sangsara.net

Tag: Daily Life

  • Week 41.24

    Week 41.24

    It’s Monday, and for the time being, my schedule for writing these updates has shifted out by a day as Monday mornings now find me in a co-working space, and writing this gives me an opportunity to blend in better than, say, watching films or playing games whilst surrounded by people grasping their foreheads, stroking their chins, and sighing loudly. Yes, those things just took place around me.

    It’s Monday, after a massive storm, and my feet are soaked from wading through puddles to catch the bus. You’d think this would be a common occurrence in Singapore, where the tropical rain gets heavy, but only a few occasions stick out in memory — those mornings where the office walkways are cluttered with umbrellas opened up to dry, like caltrops or anti-tank barricades; my damp, socked feet perched on top of sneakers I hope will dry before lunch; everyone else’s teeth a-chattering in vicious air-conditioning calibrated for sunny days.

    Earlier this week, I shuffled my feet while sitting here and felt something come loose: the right heel of my (only) three-year-old New Balance 990v4 sneakers. So much for ‘Made in the USA’! I borrowed some black plastic tape to conduct unglamorous field surgery, and they lasted till I got home. I have two newer pairs (v5 and v6), and sure hope they hold up longer.

    iPads are pretty great, actually

    My daily companion over the past four days here has been my 11” M1 iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard, somewhat neglected of late. I’ve found that it does everything I need to pass an entire day, from library books and magazines with the Libby app, to gaming, video, web browsing, chat, and photo editing. My MacBook Air would be better for watching movies, but that’s mainly it. If anything, that only makes me surer that my next iPad will be a 13” model.

    Unfortunately the new iPad Pros with M4 chips are priced on par with MacBooks, making the choice between the two much harder (and in favor of MacBooks if I’m being honest). Recall that the original iPad launched for just $499 USD, and its marketing tagline was “A magical and revolutionary product at an unbelievable price”. That’s still how the iPad lives in my mind: a powerful alternative device that does way more than its price suggests. So it occurs to me that the iPad Pro is no longer the right choice for me, and the iPad Air is a truer heir to that original proposition. (Put aside the product now simply called ‘iPad’, because at $349 USD it’s actually even cheaper than the first generation and more like a budget “SE” model.)

    We’re seeing Apple push its ‘Pro’ lines further this year, packing them with innovative features that are useful for a small subset of professional users, but which most customers won’t need or appreciate. Things like streaming multiple 4K video feeds from iPhone cameras to a single iPad for production in real time. Or recording LOG-format video to massive ProRes files, including studio-quality audio from four microphones.

    Adding these capabilities and pricing accordingly means some current Pro buyers might want to downgrade to the ‘mid’ models. In order to avoid losing them, Apple would need to elevate those products, and avoid artificially holding back features for the sake of differentiation. We’ve seen that happen with this year’s iPhone 16, which packs an OLED display, Dynamic Island, 48mp camera with a 48mm focal length option for the first time (!), Camera Control thingy, and even things like next-generation Photographic Styles and Audio Mix which they could have reserved for the Pro phones. The only thing it needs is a 120hz ProMotion display. I’m expecting next year’s iPad Air and iPhone updates will finally include that.

    I love that the iPhone 16 is now a great enough product for almost anyone’s needs, but I’ll likely keep buying the Pro models as long as they offer better camera features. I can entertain switching to an iPad Air because I don’t even know what camera hardware it has and won’t ever use it.

    A quick word on cameras and my presets

    I mentioned before that I’ve been beta testing an app called Fig Camera. It has two standout features: great “natural” processing options that dial back Apple’s aggressive defaults, much like Halide’s Process Zero mode; and the ability to process photos on-the-fly with your own custom look. As someone who somehow finds it fun to make photo filters/presets, and has fortunately had some success with them, I love that I can now take photos with my favorite styles directly applied. It’s like how Fujifilm cameras’ “Film Simulations” obviate the need for post-processing. I can now snap photos in Fig that look great to me and don’t need any further editing.

    Shot on iPhone with Fig Camera and my work-in-progress film LUT

    I posted a few recent photos using a film-style sim on IG and Threads and asked something like, ‘should I become one of those preset guys and offer my own as LUT files you can buy?’, to which several kind people said ‘sure’! So I’m thinking about it. This particular look is inspired by the “Positive Film” effect on earlier Ricoh GR cameras (they changed it for the worse with the GRIII), but slightly more “dry” like Fujifilm Classic Chrome. I’ve been using and tweaking it for over a year now, so the trick will be knowing that it’s DONE.

    Immersive Video and Submerged

    I’m still sitting here and my shoes are still wet. I’ve thought about bringing my Vision Pro to this open-plan space—not for the attention, but because it would be nice to have a huge screen that no one else can see. There are many things in my MUBI backlog that would not be cool to watch in public. And what’s even better than a 13” iPad? How about a thousand inches?

    We watched Submerged (2024) over the weekend, Apple’s new Immersive Video release exclusively for Vision Pro. It’s the first film they’ve done that isn’t a documentary or music performance — I guess the right word is fictional? I’m sure I said early on that this new immersive format (a full 180º view) lends itself best to video that puts you somewhere incredible, and wouldn’t be good for movie storytelling, with fast movement (nausea hazard) and quick cuts. I’m here to admit I was wrong.

    Submerged, by Academy Award winner Edward Berger, is only 17-minutes long but about a 12GB file when downloaded offline. You can view it as the first experiment in what filmmaking with this new technology could look like.

    I wrote on Instagram:

    Apple Immersive Video is a new medium. People will be experimenting with how to tell stories with it for years to come.

    Submerged is a great first step, the only movie I’ve ever seen that felt like “being inside” of it. More than seeing Avatar in IMAX 3D even.

    That’s different from the “being there” of POV video — it’s 100% a film with directorial intent. You experience it like a spirit summoned into the world and held down by a seance, without knowledge of your body. Your consciousness is pure camera.

    What I was trying to say was that making films for this format will require inventing a whole new set of techniques. Regular immersive video is easy: plonk a camera down in one static location and let people experience what it feels like to stand there and observe the action. This is the courtside seat at a basketball game, the front row of a performance. It’s amazing to us anyway because the viewpoint is rare, but a film made like this would only be a play.

    In the near term, we’ll see directors converging on a few approaches that work. Like how early 3D movies always had things flying directly at your face. The key question for me is how do you make an audience look at the thing you want them to notice, when they can look almost anywhere around the world you’ve built?

    Berger answers that in three ways. The first is action; big movements. When something explodes and water gushes out of a pipe a second later, you’re bound to notice it. The second is depth of field; like how I remember Cameron pushing and pulling focus at several points in Avatar (2009) to highlight subjects. This goes against natural vision and is more jarring in a wide-angle format like Apple Immersive Video, since you’re choosing for your viewer what they can and cannot look at, but it’s a filmic device everyone is familiar with.

    The third is a combination of Dutch angles and heavy vignetting that produces a novel effect in Immersive Video. When you watch a film like this, you are a disembodied viewer (what I meant above by a summoned spirit), without the ability to see even your own hands. You are severed from the real world. Your viewpoint changes according to the director’s will; sometimes a subject is extremely close and larger than life, other times they are small and distant. Berger often cuts to shots where the edges of your 180º view are shrouded in darkness, and/or where the camera is tilted at an angle, such that you feel yourself almost falling towards the zone of interest. This serves to direct your gaze, as to look in the opposite direction of gravity unconsciously takes more effort.

    I can’t wait to see what else emerges as more filmmakers play with this.

    Other media activity

    • I’m watching Lady in the Lake on Apple TV+, a 7-part series starring Natalie Portman that no one seems to be talking about. It’s rather good, but a slow burn and not one to be binged.
    • Another show that we discovered on a recommendation from Jose, and that no one seems to be talking about, is Ludwig, a 6-part BBC series starring David Mitchell as a reclusive professional puzzle-setter who gets enlisted to help the police solve murders. It’s very good, and sidesteps many of the elements that make other episodic murder-of-the-week procedurals tiresome. Well, it’s short enough that you never reach that point. I’m hoping they renew this.
    • I read Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention — and How to Think Deeply Again, by Johann Hari. This was inspired by an article in The Atlantic about how American college students today can’t even read an entire book anymore because their attention spans have been destroyed by social media, and book-reading on the whole is in serious decline. Utterly depressing. In order to get better sleep myself, I’m now trying to limit caffeine in the afternoon, alcohol, and phone use before bed. I’ve always detested multitasking—so much so that I avoid using external monitors with my laptop—and I’m now trying to be more mindful of distractions while reading or writing. As I made my way through the book, I was horrified to notice that I was picking up my phone every five minutes to check messages or look up completely unrelated topics.
  • Week 40.24: Singapore Design Week

    Week 40.24: Singapore Design Week

    “You’re really in your outdoor cat era”, said Nicolette, in response to my frequent excursions this week (I posted on IG Stories more this week than I have all year, because I realized they’re a convenient way to remind people that you’re alive). I also spent more time out of the apartment than I have in the past few months. I’ve had the freedom to go out early in the morning and do things all this while, but it took the threat of being deafened and annoyed by a neighbor’s renovations to actually make it happen. As it ticked closer to 9am each morning, I sensed the stirrings of men and machines on the other side of the wall, got my bag^ together and headed for the front door — see ya!

    ^ A quick word about said bag: I took the opportunity to get a new one for my upcoming sojourns in the out-there, and found this updated “2Way Utility Bag” from Uniqlo as part of their new lineup with creative director Clare Waight Keller (Givenchy, Chloé). It’s big enough for the stuff one needs to survive in a cafe, co-working space, or library all day: a laptop/iPad, umbrella, water bottle, power bank, camera, book, handheld fan, sunglasses^^, Nintendo Switch, or any of the things I’ve mentioned in recent weeks.

    ^^ A quick word about said sunglasses: I finally found a pair that fits my wide face and doesn’t slide down my low nose bridge. Admittedly I hadn’t tried Ray-Bans because the last pair I bought in Italy like, a decade ago, didn’t do so well on those two fronts and have gathered dust in a drawer. But Ray-Ban has since expanded their product catalog with inclusive new variants and I found some that fit. They resemble the classic Wayfarer model, but with some changes like flat lenses, and so are given a terrible product number (RB4391D) instead of a cool name. Oh and they’re made in China.

    As mentioned before, this period of domestic exile coincided with Singapore Design Week, which gave me enough things to do and see. On Tuesday, I paid S$130 to attend Day 1 of what was called the Design Futures Forum, which was noted by other attendees to have very little to do with futures exploration (many things discussed were of the present moment), and disappointingly never unpacked the business/social/political challenges that an audience of designers would be thinking about. I overheard someone say, “I could have read this in a designboom article.”

    For example, AI was a key topic as you’d expect in 2024, but presented with the breathlessness of a Forbes contributor piece from over a year ago; without offering contrarian viewpoints, sufficient interrogation of its costs and consequences, or thoughts on how its widespread use might be steered into balance with sustainable creative employment. The AI hype was pervasive, and if the audience played a drinking game triggered by every mention of it, the theater would have seen more vomit than the local ByteDance office. Some of the better speakers seemed to feel some responsibility to subvert the theme, and took genial pot shots at AI whenever they could. But I get it. We’re probably not the real audience for these events, and who knows what purposes they serve anyway? Me, I was only there to pass the time and meet old friends.

    The next day, I visited the Enabling Village, which is described as “the first inclusive community space in Singapore dedicated to integrating persons with disabilities in society”. On top of just wanting to see the place, I attended a series of presentations on projects with inclusive design elements, including some interesting work from Sony. They’ve made prototype musical instruments such as a finger-free saxophone that can be played by humming into a mouthpiece. Your voice gets turned into synthesized sax tones. I wish I could buy one, then my neighbors would be paid back in spades (j/k).

    There were also many free events and exhibits across town, and I filled pockets of time by dropping in on the ones around Orchard Road and the Bugis district. My favorite location was probably the Central National Library building which hosted some thoughtful and playful meditations on books and reading: from the physical aspects of holding spines and flipping pages, to sensorial explorations like how smelling different types of paper can evoke long-buried memories.

    It was my first time really checking out the Central Library, and it’s quite impressive. The reference section spans some five levels (from 7 to 11, I think), with the public lending library in the basement. Nearly every free seat was taken on a weekday afternoon, many by students of all ages who were… doing homework? I spotted someone doing math on the Humanities floor, so I guess it’s just an air-conditioned spot for some, nothing to do with the materials available.

    I wanted to read some poetry, and found a copy of the collected works of Philip Larkin, in the exact same paperback edition I had as a student. I sat with that for half an hour, next to some senior citizens who looked very much at home.

    Let’s loop back to Uniqlo: I half-joked on Instagram that one of the best design artifacts I saw whilst out exploring Singapore Design Week ‘24 was in fact Issue #11 of the free Uniqlo LifeWear magazine they give out in stores. It’s in both Japanese and English, with elements of Japanese editorial design and whimsical Monocle-esque illustrations. In addition to the expected fashion spreads of their products on models, there are also recipes, features about their global stores and the cities they’re in, and profiles of artists they collaborate with. I wish we had more brand publications like this, where there’s no distinction between making something nice for customers and trying to sell things. You can also read it online.

    On Thursday morning with some time to kill, I decided I’d best drop by the library@orchard to have a quick look before it closes down at the end of October for a lengthy renovation. It won’t be back until 2026, and the cynic in me thinks it won’t come back at all, much like how the Singapore Art Museum is now seemingly trapped in shipping port limbo, unable to return to its original downtown location because the land is now too valuable to allocate to the arts or whatever. I mentioned this before.

    Then I spent the afternoon with Peishan and Cien at an odd cafe that identifies as a co-working space — essentially you are welcome to sit there all day and leech off their power and WiFi, with no stated minimum purchase amount or anything. I don’t get the business model, but they’ve survived for years somehow. Perhaps it’s guilt based, because I ended spending twice as much in food and drink than the cost of a hot desk would be for an entire day.

    Media Activity

    I presume the other two got some work done, but I spent my cafe time clearing email newsletters and watching an episode of The Old Man, a 7-part TV series from 2021 that I didn’t know existed until recently. It stars Jeff Bridges as an aged CIA agent in hiding whose past catches up with him (I know, I know! But I’ll always make time for a set up like this), and the first two episodes were directed by Jon Watts (Wolfs, Spider-Man: Homecoming). The whole thing is so well executed that I wish it was longer. I’m told the second season, running now, has lost the plot. But trust me, if you like spy stories at all, you’ll want to see the first.

    Wolfs (2024) is now out on Apple TV+ and I enjoyed it just fine. For me, seeing George Clooney play a spiritual reboot of Winston Wolf, the fixer from Pulp Fiction (1994), is such a treat that it overrides other parts of the film being predictable or “small scale”. There’s also undeniable chemistry between him and Brad Pitt, who does that thing where he goes from smug, unlikable asshole to an alright guy after all, right before your eyes. Too bad he can’t do that with his real family. 4 stars.

    I finished The Book of Elsewhere, a sci-fi/fantasy (really, I think it’s both) novel by China Mieville and Keanu Reeves. It was extremely enjoyable while sounding in many places like a thesaurus was devoured in the writing of it. Once you get past some of the “awkward” use of big words when smaller ones would do, the rest of the writing is good, and occasionally becomes deliciously unhinged. Phrases literally collide with one another and tumble down pages like experimental poetry in some places. Elsewhere, Mieville (I assume) manages to replicate the dreamlike quality of visual storytelling — this story first appeared in a comicbook series entitled BRZRKR, by Reeves and Matt Kindt — and narrates the immortal protagonist’s violent fugue states and how he experiences passing from death to rebirth with some of the most Class-A, Colombian-grade stream-of-consciousness I’ve ever seen.

  • Week 39.24

    Week 39.24

    Two visits to Maji Curry in 9 days. Think I’d better cut back for awhile…

    I blame a medical appointment for our being in the area. Remember how Kim took a fall a couple of months ago and hurt her leg? She’s been feeling mostly back to normal but was advised to get an MRI just to be sure. Late last week we met the doctor for his interpretation, and it was worse than expected. The tendon that normally runs down her entire leg has become completely detached from its anchor point at the top of the thigh. In other words, she’s currently missing a crucial muscle involved in leg movement. In practice she can still move it, but with less strength than normal.

    So the weekend was spent worrying about what this meant, until our follow up appointment this Monday with another doctor who was called to advise on surgical options. Yes, it can be fixed: they’d slice the thigh open, dig around for the loose tendon, stretch it back up, then attach it to the pelvis or wherever it’s meant to be. This would then be followed by six weeks of recovery and then indefinite physiotherapy. It also carries the risk of nicking a large nerve that happens to reside in that area.

    Fortunately, this doctor’s disposition was entirely the opposite of worried. He reckoned that as long as she wasn’t an athlete concerned with peak performance, one could get by without addressing this; other muscles compensate and exercise with physiotherapy will see her through it. He said many patients just leave it, and continue to have normal lives. It was exceedingly refreshing to finally get some good news.

    But in not so good news, my neighbor’s long-dreaded renovations are finally beginning next week. That means a handful of days where I absolutely can’t be home during the day (or I’d probably go deaf from the hacking of walls and tearing up of floors); a few weeks where I probably wouldn’t want to be home (noisy enough that one wouldn’t be able to read, think in peace, or get on a call); and a couple more months after that where the noise should only be a mild annoyance.

    I’ve already made plans for that first phase next week, which happily coincides with Singapore Design Week. That will give me a few things to see and attend around town from mornings to evenings. And then for the rest of the month, I’ve decided to sign up for a membership with a co-working space company (a la WeWork), and spend my days hot-desking like a digital nomad or startup serf. It sounds ideal: air conditioning, power, WiFi, free coffee, and a change of scenery. I might even meet interesting people?! Although I’m more likely to be watching movies or gaming on my Switch rather than doing any real work (unless some new side project idea hits me).

    This is way better than my original plan, which was to hang out at public libraries the whole time. Fewer amenities there, and a lot more competition for desks because our libraries are very popular hangouts for senior citizens these days.

    Anticipating being in libraries where plugging into wall sockets might be frowned upon, I made a premature purchase that arrived this week: the most powerful power bank I’ve ever had. My requirement was that it had to comfortably get me through a whole day or more of using everything from my phone to a MacBook to a Vision Pro.

    And so I did some research on what a modern power bank looks like, and decided Ugreen’s Nexode lineup offers the best value. Anker has some competitive ones in their Prime series, but they’re twice the price and (as I discussed with Michael) they’re not even that reliable or safe these days.

    If you haven’t bought a power bank in recent times, you might be surprised by what they can do now. For starters, the one I got has a 20,000mah capacity with a maximum total output of 130W over 2 USB-C PD ports and a USB-A one for legacy devices. That’s enough bandwidth to fast charge two MacBook Pros at the same time. There’s also a digital display that shows you real-time power draw stats, and estimates of how long you’ve got before the battery is depleted (or fully recharged). Ugreen claims that it uses EV-grade batteries that can stay above 80% capacity for 1,000 charge cycles (Apple’s guidance on their batteries is only 500 cycles, for comparison). Given that coworking spaces provide lots of power points, I don’t really need one now but it’s good to have around?

    For the record, I’m still undecided if I actually would whip out the Vision Pro in a coworking space. But I can’t imagine not using it for an entire month. This week, I wandered into a conversation in inSpaze (an immersive social network I wrote about here) and found myself invited to a ‘live’ test of a new feature. It essentially lets you upload a large video file (say, a home movie or film that you absolutely have the distribution rights for), and invite others to watch it with you in real time.

    The final release will include a special 3D environment suited for watching videos, but for this test we were just in the usual “living room” environment. Spontaneously watching a film with strangers was more fun than it sounds. Everyone was well behaved and went on mute, chatting over text instead. In that way it was better than watching a film in a real theater with inconsiderate whisperers. We gave our feedback and suggestions afterwards, and I said that a visual/spatial way to express emotions like surprise or amusement would be nice to have, better to subtly feel a sense of community with everyone else in the theater.

    ===

    I also tried a bunch of new camera apps. Halide really started a trend with their Process Zero mode, and now I’m seeing new and existing apps tout a “no AI” approach. I won’t link the more blatant copycats, but will quickly mention a few that go beyond just adding a RAW capture feature.

    Fig Camera is currently in beta and offers a novel minimal camera UI, along with the ability to create your own camera-capture-to-file processing pipeline with LUT files. It also has a couple of options for taking more natural photos with less “AI” and Smart HDR, etc.

    Mood.Camera is more of a traditional retro camera app with a selection of film-inspired filters, but it also lets you select from different levels of dynamic range enhancements: from zero (expect harsh, blown highlights) to an ‘Extended’ setting that’s even more artificial than Apple’s defaults. I really liked how the dev has modeled certain aspects of lo-fi film photography that are very hard to achieve with pure HSL sliders and presets (like the ones I’m fond of making in Darkroom). Stuff like different grain sizes, halation, and textures. I impulse bought the lifetime unlock for S$20 and now slightly regret it because the color shifts are quite strong and there’s no way to turn them down at this time.

    Lampa also captures pure sensor data before Apple’s process gets a chance to stack and merge and overdo the brightness. It then puts your photos through their own RAW development profiles (the app description says they’re not “just filters”). There’s no option to shoot with Apple’s processing, unlike Fig and Mood. Surprisingly, Lampa only offers four distinct and pleasantly subtle looks, unlike the plethora of filters standard in Mood.Camera and most others. I’m a fan of this minimal approach but unfortunately the pricing model is maximalist and they want S$40/yr.

    Bonus: if you’ve been shooting RAW files with Halide’s Process Zero (or any other app’s single-capture RAW — not to be confused with ProRAW), you might appreciate this Darkroom preset I made that emulates the high contrast monochrome look that the Ricoh GR cameras are famous for. I repeat, they are tuned for the brightness profile of iPhone RAW files.

    Add P0-GRBW to your library here.

    ===

    I’ve been watching this streamer on YouTube named Pim who runs a channel called 4AM Laundry. Every weekend, he sets off with a backpack full of batteries and modems, and livestreams his adventures going around Japan to find retro gaming gems in secondhand stores like Book-Off and Hard-Off. They are soothing and educational, and great to have on in the background as he literally does this for 9 hours at a stretch.

    This week he was invited to visit the Tokyo Game Show with a press pass, so I tuned in for that. It’s an event I’ve always wanted to experience in person, even though I know it’s probably hellish and more fun in theory than practice. This was a nice way to get a glimpse of its atmosphere.

  • Week 37.24

    Week 37.24

    Kim got back from her trip with a flu, thankfully it doesn’t seem like Covid and should pass in a couple of days. Jet lag and illness are terrible partners: she spent about two whole days in bed sleeping it off and missing meals. I’m hoping to avoid it, but you shouldn’t place any bets on my famously weak immune system (putting aside the fact that it can fight off chickenpox).

    It was iPhone launch week again — where did the last year go? As usual, many key details had already leaked thanks to Mark Gurman’s sources. The Pro phones are slightly larger, the 5x zoom length is now across both models, and there’s a new “camera control” area along the right side; both a button and a ‘Touch Bar’. The regular iPhones 16 get all the great colors, while the Pro ones only get dull metallics. One of these years, we’ll get to have some fun too.

    The only things on my wishlist that hit were improved battery life and performance, which aren’t surprising — the real question is how significant are they? Apple says the CPU is 15% faster, the GPU is 20% faster, ray-tracing is 2x faster (though I can’t name a single game dying for it), and the 16 Pro Max gets 4 hours more video playback for a total of 33 hours. That’s a 14% increase over the iPhone 15 Pro Max.

    So to summarize, it’s a 15% better iPhone than the one I have, the AI features will release slowly over the next year, and there’s a camera button that I do want (but only serves to do things you can already do on the touchscreen). Given the fact that I already got a Vision Pro and could use some financial prudence during this sabbatical, pre-order Friday came and went without me buying a new iPhone for the first time in 16 consecutive years. Nobody believed I could do it!

    >> For future reference, my battery health is at 88% and 310+ cycles after a year. Coming off the regular Pro size for my iPhones 12 through 14, moving back up to the Pro Max form factor felt perfectly fine, and I think the lightness of titanium was a big factor. I never felt like I’d chosen the wrong size. Caveat: I did change out all my jeans to have roomier pockets.

    I decided to go caseless for this next year, and was quickly reminded that my iPhone came with an annoying defect: a slight misalignment of back cover glass and titanium frame, leaving a rough, kinda sharp edge that you can feel pressing into your palm. I wanted to get a replacement as soon as I took it out of the box because all the marketing talked about ‘comfortable rounded edges’ on the new design, and I was missing out. But replacement units are hard to come by the first few weeks after a launch, so I decided to wait and just popped it into a case and never got back to it.

    This week, nearly a full year later, I called up Apple Support and tried to explain this admittedly minor issue. They suggested I visit an authorized repair partner who could assess it in person, which gave me a good excuse to get Shake Shack for lunch (after Michael’s recent quest for “hot chips” — just French fries for us outside the UK and Australia — I had a craving that wouldn’t go away).

    All in, I had to sheepishly explain my problem to three different support people, two on the phone and one in person, but everyone was very nice about it? I think acknowledging upfront that you are about to sound like a crazy person (in a friendly, non-crazy way) is generally a good strategy for these situations. I’ve now got a replacement phone on the way, and think I’m happily set up for the harrowing year ahead of Not Having The Best iPhone.

    ===

    My friend and ex-colleague Bert was back in town for a visit, and a bunch of us from the old team met up with him in a configuration that hasn’t been together for maybe six years. It was great to see everyone looking no worse for wear, and arguably with more hair, muscles, and iron (from medical implants and drinking too much Guinness) than ever before.

    One thing he mentioned was how warm it is here these days, and how he’s lost all acclimatization. I’ve personally never felt acclimatized to the heat, and am always looking for solutions — see this recent post where I got the Sony Reon Pocket 5. That gadget has been plenty helpful, and I still use it whenever I’m heading outdoors for any meaningful length of time, but it’s not enough on its own. So now I’ve gone and got myself a portable handheld fan after seeing bts videos of K-pop idols holding them all the time. Edit: on second thought, I might have seen them in an episode of Irma Vep.

    This brand, JisuLife, claims to be the world’s number 1 portable fan manufacturer. Who knows if they are? But they had a bunch of products on sale during the recent 9.9 event on Shopee, so I got one of these clever folding designs that collapses into a cylinder much smaller than the umbrella I carry around in my bag. It even doubles as a flashlight.

    A couple of days later, whilst browsing the shelves at a Harvey Norman, I came upon a shelf of JisuLife products and got instant fomo when I tried another model out. The Life9 is even smaller, and eschews big visible blades for an internal turbine design that works like a hairdryer. The result is a much stronger, albeit narrowly focused and noisier stream of air. So now I have er… two fans.

    Both charge via USB-C, but the former model (Life8) uses some non-standard spec and won’t work with my usual cables, only the USB-A to USB-C one it came with. The Life9 charges normally as expected. They’re both cheaper on Shopee than on the official site, and you might catch them for lower on occasional flash or live sales.

    ===

    Media activity

    • Two current streaming movies over the weekend: The Instigators on Apple TV+ and Rebel Ridge on Netflix. The former is o-k with some amusing moments, a heist movie that subverts the usual joys of a heist: the brilliant plan coming together, the thwarting of smug antagonists. No, these guys are morons, but sorta lovable. Matt Damon is often lovable. 3 stars.
    • The latter film is more entertaining fodder, a Reacher-esque tale of small town corruption and sadism meeting a particularly skilled outsider. They messed with the wrong guy, etc. It drags a little long, however, and doesn’t quite strike the comeuppance note as satisfyingly as a Lee Child joint. 3.5 stars.
    • I know, because I read two of them this week. I finished The Midnight Line (Reacher #22) in a day or two. It’s a pretty chill story as the series goes, with a slight mystery that won’t keep you dying of suspense or anything. Almost no danger for our hero. 3 stars.
    • I immediately went onto Past Tense (Reacher #23) and found that much more entertaining because there are actual stakes involved. Part of the problem with Jack Reacher is that he’s Superman, and you never worry that he’ll make it out okay. This book introduces a few vulnerable characters that you can actually worry about. 4 stars.
    • After that, I read Rebecca F. Kuang’s Yellowface, a book that everyone was raving about a little while ago. I preferred Babel, but this is a fine little bit of meta narrative about the publishing industry, being Asian, and being Asian in the publishing industry, or just pretending to be!
    • Listened to a lot of Waxahatchee for the first time since discovering her back in May. Her latest album Tigers Blood, and 2021’s Saint Cloud, in particular. There’s something I just love about the Alabamian accent.
  • Week 36.24

    Week 36.24

    I was able to visit my parents for dinner for the first time in over a month. The long delay was on account of my dad developing a painful case of shingles, which, if you don’t know much about (like me), is a reemergence of a dormant chickenpox virus in one’s body, often after the age of 50. In other words, if you’ve had chickenpox before, you’re at risk of shingles — a nastier, localized version of the same virus.

    Unlike the regular childhood version, it doesn’t usually take over your entire body, just specific areas. In my dad’s case, it affected his back and one side of his torso, leaving the skin painfully sensitive for weeks — nerve pain that, for some, can linger for years. Thankfully, he’s making a quicker recovery.

    I had to stay away because I have never gotten chickenpox, and you can catch it from someone with shingles. I was urged to get the vaccine, because adult cpox is reportedly awful (like shingles, maybe worse), but my doctor suggested doing some blood work first to test for immunity — mostly because he didn’t believe I could make it this far in life without getting chickenpox. But it’s true! My mother swears it, and I have two traits: pretty good memory of my childhood years, and an outsized tendency to complain of ailments. There is no way that I could have gotten chickenpox as a child and everyone just forgot.

    The test results came back, and apparently I’m immune. The only theory I have traces back to this one time in kindergarten, when the boy sitting next to me in class developed cpox and had to leave school early. I recall living in fear that I would be next, and pus-filled bubbles would soon show. I remember checking myself fastidiously for a week or more, but it never came. Perhaps the glancing exposure was just enough to let my immune system prepare itself, but not enough to result in an infection? Or maybe, as my recent run-in with a car suggests, I’m actually Unbreakable like Bruce Willis in that M. Night Shyamalan movie.

    ===

    Kim is away again for work (13,600km away to be precise), and my having to deal with our pest situation alone has been a whole saga too boring to recount in detail. Tl;dr I’ve deployed a fleet of poison/bait traps, struggled with anxious insomnia, taped up a bunch of possible entry points, cleaned up a lot of lizard poop, sprayed insecticide down drains…

    More happily, the morning she left for the airport, I was up early and decided around 7:30 AM that I might go for a walk before it got too warm. This was inspired by Cien’s recent revelation that she’s been taking hour-long morning walks nearly every day. Just to get it out of the way: that’s a bit much for me, but I might go once a week. Spontaneously, this particular morning’s resolution ended in Peishan and me ‘virtually’ joining her for a walk at the same time, in our respective neighborhoods, sending photos along the way. This is actually a pretty fun thing to do!

    It was, however, warm despite the early hour. And it’s been hot and humid all week out here. I had to walk 10 minutes from an MRT station to a restaurant yesterday evening in very still air, and I could feel the sweat on my back not evaporating at all, merely pooling. Even my Sony Reon Pocket 5 brought little relief; I barely perceived that the metal contact point was cooler, or it can’t do much to dispel the mugginess of high humidity.

    ===

    I couldn’t take the wait any longer and upgraded to the visionOS 2 beta. I won’t upgrade any other devices, but I wanted any improvements in eye/hand tracking that I could get. So far, it’s been perfectly stable. I could talk about the new gestures and features, but the single most impressive thing has been the ability to view old 2D photos as 3D spatial scenes.

    What this looks like is simply layers of depth. You obviously can’t look around corners, and it’s not doing anything crazy like building 3D models you can move around in. But it’s like going from looking at a scene with one eye to two eyes. They suddenly have a liveliness to them because your brain can not only see that one object is in front of another, but perceive it too. Sadly, this is not something that can be demonstrated with a photo or video. The only way is to see it for yourself.

    The AI-powered segmentation of objects is somehow flawless, even better than on Portrait Mode (blurred background) photos taken with an iPhone. In one shot I had of a vineyard, every individual plant and leaf stretching to the horizon line was distinctly separated in space from the others. You can also blow them up to life-size with an “immersive” viewing mode, which puts you right in the space.

    Going through photos from the past two decades, of people who’ve passed on, and places I may never see again, has been profoundly moving. Documenting your experiences in photos has always been like building a time capsule, but this approaches time travel. It makes me so glad for every moment I thought to capture at the time, and the fact that the Vision Pro can do this retroactively for normal photos feels like the most unexpected gift I never knew I wanted. That’s what Apple does best, I suppose.

    Before the annual fall event tomorrow night, I’ll go on record again that I don’t think I’ll be upgrading my iPhone or anything else this year (but this time I really mean it!). So far I’ve had 16 iPhones and lost this bet with myself every year, but I can’t justify an incremental tech purchase in the same year as the AVP.

    Things that are unlikely to be announced but might make me reconsider my ‘no upgrade’ vow:

    For iPhone 16 Pro (Max):

    • No camera bump
    • New image processing pipeline that walks back the aggressive AI/HDR look and brings back natural looking photos à la Halide’s Process Zero (but with 24–48mp HEIC/JPEG XL files)
    • Bold, saturated colors like on the old iPod nanos
    • Untextured, grippy back glass
    • Significantly faster or exclusive Apple Intelligence features compared to iPhone 15 Pro
    • Completely new battery chemistry that means I won’t be sub-90% battery health in under a year

    For Apple Watch Series 10:

    • 2x battery life
    • Blood glucose monitoring
    • New body design that shames the old ones so bad you can’t wear them out in public anymore

    For AirPods Max:

    • Redesigned headband that either replaces the mesh or improves its comfort and durability
    • Significant weight reduction and/or new materials (comfort and durability)
    • A great protective case
    • Addition of a power button

    ===

    Media activity

    Recent reading momentum led me to finish reading Neal Stephenson’s Interface after two months. It’s a highly entertaining sci-fi story about contemporary American politics, media culture, and using brain implants to reverse a presidential candidate’s stroke damage. Nearly the entire time I was reading it, I visualized the main character as Robert F. Kennedy, and his VP pick as Kamala Harris.

    For my next book, I’m taking it easy with Jack Reacher #22, The Midnight Line.

    A few years ago, Nintendo remade two classic ‘80s visual novel-style adventure games under the “Famicom Detective Club” banner. This week, they released a wholly new third entry in the series, Emio: The Smiling Man, which got greenlit because of the warm reception that the remakes received. The history of these games is pretty interesting, and I watched this whole video essay on them.

    I bought and played the first remake, The Missing Heir, back around 2022, and found its authentically ancient gameplay archaic and frustrating. For example, in most such games, when questioning someone about a topic, you will reach a point where their answer starts to repeat itself — a sign that you’ve heard all you’re going to hear. In the first two Famicom Detective Club games, this is not the case (pun unintended).

    You: [Ask about the car]
    Suspect: There was a car seen at the time, I heard.
    You: [Ask about the car]
    Suspect: Hmm, that’s about all I remember.
    You: [Ask about the car]
    Suspect: Hmm, that’s about all I remember.
    You: [Ask about the car]
    Suspect: Hmm, that’s about all I remember.
    You: [Ask about the car]
    Suspect: Oh! I just remembered something. It was a black sedan.

    This is such incredibly bad game design, because someone repeating themselves like that is unnatural in the real world, so it appears as a limitation of the game (not having AI to generate different versions of “I dunno”). So of course a player isn’t going to keep pressing, because the suspect’s response isn’t an invitation to keep trying. It’s the equivalent of a brick wall in the game’s interaction model. But no, you’re meant to kick every solid object multiple times in case it comes loose.

    I ended up finishing the game using a walkthrough, and declined to buy the second game, The Girl Who Stands Behind. I’m guessing that Emio, being a new game, will be an improvement in this regard and so I intend to play it someday. But it doesn’t feel right doing that unless I also play the second game (there is no real need, they are not connected).

    Rather than pay $30 USD to frustrate myself, I watched a 7-hour video of someone else playing through the entire game — at 1.5x speed, of course. The first video I found was actually 10 hours long because the player was blundering through some of the aforementioned game design quirks, so I gave up on him and found this better one instead.

    Oh, and there’s another kinda new game that concludes something that started in my childhood, and I finished it this week. That game is of course Return to Monkey Island, which I played on the Switch. If you subscribe to Apple Arcade, you can also play it there. I don’t know how I feel about it; the original two games were the pinnacle of LucasArts’ point-and-click adventures and I probably remember them most fondly of all. The new sequel brings the story to a close, but with a new art style and an acknowledgment that a long time has passed (both in story terms and the authors’ perspectives). There was no way the ending could have satisfied every question and loose end, so they just went for something that felt true enough to its roots, but kinda comes out of nowhere. I was honestly surprised when the credits rolled. But that’s life!

  • Week 35.24

    Week 35.24

    First, an update on last week’s air conditioning saga. During another service visit, the professionals confirmed what my online research had suggested: a malfunctioning thermistor was the reason for inconsistent cooling. To test it out, they swapped sensors between two indoor units, and now that the cause has been confirmed after a couple of days, they have to come back yet again to replace the broken one (S$161).

    Shortly after, I was coincidentally served this cocky tweet about how “reasonably smart” people with internet access can now challenge an expert about their specific problems, because 1) the information is out there, and 2) the customer has more invested in the outcome than the vendor. For the record I tried hard not to preemptively suggest it to the experts, but when they diagnosed a ‘thermistor problem,’ I wasn’t the least bit surprised.

    New house problem: We found a dead cockroach and it’s been bugging me. I made a poll on Instagram Stories and asked how many people have seen a roach in their homes in the past year, and was surprised the results were pretty much 50-50 (n=29). It might be down to how many people have apartments with integrated rubbish chutes or face open-air corridors. In any case, there’s always something wrong and I need the universe to give me a break or better mental health.

    ===

    I joined my first-ever book club after hearing about it from some folks I met in inSpaze. They meet in the app for an hour every week, and have what I assume is a typical book club discussion if not for the fact that (nearly) everyone is in a Vision Pro.

    They’ve just started on a new book, Guy Immega’s Super-Earth Mother, which I couldn’t find in the library’s catalog and had to buy off the Kobo store. The title is my least favorite part, as it could turn some readers off. I didn’t expect to enjoy it as much as I did, but I ended up finishing it in just a couple of days. I was later chastised for this, as we’re supposed to be reading it together over three weeks.

    It’s about a billionaire’s mission to send an ark of human DNA across the universe in the care of an AI (Mother-9), and how its efforts to colonize other planets goes. That premise immediately reminded me of the back-half of Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves, but this is a very different effort. I think I described it in my Goodreads review as “a compact and accessible space epic”.

    What’s making this extra special is that one participant is a friend of the author’s, and they’ve been filling us in on little Easter eggs and references to real-life experiences. There’s also a chance that Mr. Immega might join us for a short Q&A in a later session.

    This external push to read broke my summer reading block. I had stalled on Neal Stephenson’s Interface for months, but after finishing Super-Earth Mother, I breezed through another hundred pages and am enjoying it immensely.

    Kim’s pretty old Kindle Paperwhite finally died, and I got her a new Kobo Clara BW (she declined the Color model, which I still think was an extra $30 worth spending), which is a very nice and slender reader in person. I am now envious of its USB-C charging and Dark Mode support, and am trying to stop myself from buying a Libra Color to replace my first-gen Libra. At over S$300 dollars, even if I’ve read 100 free books on mine so far (I haven’t), I’d still have paid $3/book for the sheer utility of an e-ink screen, which seems silly to me because one can read perfectly well on an iPhone. Or a Vision Pro, even.

    I tried that, btw. Having giant floating pages in front of you is actually not terrible. And in doing so I hit upon another realization about the Vision Pro. Photographers are always saying that you should print your photos to appreciate them, at as large a size as you can, but how many of us really do? Most photos end up being seen on phones, and maybe laptop-sized screens. But now there’s a way to view our favorite shots at wall size and have a gallery-scale experience at home. And, I suspect, discover more flaws and limitations that will push us towards buying better gear. It’s tragic how much of the last decade we documented in piddly 12mp photos because iPhones were more convenient than dedicated cameras. Ugh!

    ===

    Media activity

    • We caught up on Sunny. This is a show that, on paper, seemed designed to light up my neurons. Robotics, AI, a Japanese setting, a “darkly comedic” mystery, a story about clashing cultures, an A24 production. But it’s not for me at all. I came across the above clip on how causality, consequence, and coherence (my terms) are essential in telling a story people can care about, and sadly Sunny fails to adhere to those rules.
    • But also on Apple TV+ is Pachinko, which has just returned for its second season, and I thoroughly enjoyed the first two episodes out now. I understand that it’s one of the most popular shows on the service, and I hope it finds an even wider audience.
    • The consensus online seems to be that Apple TV+ is full of great shows that people just aren’t discovering, and Bad Monkey is one of them. Again, I think the show’s title is the weakest link here, and you should be giving it a chance. Vince Vaughn does his thing, the dialogue crackles, and things move with causality, consequence, and coherence. It also kicks off with the discovery of a severed body part.
    • We rewatched Twister (1996) and then saw Twisters (2024). The original is an actual classic, directed by Jan de Bont (who also did Speed), and features a team of tornado chasers with actual, palpable camaraderie. You feel like you’re going along on an adventure with them, and part of that happens because the script bakes in ample downtime where they strategize, tell war stories while eating steak and eggs, and hang out in motels overnight. The sequel is almost embarrassing in how it tries to check a series of “mirror the original” boxes — there’s the in-over-their-head outsider whose terror is played for comedy, the traumatic past weighing on the female lead’s motivations, her magical gut feel that can predict weather better than the science-dependent nerds. But despite all that, it can’t reproduce the magic. Still, as a standalone movie, Twisters is not all bad, and Glen Powell is definitely becoming one of the most likable and bankable men in Hollywood. 4 and 3.5 stars respectively.
    • We also watched Office Space (1999), which I realize I’ve never really seen properly at all. It’s an anti-work masterpiece, with many themes and grievances that seem to be reemerging today. Sure, it came out around the time of The Matrix, when rebellion against cubicle offices was at its peak, but I can’t recall many films in the past ten years that have so strongly espoused quitting your dumb job, burning your workplace to the ground, and finding purpose somewhere else. 4 stars.
    • Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin (2004) was leaving MUBI, so I decided I’d better see it. Boy, what a downer. I looked at reviews on Letterboxd and here are some excerpts from the positive ones: “This is a flawless film, but don’t watch it.” “This is not a movie I should’ve watched.” “I will never recover from this.” “What if I just walked into oncoming traffic”. 4 stars from me, but I tried not to think about it too hard. It might be a 4.5.
    • Also leaving MUBI was the French film Summer Hours by Olivier Assayas. It’s a quiet and beautiful story about the familial unraveling that happens when a parent dies and there is ‘bric-a-brac’ to be split up and hard discussions to be had. Sad subject matter, but nowhere approaching the rock buttom of Mysterious Skin’s tragedy. Also 4 stars.
    • I tried again to start watching Assayas’s Irma Vep TV series, but various interruptions have stopped me from finishing the first episode. I know it’s not a straightforward remake of the original film, but Alicia Vikander’s character is so different from Maggie Cheung’s that I’m intrigued to see what he’s trying to say about her/them/filmmaking with this new take.

    Featured photo (top): A superb dinner we had at Beyond The Dough on Arab Street. It’s one of those places that brings obsessive Japanese craft to traditional pizza. They are amusingly two doors down from a Domino’s outlet.

  • Week 34.24

    Week 34.24

    It seems like there’s always something wrong, and I feel like it’s one problem after another these days. The same night as my near-death experience (previously on…), I came home to find that our bedroom’s air-conditioning had died instead. It would put out only semi-cool air, then just regular air, in a cycle that lasted all night. The next day, I dragged a standing fan into the room to make things a little more livable. A few nights later, when Kim returned from Australia, we started to sleep in the living room where the air-conditioning still works.

    What followed was a series of visits by different servicemen, each finding something legitimately “wrong” but none ultimately solving the problem. There was the simple fact that the unit was clogged and dirty — despite another company just having “cleaned” it two months ago. They did a regular wash (S$66), but had to return on Wednesday for a deep chemical overhaul (S$150), and a washing of the outdoor compressors ($50). When that didn’t solve it, it was discovered that the outdoor compressor was flashing an error message, and the entire power PCB (printed circuit board) needed replacement ($711.50). FWIW it’s a Mitsubishi Starmex system; future buyers beware.

    One week later, and the problem still hasn’t been addressed, and we’re still sleeping in the living room.

    I need to mention how this has lived in my head as a much bigger problem than it objectively is. After getting home from the hospital, I just wanted to lie in bed and have everything be absolutely NORMAL. To have no outstanding problems in the world — just being in a state of calm to mentally recover. But immediately, something was wrong in the home, a psychological intrusion in my metaphorical safest space. This has just made me an anxious freak all week, feeling low and spiraling into worst-case scenarios. Like, what if they find there’s a problem with the piping in the walls and need to hack them out in our bedroom? What if this is going to cost even more money than what’s already been spent? I do believe this is all likely in the coming week.

    Another source of anxiety is the actual repair visits themselves: not only is there cleaning up to do after (which I couldn’t really with a foot injury), but our compressor units are installed outside the bedroom window, over a fragile “roof” that probably can’t take a person’s full weight. To work on them, a technician has to climb out (one even did it without safety gear) and stand precariously on a tiny parapet, dangerously close to either tumbling into our living room or down several storeys. At work, seeing all the things that can go wrong is my superpower, but it’s not a useful one to have right now.

    On the bright side, my foot is much better already, and I’m able to walk normally enough to go out for short periods. I expect I’ll be back to normal in another week. Whenever the feelings of doom reach a critical point, I remember that I’m actually alive and uninjured, and a lack of air-conditioning rarely (but not never) kills anyone, and then I get a spiritual HP reset. I just need to think like that all the time and take it easy.

    ===

    Once I was able to hobble well enough, we went to see Trap (2024), which lived up to my expectations of a fun little outing. As of right now, Shyamalan’s second wind as a maker of tight little B-films based on killer elevator pitches is looking pretty sustainable, and I’m hoping for many more. Next, I’m gonna finish watching the final season of Servant, his series on Apple TV+.

    We also had time for a quick lunch with Uma of Goggler Malaysia, a media criticism outlet after my own heart that I encourage checking out even if you, like me, have nothing to do with Malaysia on a regular basis. They do a fun podcast and publish spot-on film and television reviews. We talked about his new Apple Vision Pro and I outed myself as someone who’s never seen any of the Godfather films. But I’ve taken the first step: buying the entire trilogy on the US iTunes Store at the current sale price of US$9.99. I’m planning to watch it in the AVP’s Cinema environment someday soon.

    Finally, we visited the Olafur Eliasson exhibition at the Singapore Art Museum (Tanjong Pagar Distripark) with Cien, Peishan, and James. I say finally because this visit has been postponed three times on account of our various illnesses and accidents. Unfortunately I was not moved by anything, and it felt like a series of science experiments crammed into a small soulless space that lends no gravitas or beauty to an artist’s work.

    I remember the original SAM fondly, and hope the museum will move back into its former space off Orchard Road although that’s looking more unlikely. The news can sugarcoat it all they like, but calling a remote concrete slab beside a container port ’eminently suited for contemporary arts purposes’ is a stretch. I’d love to see the so-called ‘positive feedback from visitors’ they’re receiving. Art doesn’t belong out somewhere you need shuttle buses for people to encounter it. The museum’s rightful place is wherever ordinary people are already going.

    Olafur Eliasson’s ‘Your curious journey’ at SAM
    These were from an Indonesian pop art collection at Gajah Gallery
  • Week 33.24: A close call

    Week 33.24: A close call

    The last update almost became my final one, because I nearly died this week!

    We got the tragic news that a good friend’s dad had passed away (there have been so many cases of this lately), and as Kim is out of town, I was about to go down to the funeral wake for the both of us. I booked a Grab (local Uber-like) ride around a quarter-to-six, and headed down to meet him when it looked like he was close enough.

    As I approached the pick-up point, I saw the car approaching and waved at him, walking continuously down the stairs to the road as I watched him do a three-point turnaround to come at me from the right direction. But suddenly, instead of slowing down for me to get in, the car suddenly lurched forward at full speed. At this point, I was maybe at the very last step down, and the car was coming directly towards me instead of parallel, like you would when picking a passenger up.

    In that moment, my first thought was “is he trying to scare me, as some sort of joke?” This was followed by alarm as he was clearly not slowing down, and then a last-minute instinct to back away. The next thing I saw was the car slamming into the short wall beside the step I was just on, as I fell back on my ass. And then I was covered in debris, missing both shoes, and feeling pain beginning to spread through my legs as shock began setting in.

    I’m quite sure I was hit in the right knee at some point — there’s silver car paint on my jeans to prove it. I recall feeling my left foot being squeezed inside my shoe for just a fraction of a second before it slipped out, as my weight shifted backwards as I fell. Both shoes were later recovered underneath either side of the car. I was there at the point of impact, and then I wasn’t.

    Afterwards, an alternate memory emerged: the car may have hit the wall on the other side first, changing its trajectory towards me, but this initial impact would have dampened its speed. Perhaps my knee was only clipped by a part that was already damaged, explaining how I got a paint transfer without a broken kneecap.

    I remember people nearby running over after hearing the crash, yelling for an ambulance and the police to be called, telling me to stop trying to get up (I backed away from the car on my hands and tried to see if my legs were still unbroken), and to wait for help to arrive. A very kind man took off and came back with a cold can of Pocari Sweat for me; a neighbor I know came and kept me calm by talking things through; and the driver called for help.

    After trying unsuccessfully to call Kim, I took some photos and figured out that my legs were still attached, although moving my left ankle and right knee hurt. The police and paramedics arrived in about 10 minutes and checked me out. I was still shaking from the adrenaline and giving them too much detail, like apologizing that my feet were very sweaty right now as they peeled my socks off. They decided that I might have some fractures and would need to go to the hospital for scans as this was going to be in a police accident report.

    Side note: I don’t really know what happened yet. The driver claims he was trying to brake but the car didn’t respond. I overheard the police interviewing him and asking if there was any chance he mistook the pedals and accelerated instead. I suppose there will be an investigation.

    As I was being loaded into the ambulance, I heard the ominous approach of cars and imagined them crashing into us, and realized that this episode might end with a lasting, debilitating fear of going outside after I’d recovered. I anticipated PTSD, nightmares, and other new items to put in my therapy cart.

    What followed was a couple of hours waiting in the A&E/ER department of a general hospital, trying to joke with the orderlies, and getting x-rayed by about five young people at once who might have never done it before? But no complaints for me, everyone was incredibly nice and got me through it. The verdict, no major fractures (time will tell if there are hairline fractures, specifically two weeks of observation time), and I was lucky to get away with bruises and sprained ligaments.

    A tale of two ankles

    Amusingly, this care even extended to a small nick on my right ankle that was noted by the doctors. Although the pain was concentrated elsewhere, they promised they’d clean that “wound” and dress it for me before leaving. They did so fastidiously, washing it in antiseptic fluid and applying an antibiotic gel and bandage. Then I was also given a supply of said antiseptics and antibiotics to care for it at home. The bandage fell off after my shower and, despite being a delicate hypochondriac, I was happy to just slap a band-aid on it.

    The whole time, from when I was in the ambulance (intrusive thoughts wanting to say “amberlamps” out loud), until the next day, I kept hearing Kanye’s “Through The Wire” in my head, specifically the line “Look at how death missed his ass / Unbreakable, what you thought they’d call me Mr. Glass?” I really want to see M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap (2024), by the way.

    Forty-eight hours later, the reality that I almost didn’t make it still feels surreal. I joked around a bit on Instagram and repeated the story to people who asked, but I don’t know what it means yet. The only nightmare I’ve had was about my malfunctioning air-conditioning unit at home—a small-potato problem in comparison. Part of me expected to emerge like Jeff Bridges in Fearless (1993), recklessly putting myself in risky situations with a newfound sense of invincibility. But then I remembered Final Destination (2000), where death stalks its survivors, biding its time for another strike. That thought put me off from celebrating my good fortune, and I’ve just been sitting on these thoughts since.

    I know that if I had arrived downstairs just a couple of seconds earlier, I would have made it down to the road level and been directly in the car’s path, with no wall beside me to stop it. All I had to do was take another step forward, and both legs and my pelvis would have been crushed between the car and the wall (which stands unscathed today). Bones would have shattered beyond repair, blood would be everywhere, everyone nearby would have passed out from the gore. If I survived that at all, the next few years would still be passed in immeasurable pain and I doubt I’d have the strength or will to keep going.

    What does it really mean to miss that outcome by half a meter? Probably nothing, right? Because we’re surrounded by chaos and death is always just a coin toss away? So I guess it might be back to normal life for me, sans new epiphanies. At least I hope, but when my foot feels better and I finally leave the house, I might find myself paralyzed with fear just trying to cross the street. I guess we’ll see.

    But I have come out of this with some practical advice, which I will now share with you.

    1. Always carry a power bank: When they said I’d have to go to the hospital and might only be discharged the next day, I wasn’t worried because I had my phone and enough power to get through a whole day. I used my phone for so much during this time: updating people, notifying Grab about the accident (1 star), paying the bill. You don’t want to worry about battery life. Bring a power bank with you everywhere. This tiny Anker one has an integrated USB-C port, supports fast charging, and a 5,000mAh capacity.
    2. Wear your shoes loose: It might not help if you’re hanging upside down by your sneakers, but my loose laces might have saved at least one foot from being crushed in the moment. I hope to one day see the dash cam footage of the crash, because how I ended up jumping back and leaving both shoes behind is a bit of a mystery.
    3. Play more video games: Let your kids play them too, because everyone should train their reflexes. When the moment comes, you don’t want to be the person who freezes up. You want jumping, running, dodging, and picking up gold coins to be second nature. Somebody asked me, “Why not sports instead of video games?” Hey, I’m trying to be inclusive here. Not everyone likes sports!
    4. Take more photos: Another thing you want to come naturally at moments like these is taking photos. As evidence, for later reference, or just for sharing a story. You can’t tell yourself to remember this only when something big happens. Just train the muscle so you’re always capturing.
    5. Don’t assume anything about cars: I really got complacent around cars, and you don’t appreciate how heavy and powerful and dangerous they are until one comes at you fast. I’m never jaywalking again with a car “safely in the distance”. Be alert more. You don’t need music in your ears all the time, either.

    ===

    I had some other stuff I wanted to talk about before this happened, but they seem small now so I’ll just mention two things.

    The Halide iPhone camera app got an update that shoots photos without any AI-ish processing. They call it “Process Zero“. The resulting aesthetic is much more in line with regular cameras, and how iPhone photos used to look years ago. We’ve flown too close to the sun now, and everything is too bright, so this nostalgic return to the limits of physical lenses and sensors comes with a welcome, natural look. The above and this post’s Featured Image at the top were taken with this mode, plus editing of the underlying RAW file.

    Our home internet speed was suffering, so I did some troubleshooting and discovered the thin fiber optic cable between modem and wall access point had been coiled too tightly, and was even bent in one spot. After straightening it out, speed tests jumped noticeably. I even got a full gigabit up and down to my iPhone on WiFi 6, not even 6E.

    Stay safe out there. With any luck, I’ll see you next week!