This post is delayed on account of the Lunar New Year weekend; hope you had a good one if you celebrate!
After two years of restrictions and fear (not to mention peace and quiet), we returned to the old chaos with a few family gatherings and house visits. Unfortunately, one of my favorite parts of the whole thing, a large reunion dinner on the Eve with some of our most senior relatives, was still off the table on account of their mounting health issues. I wonder if we’ll ever get a chance to see everyone on that side of the family all together again.
I brought my GR III out to capture some of these moments, and fortunately Ricoh released their previously mentioned new Diary Edition model just the day before, which meant the firmware update for older models to get their new Negative film-inspired “Image Control” mode was also released. After some experimentation, I’ve settled on these settings: Saturation +1, High Key +2, Contrast +1, Shadow Exposure -1. Am looking forward to using it for more everyday snaps in 2023.
While hanging around with some relatives in the afternoon of Day 1, a few of us downloaded the Dimensional personality test app and began answering its slew of profiling questions to compare our toxic traits, love languages, and all that. It co-opts a bunch of well-known existing frameworks like the MBTI and so on into one gigantic pile of traits. Does that constitute a unique and proprietary offering? I don’t know, but it’s fun enough and free. Be warned, completing all available questions can take over an hour.
Speaking of apps, my advance pick for 2023’s game of the year launched this week on Apple Arcade: Pocket Card Jockey Ride On. It’s a remake of the Nintendo 3DS eShop exclusive now fixed up with better graphics and subtle gameplay tweaks. If you never played the original, do yourself a favor and give it a try. It’s an addictive solitaire-based game; the main downside (for me) is it’s time-based and needs some concentration and so isn’t something you can play while in a noisy environment.
My Mastodon use has fallen off a little. I actually prefer Twitter’s algorithmic timeline to a chronological one because I tend to follow too many people to keep up, and need some help sifting out the “best” content from the rest. Mastodon is beginning to give me the uncomfortable feeling of a full inbox, but perhaps I should simply follow fewer people.
The general rule around here is to avoid talking about work — although it is usually such a big cost center for my time — but we had a new colleague relocate from Shanghai, and it was nice welcoming them to town and having a couple of impromptu beers on a weekday night.
Last episode, I mentioned seeing some Tezos NFT art at Singapore Art Week. Well I came across one of the pieces for sale (entitled D-909 Groove Arcade) and decided to go through the trouble of creating a Tezos wallet and getting some funds in so I could buy it. It’s one edition out of 167, and so was only like USD$20, but I’m super happy to have it. Can art be absolutely adorable and funky at the same time? Provably yes!
D-909 Groove Arcade
I also continued generating non-existent videogame screenshots using Midjourney, expanding the fictional timeline to include modern-day remakes of old games. I should spend more time pushing this idea further but so far I’ve only done it in spare moments or when I should really be doing something else.
Civilization: Flat EarthDuck Hunt Remake, PS4 (2018)Drone Hunt, NES (1984)Theme Hospital: COVID EditionNeed For Speed: Self-Driving Edition
Everything But The Girl is back after what feels like decades, and the video for their new single is an incredible piece of choreography and one-take execution. I could only think of the immense pressure on each person not to fuck up. Dimensional seems to concur, reporting that my main motivation is Security.
We kind of started planning our trip to Japan later this year, but there’s still a lot to figure out in terms of what to do, and where to spend our time. It seems a lot of the popular hotels and destinations are selling out fast, if not already sold out, because of the resumption of travel out of China. I’m going to use this as a test of two new collaboration features in iOS and macOS: shared Safari Tab Groups, and the new Freeform whiteboarding app. In theory this should allow us to gather links to interesting ideas and plot them out together across our devices over several days.
On Friday afternoon, I was excited to see an article saying that one of the best bowls of ramen I’ve ever had was finally coming to Singapore. In fact, it was their opening day, and we decided to just go down right after work to try and get a seat. After about 20 minutes of queuing (which was nothing compared to the maybe three hours we spent in line for the main restaurant in Tokyo), we got into Nakiryu at Plaza Singapura, and were sorely disappointed. For starters, their signature Szechuan-style Tan Tan/Dan Dan noodles were sold out. We ordered shio and shoyu ramen instead, and they were roundly mediocre. The service was also spotty and uncoordinated.
It’s a pattern that the local franchisee Japan Food Holdings (who’ve done the same thing with Afuri and others) seems to be repeating: bring in a brand people are excited for, then do nothing to capture the original taste and quality. I suspect if you did a side-by-side comparison of the ramen from several of their brands, you’d find they’re just selling the same product under different names. Sadly, they’ve probably got the connections to get these deals and as long as the money flows in, the original companies don’t care how badly it’s done outside of Japan.
Singapore Art Week is back and we attended two events: SEA Focus and the creatively named Art SG. The former’s at Keppel Distripark where the Singapore Art Museum’s temporary spot is, and features a little NFT art corner sponsored by Tezos. In contrast to the other exhibits, I found the work in there refreshingly playful, modern, vibey.
Art SG
At Art SG (a large and mostly serious gallery fair over two floors at Marina Bay Sands), I also found myself reacting more to the digital or digitally inspired work. There was a large print of a CloneX pfp, attributed to Murakami, mounted on a wall that I saw from across the hall and made a beeline towards. The Pace gallery (which I only happen to know because of their collaborations with Art Blocks) space featured teamLab’s NFT project, and a James Turrell projection. The teamLab one is cool: anyone can download and run the artwork (an app) on their PC or Mac. These are regarded as authentic and valid copies of the work. However, one can also own an NFT of the work (there are only 7), and these collectors can change the text seen in the art for everyone else. Oh, and they’re $200,000 each.
Elsewhere, I saw a work that was a white flag printed with a surrender message that I’d read before but didn’t know where. I googled the text but nothing came up. Later, I found a tweet from early 2022 referencing it: an on-chain exchange between two MEV… “searchers”? The tweets only have between a couple hundred and a couple thousand likes, so it’s probably not a widely known thing. But I definitely saw and remembered it from last year, which means I’ve spent too much time spectating in a very small fringe community. And my time spent appreciating generative art has definitely ruined traditional abstract art for me.
The Field #290
Speaking of which, I was excited to add an edition of The Field by Beer van Geer to my collection this week. It’s an interesting (animated) work in that all 369 pieces are different views of the same “territory”, starting at random points, zoom levels, and rendered with different palettes, but viewers of any section can move away from those starting points and explore. As I understand it, the field itself was created from noise data created by aggregating hundreds of images from the artist’s body of work, trying to derive a sort of pattern map or artistic fingerprint from their ouevre. Isn’t that so much more exciting than static paint on canvas??
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Ricoh announced a new special edition of the GR III compact camera, called the “Diary Edition”. Yeah it sounds like one of those translated-from-Japanese names that sounds slightly awkward in English, but I like it. As a name, you can’t get much clearer about the concept of a camera that you’re meant to carry around to intentionally document everyday life, and it even comes with a new “negative film” look that will also come to older GR III models via a firmware update. Whether or not this behavior is one that users will actually embrace when they already have smartphones, I don’t know. I suspect not, outside for a few glorious weirdos. But the atmosphere and quality of these photos could hardly be more different than your smartphone snaps, unless you go the film route.
As a new colorway, I also love the look of the Diary Edition.
Here are a couple of photos I took with my GR III on the way to the art fair:
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We watched a couple of spy TV shows, of which Jack Ryan’s season 2 was the undisputed best. We’ll start on season 3 soon.
Miyachi’s second album, Crows, is out. I heard it through once and it’s a bop. I don’t know what he’s rapping about but I’m sure it’s slightly problematic.
I finished Arcade Spirits but can’t recommend it if you’ve got many great games in your Switch backlog. To recap, it’s a Western visual novel about running a video game arcade. Some of the background art is basic and not very polished. I was struck several times by the thought that a game creator today could create far better generic bar/beach/arcade interior background art in seconds using AI. And they probably will/are already. So as an artifact of our pre-AI phase, Arcade Spirits stands out as a bit lacking in the production quality department.
Here’s a tweet showing a game prototype someone purportedly threw together using AI tools to create the graphics, icons, and voice acting!
Quite coincidentally, I started experimenting with Midjourney prompts on Monday trying to get the EGA/VGA PC game look of the Sierra games I played in the 80s and 90s. I found a good solution and started using it to visualize screenshots of #fictionalgames from the golden era of PC games, ones that never existed, or that might be made today with modern concepts.
Police Quest 5: Capitol InvasionQuest For Glory 6: So You Want To Be A Private Military ContractorWhere in the Bahamas is Carmen Sandiego?Leisure Suit Harvey: In the Land of the Casting AgentsCommand & Conquer 2022
This one week with the new cat has felt like the longest week of my life. My brain cannot square the fact that it was only last weekend that we brought her home. I’ve aged significantly from worrying all the time!
I spoke too soon last Sunday when I said she was comfortable enough to use the toilet here. She went another three and a half days before pooping again — three and a half days in which I became obsessed with wondering why, and with when she would go again, during which I poked my head in to check the litter box, like, every hour.
I went and got some pumpkin to be boiled and pureed and mixed into her food for extra fiber; I made sure she was calm (I wasn’t); I think I even tried to talk her into it. Eventually it happened on its own, and my relief was as warm and palpable as the final product.
After being told that they have finicky gastrointestinal systems and raw/unprocessed food is best, I got her some 100% freeze dried salmon treats. That are literally chunks of recognizable salmon meat. You wouldn’t think a cat could turn down fish, but I found one. As I brought the uneaten treats to be flushed down the toilet, Asian parent as I am, I reminded her there were wild cats starving in sub-Saharan Africa.
Anyway it’s now Sunday and she hasn’t gone in three days — the cycle begins anew!
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Speaking of cycles, this season of Crypto is jumping the shark. The news this week was the sudden collapse of FTX (the world’s second largest exchange after Binance), which was seemingly caused/engineered by Binance’s CEO, starting with a couple of tweets that caused a bank run that FTX was not prepared to cash. Then it turned out that FTX had secretly transferred billions of dollars of its customers’ funds to Alameda Research, its sister trading company, who lost it all on a series of gambles.
So FTX declared bankruptcy, its CEO Sam Bankman-Fried went from poster boy of the industry to most hated, dirty laundry about sex cults and drug addiction in the company got aired, and then on Saturday hundreds of millions of dollars started being transferred out of their accounts and liquidated on decentralized exchanges in a purported “hack” — surely a euphemism for insider theft. The great thing about on-chain finance is that this was visible to all, and unfolded live on Twitter and Etherscan.
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Twitter, of course, is also going through an existential crisis. The last time this happened and we thought it might be time to leave was likely in 2017, because that’s when I set up a Mastodon account (that hasn’t been touched since). I can’t remember what happened then, possibly a post-Trump disinformation deluge or boycott? It sounds more serious this time, with the company falling apart thanks to the mismanagement and ego-driven strategy of you-know-who.
If that does happen, you should follow me at @brandon@mastodon.cloud.
In gadget news, we’ve been using a handed-down Dyson v8 vacuum cleaner for the past few months. It’s a pretty good product but with the amount of fur we’re dealing with now, I couldn’t shake the feeling that we needed better.
So I was keen to get a new one at this year’s Singles Day sales on 11/11 but somehow their latest model, the v15, has been sold out for weeks even on Dyson’s own site. To compensate, there were pretty good bundles and deals for their last model, the v12, which is better in some ways than the v15 (lighter, has a proper on/off switch) and worse in ways I can deal with (smaller bin, slightly less suction).
It arrived on Sunday and while not in the same league as Apple, the unboxing and set up experience was pretty damned good for a household appliance. Everything was self-explanatory with minimal assembly. The laser “detection” module on the fluffy head makes cleaning up like a game: you see dust on the floor ahead literally light up, and sucking it up is so satisfying. They made housework fun.
All other 11.11 purchases in our household were also cat maintenance related; still no AirPods Pro for this big ape.
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The Singapore Writers Festival is back again and we went to see Ted Chiang speak at the Victoria Theatre on Sunday. It was a little strange, in that he basically delivered a (very entertaining) lecture on time travel in fiction and film, but it was the sort of thing you’d expect to hear from a guest lecturer at a university. I was grateful for the chance to hear it, of course, but I suppose my image of a writers’ festival is one of writers talking about their own work. But if what our beloved authors really want to do between books is travel the world and give lectures on their pet subjects, I’m down.
Finally tested negative for Covid on Wednesday morning, a little more than a full week after testing positive. Despite that, it’s now four days later and I’m still feeling less well than usual. Mostly tired and unable to do very much in the way of physically normal life things, like walking around to eat and shop on a weekend, without feeling winded.
Thankfully my senses of smell and taste seem to have returned virtually 100% — maybe some things seem a teeny bit different, but overall nothing to really complain about. Crisis averted.
Monday was the Hari Raya public holiday here, and while I worked through the remaining dregs of illness only from Tuesday to Friday, it felt like an awfully long week and I’m Le Tired. A very nice Peruvian dinner at the end of it all helped restore my HP a little bit, but it’s now Sunday evening and I’m still feeling short of a few days’ rest.
TV: Just more Bosch. We’re now nearing the end of Season 6, so there’s just one more to go before we can see what happens in Bosch Legacy, the new series that takes place after he leaves the LAPD and becomes a private investigator. I have very high expectations for it to go in weird new directions.
Games: Only had time to play a bit of Spiritfarer on the Switch, and two rounds of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, which was on sale. We only made it to the $32,000 mark, In theory, playing a round of a virtual game show together every night sounds like a nice little routine, so I’ll try and do that when I remember.
My only other entertainment has been more dicking around in Midjourney to try and come up with interesting images. I’ll drop some below maybe.
Oh, and the project that Rob and I were working on together a few weeks back? It was a new design for the 0xmusic website, which has now mostly launched in its first iteration. It hopefully does a good job of explaining what makes these NFTs special.
I’ve installed the iPadOS 16 Public Beta on my M1 iPad Pro, almost entirely to try Stage Manager out. Huh. It’s disabled by default, and when enabled, completely replaces the old system of multitasking: no more Split View and Slide Over apps. So the iPad now gives you two entirely different interaction models for getting work done across multiple apps. Along with iOS/iPadOS Safari now letting one choose between two different tab management UIs, this suggests we’re maybe dealing with a new Apple that doesn’t believe its job is to make hard decisions, but to “provide more choice” for a customer base that is now larger and more diverse than Steve’s Apple ever had to deal with. Or this is just a gradual phasing in, and if the data supports it (and when everyone moves to new hardware that supports Stage Manager), the legacy modes will be removed in a few years. Still, I expect this will need explaining to family members in the months to come.
Top row: Japanese woodblock prints depicting a modern city against natural landscapes / Middle row: “Death roams the desert” / Bottom L: An impressionist painting of Handel playing the piano in outer space / Bottom R: A painting entitled “Sunset on the last day of Earth”
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#26Here 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.
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.
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.
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!
sangsara.net 