sangsara.net

Tag: Bags

  • Week 2.25

    Week 2.25

    True to early January patterns in Singapore, it’s looking gloomy, rainy, and dare I say even a little bit chilly out there (lows of 22ºC). My memory of Chinese New Year each year, though, is that it’s always intolerably sunny and hot. So unless climate change has mucked that up, things will flip in a couple of weeks.

    If you’re reading this on the web, you may notice the site sporting a refreshed design for the new year. This came out of a chat with Michael about tools for cross-posting to Bluesky and elsewhere. I said that it’s been a longstanding wish of mine to just post everything, including short “tweets”, here on WordPress and have them go out to social networks automatically. At which point I remembered that WordPress’s new annual theme was due out, and that’s what you’re looking at now: Twenty Twenty Five.

    The basic architecture is the same, but there are several improvements that I’m happy about. For one, the home page now supports showing full posts, so you don’t have to tap through to read them. You can also hide page titles on specific pages, which I used to get around with a hack. The new default font (Manrope) isn’t bad, but I wasn’t happy with the line spacing and weights they chose, so those have been customized. Wordy bullet lists are also displayed in a more pleasing manner than before, which is great for these updates.

    I moved some other components around to make more sense to me, but no one else will probably notice. I also took the opportunity to inject some classic sangsara.net yellow into the header, a callback to how this site looked 20 years ago. I literally had to go dig into my file backups to find a reference for the color code.

    I’ll probably improve the About and Archive pages when I run out of other things to do.

    ===

    Have you ever started mentally packing your bags for a trip because it was too early to physically pack, but the anxiety of wanting to sort it out was getting too strong? That’s me now, and I’ve started to decide what devices and chargers I’ll need and how to organize them, and also what bags to bring for different purposes.

    It’s at this point that I realized I’ve somehow become one of those “bag guys” — not so hardcore that I keep up with every new release from Peak or WaterField or côte&ciel, but more that I have way too many for a person who really stays in a lot.

    A couple of days ago, I started seeing online mentions and reviews of the new S$40 Uniqlo ‘Multi Pocket Shoulder Bag’ and decided that it could beat Peak Design’s 10L Everyday Sling for carrying headphones, camera, Switch, iPad + keyboard, down jacket, and a bevy of other bits on the flight over. It’s lightweight, water-resistant, and so cheap as to be disposable/replaceable if damaged. It’s also structurally unassuming, and can be used for the “everyday carry” of just a few items if needed, whereas the Peak Design bag can’t flatten down on a crowded Tokyo train even if it’s mostly empty.

    If the Uniqlo bag looks familiar, that’s because it’s a ‘dupe’ of a similar Porter bag that costs 20x more. I’m going out later today to pick one up, but can’t decide between boring black and ordinary olive. (Later: I went with black.)

    A few more travel points:

    • I signed up for a YouTrip debit card and have frankly been impressed by how well the app/service works. I used to rely on my bank’s multi-currency account + card for overseas use, but it turns out that their exchange rates are awful compared to YouTrip’s, and even Wise and Revolut’s rates. YouTrip will exchange your SGD on-the-fly as needed, or you can exchange currencies ahead of time if you like the rate. My bank requires exchanging funds ahead of time, and if you don’t have enough to cover a purchase, the entire transaction defaults to SGD (incurring high fees), even if you have enough foreign currency to cover 99% of it. What are banks even good for?
    • With this, I sadly realized I could have been using YouTrip for every online USD purchase over the past few years, instead of my credit cards which come with 2–3% foreign currency transaction fees 💸.
    • I selected Saily for my eSIM needs (discount code for $3 off: BRANDO3576). It’s a new service by NordVPN, and 20GB of data in Japan currently costs $23 USD, which I of course paid with YouTrip. Being from NordVPN, it has a good app that lets you toggle ad/malware blocking on the server side, as well as spoofing your location via their network of IPs.
    • I tried to get an updated Covid vaccine and was denied by the GP because I didn’t fall into the risk categories (e.g. over 60 years of age). This was news to me, as I thought it was available to anyone who wanted it. The Ministry of Health’s website suggests as much, but now I’m annoyed enough by the back-and-forth that I won’t get one.
    • Many years ago when I was trying to learn basic Japanese, I found some free podcasts from JapanesePod101.com, and this week was surprised to find them still around, and active on YouTube. So I’m dedicating some time over the next few weeks to watching their videos and studying up on some vocabulary which may come in useful.

    ===

    I rewatched Tenet (2020) after hearing it was recently rereleased in IMAX theaters in the US, using the Vision Pro to recreate the large-screen experience at home. It was incredible, and the film was so much better than I’d remembered it. I rated it 3.5 stars on Letterboxd before, but I’ve now upgraded that to 4.5.

    [Spoilers ahead] I read some other reviews that agreed ‘this film gets better with every viewing’, and I think it’s because you spend your first viewing trying to decode 1) what is going on, 2) how the time mechanic works, 3) what the next twist is going to be. Once those things are kind of understood, you can appreciate the craft and execution. How did they plan and stage those fight scenes, where one person is moving forward in time while the other is in reverse? And then taking that concept and applying it to driving, shootouts, and a whole bloody army? I don’t think I paid any attention to Kenneth Branagh the first time, or noticed how good Robert Pattinson really is, or the locations, or the madness of crashing a real airplane into a hangar. I was probably having a headache trying to understand catching a bullet with a gun.

  • Week 48.24

    Week 48.24

    It’s been a minute since I checked the National Gallery out, so I wasn’t sure what Peishan and I would find when we dropped by on Tuesday afternoon. Fortunately, there were some new SE Asian pieces either freshly out on rotation, or that I’d forgotten, and there was enough to see without having to shell out for the special exhibits.

    There’s plenty of time to see them yet, as they don’t refresh things very often. I looked it up online later, and some of the stuff we saw will be on display for 3–4 more years. Apparently only 10% of the total collection (stored somewhere in Jurong) can be on display at any one time, so I don’t know why they rotate so infrequently. Show me more of the stuff before I die, dammit.

    We went by because Peishan took the day off and we’d planned to have lunch nearby. It struck me that I haven’t been appreciating the privilege of my free time enough — I should be doing things like this on my own more often.

    We saw a brilliant video artwork series of Thai farmers and villagers sitting on the ground out in the fields, contemplating large Western paintings set up in front of them, casually discussing what they saw. Just saying things like “The man is sleeping soundly. He looks happy because they’ve harvested so much food”. I wanted to stand there and watch it in its hour-long entirety when it struck me that there’s nothing stopping me from coming back another day to do that. To be one of those people who has a whole hour to spend sitting in front of one painting. So maybe I will!

    ===

    My mother-in-law (who has no stomach for violence or misery) came to stay with us for a couple of days, which meant that I could only watch the family-friendly movies from my collection and MUBI watchlist. We started with Charade (1963), a classic I can’t believe I’d never seen before. Audrey Hepburn was a phenomenon — utterly faultless and impossible to look away from. With Cary Grant we’ve got our modern day version in George Clooney, but I don’t know who could ever be like Audrey.

    We also watched Futura (2021), an Italian docu-feature where young people across the country were interviewed about their hopes and dreams. To me, it only reinforced the idea of Europe in decline, and yet maybe that’s… okay? What’s so bad about living in the shadow of a greater civilization and inhabiting what’s left of their magnificent buildings. Someone’s gotta do it.

    And then a movie that has been so hyped up by everyone who’s seen it that there was little chance it would live up: Paddington (2014). Nicolette, whose cats we also visited this week (see below), was a major promoter and reckons it’s a five-star film. I gave it 3.5 but plan to watch the sequel soon—I think it’ll fare better now that my expectations are properly calibrated.

    I was left to my own questionable watchlist on Thursday and Friday, which meant seeing Festen (1998), the first official ‘Dogme 95’ film (painful in its overall ugliness); Ema (2019), a dance-centric exploration of fucked up families and urban frustration starring Gael García Bernal and Mariana Di Girolamo as two assholes who adopt a kid; and In the Fade (2017), a German revenge story with Diane Kruger avenging her son being blown to bits by modern-day Nazis.

    The absolute standout film of the week was So Long, My Son (2019), a Chinese language film by Wang Xiaoshuai with a three-hour running time. It follows two families over a period of three decades, living with tragedy and being tossed around by the rapid, true-story evolution of Chinese society. I expected the time to pass slowly but everything was handled with such authenticity and emotional power that I hardly noticed.

    On TV, we caught up on season 2 of Netflix’s Rhythm + Flow rap competition reality show, and none of the contestants are really standing out the way Flawless Real Talk and D-Smoke did in the first season. It looks like Netflix decided to cheap out and rush the audition process, basically only holding one in Atlanta whereas S1 held them in three cities. So it never feels like you’re seeing the very best talent the streets have to offer.

    The main effect of watching the show so far has been an increased desire to play Kendrick Lamar’s new GNX album on repeat. It also made look up Old Man Saxon from S1, so was delighted to find that he released a new EP and single recently.

    ===

    It was Thanksgiving week in the US, and trust me I tried to find a Black Friday deal that I wanted to spend on, but the only things I’ve bought for myself on Amazon were cheap alkaline batteries from Japan (the Verbatim brand is alive and well there!) and several boxes of Yorkshire Gold tea.

    It feels weird, spending hours online and hardly finding anything I want to buy. On Sunday we spent a few hours at the Paragon mall for some Christmas shopping and I found myself a new 6L Venture Sling by Bellroy. It was cheaper than the online Black Friday price, but only because they wanted S$16 for shipping.

    I also considered this 4L Everything Sling from Moment, but I think it’s too small to be the Goldilocks bag I need. I have Uniqlo’s round mini shoulder bag like 98% of the world, but need something between that and a laptop messenger/backpack. Just enough to bring around some combination of e-reader, Switch, camera, power bank, umbrella, JisuLife fan, and water bottle.

    The only things left might be digital game purchases that I might have time to play in December, such as Metaphor: ReFantazio, the latest masterpiece from the director of the Persona games, or Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth.

    While the Persona games are undeniable masterpieces, they’re also looooong. Sometimes it’s nice to just sit down and finish a game in one sitting, so that’s what I did with Thank Goodness You’re Here, which is published by Panic Inc. (Untitled Goose Game, Firewatch). It’s a cartoony comedic platformer set in Northern England, filled with authentic accents, dialects, and small-town imagery — what you’d expect from a British company named Coal Supper. I highly recommend it, especially if you can find it on sale during the holiday season.