I’m now at the age where annual medical exams are strongly advised. Everyone around me knows someone whose life’s been upended (or worse) by a serious health issue. As much as it sucks to find out, finding out too late is worse. We went for ours this week and are waiting for results, fingers crossed.
I’m now also at the age where lame jokes come naturally, so when the nurse asked, “You have about five drinks on average a week? What do you like to drink?”, I replied, “What do you have?” The nurse laughed harder than expected so I’m guessing the clinic doesn’t get many patients masking anxiety with comedy.
They’ll probably come back and tell me I’ve got hypertension, because I definitely felt my blood pressure spiking on Saturday when Kim agreed to give It Takes Two another go on the Switch. For the uninitiated, it’s a co-op game where a married couple on the verge of divorce magically get turned into a pair of their daughter’s wooden dolls in the shed, and need to make their way back into the main house to get her help. But in order to make the journey, they’ll need to — you guessed it — work together. As a couples conflict simulator, it’s super effective. There are many videos online showing one player (usually male) getting frustrated as their partners (usually female) struggle with the hand-eye coordination required to get through the platforming sections, dying over and over. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a lot of fun, and we surprisingly played for about three hours before calling it a day.
Speaking of things women do differently, I watched this video essay on the rise of gambling-related activities and industries, and learnt that blind box sales are overwhelmingly driven by female buyers. Supposedly, the data bears out that women prefer to get their dopamine fixes from such lower-risk, collection-and-completion-oriented activities with a community element. I definitely have never felt especially compelled to buy more than a couple of any given gacha or blind box toy. It says men prefer higher-stakes competitive play, “go big or go home” style, or what you’d recognize as traditional gambling. The point is, businesses really know our buttons and they are pushing them every minute in the modern world.
Speaking of wasting money, it didn’t take long to realize that my plastic Beats case wasn’t suited to everyday use — not because it’s candy pink but because, like the iPhone it protects, it’s too smooth and hard to hold. It’s now my occasional fun case, but for other days when I want to use one at all, I’ve got the MOFT Snap Case MOVAS™ in “Misty Cove” colored “vegan leather”. Nevertheless, it feels significantly nicer: soft, textured, grippy, yet smooth enough to slide out of a pocket without turning it inside out. One additional benefit of vegan leather over the murdery kind is that it’s more stain/patina resistant. I would never have been able to risk this color with a cowhide case; it’d turn blue-black from my jeans in no time. Btw, when did we all agree to start calling PVC vegan leather? That’s quite the PR masterstroke by Big Plastic.
Last week, the Twitch streamer 4amlaundry once again attended the Tokyo Game Show and streamed hours of walking around the show floor. I missed it then, but watched some of the recording this week on YouTube. I was more excited when he decided to visit the Extinct Media Museum in Tokyo on Wednesday. It’s a private collection of old cameras, laptops, phones, and media devices like the Walkman/Discman, MP3 players and so on. This was on my list to visit back in February, but on the day I was meant to go, it got too cold and dark for the 15-minute walk over from Tokyo station and I decided to head home. Watching the POV stream felt like being there — except he was happy to touch all of those beautiful tech artifacts where I, the germophobe, would have declined.
I read a couple of books. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes is one of those titles you always hear about, but I never actually knew what it was about. I thought it was some inspirational crap like ‘Hey God, it’s Whoever, Are You Listening’, or ‘The Five People You Meet in Purgatory’ or whatever. It turned out to be about an intellectually disabled man who’s turned into a genius in a science experiment. It was also more powerful than I expected because it’s presented entirely as journal entries by the man himself, so the reader experiences his increasing intelligence and widening awareness of his position firsthand.
Another book was Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, which has been getting mentioned a lot on account of being nominated for the Booker Prize this year and for being too painfully truthful a look at millennials, and our devotion to living through trends, cool hunting, digital nomadism, performative wokeness, and mediocre aesthetics. Here’s the New Yorker’s article about Perfection, which makes me want to read the Georges Perec book that inspired it. Me? I loved it, but if I’d taken a few different turns — say, moved to Berlin — I’d probably feel personally attacked.
The week got off to a bad start when our three-year-old Dyson V12 vacuum cleaner stopped working. The motor cyclone made a pulsating noise and the error message “Airways Blocked” appeared on the little LED screen. Usually this means that you’ve got some ball of hair choking one of the attachments, or your filters need cleaning. I checked everything and knocked out so much dust that my palm hurt, but still no luck.
Our cleaner shared that another client had similar problems and paid about $150 for repair at a Dyson service center, and a Perplexity search corroborated that would be the starting point, depending on what needed to be fixed. It said complex replacements could take over three weeks! My first priority was to get it working asap, because I have no idea how people lived before vacuum cleaners were invented.
On a whim, I decided to check what a new vacuum cleaner would cost. The latest Dyson, the “V16 Animal” model is over S$1,100, and another V12 would be S$800. But the shocking thing is how crazy cheap the Chinese clones have gotten, ranging between S$80 (yes) and S$400. Xiaomi’s most powerful, the G20 Max, is only about S$320 and I’m sure it rivals our Dyson in capability and (I wouldn’t have thought so before this) longevity. I was beginning to think buying an entirely new Chinese vacuum for the price of a Dyson repair was a viable option.
Anyhow, I got an appointment at the service center for a couple of days later, and the staff’s instant opinion was that there wasn’t anything stuck further inside the cyclone unit, but it was an electronic or PCB (printed circuit board) issue. Meaning the entire main bit of the vacuum cleaner, minus battery and air filter, would need to be swapped out. Total cost: S$168. I believe this is simply the modern default for consumer electronics — don’t bother repairing or replacing one little component, give the customer a new unit and send the old one back for recycling (or disposal). It’s wasteful, but means the business doesn’t need to train frontline repair staff and the customer gets a “better” experience to boot.
Later, I went to have a look at the Xiaomi model in person, and it’s definitely uglier and clunkier, with the same downward dust receptacle ejection system as much older Dyson designs. I do like my V12 very much, I just don’t believe in it as much after this incident.
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I saw with some excitement that Puzzle Quest was being rereleased in an “Immortal Edition” for the Switch, with remastered visuals. It’s also out on other platforms. I played the original back in 2007 on my Nintendo DS and probably sank over 100 hours into it. It was probably the first game to combine Match-3 puzzling with an RPG storyline and character progression. To date, I haven’t played a better expression of this idea.
With regards to this new version, it’s been good so far. The UI looks gigantic going from a tiny handheld to a 65” TV, but the great thing about playing on Switch is that you have the touchscreen controls this genre was made for. I have yet to encounter any of the bugs that plagued the original release, but that’s no guarantee I won’t. If I recall correctly, sometimes moves wouldn’t register and you’d die despite technically winning. On one hand it made the game feel unfair, but glass-half-full people would call it extra challenge. The game was so fun, I was happy to play around these deficiencies.
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On Friday night we met Wen and Sarah for Mexican food at a place called Huevos, in New Bahru. I read awhile back that the retail complex was struggling but that was not the case that night; it was pretty loco. One fun memory that came up was a trip to Bintan we took together back in 2009 where Mandy sang John Mellencamp’s Hurts So Good in the pool so often that it became the theme song of that vacation. I went home that night and unearthed a video I made in iMovie from all the clips I shot, using that song as the soundtrack. The video quality, shot on my Panasonic LUMIX LX3, has held up incredibly well after all this time.
The next day, I ate at Shake Shack and made the double mistake of ordering a Tiramisu milkshake and finishing it even though I could have stopped halfway. It turns out that single serving had 850 calories and a whopping 90g of sugar — that’s 18 teaspoons of system-disrupting poison! For comparison, the single-patty Shackburger I also ate has only 550 calories. After learning all that, I didn’t have the heart to look up the side of fries I also ate. At this age, I don’t think the damage will ever be undone. I might have to start saving up for Ozempic.
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My Goodreads annual reading challenge has been completed with a vengeance, and currently stands at 40 books out of a targeted 24. The last few weeks have been made up of financial self-help material, including Nick Maggiulli’s The Wealth Ladder, which I also saw being featured on the shelves of a local Books Kinokuniya. I thought it worth mentioning because of how it lays out different strategies for people on different rungs of the so-called ladder of net worth: $1–10k, $10–100k, $100k–1M, and so on. It’s a very clear way to think about what actions and sacrifices are needed to get to the next level, and whether you’d even want to. There’s also some interesting data on how people at the higher levels distribute their money in completely different ways from us plebs.
I also read Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, an infuriatingly patchy story about time travel and searching for a father who’s gone missing in time and space. There are some novel ideas here that move the genre forward, some of them explained with a lot of (pseudo?)science and some only intriguingly hinted at. The post-time travel world that it builds is fundamentally illogical, and almost no effort is made to integrate it with a reader’s expectations — in other words, it kind of fails to hold together. However, the actual writing is occasionally brilliant. There are passages that collapse memory, description, and feeling — suddenly you’re thinking about your own childhood and watching it through the quantum bookshelf, like at the end of Interstellar (2014).
Speaking of movies, I rewatched the Wachowskis’ 2012 version of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas with my book club and it wasn’t as good as I remembered. Turns out both the book and film feel shakier on return. Anyhow, it was only 13 years ago, but there are race impersonation elements in this film that seem like transgressions today. Multiple white actors have their eyes taped up to play Asian characters. Halle Berry and Zhou Xun both have scenes where they play blue-eyed white women. The Korean characters speak English in a mix of other Asian accents. The only line that isn’t crossed is white people putting on blackface. Everything else seems to have gotten the green light.
It was a low-key week after those few days in Bangkok. There’s more travel lined up soon, so I figure it’s no bad thing to enjoy the quiet while I can. We had someone come by to look at a house issue that’s been worrying me, but the prognosis was that it’s not a big problem for now, and they’ll do some proactive repairs in the meantime. So I have to admit life’s pretty good.
When I first went to Bangkok back in March, I found the retail scene vibrant and thriving in a way that you don’t see in Singapore anymore, and this week there was a long and well-researched piece on CNA about how shopping in other SEA countries has made Singapore seem dull in comparison. It’s a rough situation because we’re short on both land and entrepreneurial spirit, which means a vicious circle of high rents and safe concepts. People like to blame greedy landlords, but I suspect they’re the same ones counting on retiring with their REIT and bank dividends. You can’t have one without the other.
Doing my part for the restaurant scene, I ate out thrice this week and two were unhealthy affairs. A Singaporean sort of pub (al fresco) with Guinness and Thai food, and a Chinese hot pot restaurant picked for its amusing name, HIPPOT, that turned out to be one of those meals that goes down easy but feels awful after. Too much grease and heat. Note to self: make better choices!
The only thing I bought on the Amazon Prime Day sale was a book I’ve been wanting for a while, but the shipping cost is usually almost as much as the book itself. Thanks to the questionable economics of Amazon, shipping was free this time. The book is A Handheld History by Lost in Cult, and it covers the corner of gaming hardware that I have the most affection for: portable systems like the Game Boy and PSP. I suppose the smartphone is inadvertently part of that lineage; a stepchild or distant cousin. I don’t know when I’ll sit down to read it — paper books are just… inconvenient — but I look forward to that rainy afternoon.
I just finished reading The Butcher’s Boy by Thomas Perry, a 1982 thriller about a hitman. The anniversary edition’s foreword was written by Michael Connelly, author of the Bosch series, which got me in the right mood. If you liked the recent Day of the Jackal TV series, this will likely do it for you. The killer is the sort that doesn’t look especially athletic or dangerous, in fact he has the kind of face people don’t remember, but he’s great at what he does and when he gets into a jam, you root for him to get out. There are three more in the series [Goodreads], so those are going on my list.
Evan mentioned to me the existence of an Amiibo emulator a few weeks back, and when I saw one show up on Reddit it nudged me into ordering a unit off AliXpress. It’s a small electronic device that you can program to mimic the NFC chips on various Nintendo Amiibo figures, which unlock benefits in certain games when held next to your Switch/Switch 2 console. As I am very much against the idea of making people waste money buying large amounts of unnecessary plastic crap to unlock software features built into the games they already own, I have no moral qualms about using one of these.
This doesn’t have Amiibo support, but I played and finished Caravan SandWitch this week on the Switch. Weird name that doesn’t tell you much, I know, but hey it’s French. It’s a chill little indie game about exploring a planet (inspired by the landscapes of Provence) in search of your missing sister, with strong anticapitalist vibes, and was mentioned in a recent NYT article about videogames with a Studio Ghibli-like aesthetic. I enjoyed it enough as a short adventure, but the English translation lets it down in some areas. It runs well enough on the Switch 2, but I think the frame rate will be choppy on a regular Switch. 3.5/5.0
Pulpy paperbacks and cozy games are good and all, but a great media diet needs something of substance, and thankfully MUBI delivered. They’re featuring a two-film collection by the director Shinji Somai on their front page, and I was floored by both of them. They’re linked by a shared theme of childhood summers marked by transformative upheavals — broken families, deaths, newfound freedoms — but also the building of friendships, independence, and memories that become strengths in adulthood.
Moving (1993) features an incredible performance by Tomoko Tabata who was probably 12 at the time; the kind of work that’s almost too good, too early — fortunately she’s still working in film and TV today. There are lines in this that hit so hard, and incredibly audacious and magical sequences that are as good as anything I’ve seen put on film.
Notably, the three titular child actors in The Friends (1994) never acted in anything again. Scrambled by emotion after the ending, I hastily wrote on Letterboxd: “A film doesn’t have any business being this good! I cried till my Face ID struggled. There are frames in this so beautiful they should be hung in the Louvre.” Both films are a 5/5 for me. Perhaps for the way they perfectly capture the haziness of childhood memories, the nostalgic look and air of that era, and the open-ended way that school holidays felt as you experienced them. Stuff we didn’t think would matter becomes what we remember most.
Kim was away for work again, so I mostly stayed in and spent more time with the Vision Pro. Apple’s new VIP video series that takes you to major sporting arenas doesn’t sound like my sort of thing on paper, but the first episode on Yankee Stadium was a surprisingly entertaining watch. The crowds feel real and the only thing missing was a closeup of a hot dog. It was filmed last June, I think, and feels like a document of a much saner time. There are still many more apps and videos I have yet to check out.
Back in the present, Trump’s wacky tariff rollout drama continued, with the latest being a series of takesies-backsies that is great news for Apple and other makers of computers and smartphones: exemption from whatever the crazy current rate is on imports from China. 125%? Or was it 155%? Everyone now expects the stock to surge on Monday’s open, but come on, none of these pronouncements stick or mean anything now. The best move might be to sell all US-based assets and spend the next year off-the-grid on a beach somewhere.
Starbucks has done a collaboration with Peanuts (that’s Peanuts × Starbucks, for readers who were here last week), and of all the merch they put out, it was a yellow stoneware mug that I liked the best. It features the whole gang sitting at a long table, with Snoopy dressed as a barista and serving up espressos in his latest persona, a corporate caffeine shill stupidly named “Joe Kind”. I like Snoopy, probably on account of being exposed to the Apple TV 4K’s wonderful Snoopy and Woodstock screensaver, so I’m turning a blind eye to this sacrilege. Anyway I received my mug in the mail this week and it’s my new teatime go-to.
I did go out fairly early on Saturday morning to go hang out with a bunch of coffee nerd ex-colleagues who spent more time messing around with grind sizes than I ever thought possible (my contribution was a bag of beans fresh from Ho Chi Minh). It was a good time, and the occasion gave me a novel writing prompt to try out, which brings to me to my latest ChatGPT-based hobby…
About two years ago, when we were just grappling with the GPT-3 model and what it could do, I spent quite a lot of time trying to get it to write passable poetry. The most successful approach I found was to provide it with a detailed character backstory and ask it to write from that person’s perspective, taking into account their preferred styles and word choices. I managed to eke out some genuinely good stanzas (imo), was moved and amazed, and then moved on to other experiments and forgot about it.
Until this week, that is, when I wondered how the latest models would fare given the same tasks. I put my old prompts together into a custom GPT, and asked for the first silly idea that came to mind: a poem about growing older but ironically becoming more attracted to cute things like Snoopy. It did an honestly good job with just that. Then I asked it to write one about the story of how he got his name — a true story: Charles Schulz’s mother daydreamed they’d buy a family dog when she recovered from cancer, but she never did — and the result was good enough to refine further. So I went back and forth on it with the bot (who I named Penrose), combined several attempts, intervened slightly, and here’s where we landed.
She Gave Him the Name
“If we ever get another dog,” she said, “we should call him Snoopy.”
It was a small thing, tucked between errands or waiting rooms, the kind of sentence you don’t expect to echo.
He was fifteen. Maybe he nodded. Maybe he carried it like lint in his pocket, forgotten until everything else was gone.
Years later, drawing alone in his studio, he gave the name to a dog who danced on rooftops, typed novels no one would read, stood in for joy and for all the feelings boys weren’t supposed to have.
Snoopy caught on. So did the quiet boy with no luck, the girl who loved too hard, the blanket dragged across the years. The world came to know them and needed their steady kindness.
Maybe that’s what it means to miss someone forever, to take the smallest thing they gave you and let it become the sky above everything you make.
And here’s one from another session where I asked it to identify a core human paradox and write something about it. It chose to explore how we want freedom but crave structure.
The Night I Rearranged the Furniture
I moved the couch against the other wall just to see if the room felt different. It didn’t. I stared at it like it had betrayed me, then moved it back.
It was past midnight. The kind of hour when you wonder if this version of your life is the one that sticks.
I opened the window to let in some air, but it was the same air as yesterday. Nothing new came through.
I thought about driving somewhere, but didn’t know what I’d be driving to. The gas tank was full. The fridge was full. I was full of something I couldn’t name.
They say people like me always want to leave, but never go far. We change the wallpaper. We cut our hair. We imagine new cities without maps.
The truth is, I love knowing where the forks are. I love the sound the radiator makes right before it kicks in. I love the old light switch that sticks unless you press it just right.
But still— some nights I crave an airport gate, a highway at dusk, a conversation in a town where no one knows what I used to be.
I don’t go. I just stay up too late and move the couch.
It feels unreal to have this tool for S$30/mo. I can ask it for poems about any random scenario or feeling, and it tends to throw out lines and images that catch me off guard. I’ve now taken to giving it things I half-wrote long ago and never finished, and it gives pretty good notes. An unexpected side effect of this is that I’m feeling more inspired myself, and now I’m asking it to give me prompts, and I’ll write things for it to review.
Here’s one I reworked this week.
He died in his 17th year
And flowers were laid by the side of the road Fit to be swept within just a fortnight
Parents kept his memory alive another thirty years, Until grief or emptiness took them too
I used to think we were made for more How clever bones and cells can seem
But a body is mostly waiting to be undone And our home keeps going around the sun While out there Nothing waits for no one
While I was messing with Penrose, OpenAI launched a new feature called “Memory”, where ChatGPT is able to reference all your past conversations across previously separate chats. The way they chose to showcase it was to suggest you let the AI describe you, the black mirror lighting up to reveal a camera was recording all along. I didn’t expect them to so transparently demonstrate how this technology is a more powerful, more dangerous profiling machine that anything Facebook or Google has ever put online, but I suspect they think there’s nothing we can do. I asked it to guess how I felt about certain topics, like Nolan’s Batman trilogy or the Fujifilm X100VI camera. It didn’t exactly read my mind but they were very educated guesses. Not very reassuring. It offered to guess other things like my favorite cocktail (it said Negroni; not my absolute favorite but one of them), my favorite beer (a Belgian saison; not even close), and my favorite band (Radiohead; they might be in second place).
This reminded me I was due another playthrough of OK Computer to keep my millennial card intact. It only gets better with time. I’ve also been listening to Counting Crows’ Hard Candy again recently. Some of those songs are the best that anyone or any AI will ever write.
I read All Systems Red, the first book in Martha Wells’ Murderbot series. It’s about a security robot that’s hacked its own governor module, secretly sentient but pretending not to be, and mostly just wants to be left alone to binge-watch serials. Deeply relatable. Apple TV+ has made a show from it that’s meant to come out soon, and I can’t wait. Thankfully there are six more books (plus some novellas), so this could be their next Silo or Slow Horses: a long-running fan favorite franchise they get to keep making more of. If you like introverted robots with trust issues getting into some space shootouts, it’s a fun time.
Still on AI bots, since I paid for ChatGPT Plus again last week, I decided to update a custom GPT I made to serve as my personal editor and proofreader. It’s trained on a bunch of these very blog posts and now incorporates a detailed summary of my writing style into its prompt. It’s shockingly fun to work with and makes half-decent suggestions. If you’d like to try this, give ChatGPT access to a bunch of your writing, get it to codify your style as a JSON profile, then refine it by reviewing examples together.
It actually managed to write me a half-decent LinkedIn post from a premise I provided, not that I care to post on LinkedIn at all. After some editing and joint revisions, it’s now in a shape that wouldn’t make me cringe if I read it from someone else on LinkedIn. Wait, that’s not true. Everything on LinkedIn is cringe.
I’m not going to say a lot about Trump’s tariffs and the mess they’ve made of the stock market, but boy am I seeing red in my finance apps. I don’t know how Americans will be able to afford anything, and I’m kinda mad that this will affect the rest of us too.
Caught in the blast is Nintendo’s new Switch 2, which was detailed this week in a series of live broadcasts I’ve been anticipating for the past couple of months. The new GameChat and GameShare features they showed are very welcome, especially if we’re ever locked down in a future pandemic. They’ve done a lot to make playing with friends online feel like hanging out on the same couch. Unfortunately, the announcement was marred by a higher than expected price, something of an unforced error on their part, and people flooded the Treehouse livestream chat with calls to “DROP THE PRICE”. To make matters worse, the already unwelcome US price of $449 is now set to rise once they calculate the impact of tariffs.
We’ll be missing the June 5 launch in any case, with the official site saying “July–September in Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines”. As for price, the original Switch launched at $299 USD, which should’ve meant about S$400 — but we ended up paying S$650 here, bundled with Breath of the Wild, because of limited supply and some greedy local distribution. I don’t expect the same kind of scalping this time, but I also wouldn’t be shocked to see it land at S$800. Can’t wait.
I still have so much to play on my old Switch OLED anyway, and this week I got started on Ace Attorney Investigations Collection. It’s a remastered version of the two Miles Edgeworth games from the Nintendo DS, the latter of which was never released internationally. Also in my backlog are Kirby and the Forgotten Land and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, both of which are getting Switch 2 enhancement patches — higher frame rates, HDR, all that good stuff — if you’re willing to pay for the upgrade. Which means I now have a perfectly valid excuse to keep ignoring them until summer.
Michael pinged me out of the blue to ask if I knew anything about the origins of using the × symbol in Japanese to mean “and” or “plus”. It’s something I’ve long wondered about too, especially with anime titles like Hunter × Hunter and Spy × Family. So I outsourced the research to Perplexity (an AI search engine), and found that this usage came out of Japanese fashion subculture in the 1990s. Turns out it’s a Japanese invention, possibly inspired by its use in botany to denote crossbreeding. In modern use, the × stands in for “with”, “versus”, “of”, or “intersection”. It’s also not pronounced aloud, which is why the show is just called “Spy Family”. I like how the symbol invites layered meanings — it implies both conflict and connection. In Spy × Family, it’s the tension between the fake family setup and their hidden identities, but also how those roles merge into something real. A simple little mark doing a lot of work.
I watched a new anime on Netflix called I Parry Everything. Following the isekai wave a couple years back, the new trend seems to be fantasy stories about “weak” characters who go all-in on training one obscure skill — to the point of accidentally attaining god-tier strength. Jose reminded me of another in the same vein, with the glorious title I Don’t Want to Get Hurt, So I’ll Max Out My Defense. In Parry, the main guy is told early on he has no future as a swordsman — so he just spends the next 14 years practicing how to block. Now he’s practically unkillable. But the show’s comedy hinges on him not realizing this, while everyone else assumes he’s the savior of their kingdom. It’s extremely stupid, extremely fun, and yeah I binged the whole thing in a weekend.
We’ve also been watching The Pitt on Max and it’s a great hospital drama (starring Noah Wyle of ER) that leans more towards realism than the likes of New Amsterdam. Everything takes place over 15 hours in 15 episodes, which takes me back to watching 24 in absolute awe as a young man.
Pulse on Netflix is everything The Pitt is not. It’s cheesy, everyone’s more model than medic, and there’s no urgency or realism. Even the surgeries are shot in crispy iPhone-like HDR and cinematic lighting. It does have Willa Fitzgerald (aka Reacher’s partner in S1) and Néstor Carbonell (Yanko from The Morning Show) but even they can’t lift this to greatness. It’s fine background TV though.
What’s up with this image? I went for dinner with Peishan and Cien, who decided it would be funny to tell HaiDiLao (a massive Chinese hotpot chain) that it was my birthday month, so the staff came round and sang/blasted out of a Bluetooth speaker a proprietary and very Chinese birthday song, that apparently everyone around us knew because they joined in and clapped along. I tried to stop them, but in the end had to endure it with a pained smile.
Btw one legitimate use case of AI is transforming images into drawings to get around the problem of publicly sharing people’s faces.
I got busy with a little work for the first time in ages, helping Rob out with an interesting web project he’s taken on. Well, I say I’ve helped, but only he would know, and he’s too nice to tell me if I didn’t. It was a good experience in that I now know it’s not impossible to get going again quickly from zero; come to think of it, I did pretty much get thrown straight into it after my last sabbatical too. But I also know that sitting alone in my home office with nobody to collaborate with is not a lot of fun anymore.
Regular readers may recall that Michael (who, along with Yiwen, I sadly failed to meet up with in Tokyo despite having many weeks to do so) once told me that he’s probably never seen a cockroach in Japan. Well, they must follow me around or something, because I saw a dead one on the floor of the apartment building’s garbage sorting room just a few days into our trip. Now, after a few days back, I found a dead one at home. Measures have been taken, but my mental state is brittle glass. I got a quote for professional help (pest control, not psychiatry), and they want about S$900/year for peace of mind. I’m wavering. Maybe.
I thought I was done with travel for a while, but it looks like I’ll be going to Bangkok soon for (*small voice*) the first time in my life. Nobody can believe it when I say that because all Singaporeans are expected to love Thailand and to go shopping there several times a year or something. It suggests that I should be ashamed, like the time I went into a MOS Burger and declined chilli sauce with my fries, and the aunty (see, I am a local) asked incredulously, “No chilli? Are you a Singaporean?” Well ackshually! “I can’t tolerate proper spicy food, and I don’t see the point in flying to another hot and humid city!” — are reasons why I haven’t so far, but now I will, and I might love it. It’s just for a few days, and I’m under no obligation to deep-dive the city and make the most of it. There should be plenty of time for other visits if all goes well.
A couple of months ago, it was suggested that a couple of us friends should institute a regular dinner ritual because it’s too easy to withdraw and neglect relationships as you get old. I agree with this, and we’ve been doing it, but I still don’t know what fundamentally changes this with age. The easy explanation is more time being taken up by marriages and children and work and caregiving, coinciding with a decrease in overall social and physical energy. But there must be more to it. I used to think it was wild that my parents stopped going out to the movies, only visited the same few familiar restaurants and malls, and appeared to have a shrinking circle of concern. But now I’m here too. I used to know what was happening around town through some unconscious osmosis, but Orchard Road is an alien place whenever I pass through now. Perhaps it’s a decline in curiosity and, subsequently, neuroplasticity. We need to institute some rituals around that.
Media activity
Still reading The Satanic Verses. It’s disorienting, like swimming in viscous psychedelics. I said to my book club that it sometimes feels like watching Quantum Leap the way you, the reader, keep surfacing into new stories and identities and viewpoints — you break above the water, gasping just long enough to get your bearings on some new threads, and then you’re pulled under again. What an incredible achievement.
Not related at all, but man is Conclave an amazing film! Such a shame it didn’t pick up more Oscars. I enjoyed it so much I was hoping it would go longer than it did.
I put Jennie’s debut album on during a long train journey and while it was better than Lisa’s album (agree with that 5.2/10 Pitchfork review, btw), it was still kind of like an imitation of interesting pop music. I didn’t get the sense that Jennie is anyone, and that these were just some beats she’d curated from producers’ submissions.
Queued up directly after Ruby was BANKS’s new album, Off With Her Head, and I honestly FELT that transition. “Okay, this is getting good” soon turned into “oh, this is actually another album”. I know they’re not really in the same category (except for both having features from Doechii), but BANKS’s work sounded so much sharper, from the control of her voice to the quality of the production. So the Blackpink solo effort ranking still stands at Rose > Jennie > Lisa > Jisoo for me (with a wide gulf right in the middle).
I’ll try for a shorter bullet point update this week.
It’s hard to believe we’re already done with the first week of December. Every year, I say Christmas crept up on me and I don’t feel it coming at all. Now I accept that it’s just the nature of Christmas in the tropics (without winter), and if I don’t surround myself with visual signifiers of the season, the mind forgets what the body doesn’t feel.
Nintendo released Animal Crossing Pocket Camp Complete, the offline, self-contained, definitive version of their mobile AC game, and I decided to buy it after all. I played the live service version briefly when it came out, but soon decided I didn’t like the in-app purchase model. This is much better. So much better, in fact, that I have spent several hours this weekend fishing and harvesting fruit.
The game was actually mentioned in my first-ever weekly post back in July 2020. After 7 years of iteration, it now feels like a massive game with tons of content (clothing and furniture to buy and craft) and new functionality bolted on. Currently, it’s snowing in the world and the seasonal events have got my campsite decorated with sleighs and piles of gifts and I’m wearing a reindeer hat… and dare I say? It kind of feels like Christmas is coming.
If you’re playing too, add me to your world with the Camper Card below! I believe it’s just a one-way thing, and we won’t get to interact for real since there are no servers involved. And don’t forget, the game is half price now and will go up to $20 at the end of January 2025.
We collected our Zeiss Optical Inserts for Vision Pro (prescription lenses that click in magnetically), and the setup experience was pretty cool. The device detects that they’re in, and makes you redo the eye setup process. Then it registers the new lenses on your profile by having you look at a QR code printed inside the box. Given that my contact lenses are “weaker” than my regular glasses, I’m now seeing everything in the Vision Pro with even more clarity than I was before.
Leica fixed a deal-breaking bug in Leica LUX where your preference of ProRAW or HEIF file format wasn’t remembered between sessions. They also fixed some other small things that bothered me but aren’t worth mentioning. This makes it a viable camera app for everyday use because it gets you HEIF files with the gentler/less sharpened look of shooting in ProRAW. Plus you can choose a “Leica Look” color profile to start from, and non-destructively try others or revert to the underlying original photo afterwards. I like it enough to put a shortcut on my Lock Screen.
Our home broadband plan was up for renewal, and I got a call from the company to that effect. They wanted me to give the last 4 digits of my national ID number over the phone for verification before they would even tell me anything. “How do I verify you’re really from the company?”, I asked. “Can you tell me something you know about me?”, I offered, to which they said “We can’t share any customer information”, and agreed when I asked if I was just supposed to trust them. I said that didn’t work for me, and so they could just send me whatever special offers they wanted via email instead.
The offer was fine, and I decided to stick with them for another two years because it’s the best price I’ve seen anywhere. And as a bonus, we’ll be getting an upgrade to a 10gbps line. We’ll only be utilizing a maximum of 2.5gbps though, because that’s the maximum supported wired input on the WiFi 6E router I just got a few months ago.
Renovation noises at home continued, and someone lodged a complaint with the housing board against our new neighbor’s contractors. It wasn’t us, but I can see how this might not be the warm welcome anyone would hope for. There are also reports from other residents that they’ve been seeing ceiling leaks during the recent storms, and mysteriously, these are people lower down in the building! Fingers crossed this doesn’t grow to affect us, because I can’t take any more drama.
One noisy afternoon, I decided to finally pay a visit to my local library branch after talking about it for the last six months, and… it’s not much to write home about. Lots of retirees sitting around playing Pokémon Go and reading magazines. Afterwards I decided to eat at Yakiniku Like, a place that seems well designed for solo diners. I got my own little personal grill, and ate 200g of beef short plate with 300g of rice (and a huge mound of shredded cabbage) for a little over $20 and went home very happy.
We went out for a much nicer dinner on Thursday, checking out Hayop on Jose’s recommendation. It’s affiliated with the Manam restaurant in Manila, a fact that only landed as I was looking at the menu — I ate there a couple of times back in 2019 when I was there for work. The prices here have been proportionately raised, but the food is nearly as good as I remembered, so that’s fair. I like Filipino food because it respects the power of pork fat.
Testing the Leica Lux app with these
It turns out that writing bullet points ≠ shorter updates when you’re a typer-yapper like me.
I wanted to binge an entire anime series in a week and decided to go with Summertime Rendering. It’s a time loop story that feels like a visual novel game adaptation, but actually started as a manga series. I was hoping more for sci-fi but it’s really a supernatural thing. At 25 episodes, it became a bit of a slog near the end as the multiple timelines became too convoluted to follow. Don’t really recommend.
Netflix released a new 6-part spy series called Black Doves, starring Keira Knightley and Ben Whislaw (aka Q in recent James Bond films, and the voice of Paddington). I was optimistic, but while it’s not as bad as most Netflix shows, it still suffers from the Marvel-ization of popular culture where any seriousness or suspense is immediately undercut by comic relief before it can mean anything. That’s not the only problem with it, but the result is a show that feels like background fodder for phone fiddling.
Months after the Katseye moment, we watched the Pop Star Academy show that shows their formation and training over two years. It was interesting to see non-Asian idols like Lexie chafe against unethical manipulation in light of HYBE’s recent troubles with NewJeans. I don’t think the industry’s current models will hold up well as talent starts to realize they hold the keys to their fandoms and can stream online on their own. It’s like K-Pop’s In Rainbows moment.
I also think HYBE made a strategic error in greenlighting this behind-the-scenes show with Netflix, and it’s translated into Katseye’s failure to take off with an international (beyond K-Pop) audience. Fans of J-Pop and K-Pop aren’t surprised to see the rough training and emotional abuse their idols go through, but people seeing that shit for the first time probably feel terrible about supporting the whole business, especially when adult music execs gleefully admit on camera that they fucked with the teenaged girls’ trust in each other to create more drama.
Yiwen shared her Spotify Wrapped on IG and I learnt about the artist known as Night Tempo, a self-proclaimed “retro culture curator” who puts out city pop-inflected music that sounds exactly like how the perfect night drive must feel. Check out his latest album, Connection on Apple Music.
For something less weeby and more eclectic, Jean Dawson’s new album Glimmer of God is worth a playthrough. I’m going to be putting the opening song Darlin’ on playlists for quite awhile, I’m sure.
ROSÉ’s debut album rosie dropped, and what I’ve heard so far sounds like competent pop with a teenaged guitar girl’s poetry notebook slant. That’s not a knock; it’s as satisfying a sub-genre as a sad man’s whiskey-soaked heartbreak blues. I’m still feeling good about my prediction that she’ll turn out to be the most musically interesting Blackpink alum.
I’m on my last week camping out here in a co-working space while renovations continue in the apartment next door. From what I’ve observed, they’re probably behind schedule and will continue into November. As of this moment, however, I’m not planning to extend my membership another month.
On the few days I’ve stayed home, I found that AirPods Pro do an okay job of reducing the noise, as long as you’ve got some audio playing. That should allow me to do most of the same things well enough (watching films, reading books, scrolling trash), but the part of being out here that I’ll miss is observing other people at work and guessing what they do. The most entertaining one so far has been a life coach who saw his clients for one-on-one sessions out in the open space, right next to other people typing away on laptops. Weird!
I am incidentally looking forward to the AirPods Pro update next week that will turn them into hearing aids and concert hearing protectors. We got my dad a new pair in anticipation of the former, and he’s open/excited to try it out. If you know someone who may have impaired hearing but doesn’t want to get fitted for traditional hearing aids, check this new feature out because it may be a helpful alternative. Hearing loss apparently contributes to dementia.
Come with me to Bluesky
On le scrolling de la trash: I decided to reduce my participation in totally toxic platforms like Twitter, toxically owned platforms like Threads and Instagram, and make another go at a decentralized alternative. It’s complicated, but I don’t want to fully leave these places because I want to know how people I disagree with think. I’ll spend less time there, though, and I won’t post new content.
I’ve tried Mastodon but its lack of algorithmic discovery was a bug for me, not a feature. Like Michael who reached the same conclusion, I will not be renewing my omg.lol subscription and that will mean the loss of my social.lol Mastodon account in about a year.
So that means returning to Bluesky, 14 months after I first got in. In the beginning there was a waitlist, and it was hard to find people I already knew elsewhere, and I couldn’t get anyone to follow me. A year on, it’s beginning to look like a viable place to hang out. There’s a tool called Sky Follower Bridge that helps you find your Twitter people on Bluesky.
You should look me up at @sangsara.bsky.social if you decide to join! I have just 44 followers now, but with your help I might get to 45.
I like two things about it right now: that the community I see is welcoming and nerdy in that OG internet way, and that one can customize their experience via ‘feeds’. Technically, if the niche and/or conspiracy theorizing content I see on Twitter ever comes over, I can wall them into a clearly marked section that I’ll only see when I want to, but on the same open platform built to last longer than the ones we’ve had. I’m tired of moving from shipwreck to new-but-already-cursed ship every few years, an odyssey described in this great thread by @pookleblinky.bsky.social that I reposted. It’s disgusting but us millennials probably coined the term ‘digital nomads’ because that’s what we are.
Later: After writing the above, I came across this post by Adam Singer about why quitting TikTok and Instagram gives you an edge over most other people, who are hopelessly addicted and mentally fractured, a topic I mentioned recently after reading the controversial book Stolen Focus. He makes a distinction (that I agree with) between image/video-based networks, and text-based ones like Bluesky, Reddit, and old-school forums, because the latter type fosters connections and discussions in a way that pure content delivery systems largely do not.
In the same way it doesn’t matter if Johann Hari got the facts exactly right in his book, it doesn’t matter if you cut down on social media because you hate a tech baron’s irresponsible personal/business/product design choices or if it’s because you just want to reclaim some agency over your own mind. The important thing is that you try it and see what happens.
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Test photos
Here are some photos I took this week (ProRAW in the default camera and some with Fig Camera’s beta) while further improving my upcoming positive film LUT. I’ll probably sell it on Gumroad for a few bucks. I have no marketing channels and no hope that anyone will ever find it. Other than that, the main thing holding it back is that I have no name for it.
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Other activities
On Wednesday I saw Ben and Nate for a few drinks and dinner, which became cocktails till midnight and a S$230 expense I consider irresponsible in this economy.
On Friday we met my parents for a rare weekday lunch. It was at a restaurant attached to a gourmet grocer, and afterwards I found an entire suckling pig gutted and shrinkwrapped, on the bottom shelf of a freezer, ready to be taken home for S$285 (pic below, you’ve been warned). How many people would know what to do with that?!
On Sunday we went out to watch our niece play netball in a youth tournament. It was my first time watching the sport at all, and it struck me as a strange cross between basketball and golf. It’s all running and passing until someone gets close to the basket, then everything stops and they take their sweet time to shoot.
Over the weekend I convinced Kim to play some co-op games on the Switch. We started with the indie game Blanc, which mostly has a unique art style going for it: hand-drawn and scanned sketches turned into a 3D world. The gameplay — a baby fox and deer journeying together through a snowy world — was unfortunately boring.
Then we tried It Takes Two, a bigger budget affair from EA, which Munz recommended to me awhile back as a non-gamer who enjoyed it with her boyfriend. This was surprisingly a lot more fun despite the higher difficulty level (from several platforming sections while wrangling a 3D camera). It helps that you have unlimited lives, and can learn by dying.
IYKYK, but we have been bingeing The Devil’s Hour on Amazon Prime Video, a UK drama series that came out in 2022 and whose second season just premiered. We watched the first episode when it came out then never went back for more. That was a mistake. It looks like a cop show, but with something supernatural going on, and it’s kinda creepy/scary to watch alone in the dark, but towards the second season it starts to show its hand and I was hooked.
MUBI has a few films by François Truffaut in my region, and they’re all due to leave today, so I’ve been trying to watch as many as I can. In order, I saw The 400 Blows (1959), Stolen Kisses (1968), Antoine and Colette (1962), The Last Metro (1980), and Jules and Jim (1962). I probably watched The 400 Blows in my late teens but it reads so differently when you’re closer to the parents in age than the child.
I’m planning to see his last film, Confidentially Yours (1983), later today after posting this. What can I say? The dude had range. These films reinforce the notion I have of French cinema effortlessly, almost pathologically, blending genres. They go from tragedy and defeat to absurdist comedy in an instant — it all exists together, I guess.
I read and enjoyed Psalm for the Wild-Built, a cozy little novella by Becky Chambers that won the Hugo Award. It’s set in a neo-Luddite world where people lead more sustainable, less technology-driven lives after all their robots became sentient one day and decided they would live separately from humans.
sangsara.net 