating with a person, as we discussed possibilities and complimented each other along the way. It has trouble following instructions about very minute details, which it explained as a shortcoming of the way its models were trained (it leans towards cartoon conventions, which one of my notes contradicts), which one can take as proof that this is all built on the back of awful copyright violations.

    But with its help, I’ve managed to produce more versions of the rabbit and even imagined the cat in various art styles, so I’d say this has been a half success. I might use it as a foundation for tracing/drawing new ones myself, or as inspiration for different scenarios.

    I only wish I was using this renewed subscription to explore how to stay relevant in my own job domain rather than in the lane of starving artists. Yuk yuk.

    Speaking of the design field, I went back to the same college I visited last November to help give feedback on the work from a class of students doing a design thinking course taught by my former boss and mentor, and was again struck by how much of what we do and prescribe as designers, the responsible way to move in the world, is naive and vulnerable to the at-odd incentives of everyone in the AI business. They’ll throw a synthetic persona at a problem for $10 in compute before they spend a dollar on asking a real person what they need to lead a better life.

    And that brings me to Careless People, the Facebook tell-all book by Sarah Wynn-Williams that I’ve just finished reading. The one that Zuckerberg and his lawyers tried to quash before it was published. I thought I knew enough about Facebook’s bad behavior, but I was still stunned by some of her anecdotes.

    I haven’t made many rules about what kind of work I’ll do, and when I used to smoke, I believed that I could consult on work for tobacco companies because to do otherwise would be hypocrisy (I’m wiser now), but “never work for Facebook” was a promise I made maybe a decade ago. I simply do not understand or respect anyone who chooses to, and this book should be required reading for those who think they might.

    ===

    I listened to Alessia Cara’s new album Love & Hyperbole a couple of times, hoping that something would finally click, because I did want to like it. But I was left without much of an impression. I’m probably coming off R&B in general because listening to SZA’s deluxe edition of SOS on the plane home last week was quite excruciating.

    But then I put on Jessie Reyez’s new album PAID IN MEMORIES and I loved the one playthrough I’ve heard. Maybe it’s the millennial in me but there are some samples for old people in here, including the Smashing Pumpkins’ 1979. She makes it work, and the melodies are strong.

  • Week 11.25

    Week 11.25

    • On Saturday morning there was a circular rainbow across the sky, it’s a circle rainbow all the way, yeah, oh my god. Well officially it was a “sun halo”, and it seems everyone got a photo of it too.
    • It happened right as we were walking out of a new-ish brunch cafe, where I waited what must have been close to an hour for an expensive plate of scrambled eggs, some kale that was actually edible, plus sausage, mushrooms, tomatoes, and pork belly. I’ll take the heat; going for brunch was my idea, but I don’t know why everyone still does this on weekends. The place was packed and a line was still forming at 1pm.
    • I went out and met people several times this week, and on Thursday I managed to drop in on the new Maji Curry outlet at the Funan mall with Brian. I’ve mentioned them several times in the past, and they are probably the most authentic and interesting Japanese curry spot in all of Singapore, although (not to take anything away from Maji) there’s practically no competition. I hope they do so well that other brands have no choice but to enter the market or stop slouching (I’m looking at you, Coco Ichibanya).
    • As a group, I think us millennials have been brainwashed to perfection by advertising algorithms because the first thing Brian pointed out when we met was that we were both carrying the same Bellroy sling bag, albeit in different sizes and colors. I said I’d bought mine on a whim very recently because my mother-in-law was after some sort of small pouch, and for reasons I couldn’t explain, I’d recommended we take a look at Bellroy’s offerings. I couldn’t believe it when he said his in-laws were also in town and he’d bought his under the same circumstances. What the hell, man?
    • Studio Nuevo.Tokyo & Héliographe launched their long-awaited black & white film simulator app, AgBr, which stands for Silver Bromide, of course. It’s currently 50% off as a launch special (S$14.98, one-time purchase, no subscriptions), and I’d recommend it to any fan of black and white photography. The purchase gets you the app across iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and they’re promising a new film preset every month for the rest of the year. Funnily enough, I think the best way to use AgBr is to pair it with the similarly named Halide app, shooting RAW files in “Process Zero” mode. Sure, you can process a normal iPhone photo with a Fujifilm NEOPAN 400 preset, but the HDR exposure won’t look quite right.
    • I watched the new Metallica concert video that Apple TV+ put out for the Vision Pro. At 25 minutes, it’s the longest show they’ve put out so far, and I’m ready for more. Don’t make the same mistake as I did: watch it with AirPods. I used only the built-in audio pods, and while they sounded fine, I think the immersion will be even better if you turn things all the way up. They perform three songs, captured from 14 cameras, and it’s a truly new experience in this world to be right up next to each musician doing their thing on stage, in your own home. My main criticism: the crowd is quite low in the audio mix, so you don’t truly get the feeling of being there with all that energy (they could have offered two audio tracks to choose from, maybe).
    • With this, Apple has tried four immersive presentations of music on the Vision Pro: A traditional music video (The Weeknd), an intimate band rehearsal in the studio (Alicia Keys), a Concert For One where the artist is right there with you (Raye), and now a full-blown, live arena show. Next up is Bono’s full-length documentary on May 30, Stories of Surrender. I personally can’t stand the guy, but if this changes my mind, then that’s really saying something about this new format.
    • I spotted this familiar Mario statue (?) at the Courts/Nojima/Nittori electronics and homeware frankenstore on Orchard Road, in the old Heeren building. He pops up in the gaming sections of Japanese stores like Yodobashi Camera, and I saw him at least twice last month in Tokyo, so it was a surprise to see him here. It was mostly a sad reminder that our electronics retailers sell junkier crap and aren’t anywhere as fun to browse.
    • For the past couple of months, I’ve been writing these posts in Apple Notes, solely because of its integration with Apple Intelligence, which does a quick QA check at the end. However, rich text formatting in Apple Notes is quite laborious (having to select text and choose styles from a menu), and often I lose some of it anyway when pasting the text over into WordPress. It became more trouble than it was worth.
    • I’m now back to using iA Writer, my tried-and-trusted Markdown text editor of choice, where text formatting is simply done with in-line symbols so you can focus on writing. It makes much more sense on mobile devices. This is an excuse to mention Apple Intelligence, which has recently been in the news for falling behind schedule and possibly the rest of the industry. I’m not super reliant on AI to correct my writing, but it has definitely helped catch the odd typo and missing word. By right, I should be able to use it systemwide, in iA Writer and any other app on my iPhone, but the implementation is inconsistent and so the “Proofread” feature can’t walk me through the changes it makes; it just makes them and I can accept ALL the new text or not at all. This is what I would prefer we get in iOS 19: a rigorous cleaning up of bugs and rounding of corners so that what we already have works better than what’s on any other OS. If we have to wait a couple more years for truly agentic edge AI from Apple, that kinda sucks, but we’ve been here before. I remember the days of wanting a bigger screen and having to put up with the iPhone 5 and 5s for two years. 🤷‍♂️
    • TV: We finally started on the new season of Reacher now that enough episodes have come out. We also decided to pick up House on Amazon Prime Video from the beginning of season 5, since I’m pretty sure we finished four seasons back when the iPhone first came out or thereabouts. House uses a flip phone. It’s terribly formulaic but also fun, and the perfect kinda show for watching at the end of the night.
  • Week 7.25

    Week 7.25

    Rojiura Curry SAMURAI
    • 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.

    Some other photos

  • Week 3.25

    Week 3.25

    • 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”.
    • 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.
  • Week 50.24

    Week 50.24

    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.

    ===

    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.

    ===

    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.

  • Week 47.24

    Week 47.24

    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.

    ===

    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.

    ===

    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.
  • Week 46.24

    Week 46.24

    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.

    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.

    — Brandon Lee (@sangsara.bsky.social) 2024-11-15T05:26:48.235Z

    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.

    ===

    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.

  • Week 44.24

    Week 44.24

    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.