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Tag: Beatles

  • Week 44.23

    Week 44.23

    I’ve been on the edge of a flu, with intermittent fatigue and headaches and a warm scratchy feeling at the back of my throat that makes me remember being ill and nauseous, but it hasn’t gone full blown. Maybe I’ve actually got the flu, but the vaccine I got a few weeks ago has inspired my immune system to resist and now my body is locked in a hundred-year war. I write this on Saturday with a full-day social test (wedding party) to attend tomorrow that will probably push me over if this doesn’t get better.

    While on the subject of health: I suppose you’re officially old when you buy yourself a blood pressure monitor. It was a conversation about strokes that got me on it, and it was a very quick impulse purchase that went from idea to research to purchase in under half an hour.

    I think this is the Omron model I got. I didn’t know they made them this small nowadays, not to mention that you can measure BP from a wrist! It connects to your phone via Bluetooth, and the Omron Connect app also syncs with the Apple Health app — which was the selling point for me. Omron’s app looks overly complicated and isn’t very pleasant to use, but it doesn’t matter since you can just overanalyze and freak out over your data more comfortably in Apple Health alongside your other health metrics.

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    The only music news of the week that mattered was the release of the final Beatles song, Now and Then. This was the third and last John Lennon demo on the tape that gave us Free as a Bird and Real Love back in 1995. The audio quality on this one wasn’t good enough for it to be finished back then, but now it’s relatively trivial to separate vocals from instruments using tools built on machine learning — one music YouTuber reviewing the song literally demonstrates it himself using an online service — and so Paul and Ringo were finally able to complete the song using guitar bits George recorded in the ’95 sessions, making it probably the last song we’ll ever get with all four Beatles on it.

    It’s a lovely song and I’m glad we’re around to enjoy this historic moment of celebration and closure. I don’t mind posthumous vault releases as long as they’re done with love, care, and good intentions, and the short film above goes to lengths to assure everyone that John would have gotten a kick out of this. Real Love is one of my all-time favorites, just for the beautiful melody in its chorus and refrain, and the existence of these three songs together are like a treasure from a parallel universe where the Beatles never broke up (a scenario that the Apple TV+ show For All Mankind tantalizingly visualizes for a moment in one episode). It’s extra heartbreaking that all three songs read to me like products of John’s regret and wish for reconciliation.

    The incredible clarity they were able to get out of the tape recording, though, makes me want new versions of Free as a Bird and Real Love, remastered with modern technology. I don’t care who complains about opportunism or George Lucas-ism, it should just be done to close the chapter off neatly and in the best possible way for fans. Get it done, money men!

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    Other bits:

    • Normally when you see too many sequels and the drawing out of stories, it comes with lowered quality, formulaic laziness, and/or the jumping of sharks, but Only Murders in the Building topped itself with the third season and now I can’t wait for a fourth. (Spoiler) I didn’t expect them to really go down the musical route with proper abandon, but they did and that bloody Pickwick Triplets patter song was stuck in my head for days. And they only got bloody Meryl Streep to be part of it, Christ.
    • Okay, but you know what IS a scummy money grab? The Backbone controller company pushing their old designed-for-Android USB-C models at the launch of the new iPhone last month, telling early adopters to step right up and get them (and then messing up the release so many of us received ones without the iPhone-supporting firmware), KNOWING FULL WELL they had a 2nd-generation model waiting in the wings that would support the new iPhones even better! Old inventory cleared at full price, the new model then quietly dropped, with redesigned dimensions that mean the camera bump no longer presses up against the chassis, bending it, and even supports being used with a case on. I was a big supporter of their work, but no longer. They’ve apparently been deleting critical posts from their subreddit, if you can believe such foolishness.
    • Three months ago I switched mobile telcos from Circles to M1, lured by a bigger data package for the same price. Shortly after that, M1 migrated many users to new plans (it was not a very smooth process either, fraught with confusion and poor communications), and sort of reneged on a basic tenet of my “contract” (technically it’s a contract-free plan): once free, 5G would now be a paid add-on after six months. Fudge that, I said, and now I’m back with Circles for (yet again) even more data and a lower monthly price to boot. The porting process was also flawless compared to my experience moving to M1.

    While looking for the above link to my own recent post, I chanced upon older entries talking about local telcos and got sucked into reading notes from my younger self. It’s one of the greatest joys of keeping a blog, and yet I rarely take the time to. I’ll post a few links now.

    • As the iPhone and Android wars heated up, I asked in 2015 what telcos could possibly be thinking by advertising Xiaomi devices alongside iPhones in their weekly newspaper advertising spreads. I said they were legitimizing cheaper Chinese devices that customers could easily buy through other retail channels for a couple hundred bucks, which would come back around to hurt telcos by dispelling the idea that one should sign a two-year contract (with high margins baked in) to get a good phone. I think I was right? Who gets a phone with a contract these days?
    • Back in 2006, I noted the opening of the Fifth Avenue Apple Store in New York and called it the most beautiful storefront I’d ever seen and wanted to visit someday — it would be 10 years before I did. And then there was this post from 2017 when Singapore finally got our first Apple Store.
    • Reader, I was even there when the fresh and ultra-luxe ION Orchard mall opened its doors in July 2009 — a fact that seems mindboggling today; hasn’t that building been there forever? At the recent team barbecue at a colleague’s condo overlooking Orchard Road, we were discussing some of the visible buildings and I discovered that our youngest team members are so young they don’t remember how the site of ION Orchard used to be a grassy mound of park-like open space. They were rightfully incensed when told that it used to be a popular picnic spot for Singapore’s domestic helpers until ION’s construction drove them away.
    • That just reminded me of the famous murder case where a bag of body parts was found dumped near that park.
    • In a 2016 post, I said that the future of gaming looked like cloud saves, cross-platform compatibility, and game designs that allowed you to play for both hours on a console or minutes on mobile. Back then, my signal was universal binary games on Apple TV that also ran on your iPhone. In 2019, Apple Arcade launched and that model was a core requirement for developers: all games had to support Mac, Apple TV, and iOS. And this week, Resident Evil Village launched for iPhone 15 Pro, as well as Macs and iPads with M1 chips or newer, the first in a new wave of console-quality titles you can both play at home and on-the-go. I think it’s a direct threat to whatever the Switch’s successor will offer, but the picture won’t be complete for a few more years.
    • Reading my posts from the year of living well (on sabbatical) is so bittersweet. On one hand, I was a bum reading books, watching films, and drawing all day. On the other, it was not unfulfilling? The little bit at the end of this weekly update from Jan 2022 reminded me how great a game Disco Elysium was and that I should replay it someday soon.

    (This week’s featured image was created by DALL•E from the idea of “The Beatles Resurrections”)

  • Week 49.21

    — It felt like a long week. Part of that might be related to binging the eight-hour entirety of The Beatles: Get Back in a matter of days. And then consuming more videos and articles to fill in the blanks. If you haven’t yet heard the yelps of appreciation for it online, it’s Peter Jackson’s four-year attempt at editing together a never-before-seen side of the band’s final album coming together, down from 60 hours of footage and 150 hours of audio. At the lowest level of why it works, watching talented people create something as ephemeral as pop music through messy collaboration is irresistible.

    I won’t repeat too much of what’s already been said, except that it’s given me an even greater appreciation of them all, Paul in particular. When I look at him, I think about two things: one, he looks like my friend Christian when he had a beard, and two, it’s so hard to mentally connect the guy on screen (just 26 years old!) with the older Paul that I’ve always seen. I don’t know his solo material as well, but it’s probably safe to say he was at his best when playing off the boys. His enthusiasm for them giving it a proper go again suggests he knew it too at some level.

    So my listening shelf now has on it:

    — After two months of ADD-ed attempts to finish David Mitchell’s Number9dream, I finally did it. It’s a great book, but every time I tried I would get distracted by something else after a couple of pages. It led me to think that any time in the future I find myself stuck on a hazy and challenging book, I should simultaneously read something dead straight on the side, non-fiction like, just to keep the habit regular. But maybe I’m just coming out the end of a no-reading funk, the kind I seem to encounter every year.

    Afterwards, I went for something totally different, Ben Mezrich’s follow-up to The Accidental Billionaires (which turned into the The Social Network film), titled Bitcoin Billionaires. I usually detest books that try to tell true stories narratively, pretending to know every character’s thoughts at critical moments, and boy does this one do that with a huge dollop of cheese on top. But… it’s an interesting story at its core, about how the Winklevoss twins got over losing to Zuckerberg and successfully invested in their next act. So I managed to read the whole thing in a day.

    That was followed by My Korean Deli: Risking It All For A Convenience Store, which has been on my list for years because I just like convenience stores and stories set in them. Except this one isn’t really a Korean deli at all, although the author’s wife’s family is Korean. It’s just a dilapidated American corner store in Brooklyn, there are several tonal issues like borderline racism and lame jokes, and it’s quite whiny. The image of the American convenience store just depressed the hell out of me but I finished it anyway.

    — I’d like to keep the book streak going, but I’ve played next to no video games lately. The only ones I’ve touched are two beautiful but ultimately shallow and unfun mobile gacha games, Figure Fantasy and Blue Archive. The former has a great idea: some people like to collect figurines, why not turn that into an AR game? They even made it look like several million dollars, but didn’t spend enough on the awful translation, so that was deleted quickly. The latter has a great English translation, but there was nothing in the core game (auto squad combat) to keep me, so that’s gone too.

    — The release of Misery Men NFTs continues on OpenSea, and I’m still enjoying the somewhat meditative experience of drawing and coloring them in my spare time.

    — Our Christmas tree arrived and was decorated after sitting naked and neglected for a few days. It’s a little short on the usual pine scent, despite being very green and flourishing, so either we’ve got the Covid or the trees have mutated as well.

    — Covid numbers have been falling; we actually had a couple of days with cases under 1,000, which doesn’t sound like a huge achievement but can you believe it’s been two months since that happened? In the meantime, we’re just waiting on more Omicron deets like everyone else. Nevertheless, I went out a couple of times this week, either to drink Guinness or coffee.

    On Friday I saw Ci’en, Peishan, and James at a cafe/restaurant that seems to be geared towards startups and remote workers. Just groups of four to five young people on long benches and round tables, hammering things out on PC laptops (weird) and playing mobile games on their breaks while ordering coffee and snacks. I sat there for six whole hours and everyone in my vicinity was there longer. Not a bad place to go hang out and work with your team, but I wonder how they turn a profit.