sangsara.net

Tag: Books

  • Week 15.24

    Week 15.24

    It was Hari Raya Puasa here on Wednesday, which, along with the city’s oppressively hot and humid weather, left those of us who don’t celebrate the holiday feeling somewhat unsatisfied upon returning to work on Thursday. More than one person slipped and called it a Monday, or asked how the weekend was. So instead of a four-day workweek, it felt like two weeks in one.

    Perhaps the depressed mood was justified. Earlier in the week, tragedy struck a colleague who lost their father to a heart attack — a feeling all too familiar within our team as the same thing happened to another young designer just over a year ago. And you may recall just 9 weeks ago, another friend lost their dad too. At the same time, my thoughts have been occupied by a family friend, virtually family, currently recovering from surgery with an as-yet-unquantified cancer running loose in her body.

    I’m tired, but feeling better about the recent decision to make room for more important things than my current work. I came across this poem about mortality that captures the suddenness of loss and how we take everything for granted: If You Knew, by Ellen Bass. I was also reminded of this Zen concept that a glass always exists in two states, whole and broken, while reading responses to a tweet asking for “sentences that will change your life immediately upon reading”.

    Hitting the books

    Speaking of reading, I picked up Isle McElroy’s People Collide again after months of sipping its beautiful phrases through a tiny time straw, finishing it quickly. It’s the best thing I’ve read in many months; a profound questioning of what it means to be a particular person in a specific body, and how much of you makes up who you are to everyone else. At its core it’s a Freaky Friday body swap story. I don’t know if it’s because McElroy is trans that these perspectives and insights are so tangible, but I felt them. Even though the story didn’t go where I wanted at all, I gave it five stars on Goodreads because the final page is a triumph. I had to fight back tears of admiration while reading it on the bus.

    Right after that, the book train was rolling again and I read After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul by Tripp Mickle, which had some inside stories and gossip I’d not heard before, and an interest in how Jony Ive “neglected” his design leadership role in the later years, a story I’ve been interested in hearing. Still, it’s one of those non-fiction narratives that dramatizes and assumes a lot about what its subjects did and felt at key moments, things nobody can know for certain.

    Here it comes, the AI part

    Meanwhile, the Apple Design Team alums who decamped to Humane launched their first product, the “Ai Pin”, to largely middling reviews from tech outlets like The Verge. Quick recap: this is a camera-equipped, voice-enabled wearable you attach to your clothing, letting you access a generative AI assistant so you can ask general questions and take various actions without getting your phone out. In theory.

    Most of its faults seem to stem from issues intrinsic to OpenAI’s GPT models and online services, on which the Pin is completely dependent. It’s a bit tragic for Humane’s clearly talented startup team. I’m inclined to see the hardware as beautiful and an engineering accomplishment, and what parts of the user experience they could customize with the laser projector and prompt design are probably pretty good, but it doesn’t change the fact that the Pin’s brains are borrowed. A company with financial independence and the ability to make its own hardware, software, and AI services would have a better chance. Hmm… is there anyone like that?

    Meanwhile, a new AI music generation tool called Udio launched in public beta this week and I spent some time with it. I’ve only played with AI models that do text, images, and video, but never audio. It’s currently free while in beta and lets you make a generous amount of samples, so there’s no reason not to take a look.

    Basically you describe the song you want with a text prompt, and it spits out a 33-second clip. From there, you can remix or extend the clip by adding more 33-second chunks. It generates everything from the melodies to the lyrics (you can provide some if you want), including all instruments and voices you hear. Is it any good? It’s very impressive, although not every song is a banger yet. Listening to hip-hop instrumentals featured on the home page, I thought to ask for a couple of conscious rap songs and they came out well, with convincing sounding vocals. I then asked it to write a jazzy number about blogging on a weekly basis and you can judge for yourself if the future is here.

    At present, I see this as a fun toy for the not-so-musically inclined like myself, and as an inspiration faucet for amateur songwriters who work faster with a starting point. So, pretty much like what ChatGPT is for everything else. And like ChatGPT, I can see a future where this threatens human livelihoods by being good enough, at the very least disrupting the background music industry.

    Comfort sounds

    One musical suite that stands as a symbol of human ingenuity’s irreplaceability, though, is what I’ve been playing in the background on my HomePods all week while reading and writing: the soundtrack to Animal Crossing New Horizons. Because Nintendo hasn’t made the official tracks available for streaming, I’ve been playing this fantastic album of jazz piano covers by Shin Giwon Piano on Apple Music. It takes me right back to those quiet, cozy house-bound days of the pandemic. Could an AI ever take the place of composers like Kazumi Totaka? I remain hopeful that they won’t.

    Maggie Rogers released her third album, Don’t Forget Me. I put it on for a walk around the neighborhood on Saturday evening and found it’s the kind of country-inflected folk rock album I tend to love. One song in particular, If Now Was Then, triggered my musical pattern recognition and I realized a significant bit sounds very much like the part in Counting Crows’ Sullivan Street where Adam Duritz goes “I’m almost drowning in her sea”. It’s a lovely bit of borrowing that I enjoyed; putting copyright aside, experiencing a nostalgic callback to another song inside a new song is always cool. It’s one of the best things about hip-hop! But why is it okay when a human does it but not when it’s generative AI? I guess we’re back to Buddhism: Everything hangs on intention.

    ===

    Miscellanea

    • I watched more Jujutsu Kaisen despite not being really blown away by it. Mostly I’ve been keen to see the full scene of a clip I saw posted on Twitter, where the fight animation looked more kinetic and inventive than you’d normally expect. I decided that it must have come from Jujutsu Kaisen 0: The Movie, because movies have bigger budgets and the animation in season 1 looked nothing like it. And I had to finish season 1 in order to watch and understand the movie.
    • Well, I saw the movie and it was alright, but it didn’t have that fight scene. So where is it?? That got me watching more episodes of the TV anime, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a jump in quality like this between two seasons of a show. It seems a new director came on board (maybe more money too), and suddenly the art is cleaner, the camera angles are more striking and unconventional, and everything else went up a notch. I guess I’m watching another 20+ episodes of this then.
    • I finished Netflix’s eight-episode adaptation of Three Body Problem. I’m not invested enough to say I’d definitely watch a second season, assuming they pick it up at all.
    • On that topic, Utada Hikaru released a greatest hits compilation called Science Fiction, with three “new” songs, and 23 other classics either re-recorded, remixed, and/or remastered in Dolby Atmos. I don’t really know these songs in that I have no idea what many are actually about, but I’ve heard them so much over the last 25 years, I probably know them more deeply than most.
  • Week 9.24

    Week 9.24

    I finally got my hands on a Playdate! This is the tiny yellow handheld gaming device that was announced by Panic Inc. back in 2019 and came out in 2022. Longtime Mac users will know Panic as a software development company that in recent years started to dabble in games publishing — Firewatch was their first, followed by the smash hit Untitled Goose Game — and the Playdate is their first foray into making hardware. Which we all know is 1) hard, and 2) what people who are serious about software do. In this case, the industrial design came by way of the very trendy outfit, Teenage Engineering, who can hardly do any wrong and certainly didn’t slip here*.

    It’s a tiny little thing, about the size of a Post-It note and about as thick as an iPhone minus the camera bump. The screen is designed for young eyes and has no lighting: it’s purely reflective and relies on ambient light, so you won’t be playing this in bed late at night. Did I mention the screen is in black and white? Keeping things simple is exactly what a little thing like this should do, but it adds a unique input method with a little crank on the side; a gimmick so obvious and versatile it feels like something Nintendo would have done on a Game Boy in some parallel universe. Everything feels solid and extremely well put together, as it should for US$199.

    You might think this is a niche luxury retro gaming gadget, and while there are chiptunes, the software experience is very contemporary. Fluid animations, an eShop with elevator music à la Wii menus, and a catalog of modern, inventive indie games by luminaries such as Zach Gage, Chuck Jordan, and Shaun Inman. Included with your purchase are 24 original games that automatically unlock at a rate of two each week, keeping the thing fresh long enough to form a habit. After that, there’s a whole online catalog to shop from. Have a look to see if this is your sort of thing, but the first two games (Casual Birder and Whitewater Wipeout) from “Season 1” are promising and I’m eagerly waiting to see what’s next.

    When the Playdate was first released, I didn’t buy one because they didn’t ship to Singapore, but my friend and colleague Jose ordered two through a freight forwarding service, so he’s had his for a while. He offered to sell the other one to me, but I declined. My stance on companies snubbing Singapore with their shipping policies is simple: if you’re not selling here officially, you’re not getting my money. That’s why I never had an OG iPhone and don’t have an Apple Vision Pro or Steam Deck.

    * I put an asterisk above because it’s worth pointing out here that the intersection of millennials who love gaming and millennials who are drawn to Teenage Engineering products is probably very large, with Jose and myself squarely in it.

    Then a couple of weeks ago, I got an email from them to say they finally worked through their very long production and shipping backlog, so if you ordered one now you’d get it almost immediately, plus sales were open to many more countries, including Singapore. And this is ironic because the thing is manufactured in Malaysia, prominently stated on the back of the device, which is just a short drive away.

    So far my only problem with it is that I may have gotten a dud battery, or it needs some cycling before it lasts as long as it’s supposed to. File this one under Brandon’s Battery Curse: it happens (objectively!) on nearly every device I’m excited to buy, and I end up getting a replacement or just learning to live with it. It’s happened with iPhones, iPads, headphones, fitness trackers, you name it. Maybe I just notice it more than most and it drives me crazy.

    ===

    Ever since I got back from New Zealand, I’ve been thinking a lot about fragrances. I think this happened because I was mindlessly shopping at duty-free stores at airports on both sides and started looking for a good deal. I’ve been wondering if it’s finally time to freshen up my cologne collection, so to speak. I currently use just a handful (three, really) and never really think about buying new fragrances except for once every three or four years when it’s finally time to throw them out and get some new ones in.

    If you’ve been to Fragrantica.com, you’ll know what a terrible rabbit hole this can be. Instead of buying something really expensive, I decided to scratch the itch by blind buying a bottle of Davidoff Cool Water Intense EDP, because I always wanted the original Cool Water as a teenager. This one is a new fragrance altogether, characterized by green mandarin and coconut nectar notes, and is quite aggressive and long-lasting. Haters say it has nothing to do with Cool Water, but I think the idea is that it’s in the same conceptual territory — warm summery vibes, casual like a linen shirt, worn poolside at a four-star resort. It’s not bad!

    Unfortunately for me, the itch was not fully scratched, and I’ve still been looking. I’m keen on this idea of revisiting classic fragrances from the 90s with new incarnations, and it seems the industry is too: Acqua di Gio (there’s a new EDP formulation), CK All (a sort of midpoint between One and Be), and Issey Miyake’s L’eau d’Issey Pour Homme EDT (no change here, still the original). Is this a mini midlife crisis? Will it end with me smelling like a teenager?

    ===

    Media activity:

    • We finally finished Season 1 of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters on Apple TV+ and I’m gonna do a Hideo Kojima-style review here and leave it at that.
    • We also finished Season 1 of Mr. And Mrs. Smith on Amazon Prime Video and really enjoyed it. It’s the rare 8-episode season that felt like the perfect length, given the creative choice to show most of their missions as excerpts and focus on the spaces between.
    • I read on William Gibson’s Twitter account that a Neuromancer TV series is underway, and it will be only 10 episodes long. Seeing as Neuromancer was the blueprint for so much of what came after with The Matrix and other cyberpunk-indebted stories, I’m low-key hoping they’re not very faithful to the source and use this as an opportunity to go big with some fresh futurism, and draw up a new world the likes of which we’ve never seen before on screen, like Spielberg did with Minority Report. Spend that Cupertino money!
    • In line with my olfactory return to the 90s, I’ve been listening to Counting Crows again. They released a new album of two live performances from ’93 and ’94, entitled Feathers In My Hand, which has brought me back. This is a band that deserves some 20th anniversary or super deluxe edition remasters!

  • Week 6.24

    Week 6.24

    It was Chinese New Year week and it’s not been the same for several years, partly because of Covid and because many key relations have simply gotten old. My uncles and aunties, for decades only known to me by honorary titles describing their places in the family hierarchy, are getting ill, weak, and unwilling to leave their homes or receive visitors. Several years ago I started to ask what their actual names were, because I grew up literally calling them names that translated to second son of third uncle, or eldest paternal uncle; I’ve often wondered why Chinese culture has mechanisms that foster emotional distance between children and adults, a tradition that feels increasingly out of touch with today’s world. But that’s how it goes.

    I remember the typical CNY reunion dinner for many years as something to get through with gritted teeth and withheld snarky jokes, and if you’d told me then that I would look back now on those as the good times, I would have despaired. Now they appear as charmingly awkward and well-meaning attempts to bond, by people I might never get to wish a happy new year to again. I always thought the idea of an annual reunion made more sense against the backdrop of a vast country like China, but now that it’s hard to connect for all sorts of reasons even across our tiny one, I see the real terrain is time and memory, and so many relationships die starving in those fields. That’s how it goes too.

    ===

    One of our friends lost his dad this week. He was by all accounts the kind of guy you call a ‘real character’. He went from a corporate career to a becoming writer in retirement, putting out three books in the last decade or so. Because we didn’t have any reunion dinner commitments at the usual time, we were able to attend his funeral wake and share in some lovely stories from the family. They managed the joke that this terrible timing right in the middle of festivities was the last prank he’d play on them. I learnt he had a regular blog, which he kept going even after suffering health setbacks — that’s dedication. Every week I wonder what I’m going to say here and always think the streak’s about to end.

    Even the funeral was remarkable for the fact that he planned it all himself, leaving behind detailed instructions on what he wanted, to the point of getting his own headshot taken and sealed in an envelope which his family only opened after he was gone, so they wouldn’t have to fuss over this stuff at the worst time — that’s love. It got me thinking that everyone should prepare their own playlists and slideshows too. I might get started on it this year. Don’t be surprised if you come to my funeral and hear that Chinese AI dub of Van Morrison on repeat.

    ===

    Other activity:

    • I’ve started on a new book and only read two short chapters but I already know this is something special. It’s People Collide by Isle McElroy.
    • We are back watching Below Deck and I’m still sure that this is one of the best management trainings you can get for your time. Every single season is full of unnecessary crew drama because people don’t communicate expectations, don’t provide clear feedback, and allow emotional reactions to escalate. I get that it’s not easy, and I’m not sure I do it so well myself, but the lines between action and consequence are so clear here; they’re literally edited together for entertainment. Another lesson: everyone is flawed. The people you root for because they’re usually sensible? Sometimes they fuck up! Working relationships are rarely black and white.
    • Kanye West finally released Vultures two months its initial release date, with a new cover and possibly a different tracklist. I haven’t heard it yet. But once again, Apple Music has not recommended me music I’m interested in, although I’m quasi-certain it will be featured somewhere in the app in the next few days. Right now the Singapore ‘Browse’ page is full of Chinese New Year related music that I definitely do not care about.
    • After working too hard and not getting enough rest, Kim’s sort of fallen ill now, with me feeling a milder version of it. The timing could not be worse: we’re off on holiday soon, the kind where sneezing and aching and feeling weak might derail a complex itinerary.
    • Speaking of which, I used ChatGPT to help plan this vacation, and I’ve taken those instructions and made a custom GPT called AI-tinerary which might help you if you’re going someplace new and want to create a multi-day schedule of things to do. It can work off your individual interests and transport modes, as well as answer other travel-related questions you may have. At some point I’ll be able to make it plot your route on a map (if you ask it now, it’ll generate some wacky DALL•E map drawing that you should absolutely NOT follow).
    • You should know by next weekend whether these AI-generated plans worked out, or if we tried to stay in towns that don’t actually exist.
  • Week 51.23

    Week 51.23

    Merry Christmas! Let’s talk about music this week.

    I received the Beats Studio Pro headphones as an early present, in the Sandstone color, only 22 weeks after I wrote about how I thought they were set to be a fantastic update to the aged/obsolete/frankly embarrassing Beats Studio3 Wireless model. In that post, I said I would not be buying them for myself on account of having enough headphones. No promises have been broken, and I can confirm that they sound really good and are comfortable even with my big head. If you’ve found others like the B&O H95 or B&W PX7 too small to fully enclose the bottom of your earlobes, these may do the trick.

    I often try to convince myself that a pair of AirPods Pro should suffice for my/anyone’s needs, that a pocketable pair of smart, well-engineered buds are more than enough. Who needs HomePods or other home speakers, over-ear headphones, soundbars, etc.? But just as you can feel the bass from a towering set of speakers in your chest, a pair of big drivers blasting air into your ears do feel something different.

    Since I had the week off, I spent hours testing them out, thinking about what music I enjoyed the most this year. I sometimes do an annual wrap-up playlist with all my favorites, in lieu of making playlists throughout the year like I should. But this year I’ve made three: BLixTapes 1, 2, and 3, so I’ll see if I feel like it next week.

    In the meantime, I think I’ll name some personal “winners”!

    2023 sangsara.net music awards

    Best comeback: Damon Albarn (Blur, Gorillaz)

    Please note these are personal picks, and I’m not saying Albarn disappeared, but for a long time I’d written him off completely — a remnant of the 90s and mid 00s who still puts out funny tuneless projects every few years that I play through once then delete from my library. When that time came around again with this year’s The Ballad of Darren and ‌Cracker Island from his Blur and Gorillaz bands respectively, I played the albums and was stunned. Did he get his mojo back?! The jams get your feet tapping, the lyrics are somewhere between conceptual backstory and dadaist poetry as usual, and the pretty moments are so pretty they just pop into my head some mornings as I brush my teeth.

    Honorable mentions:

    • Everything But The Girl, Fuse: How often do you hear from a band after 24 years of hanging up the name, and the new stuff is up there with their best work? Sure, Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt kept busy with other projects but I never expected them to release new music together. This coming out of the pandemic was one of its silver linings.
    • Bob Dylan, Shadow Kingdom: Revisiting one’s old material with the benefit of age and experience made Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now (2000) a revelation for me when it came out, and while I still don’t know Dylan’s work well enough after all these years to appreciate every nuance of these new versions, I’m planning to put in the work.

    Best reissue: Jesse Malin — The Fine Art of Self Destruction

    The 20th Anniversary Edition of this seminal album sadly took on a different meaning a couple of months after it was released. Jesse Malin suffered a freak “spinal stroke” in New York and became paralyzed from the waist down (an update in December revealed an unfortunate lack of progress, with him now seeking stem cell treatments in Argentina). The Fine Art was somehow a formative album for me, although I had no reason to identify with its East Coast bohemian city life vignettes. I suppose it’s universal the same way Springsteen is. This new edition includes 2022 versions of key songs, and although Malin’s voice is virtually unchanged, you can hear the years on his shoulders in these slower, introspective readings.

    Honorable mentions:

    • Portishead, Roseland NYC Live 25: This came out of nowhere, a remastered 25th anniversary edition of an insanely historic performance, and now with three tracks that were previously only in the film. I remember buying it on VCDs (remember those?) from the local HMV. If only they’d remixed it in Spatial Audio… I would die to experience this like a real concert.
    • R.E.M., Up (25th Anniversary Edition): I already mentioned this one in Week 45.23. As I noticed these last two albums with 25th anniversaries, I thought “huh, 1998 sure was a special year”. And thanks to Apple Music showing other playlists where a song is included, I discovered this one: At Home With Jack Antonoff, which is entirely dedicated to the magical moment that was 1998. Check it, The Smashing Pumpkins put out Adore, Neutral Milk Hotel made In The Airplane Over The Sea, and Natalie Imbruglia sang Torn?! What was in the air?
    • Daft Punk, Random Access Memories (10th Anniversary Edition): I actually wrote a couple of sentences about this album when it came out in 2013 and accidentally found the post while searching for a more recent mention. Still a masterpiece, now in Spatial Audio.
    • Daft Punk, Random Access Memories (Drumless Edition): And this crazy rerelease idea. As I said a few weeks ago, who the hell would have thought making a version without the drum tracks would result in such a wholly new experience?

    Best single line:

    Thank God I’m fly!
    — TGIF, XG

    Best bars:

    I’m down to click out you hoes and make a crime scene
    I click the trigger on the stick like a high beam
    Man, I was Bentley wheel whippin’ when I was nineteen
    She call my number, leave her hangin’, she got dry-cleaned
    She got a Android, her messages is lime green
    I search one name, and end up seein’ twenty tings
    Nadine, Christine, Justine, Kathleen, Charlene, Pauline, Claudine
    Man, I pack ‘em in this phone like some sardines.
    — First Person Shooter, Drake feat. J. Cole

    Best new (to me) artist: yeule

    I racked my brain trying to think of another Singaporean-born artist who has achieved critical acclaim overseas singing in English (we have quite a few who make it in Mandopop, in Taiwan and so on), but couldn’t think of another besides yeule, a London-based non-binary 25ish self-taught musician who studied fashion but also paints and streams and has a way with theatrical makeup. Their latest album, softscars, got an 8.5 from Pitchfork, and the last one got 8.3. That’s a hometown hero medallion as far as I’m concerned, and for the record I really like these records. There are interviews online that suggest a tumultuous childhood, and looking at how they’re covered in tattoos and generally act and look like someone who would give an Asian parent a coronary, I can imagine the difficulties faced growing up here were potent inputs for artistry. They also have an extremely-online underground idol type of presence, with a community distributed across platforms — I’d never joined a musician’s Discord server before this one, but why isn’t more of a thing?

    One of the things I realized this year was how the ways we as fans connect with artists we love have crossed a line, and the tools and channels we use seem to be encouraging the development of parasocial relationships. This is something that maybe evolved from Asian pop and idols, e.g. handshake events, but I believe is going to become very mainstream from here.

    Honorable mentions:

    • Kassa Overall: A super talented drummer who performs a funky modern mashup of hip-hop and jazz. An indie Anderson .Pakk? Btw I discovered the Seattle radio station KEXP while looking for yeule’s performances, and discovered a wealth of great music on their YouTube channel, as well as a ton of new bands to look into. Fortunately, Kassa Overall also played a set for KEXP and it’s — to use a term Scott Forstall once tried to make happen — absolutely blow away. And that logo with his name on all the band’s hoodies!
    • Samara Joy: Another jazzy discovery from late in the year, and possessor of an incredible vocal instrument you need to hear. Here’s her album Linger Awhile on Verve Records.

    Best album: XG — New DNA

    I waited months for the New DNA mini-album. I watched hours and hours of “documentary footage” on YouTube, following the members as they struggled through five years of frankly brutal and manipulative training under their manager Simon’s direction. I learnt all seven of their names. I watched each new single and video drop, and then watched reaction videos. I watched fancams and BTS specials (but drew the line at braving a heatstroke at their Formula 1 concert here). From the moment I first heard them in February, I knew they were different. They’ve doubled their following on YouTube since (currently with 2.41M subscribers), but I think they’re still being slept on. J-Pop groups are never this polished, and K-Pop ones are never this accessible. With every song in English and a style that effortlessly unites hip-hop, electronic, and 90s R&B, these girls deserve to be massive in 2024. I wish New DNA contained all their previously released singles, which would have made a beefier release and maybe helped them break out, but I suspect that’s just the millennial in me talking. Everyone knows nobody listens to whole albums anymore, which makes this category very sad.

    Honorable mentions:

    • Sufjan Stevens, Javelin: It was close, I wanted to call this the album of the year. Deeply moving, and kinda makes up for not having any new music from Joanna Newsom.
    • Kevin Abstract, Blanket: I never listened to Brockhampton, of which Abstract is a member, and I don’t remember his previous album ARIZONA BABY doing anything for me. But Blanket is something else. Like yeule’s softscars, it draws on 90s alt-rock to create a new sound that goes beyond labels.
    • boygenius, the record: I miss the days when we had more supergroups.
    • Vagabon, Sorry I Haven’t Called: I really need to play this more often. It’s a soulful, elastic collection of ingenious songs and the opener, Can I Talk My Shit?, is one of my favorites of the year.

    ===

    Other media activity:

    • I finished reading The Paris Apartment and gave it two stars on Goodreads. Please don’t.
    • We binged the Dead Ringers TV miniseries on Amazon Prime Video. Wow. Rachel Weisz does that incredible thing actors do when they’re bored of playing one character and want to play a set of twins. You literally forget they’re not two people. Also the bloodiest show of the year, not for the squeamish.
    • Slow Horses is back, and we’re nearly done with Season 3. It’s still very very good, and even better than the last season. I’ve only just discovered they’re based on a series of novels by Mick Herron, of which there are eight, so that’s my 2024 reading challenge sorted.
  • Week 50.23

    Week 50.23

    Christmas is creeping closer, but the Goodreads Challenge angel won’t be darkening my doorstep as I’ve redeemed myself with two weeks to go! James Hogan’s Thrice Upon A Time was the twelfth book of my year, and definitely one of the better ones. It’s a 1980s time travel story where no time travel takes place, but it grapples with ideas about how timelines are rewritten, plus some other global topics that seem quite prescient when read today. Stylistically, it’s aged, but in that classic sci-fi way I love, which takes me back to reading books in the library after school. I think those hours, that precious access back then to a ton of books I couldn’t wait to read, were the part of going to school I looked forward to most. Anyway I’ve started a dumb new book that I should be finishing this year for bonus credit: The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley.

    If you’re looking for reading material, it may interest you to hear that I somehow managed to finish B’Fast, the AI-generated breakfast zine project I mentioned last week. The InstaZine GPT I made to create the content is also available through the same link (I updated the page with some additional usage tips today). Now that it’s done, I’m planning to make a companion breakfast-themed zine called “B’Fast (Brandon’s Version)” which will be made entirely by me, in a way that an AI presumably would not. But probably not straight away.

    ===

    Earlier this year, Hipstamatic redesigned and relaunched their Hipstamatic X app. The “X” was dropped, and they added a new social feed. It was the official replacement for their original app which became Hipstamatic Classic. Where the original was funded by in-app purchases for new filters (at a pace of roughly one new 99c release each month), the new Hipstamatic charges a $30/year subscription, doubling their income from faithful fans.

    I used the new app for some photos during my trip to Japan and mostly enjoyed the experience, but it was too buggy and the UI was still too cluttered and confusing (a longstanding problem with the original Hipstamatic app as well) for me to consider continuing with a paid subscription.

    Their main problem is that there are now over 300 filters in the forms of “films” and “lenses” and “flashes” that you can combine to make infinite looks, and no good way to make the attractive human-curated combinations they recommend accessible and discoverable. In the last version, they tried to give a few of these combinations the tangible metaphor of being unique “cameras”, each one with a different skeuomorphic body you picked off a shelf, but essentially they were presets you could call up. But you can keep, what, ten of these aside in a little drawer before you couldn’t tell them apart? And so many of the other combinations were left out of sight and out of mind.

    Now, after a week of teasing social media posts, wherein a “physical camera” was shown in videos — quite obviously a 3D model rendered in AR, but some people believed they were going to release a hardware product anyway — they’ve released a major update (v10) that tries to untangle the Gordian knot of their UX issues.

    In this new version, they’ve tried to marry what worked in the original app with a new info architecture and set of metaphors to manage the library of looks they’ve accumulated over the last 14 years. You get just ONE skeuomorphic camera to call your own and customize the look of, and this camera is capable of loading up many presets. You can either let the camera detect the scene and choose a suitable preset for it (Auto mode), or specify the preset yourself (Manual mode). There are 9 possible scenes, such as Travel, People, and Still Life, but in a puzzling and unfortunate move, when you start using the app, each of these scenes has just one or two associated presets. That means you’re going to see the same looks over and over, when there are over a hundred more hidden away in a long list. This was presumably done to allow you, the user, to customize your experience and assign your favorite presets to the scenes.

    There are two major problems at this point. One: leaving it up to the user to gain their own understanding of all the pre-existing “good combos” and assign them to 9 scene categories is insane. It’s a lot of work to hand off to a customer you hope will pay you money. The team should be doing the work of tagging each preset combo with a recommended use case, AND making it easy to assign them. It’s not currently easy. I had to move back and forth between two sections of the app looking at presets and memorizing their names to go assign to a scene, because these things aren’t placed together. Off the top of my head, it just needs an in-line list of suggested presets (from the aforementioned tagging exercise) on the same screen where you customize a scene’s presets. Perhaps this is coming. I’d argue it should have been in the MVP release of such a big redesign.

    Two: as I mentioned, there are infinite possible presets given the number of ingredients they’ve accumulated. You can make your own combos, but there’s no great way to experiment and do this — there should be a sandbox where you can explore each lens/film/flash’s characteristics and try them out in real time to find a good combo. There used to be a section of the app called the “Hipstamatic Supply Catalog” where you could browse all these effects (it was only like a static magazine, but they could have made it interactive), and this now seems to be gone or I can’t find it anymore in the maze of menus and buttons. Perhaps they’re okay with most users just using the curated “good presets” and never making their own, but it seems like a missed opportunity.

    I was feeling a mix of optimistic and bored, so I paid for an annual subscription anyway and will be trying to take lots of everyday silly snaps with this, and maybe even use it on my upcoming trip to Thailand. But if you know someone who works at Hipstamatic, please talk to them about taking on some external advice.

    ===

    • I finished watching Pluto on Netflix. It’s still a strong recommendation for me; a modern anime made with classic sensibilities and a story that really keeps you guessing. It’s also a very different Astro Boy story, suitable for people who hear “Astro Boy” and think it’s stuff for kids.
    • We started watching A Murder at the End of the World and I’m really liking it so far. Especially its star, Emma Corrin, who I’ve never seen in anything else before. They’ve got the most strikingly similar face to Jodie Foster, I was sure they were related.
    • New playlist! BLixTape #3 is done, made up of mostly new songs that I’ve been listening to since mid-October. Add it here on Apple Music.
  • Week 49.23

    Week 49.23

    As usual, I find myself in disbelief that another year is nearing its end. My Goodreads Reading Challenge count stands at 11 out of 12, and I’m halfway through a book right now, so I guess I’ll just make it before New Year’s. Which, incidentally, I’ll now be spending overseas thanks to some last minute plans. I’ll say where and post some photos after I’m back.

    On reflection, it’s a bit of a shame that almost all the books I’ve read this year were just 3-star affairs. It’s like I’ve held back from tackling the big names on my reading list, choosing lighter and more inconsequential fare. In some ways, this has been a calmly chaotic year, with instability in the wider world putting everyone on edge, and that may have influenced my need for soothing, low-stakes entertainment. I saw a mention somewhere that the self-care industry is “sedating women”, making them focus on trying to fix something in themselves instead of fixing the problems out there. I can relate.

    The holiday overeating has begun (although I may have forgotten to stop after last year), which I think is linked to a feeling of letting go and treating yourself in the evenings as work slows down (or seems less important) at this time of the year. We ended up eating out a fair few times, and as I write this I’m looking forward to another trip to Maji Curry this evening.

    It’s not just fat cushioning my bones — while at Tokyu Hands this week (now simply called Hands), I saw a $75 wavy seat cushion and decided I had to have it for all the sitting around I do when working from home. Does it do anything for me? I don’t really know! But I’m treating myself. And then on the weekend we wandered into some kind of fancy organic bedding store and walked out with a pair of new pillows. Kim unfortunately may have chosen the wrong height/density for her sleeping style, but after one night I can cautiously report that mine cradles my noggin just fine.

    ===

    Where’s the usual AI garbage, Brandon? I can hear you thinking it! Well okay, so Peishan mentioned she’d made a new zine, which reminded me of a project idea I’d written down and filed away. It was to make a zine on the subject of “Breakfast”, but using only AI-generated words and images.

    If you’re thinking that sounds like a pretty mediocre zine, then you understand the challenge here. We’re now at a point where generative AI’s infinite supply threatens to drive down the perceived value of all but the best; content vs. art. So I’d like to see if my human labor of directing an AI worker to deliver above-average quality and packaging its output as a coherent product, can create something worth looking at. The only way to find out is to make it! And now that we can do custom GPTs, I decided to start by making one that acts like a diverse team of writers and artists, with a range of different styles, which can then be applied to a zine on any topic you like.

    I’m still testing it out, but so far I’ve gotten a handful of articles. And in doing so, I’ve realized that I know nearly nothing about print layouts or how to design an attractive zine. I’ve read my share of mags, of course, but without effectively taking in their details. I’m making it with Pages on my Mac, and using its “Free Layout Mode” has been the best approach I’ve found. It’s sort of like a digital version of making a physical zine: I’m moving chunks of text and cut-out imagery around on A4 canvases; almost like scrapbooking. I just need more fonts and more imagination and more time.

    ===

    • I listened to no new music this week.
    • I didn’t turn my Switch on once.
    • I haven’t seen any films.
    • We did start Season 2 of Bosch Legacy though, and that’s still as great as ever. Not just the modern noir vibes and great jazz soundtrack. It’s a show that respects its audience and their time, without overelaborating on plot points or explaining every term or acronym that comes up. We’re already on episode 7 of 10, and I’ll be sad when it’s over. Thankfully a third season has been confirmed!

    (This week’s featured image was taken while walking around Tiong Bahru, edited with a Ricoh GR Positive Film effect simulation preset I made.)

  • Week 34.23

    Week 34.23

    Trivial bullet point notes this week.

    • The new fridge arrived without a hitch. It makes the tiniest ice cubes, they’re like chiclets. We also got baited and switched: the model in the showroom said “20 year compressor guarantee” but the one that arrived has a sticker that says 10 years. In any case, we’ve been assured that these compressor warranties are meaningless because they’re never the first thing to break down. Kinda like LED bulbs that claim to last centuries, then.
    • The Onchain Summer campaign/festival on Coinbase’s Base network (Ethereum L2) continued, and I really got into the release of a few generative art projects on Highlight.xyz, in particular RUNAWAY by James Merrill. It’s designed to be a long-form open edition project, and so the algorithm is wackier than most, with quite a bit of variety in the outputs. Of the four projects launched together, RUNAWAY understood the assignment best.
    RUNAWAY by James Merrill
    • This inspired me to get back to playing with Midjourney, and totally unrelated to the above, I made a couple of images I call “Swamp Aesthetic” and “Pond Aesthetic”.
    Pond Aesthetic and Swamp Aesthetic
    • XG’s buildup to their first mini album continued with the release of New Dance, yet another solid pop song accompanied by a fun video (this one goes for an early 2000s vibe). So far they’ve only released one early dud — Mascara is not a great song imo — and everything else has been a straight banger. It’s an incredible track record, so to speak, and they’ve created a formation where every member is differentiated and recognizable. Back when I found them in February, they had 1.1M YouTube subscribers. That number is now 2.18M. I said back then that they’re gonna be huge and I’m more certain than ever everyone’s going to know them in about half a year.
    • Apple Music agrees, and they’re featured in this month’s Up Next spotlight, which means a short video, radio interviews, and pre-order promotion for New DNA which drops at the end of September. Just for reference, past honorees of the Up Next program include Billie Eilish, Megan Thee Stallion, Sigrid, and Burna Boy.
    • I finished reading Ann Liang’s If You Could See The Sun, which turned out to be a YA novel set in a prestigious Chinese high school, with a protagonist from a poor background who’s struggling not to drown amongst her fuerdai classmates, and then… she develops a superpower? It’s pretty fun, and you can see it being Netflix adaptation fodder. 3/5.
    • We’re currently watching Deadloch on Amazon Prime Video. Throughout most of the first episode, it felt like we would quit, but it somehow picked up and now it’s a fun and ridiculously vulgar ride. It reads as a send up of the small town murder mystery genre (albeit set in Tasmania), but the murder bit is just as interesting as the comedy.
    • I’m still rationing episodes of Poker Face, watching them like little films. Episode 5, The Time of the Monkey, had such a fantastic payoff I’m still thinking about it days later. I don’t want to spoil anything, but that ridiculous episode title will actually make sense by the end.
    • Oh oh, I found a silver bracelet I bought off SSENSE years ago and decided to put it on one morning as I was going to work. Some colleagues immediately noticed it and said ‘hmm what’s going on with Brandon lately? He’s accessorizing and wearing new clothes and painting his nails?’, which led me to wonder if I’m going through some kind of weird mid-life crisis? Technically the crisis probably began when I turned 40, which was the year the bracelet in question was purchased. LOL why are people such cliches?
  • Week 32.23

    Week 32.23

    Vacation update

    I survived the island. Their warnings of limited internet access were exaggerated, and it turned out that we did have wi-fi in our villa, albeit quite slow; I did not feel completely disconnected, but I managed to avoid being “online”. I did not, however, get a chance to play Hello Kitty Adventure Island, nor finish the book I was reading until I got back to Singapore. That will have to be remedied in the coming week.

    We mostly spent our time sitting by the pool, or the beach, or eating, or walking around and exploring the “private island”, which is incidentally a marvel of self-sufficient sustainability. All water used in showers and bathrooms is collected rainwater and natural well water. Wastewater is processed and filtered on-site and used on plants. Food waste is composted and broken down by black soldier flies bred for this purpose, not shipped back to the mainland and incinerated.

    I managed to get a tan, and now I’m sporting a ‘just healthy enough to look like a living human’ shade. I also need to shed my lizard skin this weekend and head out to a wedding, so there was a shopping trip as soon as we got back to pick up a decent shirt. Putting on a suit stresses me out more than wearing shorts and sandals on the beach, tbh. There’s a Goldilocks zone of comfort somewhere in between and it looks exactly like a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, which is where I plan to stay for life, thanks very much.

    Island photography and phones

    Speaking of being indoors and online, I took a bunch of panoramas on this trip with the express intent of viewing them on the Apple Vision Pro when it comes out next year. Enjoy this one, and a vertical video of some gentle waves if you need to take a little mental break.

    The majority of other photos were taken with the Halide app as is now my usual practice, and in comparison to photos of, say, the sunsets taken with the camera app on my iPhone, they came out much more natural and aesthetically pleasing. It still boggles my mind that Apple shipped the Photonic Engine on the iPhone 14 Pro the way they did because it looks so overprocessed by default.

    I can’t wait to see if the 15 Pro will resolve this, and if I’m honest I’m also keen to replace the ailing battery on my 14 Pro — online anecdotes suggest many of us are suffering from accelerated battery aging this year. I’ve watched mine fall from 88% to 86% maximum capacity over the last two weeks. Some people believe the combination of using a case + MagSafe charging is the cause, because of the heat generated. I don’t know what’s going on, but I don’t want to avoid useful features or stop doing normal phone things just because of this.

    Blue skies

    I finally got into Bluesky this week, and I don’t dislike it! Threads is unfortunately a place where I’m visible to everyone who knows me on Facebook/Instagram, which is to a large degree my real-life social graph. And what I liked about Twitter was that it was an online place for my online identity and my online people. I’m hopeful that Bluesky can be more of a Twitter replacement, and its relatively smaller size could be a strength, as long as the people I want to follow are on there. At this point, I’m rarely even checking Mastodon.

    Follow me at @sangsara.bsky.social if you’re on there.

    Crypto/web3 interlude

    Coinbase launched their new Ethereum L2 chain, called Base, and its stated purpose is to be a more user-friendly blockchain that could go mainstream and be used by the next billion people (ambitious). They say (and I like this positioning) that “online” was the first revolution, and “onchain” will be the next.

    I’ve been playing with it within their Coinbase Wallet app, and enjoying their “Onchain Summer” campaign which focuses on minting a bunch of free/very cheap NFTs. It’s a good demo of how low gas fees are on Base compared to regular ol’ Ethereum; most transactions cost just pennies. There’s still a lot of work to be done to make this more understandable, and arguably the entire user experience of creating and funding a new wallet needs to be rethought.

    The main launch event was Cozomo de’ Medici (who I thought everyone agreed was Snoop Dogg but now may not be?) partnering with the Friends with Benefits (FWB) DAO and the Korean animator DeeKay to launch a pair of Open Edition artworks depicting a cryptocurrency future. Importantly, people could buy them with a credit card, instead of fumbling with wiring money to Coinbase and then buying ethereum and then sending it to their self-custodied wallets on the Base chain.

    Did I lose you in crypto-jargon land? Don’t worry, I can’t keep up either. Think of Open Editions like an all-you-can-eat buffet, but with a closing time. The intent is to encourage access over the usual scarcity and price speculation. In this case, the NFTs were only available to be minted for 24 hours, and apparently some 70,000 were snapped up at a cost of 0.01 eth each (around $20 USD, I think). That’s still a cool $1.4M made!

    Sounds of summer

    We enjoyed this summer vibes playlist compiled by XG (Apple Music) while lazing in the pool this week. I still can’t get their housey new song, TGIF, out of my head.

    Speaking of Apple Music, I noticed a new personalized radio option appeared on my “For You” tab this week, called Discovery Station. 9to5Mac.com reports that this feature has been in testing for awhile, with people spotting it on and off over the past year (how do I get into these betas?!) — in any case I’m glad to see new features and am hoping for more improvements around the launch of iOS 17.