Tag Archives: Crypto

Week 48.21: Musings on Misery Men

  • Paraphrasing what I wrote on my NFT page earlier in the week, my sometime dabbling in the Web3 scene as a technology gawker and small-time buyer evolved to a new level this week when I started minting some amateur sketches on OpenSea (as promised back in Week 46.21). Everyone has been really kind and saying nice things about them the whole time, which is sweet but also suspicious.
  • It’s been cool to notice how my own perspective and approach has been changing even within this short period. It began with emotional distance and defensiveness, like “I’ll toss out a few doodles and price them preposterously high for fun, like thousands of dollars, so no one would buy them, and nor would I expect them to.” And then, the more I drew and spent time coming up with new ideas for them, the more I felt like I might as well be doing a better job of it.
  • So my drawings started to improve from the repetition and experimentation, and I began to view it as a learning activity (plus it’s been a lot of fun). I joked that the publication of this collection was me learning to draw in public, in real time, on the blockchain. I can’t delete anything that’s now owned by anyone else (I’ve given a bunch away) and I’ve locked some of the older ones into decentralized storage so they’ll be haunting me eternally.
  • A breakthrough occurred when I drew no. 39 while talking to Rob, intending to make a portrait of him. It was the most detailed one yet with hair partially obscuring the basic head shape; suddenly, I had more freedom. The quality improved from there, and I started doing them in color with skin tones, starting from #49. Looking at the contrast between the first one to the latest, after a week and a half’s worth of self practice, I’m frankly stunned as a person who hasn’t done much drawing in general.
  • The way I see it now, it’s not enough to just throw some stuff on OpenSea for a laugh. Nothing’s stopping me from larping as an artist, so I’m gonna keep on doing these to see where I end up, but until I actually sell one, I can’t say I’ve had the full NFT experience. So I’ve been taking the prices down to try to find a couple of different price points that the market might accept.
#2: One of the earliest surviving specimens, this was a portrait of a colleague on a whiteboard, photographed.
#8: The first few looked pretty much like this.
#25: Trying to make a “beautiful” one forced more detail and careful lines.
#34: This is one of my faves because there’s a suggestion of a body.
#39: Rob’s portrait.
#56 (WIP): The first one that I did in full color, after which I went back and retroactively colored in a few.
#58 (WIP): Inspired by those rockabilly dancers that (used to?) practice outside Yoyogi Park.
#61 (WIP): Metaversal misery. I don’t know where to go from here, because it’s more than I’d planned on.
  • It was also Black Friday, which I didn’t get too excited about for once. A couple of days prior, I got a little bit of money from an airdrop and couldn’t think of anything I actually wanted to buy for myself. I asked a couple of people what they’d get, and none of the answers gave me any inspiration. Maybe not having any need for retail therapy is a sign of… not needing therapy anymore? In the end, I just ordered some things that were already on my Christmas gift shopping list, renewed my VPN subscription, and downloaded Doom Eternal for the Switch at 60% off.
  • Speaking of the Switch, it’s now also my sole source of exercise via Ring Fit Adventure. At the height of pandemic lockdowns, supplies of this game and its physical accessories were so constrained that scalpers were selling it for nearly S$300. I got mine now for just S$76, and I’m certain it’s better than any gym membership or fitness video. I’ve done two sessions so far and it’s hard work, but doing gamified squats and crunches to battle monsters is a fair bit better than just doing them to bad music or trainers who look better than you ever will.

Week 46.21

  • We’re about six weeks from Christmas when it feels like it should be six months. This year’s time progression has been slippery; because I had clear point in the middle when I started to take time off work, it feels a little like two years in one, and yet much less. I’ll bet it’s the same for everyone buried under lots of work and not going out enough anyway, because a lack of New Stuff happening each day just makes them go by faster.
  • I read something somewhere about the mental health toll that working from home is taking on people, and of course someone quoted said the lack of human contact was bringing them down. Something in my head said, “well now you know how work felt for everyone who doesn’t love being surrounded by lots of people, but had to do it anyway for all of their lives”, but I’m sure that’s already been said. I land somewhere in the middle: I can do either infinitely and hate them equally.
  • I met Khairul for a coffee earlier in the week, for the first time in maybe a year. He’s been exploring new interests and possible personal projects during his time off. So it was great to talk with someone in virtually the same boat, and we both gave each other some homework to research and think about before the next chat. After that we took a short walk around Chinatown where my first-gen Ricoh GR got some use.
  • Speaking of projects, I was inspired by this Twitter thread of Venkatesh Rao’s wherein he goes down the web3 rabbit hole and ends up minting NFTs out of his old blog/newsletter artwork. What happened with me was initial dismissal, curiosity, then buying a couple of NFTs to see if I was wrong, before moving onto other topics (currently trying to grok DeFi 2.0 bonds) without considering that I could make some NFTs of my own, just for kicks. I hardly have the skills for it, but why should that stop me?
  • So now I think I‘ll do it, starting with a collection of these Misery Man doodles I started drawing by accident a couple of years ago, which became a joke signature/tag of sorts I’d leave on whiteboards around the office. I’ll probably draw a bunch of variations, maybe a hundred, and put them up on OpenSea soon.
Basic Misery Man
  • I spent a little time on Decentraland this week checking out the alternative metaverse. It’s rough by modern game standards, but it’s cool that anyone can create assets and straight plug them into what is essentially an MMO, or sell them on an open marketplace. I wandered downtown and saw buildings that companies had built as shrines to themselves, on plots of virtual land that they’d bought and now hold as NFTs. It’s early days because no one really knows what to do with them. One company recreated their org chart in the lobby as photos on shelves, and if you go upstairs to a cathedral-like space with glass and high ceilings, you can browse their website in a Jumbotron-sized window.
  • Speaking of giant things, KAWS’s Holiday artwork is now in Singapore as part of its world tour, albeit embroiled in some legal mess that means it can’t officially open to the public yet. That said, it’s still up, and it looks great (better?) from afar. I love the idea of a giant character chilling out in different cities, but it loses that magic for me the closer you get. We had the opportunity to visit before it was meant to open, and yeah if there was merch on sale, I’d say definitely go. If you’re just nearby on the Helix Bridge, that works too. I brought my D-Lux 7 out for that. The iPhone is great and all, but as I said to Joseph in a chat yesterday, everything is so crispy and bright and HDR these days, it’s a relief to shoot with a “real” camera based on aging technology now and then.
  • We’re watching Only Murders In The Building, a 10-episode series set in New York, with some strong Manhattan Murder Mystery wannabe vibes. Instead of Woody Allen, Alan Alda, and Diane Keaton, you get Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez. And oh, they’re making a podcast of their amateur murder investigation as they go. It doesn’t always feel consistent — there are some admittedly cool ideas choppily shoved in but they mess with the tone and pacing — but I’ll take what I can get because cozy, fun weekend viewing is rare these days.

Week 44.21

  • This is the first post to be late since I started over a year ago. Apologies to myself; I/you were busy all day yesterday on Monday, which I guess I’ll only explain in the next report.
  • Apart from walks around the neighborhood, where I was surprised at my surprise to see a few Halloween-decorated houses because who does that right now + it’s nice that we think we could or should, I went out exactly once this week: to meet Cien for brunch and coffees on a weekday. Doing this after a long time kept in the cubicle cage leads one to wonder, “who are all these other people lounging, chatting, walking dogs in athleisure, looking jobless?” It’s perhaps a process of normalization for the brain; this gestures at ongoing freedom is a legitimate community too, transitory or not.
  • Transitory is probably going to be some dictionary publisher’s Word Of The Year.
  • After lunch, about an hour’s walk in blazing sun and humid air, getting wound around on top of our own footsteps, lost in the Tiong Bahru area while taking photos with my underutilized CL. I shall try to make it something I don’t leave home without these days.
  • I came across this article about the New Balance 990, a classic “dad shoe” the likes of which are now cool on account of looking uncool, I think. Back in the day, they were coveted in some circles for being the high-end of the low at $100, the best shoe that NB knew how to make in the USA, and so a bit better than “premium mediocre” actually; they would have been more comfortable and better-made than most. Well, I’ve recently had to toss out a few pairs of sneakers after wearing them black and broken after many years, so I immediately ordered a fresh pair of these after reading. They arrived in two days from an outlet in Chinatown. They look so dorky but I like them.
  • A cousin’s Chinese wedding dinner over the weekend. The first I’ve attended in Covid times: the rule is now five to a table rather than the customary 10. Where courses would normally be displayed in the center and doled out for sharing, accessible for any who wanted seconds, it’s now individual portions delivered directly. All expected, all logical, an improvement to the experience in many ways, deficit in other intangible ones, hindering interaction and breaking connection with our traditions and past — “that’s just how it’s always been done”, until one day, no longer.
  • As NFT floor prices crashed across OpenSea over the week, I found myself irrationally tempted to buy into some formerly (and really, still) overpriced collections. I had to talk myself down, but I’m glad I managed. Outside of Bitcoin and DeFi, there’s a lot of potential in the so-called crypto space with token-based projects and DAOs, namely new models of ownership and running a business, but this stage looks like pure spaghetti-on-walls and speculation. I accept that it’s part of the process, but I want to fast-forward to the next bit where it happens without so much get-rich-quick motivation. And the less is said about play-to-earn, the better.
  • On Netflix, we’ve been watching El inocente, yet another Harlan Coben TV adaptation. I think this will be the last one because it feels too much like the other we saw a few weeks ago: mechanically reliant on outlandish coincidences and undisclosed (to the viewer only) pasts to provide the twists it thinks are necessary to keep you hooked. Well, maybe they are.

Week 37.21

  • On Tuesday, I watched with some interest as El Salvador became the first country to accept Bitcoin as legal tender. There were videos online of people paying with Bitcoin Lightning at major brands like McDonalds and Starbucks; small purchases going through quickly and with virtually no fees. It seemed as good an experience as paying via GrabPay or PayLah or any of our local solutions, only with no intermediaries and using an alternative monetary system. How many years till we can do that anywhere, I wonder.
  • No new NFT purchases, but about a year ago we bought some art for the home and had them all framed. Because we never got around to putting nails in, they’ve sat against the walls until this week when we had someone come by with a power drill. It’s kinda weird to see them not leaning against the walls, to be honest.
  • Ricoh surprise-announced a new model in their GR series, which I love intensely. The GR IIIx is the first to not employ a 28mm (35mm equivalent) focal length: it’s 40mm instead, and I think it might just be the Goldilocks choice for any trip where you just bring one compact. Tight enough to get capture points of interest with some background blur, and still just wide enough for some landscapes. Or else there’s always your smartphone.
  • What I like best is that the new focal length gives my aging GR (first-gen APS-C model) a reason to keep existing. They don’t have to compete. I got it out of the drawer to take a few shots around the house and remembered how great it is to use in the process.
  • On Saturday, some friends came over for dinner and Howard brought his Oculus Quest 2 along for me to try out. I’ve lightly considered getting one as a couple of colleagues have it too, and during the 9.9 sale on Thursday the realization that a Quest 2 goes for the same price as a new Nintendo Switch OLED helped me to back down from buying one of the latter on Lazada. It turned out to be for the best, because I found that I can’t fit my glasses into the Quest 2 at all, and my large head doesn’t make things any easier. If I were to get one, I’d have to spring for a spectacle spacer and a bunch of other accessories.
  • Michael published his Weeknotes first, which reminded me that The Matrix Resurrections trailer dropped. Kim hadn’t seen any of the films, unbeknownst to me, so we watched the first two over the weekend. The first one still holds up, of course, but while I had no problems with Reloaded back in the day, I didn’t retain any strong memories of what the plot was about; just the spectacularly overblown fight scenes. Seeing it again now, especially with the help of subtitles, I think I finally got what it was going for. Not that it’ll redeem Revolutions for me, which I hated so much for not doing justice to the whole set up (I really bought into an online theory that Neo was an AI/human hybrid meant to bridge the two sides, which explained why Keanu was cast — he’s intentionally wooden!) But hey, maybe I’ll like it this time!

  • 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. I don’t know if I can label what I feel/felt as burnout, so I’ve not used that term very much. But I did aim to take a break and be intently relaxed. It’s only now that I’m finally beginning to BE relaxed about it, as opposed to relaxing on demand. So that’s it for now. I didn’t do a whole lot. I may not do a whole lot next week. It should be fine.

Week 36.21

  • I said last week that I wouldn’t end up buying an NFT, but that’s exactly what I’ve gone and done. Two, even. I’m classifying the associated costs as educational, along with all the time I now spend looking up and absorbing blockchain-related knowledge. Upon reflection, this area probably constitutes the largest and most meaningful use of my time so far during this sabbatical; something I wouldn’t have guessed at the outset.
  • Since people like to display their NFTs, I’ve added a separate page on this site for them, which you’ll probably see in the navigation bar somewhere above. Speaking of which, I’ve also cleaned up the Sidebar/About section and made a separate page for navigating the blog archives via search, categories, tags, and all that.
  • I’ve been listening to Donda, taking it in and feeling kinda sorry for Kanye. Then Drake’s Certified Lover Boy came out this week and it was like easy listening. The first playthrough was smooth, kinda enjoyable, and unchallenging. It felt like relief after Donda, and so I thought I liked it better. After listening to them both again, I think Kanye has created the better work, patchy and weird as it is. As of this minute, the leaked track Life Of The Party still hasn’t been officially released, so I’ll be waiting for that.
  • Meanwhile in the UK, Dave’s just released his second album, We’re All Alone In This Together, and I urge you to give it a chance. The song Clash with Stormzy and In The Fire (which features a Giggs verse with his classic flow) are particular standouts.
  • TV-wise, I’ve been watching a rather good Chinese anime (can you say that?) series called Link Click which has a novel gimmick where one of the protagonists can sort of time travel into the past, provided he has a photo of the scene. He then inhabits the body of the photographer for a short amount of time: the window in which they have to solve a mystery or obtain some information.
  • Similarly titled but nowhere as fun is Netflix’s new series Clickbait starring Adrian Grenier of Entourage fame, which we binged over the weekend. Okay it’s not bad, and if you like having the rug pulled out from under you every other episode, then it’s a fine way to spend some time.
  • I’ve started playing Beatstar, a mobile music/rhythm game on iPhone by Space Ape Games. It will remind you of Tap Tap Revolution from the early days of the App Store, but is possibly even better than that. I learnt about it on Twitter from following @xndra who happens to work there — follow her for mobile gaming-related content.

Week 35.21

  • The week passed without much direction, pockets of time invested in various pursuits without any idea of their worth or contribution to a larger whole, psychologically enjoyable but with an undercurrent of guilt and worry. In other words, I’ve been a lousy bum.
  • The existence of a Gossip Girl reboot for today’s teens would make any Millennial feel old, but it… feels like it’s written by one of us? That’s not really a compliment. So while it’s trashy fun with scenes that would have been shocking on TV 20 years ago, the way it tries to incorporate current social media and cultural trends, and how it sounds while doing it, feels inauthentic. Haha, here I am complaining that Gossip Girl doesn’t feel real like it used to. I mostly spend every episode trying to figure out who each actor resembles most.
  • On Monday evening we took a walk in the neighborhood. By Tuesday afternoon, many of the homes we passed would have been flooded up their driveways. It was the single heaviest day of rainfall in any August ever, I believe the news said. It was a normal August’s entire month of rain in a single day. As apartment dwellers we were unaffected, but watched online videos of overflowing canals and mall basements in borderline horror. (It’s now the following Monday morning and we’ve got reports of flooding around the island once again.)
  • For much of the week, I was looking forward to Friday for the (re)release of Asphalt 8 on Apple Arcade, with all its in-app purchases removed and replaced with a more traditional “premium” progression model. The game is 8 years old now, but it looks just fine and is still being played and refined regularly — the free-to-play edition was updated last week, so it must be doing good numbers. As I said in a review I left on the App Store, this is a welcome return to Asphalt’s roots, as anyone who played its original incarnation back on the Nintendo DS (Wikipedia) would know. I paid $60 for it then, which was roughly a dollar per polygon.
  • It’s a testament to Gameloft Barcelona’s work (or my degeneracy as a gamer) that I can be literally sitting in front of a PS4 and Switch but spend hours playing a mobile racing game on my iPad instead.
  • The next Apple Arcade release I’m looking forward to is yet another Nintendo DS revival: Zookeeper World. If you haven’t had the pleasure of playing Zookeeper, it’s essentially an animal-themed Bejeweled with a sort of blocky pixel art aesthetic, cheap but lovably annoying tunes, and a multiplayer mode where you mess with your opponent’s vision. This was also a $60 game back in the day, and I remember playing it to death in university on my DS Phat. It was such a blast that several of my non-gamer housemates ended up buying DSes just to play Zookeeper!
  • At the week’s end, I hung out with some friends at a cafe all afternoon and discovered with the help of my HiCoffee app how it feels to exceed the recommended amount of caffeine in a day: pretty fucking awful. I had what felt like a coffee hangover the next morning and had to cut down to a single shot for the day.
  • Tech-wise, I spent time looking at NFTs and being tempted to do something stupid (pretty sure I won’t) and getting my feet wet in the Terra ecosystem. In particular the Anchor and Orion projects, which enable high interest rates for savings, of around 19.5% and 13.5% pa respectively. To use Anchor, you’ll have to set up a Terra wallet and deposit UST (their USD stablecoin), but Orion makes it easier by bridging your Ethereum stablecoins like DAI/USDT/USDC over to Anchor while still returning higher rates than anywhere else. I think they’re incredibly interesting and worth looking into if you’d like to experience something that sounds too good to be true but actually seems to work. This is not financial advice, of course.
  • Now if you’ll excuse me, Donda (Apple Music) just came out and needs listening to.