sangsara.net

Tag: Books

  • Week 36.22

    Further COVID measures were lifted here this week: masks are no longer required indoors with the exception of medical facilities and public transport. I’m not sure this is entirely a good idea, but The Rest of the World apparently demands it so we’ll have to see what happens now.

    Coincidentally, but so quickly that it can’t be related to the above, someone from work tested positive the day after they were at the office with a bunch of other people (I was home that day). That understandably got some worried and we made plans to work remotely for the rest of the week.

    I was meant to meet Rob one final time before he went home to the UK, but then his whole family came down with something and we had to cancel. Thankfully, not Covid. Note to self: get a flu shot soon.

    ===

    Kim left on Sunday for a work trip, which gave me time to try out Ooblets, a cozy new indie game on the Switch which has you moving to start a new life on an island called Oob (definite Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing influences here), but throws in cute creatures (the titular Ooblets), card-based dance battles, and a lovely low-poly pastel style that recalls Untitled Goose Game. So far so fun; it’s very light hearted and the busywork doesn’t feel like a chore yet.

    The introductory price of $20 (down from $30) and their very nice FAQ sealed the deal for me:

    Q. Will Ooblets be a phone app or free to play?
    No, it’s just a normal game you buy with money, like you might buy a vacuum cleaner or a kebab

    Can I submit ooblet designs for you to use in the game?
    Unfortunately we can’t use any designs you send in due to intellectual property stuff we don’t really understand.

    I also started playing Wolfenstein: The New Colossus which I also got on sale, and boy are the Switch and its Pro Controller not ideal for FPS games. It’s a quality production underneath, if overly violent and depressing, but the low detail and sluggish response time simulates having cataracts and about 30 extra years of age. When I found a YouTube clip recorded from the PC version, the quality difference was shocking.

    ===

    The reading slump is over! I returned to Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves, which I started back in May (over three months ago!!) and made some very enjoyable progress. I’m now about halfway through and at the end of Act 2, where the book’s title is finally explained. Since I’ll have quite a bit of alone time next week, I hope to keep going and maybe catch up on my annual reading challenge. Stephenson’s books should really count as three each, at least.

    ===

    I minted my first artwork from Art Blocks in quite some time: The Inner World by Dominikus appeals to the part of me that likes glitchy abstract pieces, especially with the pseudo-3D shading that appears in roughly of these. I might be mostly alone in my appreciation though, as only 88 out of 400 have found owners so far.

    The Inner World #44

    ===

    My MidJourney use this week was limited to playing with their new photorealism-centric beta model (–testp). I generated a ton of portrait photos trying to make someone who looked like me, with no success, but the improvements are stunning. Where we used to be afraid of how faces would ruin an otherwise beautiful image — almost all of them were distorted and unnatural — they are now really coherent.

  • Week 35.22

    I met up with Rob again to talk side projects, debate the existence of meaningful work, and see some free art at the National Gallery. The children’s biennale was on and offered the most impressive sight of the entire visit, a massive work called Head/Home by Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan.

    It’s a sprawling installation pieced together from cardboard houses and elements, many customized and signed by visiting children. There’s also an online component on the above-linked site, where you can pick a space to “move into”. I was immediately struck by its resemblance to the Bidonville NFT project I bought into a few weeks ago; the drab uniformity of the cardboard and the haphazard placement of everything atop everything else recalls the appearance of a slum, but like in Bidonville, it’s presented with childlike wonder instead of judgment.

    In the pursuit of more creative escapes, Rob’s also committed to blogging again, supposedly inspired by this weekly update. He’s put out a banger of a post already. We also started a game of doodle/caption tennis, where he draws something and I write the caption, with neither of us knowing what the other is doing. So far we’re four for four, and the combinations have made a sort of sense! Might start a blog or an account somewhere to put them if this exercise has legs.

    Otherwise it’s been a somewhat physically exhausting week: my injured legs have made getting around more tedious and painful than normal; good sleep has eluded me; I’ve had a higher-than-acceptable number of frustrating “conversations”; my introvert’s social savings account went into overdraft with the number of people I’ve met, talked to, had dinner with; and the weekend has not felt very restful at all.

    ===

    • I played zero video games but managed to read a fair bit more of Seveneves. I may yet finish it this year.
    • We watched Five Days At Memorial, the new Apple TV+ series set in a hospital during Hurricane Katrina, and it’s one of those stories you can’t believe took place in recent history. Not only for the scale of the tragedy and how comparatively little we (me, anyway) remember of it, but the failure of government to prepare for something they should have known about from past experiences? Scratch that. It’s not surprising at all.
    • There’s a bit where someone says, “this is supposed to happen in third-world countries, not here”, and it just made me wanna go “oh, honey. I’ve got news for you…” at the TV.
    • I came up with the name Man-Sized Vase for a band I might like to be in one day. Shortly after that, I saw a man-sized vase on the Raffles Hotel’s grounds.
    • MidJourney briefly enabled a new beta model, for like a day, which made all outputs more realistic. It was reportedly a combination of their engine with the newly open-sourced Stable Diffusion model. Before they closed it down for “improvements”, I managed to make this masterpiece of a golden retriever drooling an entire river in the Amazon rainforest.

  • Week 31.22

    I opened last week’s update wishing for an Apple Music playlist that recreates detective Harry Bosch’s jazz music collection for those of us who’re okay with digital in place of vinyl. Well I’ve found one: BOSCH JAZZ by Bobby T. It’s 111 songs (nearly 12 hours), lovingly put together by an obvious fan — you know an amateur playlist is going to be good when they’ve bothered to make their own cover art.

    There’s so much new music out, I’m going to need a commute again to get through it all. I’M KIDDING! I think I’d rather be unemployed. But Ryan Adams seems back to his old ways, just musically, one would hope, releasing a third album called FM available on his site now and on streaming soon. If you count Romeo & Juliet as a double album, then he’s put out four already this year. Also, King Princess with Hold On Baby, which I’ve heard through once and wasn’t entirely satisfied by. The first half of DOMi and JD BECK’s NOT TiGHT on Anderson .Paak’s new label, though, sounds amazing and entirely tight. Plus there’s new Perfume, Maggie Rogers, and Billie Eilish…

    I saw somewhere recently that the use of ellipses, as in the punctuation mark above, is a boomer (not really, but just everyone who isn’t young) thing. It’s made me very self conscious lately.

    ===

    Wednesday was my day off which I spent playing games and drone flying with my dad in a very pleasant return to the sabbatical era.

    https://twitter.com/bookaholic134/status/1552706287003209728

    It never occurred to me 1) to call them reading slumps, but it’s a perfect name for this state of being all read out after going through too many books too fast; which happens to me annually, or 2) that it also happens to other people. I read the first third of Seveneves (enjoyed it fine) and then suddenly left it alone for weeks. No progress this week either.

    Instead, I picked up Life Is Strange: True Colors for the Nintendo Switch on sale, having enjoyed the first series many years ago. True Colors is still episodically arranged, but released as a single installment. I’m about halfway through, and would recommend it as a light gaming experience (no skill required) with good writing and some actual emotional weight. It features an inclusion and diversity situation that seems unrealistic for the small town it’s set in (you play a Chinese American girl and get to determine her sexual orientation, you’re surrounded by people of color, mental health issues are discussed), but I love that they’re simply showing and not telling. Bear in mind the game looks a decade old on the Switch, so just get it on your platform of choice. I prioritized portability and a lower price.

    End of Sunday update: I’ve just about finished the main game now. It felt shorter than I expected, but was still about 10 hours? I would have enjoyed a more epic and twisty mystery, but the point seems to be soaking in the quiet small town moments, music, and interactions with new friends. And feeling depressed. There are a few sucker punches in here.

    Have also started on a new mobile gacha game, ALICE Fiction by Wonderplanet. Years ago, this company released another title that borrowed the aesthetic and some of the narrative set up of Mamoru Hosoda’s Summer Wars, recently mentioned here as one of my favorite anime films. Sadly, while they had the idea then, the execution in Crash Fever did not pay off. This time, they seem to have brought a much bigger budget and many more influences. The result is a more generic but probably quite crowd-pleasing anime-ish puzzle game. While there’s the old tiresome squad battle thing going on, it’s underpinned by a color-matching game mechanic that I don’t mind at all. In fact, this linear gem conveyor belt thing is definitely familiar. I may have encountered it before in some game on the Xbox360. Anyway, it looks great and is worth a look if you’re into any of this.

    It’s worth mentioning that ALICE Fiction’s conceit, seen in the second App Store screenshot, is that it’s set in the metaverse. Not new, we’ve had this for ages, e.g. Sword Art Online and its many game adaptations. But I’ve been seeing an increase in mediocre open-world games that bill themselves as a/the metaverse, for obvious marketing and investor-attracting reasons. I expect this trend to accelerate, with hundreds of companies willing some faux-metaverse into existence, creating extreme confusion as to what it really means, so that by the time we actually have one it will (thankfully) be referred to as something else entirely.

    ===

    Looking for a new show on Amazon Prime Video, we found Chloe, a co-production with the BBC with a premise that sounds like you’d struggle to get with it, but by god does it work somehow. In part thanks to Erin Doherty’s shapeshifting performance of a pathological shapeshifter, and in part due to deft direction that creates effective suspense. It’s not something to watch directly before trying to sleep.

    ===

    Midjourney upgraded their algorithms and the new V3 system creates even more impressive images than before. I’ve been playing with creating food photos lately, trying to make unlikely pairings such as Spam slices sprinkled with 24K gold flakes. Also a series on Conscientious Consumption, where you are bludgeoned over the head with symbols of the environmental and moral costs of what you’re eating.

    Midjourney v2: color drawing of Asian female superhero
    Midjourney v3’s interpretation of the same prompt
    V3 does a great job with details and coherence in this magical steampunk library
    The same prompt with a Studio Ghibli style modifier
    Default quality, prompt involves a futuristic city in the desert with greenery
    Using the new Quality setting to increase GPU time by 5x
    Future travel agency booth, using teleportation
    Teleportals on a larger scale
    Ramen burger, professional food photography prompt
    Steak and cotton candy
    A sorbet shaped like a massive diamond
    An amuse bouche resembling AirPods
    Conscientious Consumption 1: Fried chicken and feather
    CC2: Dairy ice cream on terroir signifying the acres of grass utilized to produce it

    Oh, I’ve also been using the VSCO app’s fairly new Dodge & Burn brush feature and loving it. Fairly mad that in this day and age of touchscreens, all the other popular photo editing apps don’t let you just reach out and light pixels. Instead, we have radial/linear masks in Darkroom, and other clunky controls. VSCO has been flirting with the bottom of the barrel lately (Hipstamatic firmly owning said bottom), but the addition of this one classic tool has helped its chances of survival significantly.

    Just putting this here to say I love the Ricoh GR III
  • An idle year in review

    An idle year in review

    Before heading back into the working world tomorrow, I took some time today to review the past year of these weekly blog posts. You don’t realize how long it’s really been until you review all the news events (daily Covid numbers jumped from two digits to four) and things you did. It’s probably not a good idea to question whether they were worth doing in the first place. Ah what the hell, let’s do it.

    Here are some ironic bits I pulled out, because hindsight:

    I’ve always envied people who find the hobbies/obsessions just for them (damage to finances and relationships aside). I’ve never met a game I loved so much that I would spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on buying its in-app purchases. Or shoes, bicycles, etc. I know people who do, though. They seem to buy almost thoughtlessly and without regret. [Week 26.21]

    That was me wishing I had a hobby I liked enough to spend on it without thinking. Not long after writing that, I bought my first NFT. Over the next few months, I would fall out of love with the idea, and then back again. At present, there are days when I spend hours browsing interesting new releases and have the urge to just catch ‘em all. I don’t even know if it’s rational, if these artworks are real, or if this web3 mode of acquisition is legit, the way it might verifiably be in the real world. I justify it by saying this intersects with my work and my interests, but the simple truth is I’ve found my version of sneaker collecting. Be careful what you wish for.

    Rather than continue reading Firebreak this week, I looked into a few topics I’ve been feeling ignorant of: what’s going on with social tokens? What do people mean exactly when they say “metaverse”, since they can’t literally imagine it’s Snow Crash, (insert Princess Amidala face) right? [Week 33.21]

    A little while later, the metaverse hype train really took off (or derailed, depending on your POV) with Facebook’s rebranding to Meta, and every other company having some interest in exploring the space. Sadly, it seems that some people really do want life to be like in Snow Crash.

    Prompted by a friend’s reports of how well their investments in the Luna token were doing, I looked into the Terra ecosystem out of Korea and was impressed by its vision — insomuch as someone with little background in economics can certify a financial flywheel logical and brilliant. I don’t know what I don’t know, but it sure looks good to me. [Week 34.21]

    Narrator: Yup, he was indeed unqualified to certify any financial flywheels.

    This tweet helped me to see that it does take longer than you’d think to disconnect from work/overwork. I thought I’d gotten to a good place in just a couple of weeks, but looking back, I’ve been giving myself a hard time about not being productive enough, not doing enough each week to learn new things, or start new hobbies, or have enough fun — and all of that is a psychological holdover from the rhythms of work/overwork. [Week 37.21]

    I’m not ready yet to sit down and properly reflect on the entire period, what I learnt and how/if it’s changed me, but the short answer I’ve been giving people along the way is based on the above. For me at least, it’s impossible to take time off and just disconnect without going through several loops of trying to relax, trying to make productive use of the time, and feeling upset that I suck at taking time off.

    The first half was more deliberately used: I planned things, I met up with people, I took stock at the end of every day to ask what I could have done instead. Fooling around with the Misery Men project was probably healthy; a way to feel like I was making something without the usual worry of whether it mattered.

    Emotionally, the volatility probably went down in the second half — I wasn’t worried too much about how the time was used because it felt like there so much of it; maybe similar to how rich people don’t think too hard about their daily expenses. At the start of this sabbatical, one of the ways I phrased my objective was “to find boredom”, by which I meant total leisure satiation. It’s not possible, of course, just an ideal, because I could goof off forever. My guess is that it was only in the final third of the year that I started to live in the right mental neighborhood. I don’t feel completely renewed and energized or anything like that, but I take the emergence of my Subconscious Heirlooms project last week as a good sign. A year ago, I would not have suddenly found the will and courage to dash off 39 drawings in a week and put them up in public to be laughed at.

    In terms of all the media activity I recorded, it looks like I watched a hell of a lot of TV, mostly disposable Netflix crap. Could have done with less of that. I spent enough time playing games, but still failed to get around to Yakuza Kiwami 2, Yakuza: Like A Dragon, Lost Judgment, Astral Chain, Unpacking, Paradise Killer, A.I. The Somnium Files, VA-11 Hall-A, and a couple more still! I didn’t read as many books as I’d have liked, and that’s a bigger regret than not clearing the games backlog. Either I get better at squeezing gaming and reading into the rhythms of daily working life, or I’ll have to take another year off soon.

    Writing anything down, whether in my journal, to friends, or in these blog posts, never felt like a waste.

  • Week 21.22

    The week started with a public holiday (Vesak Day), which I spent having coffee with Peishan and Cien at the National Gallery. We ended up not having any time to see the exhibits. Mid-week, I joined Howard and Hunn at a random crypto meetup in town that one of them had heard about. We didn’t last long there, but ended up drinking at a cocktail bar in Golden Mile Complex for the next four or five hours. I will probably develop Covid in the coming week, let’s see.

    Out of nowhere, I decided to start making a new series of abstract paintings/drawings/doodles that I’m calling Subconscious Heirlooms. Drawing them has somehow been very satisfying, and they’ve consumed most of my free time in the past few days.

    So far I’ve done 30, some more awful than others, but I want to keep them in series where you can see progression in the process. Taken together with last week’s greater-than-zero creative output, I can only interpret this productive surge as my right brain’s last gasp of protest before returning to regular employment, a “please, can’t you see what we could be?” Hail Mary plea for me to continue being unemployed and free each afternoon to create whatever nonsense strikes me. Well, if you want to support this mission, you can buy one of these as an NFT on OpenSea! Yeah, I didn’t think so.

    Here’s the official description/museum wall text:

    Endless images lie dormant in our minds — generational lessons encoded in DNA; disassembled dreams; reflections on a lifetime of inaccessible memories. Subconscious Heirlooms is one attempt to surface a small collection of primal forms and concretize them for future generations.

    Recursively inspired by automatic drawing and generative art, each piece is made without intentional direction, using a small but continually expanding vocabulary of elements that occur, repeat, and evolve freely over the creative process. Some may cause you to feel a sudden and inexplicable affinity, affirming the connectedness of our lived experiences.

    #1
    #2
    #7
    #16
    #18
    #19
    #21
    #23
    #26
    Here are 9 that I happen to prefer at this moment. Might put the rest up later.

    Media activity:

    • Finished reading Daniel Suarez’s Delta-V, and just so you know going in, it’s going to be a series. It also feels like it was written for a film or TV adaptation, which is a feeling I also have with Blake Crouch’s books. It’s fine, anyway, and is a bit of The Martian meets Armageddon with a little more paranoid drama. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but the asshole billionaire role would definitely be best played by Jared Leto.
    • Just for maximum memory cross-talk, I immediately started on Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves next, which is also set in space, with another version of the ISS and another band of doomed adventurers, and I’m already getting a little mixed up.
    • I decided to see the Uncharted film, having played all the games. The casting is all wrong for sure, but once you get past that… it’s still a pretty bad movie. The first half works quite well, following the infallible Indiana Tomb Raider formula of ancient clues, exotic locales, and parkour. But by the end, I was on my phone and rolling my eyes at improbable set pieces that would look ridiculous even in a game.
    • How do you follow that? I asked my Instagram followers to vote between Morbius (Jared Leto in a role nobody asked for) and Memory (Liam Neeson in a role he’s done 1000x before). People are sickos, and 100% of people voted for Morbius, so I put it on… and it wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d expected. There’s a good film in there somewhere underneath, most of it probably on the cutting room floor (isn’t that a weird saying to still be using? Should we say “still in the Final Cut project library?”). I’ll venture that it’s a better film than Uncharted, but being able to waste time on both of them was a luxury.
  • Week 20.22

    Week 20.22

    A week of calamity for many participants in le monde de la cryptographie, as the Terra project unraveled at shocking speed, its two main tokens shedding over 99% of their value in a couple of days. I’m told that other tokens and the entire stock market also had a bad time, but I hardly noticed tbh. Everything looks good next to a raging gasoline fire.

    I try not to mention (and certainly not encourage) any proper crypto stuff here, apart from talking about the technology or artistic merits of some NFTs, and this is why. Many people lost life-changing amounts of money this week, and some apparently took their own lives too. A couple of friends checked in to ask if I was affected and if I was okay, which was honestly sweet and appreciated. In short, I am/will be okay. I would be even better had I followed some basic risk management rules I knew well enough but chose to ignore. 🤷‍♂️

    While on the subject… I discovered a bunch of new enefftee art of merit, that made me feel the urge to buy despite the screams, cries of doom, it’s-all-overs, etc. all around. Vice Motherboard reported that Neal Stephenson himself has purchased his first NFTs, which felt like a momentous occasion in SF history. He’s made interesting picks, with the series I liked best being Neophyte MMXXII by Sterling Crispin, which renders living simulations of plant growth in each artwork (disclosure: one now resides in my wallet too). I decided to send the VR-themed Misery Man #61 as an unsolicited gift to his address. As much as I’m fond of that one, if anyone deserves it, it’s surely the man who coined the term “metaverse”.

    I also found myself attracted to Memories of Qilin by Emily Xie, which are generative paintings inspired by East Asian art. Both of the above are collections curated by Artblocks, the same platform that launched Fidenza by Tyler Hobbs, and exploring their site and Discord led me to Screens by Thomas Lin Pedersen, abstract pieces based on simulating screen printing techniques and featuring beautiful structural planes with swirling geometry that collide to suggest insane urban architecture and spatial depth. Ancient Courses of Fictional Rivers by Robert Hodgin visualizes the winding paths of rivers over time, and then the growth of human settlements on their banks. It’s beautiful art and a wonderful concept. Finally, Edifice by Ben Kovach also plays with the grids of imaginary cityscapes, generating the facades of impossible buildings. If I were rich I’d collect heaps of these.

    Heyo three new creative outlets emerged!

    1) Before Covid, I received a DJI Mavic Mini drone as a gift and then never got a chance to fly it properly. Those were the days when going outdoors unnecessarily was prohibited, and then even after the rules were relaxed, I was lazy and it didn’t happen (an example of how much time has passed: DJI just announced the Mavic Mini THREE). It’s been on my to-do list to start flying it during this time off, so that finally happened. My dad’s been into remote-controlled things his whole life, so he had the experience and interest in doing it with me. It was a fun afternoon, and I got some good photos from its pretty capable camera.

    When your size is not size.

    2) The Kabukicho webcam mentioned in previous weeks is still my background video feed of choice. I’ve decided to embark on a new project where I blow up this live scene onto a wall with my projector, watch it intently, and take photos (not screenshots) of interesting things happening. It’s street photography, but remotely!

    Sure I’m restricted to just one angle, but for all purposes it’s a covid-era adaptation to not actually being there to document life on a seedy rat-infested street in a red-light district. And without the threat of being beaten up, as a bonus! The results are filtered through the mediation of space, codecs, optics, light; they look more pixel art than photos. But still street photography, one could argue! Sometimes you’ll see shadows cast by my body or items in my environment. It has layers of removal, but still ultimately real life in Shinjuku. I’ve just started, but already I’ve got a lady flashing her underwear to passers by, a man peeing against a wall after midnight, police stopping an altercation, people mugging for the camera…

    3) It’s been five years since Rob and I had the opportunity to work together on something, but now something is coming together over the next few weeks, which should be fun. Albeit remotely and in two different time zones. I hope to be able to share more when it’s over.

    Media activity:

    • I’ve been reading Delta–V, the latest book by Daniel Suarez. It’s set in the near future, and concerns the first deep space expedition by a private company. They want to send a team of extreme adventurers and a few physically impressive scientists up to mine an asteroid for valuable materials, because it makes more sense to get building blocks from space to build stations and ships in space, than to fly it all up there from Earth. It’s good fun so far.
    • Big week for new music. I’m still making time to hear it all; certainly too early to share any proper thoughts.
    • The new Kendrick Lamar album, Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers. Such a huge deal, the entire top of the Browse tab in Apple Music was taken over by carousels and featured tiles for this one album.
    • Ryan Adams is back with a new double album, just weeks after releasing Chris, which was dedicated to his late brother. Now it’s time for Romeo & Juliet, billed as a summer heartbreak album of sorts, and much more accessible.
    • Them Yorke and Jonny Greenwood have a new band with another guy, but Pitchfork says it’s pretty much like a new Radiohead album, and that’s very high praise. The Smile — A Light for Attracting Attention.
    • Florence + the Machine — Dance Fever. Not sure what that title is about.
    • Oh No — OFFAIR: Dr. No’s Lost Beach. I haven’t heard an Oh No album in years, but good stuff.
    • Röyksopp — Profound Mysteries. I’ve never been a fan, but I played this once through and I’m keeping it in the library.
    • Finally, Jens Lekman has rereleased two of his seminal albums from the past under new names, with some tracks rearranged and rerecorded, apparently because they are meant to be living works and changing over time. He’s serious about this, because the previous versions are no longer for sale or streaming! I recommend listening to The Cherry Trees Are Still In Blossom (formerly known as Oh You’re So Silent, Jens), because it has more of the songs I love, including Black Cab, of which there are two new versions here. The other album is The Linden Trees Are Still In Blossom (formerly known as Night Falls Over Kortedala).
    I actually saw Jens up close when he performed in Singapore wayyy back in Jan 2007!

  • Week 19.22

    This was the first week in probably the entire time I’ve been doing these weekly updates (maybe a year and a half) where Monday came and I forgot to sit down and start drafting.

    My sabbatical from work is coming to an end, and it’s quite likely that it’ll be hard to continue doing this in its current form once I have meetings to attend and less head space for frivolous introspection and mental health protection — what a concept! Ha ha! I will probably gather bullet points over the course of the week instead, or just write less, which may be a blessing anyway.

    The wife-away season of 2022 has begun, as I said on my Instagram stories, but it’s too soon to say if I won’t die of malnutrition, lack of attention, insect infestation, sudden tumbles down the stairs, strokes, or other incidents — with no one to realize my demise until a week later, when one of these blog updates fails to materialize (and now I’ve gone ahead and pre-empted that they may be late; what a genius I am).

    ===

    What have I been doing? I started playing Spiritfarer on the Switch. It’s beautiful, it’s chill, I think it will break my heart eventually.

    I met up with my closest cousin after probably four years without a proper conversation. Some of the blame must be shouldered by the times we live in, but some of it is mine as usual.

    I went to an NFT meetup the other day on Howard’s invitation. It wasn’t nearly as awkward as I expected. I met a couple of good people who were clearly experts in their fields; the time investment and esoteric ecosystem knowledge just radiated from them. I also met some explorers like myself, who know enough from dabbling but are still bewildered by glimpses of the outer lands. Perhaps we don’t need to go there at all. But good to know there are guides.

    I’ve been talking to the team behind a project I find fascinating and artistically sound. We might do something together. It feels right and effortless to be involved in something like this on my own time. Perhaps that’s how getting back to work will work out.

    Sigrid has a new album out this week. I need to find the time to hear it.

    I finished reading A Gentleman In Moscow, and found out that the television adaptation is being made for Apple TV+. That’s restored my faith in the project, because I know they won’t shortchange it. It’s funny how ATV launched with the promise of quality over quantity, and how we felt that wasn’t a real positioning. Fast forward to 2022 and the imminent collapse of Netflix subscriber numbers thanks to a perceivable decline in content quality, and Apple’s seal of assurance is suddenly valuable. Some of the best series I’ve seen this year have been on their service: WeCrashed, Slow Horses, Severance. Anyway, fantastic book, not schmaltzy and populist at all. 4.5 stars, I’d say.

    See you all next week.

  • Week 18.22

    Week 18.22

    • The high point of the week was probably a celebratory meal at a fancy sushi place on Monday, an appointment that had to be booked two months in advance. I’d like to say the iPhone’s camera performed well on this occasion, but it did not. Specifically, when using the 3x telephoto in low light conditions and the phone decides to shoot with the wide lens and crop in instead, which happened every time I thought I was using the 3x lens. You might not notice it on screen at the time, but these are usually unusable when looking at them later. I still maintain 2x on previous iPhones was a more useful focal length, and when it did happen, a 2x digital zoom is nowhere as bad as a 3x one. So this makes third-party camera apps like Halide an unfortunate requirement rather than a nice-to-have affectation for “pros”.
    • Finished reading Grace D. Li’s Portrait Of A Thief which I’d happily give 4 stars for the overall experience: a fun heist caper sprinkled with Chinese-American YA identity crises and politics. The entire cast is Asian; there’s not even a token white friend or anyone else of color that I can remember. That, along with the mechanics of the sophisticated art thievery by confessed amateurs, seems unreal? But perhaps it does feel that way sometimes being Chinese in America, I dunno. There’s apparently a Netflix series being developed around this, if it wasn’t canceled in the last few weeks along with so many other projects, and I’d love to see it at the very least match the production quality of One Of Us Is Lying, but of course To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before levels are welcome.
    • Am now on A Gentleman In Moscow by Amor Towles, an author I know nothing about, but the book came highly recommended at some point I no longer remember. Was afraid it would be the Paulo Coelho sort of 5-star book, but so far it’s very enjoyable. Looking it up on Wikipedia, it seems there is also a TV adaptation being developed, to star Kenneth Branagh. I can see this role being completely appropriate if he can resist hamming it up.
    • While reading in bed late at night, it’s become a habit to put up webcams on the projector. And my absolute favorite now is this street-level livecam in Shinjuku that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. It has ambient sounds unlike most cams, so it’s great for having on in the background like a window to another place. I feel like I know this area intimately now, the way people leave bars around 11pm to get the last trains, how the touts stand in the middle of the lane to pull people into their establishments, and (especially) the movements of the rats outside the ramen shop. It’s a Night Trap-like delight whenever I look up and catch a rat scurrying out at the exact time a woman walks by, triggering a scream.
    • I also saw an altercation on camera one time, but partially obscured by a passing vehicle so I’ll never know how exactly it started. A man seemed to bump into a nerdy looking guy on a bike, but whether he started it or not, the nerd eventually became the aggressor and shoved the guy to the ground with such force he rolled over backwards. It was raining and he practically landed in a puddle. Then the nerd stood over him and menacingly grabbed his collar and said a few words before going off and cycling away. The victim just sheepishly got up and straightened his jacket, picked his phone off the ground where it landed a few feet away, and walked off. Plenty of people nearby, nobody intervened or wanted to stare.
    • Vanillaware pulled off a pretty ambitious story with 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim. My playthrough clocked in about 24 hours, but I just missed 100% completion because of some bonus objectives that weren’t met. I don’t want to think about it too much more, but perhaps there was just one too many twists for the story’s good. If anything needs a multimillion-dollar TV adaptation, this absurd mashup of The Matrix, Cloud Atlas, The Fountain, Pacific Rim, Evangelion, The Island, Battlestar Galactica, The Terminator, and maybe a dozen more SF classics, is begging for it.