sangsara.net

Tag: Daily Life

  • Week 30.24

    Week 30.24

    An enduring memory/scar I have from my university days is watching a documentary on the UK’s Channel 4 called Fat Girls and Feeders. It was about women who were extremely overweight (the term ‘morbidly obese’ may not be strong enough), to the point of being completely dependent on others for everything, and the (non-fat) men who liked and kept them that way. These women were immobile prisoners, either confined to bed or needing support to get around their homes, which were fitted with handlebars and accessibility fixtures everywhere. It was a saddening story of abuse and sadism in the guise of a consensual kink.

    But why am I mentioning this? Well, the week got off to an awful start with Kim slipping at home and pulling/spraining/tearing a leg muscle, badly enough that she couldn’t put any weight on it without wincing. So she’s spent the last six days lying in bed resting and icing it, and I’ve been the nursemaid and caregiver helping her to the bathroom, making dinner, fetching water, just being on call for whatever. And having gone through this, let me just say! Those feeder guys are really sick if they find this fun!

    Thankfully, the swelling has gone down and the pain is moderating. She can now get up and walk around slowly on her own, but sitting in certain positions still hurts. It’ll probably be a few more weeks before life gets back to normal, but this was an eye-opening preview of elderly life and if we don’t make it rich enough to afford the best AI robocare, then I hope I die before I get old.

    ===

    • 📺 We’ve been watching Netflix’s new Japanese reality series, The Boyfriend. I’d hoped it would be a spiritual successor to my beloved Terrace House, only with gay men, but it doesn’t quite capture the essence of what made TH great. Perhaps because of what happened with TH, the commentary panel here never goes too hard on the ‘contestants’, but more than that, I think it’s just a different sort of show. Terrace House was more about watching young people learning to live together and develop over a longer period, whereas The Boyfriend is overtly about “finding love” and takes place over just a few weeks.
    • 📺 We also resumed and finished Season 8 of Below Deck after a break of several months. My usual complaints about Captain Lee’s leadership apply: he’s not hands-on at all, communication is poor, and his boundaries/consequences aren’t clear and can’t be taken seriously. However, because this season took place in Feb–Mar 2020, just as Covid was brewing, seeing the crew get increasingly ominous updates from family abroad and ultimately being shut down two charters early makes for an interesting document of a very strange time.
    • 📺 The season finale of Apple TV+’s true crime/courtroom drama Presumed Innocent came out on Wednesday, and I think they stuck the landing. It’s one of the better shows on the service, and has apparently been renewed for a second season, which I assume will feature a completely new story and setting, in the manner of True Detective.
    • 📺 I’ve started on Season 1 of The Big Door Prize, also on Apple TV+, and think it’s rather good. It’s about a small town that receives a mysterious machine that tells you what your potential is, and soon everyone is reevaluating their lives and having crises. But it’s also a comedy with surprising emotional depth.
    • 🎬 I watched the seminal short film La Jetée (1962) on MUBI and immediately thought, ‘Oh this is quite like 12 Monkeys’, and unfortunately saw its twist ending coming. I wrote “√12 Monkeys” on Letterboxd, thinking I was very clever. Then I looked it up and hey, 12 Monkeys was explicitly inspired by La Jetée, so that makes sense. Despite that, it’s a must-watch because the form of it (a slideshow of black and white stills with a voiceover) is ingenious and works so well to create a slippery narrative vehicle: is this all a document? A memory? An oral story passed around in a broken future? —4 stars.
    • 🎬 I also watched The Bat Woman (1968), a truly terrible B-movie, only because it was due to leave MUBI. It reminded me of some schlocky sci-fi Singaporean films from the 60s that I’ve seen at film festivals; the acting is either hammy or wooden, the special effects are often just literal toys, and the story is a nonsensical farce. A rich lady solves crimes as Batwoman, which is also her Lucha wrestling persona (I suppose to sidestep any copyright claims), and helps the police catch a mad scientist who is trying to breed a fishman monster. It ends with a sexist joke: Batwoman, in her civilian clothes celebrating victory with two male partners, screams and hides upon seeing a mouse while the men laugh. —1.5 stars.
    • 🦻 Very little music was played this week, but I enjoyed a run-through of Jesse Malin’s first album, The Fine Art of Self Destruction, in preparation for Silver Patron Saints, the tribute album due out in September to raise awareness and funds for his recovery. It will feature covers by Bruce Springsteen, Willie Nelson, Bleachers, Counting Crows, Dinosaur Jr., Lucinda Williams and Elvis Costello, The Wallflowers, Spoon, and many more.
    • Oh I nearly forgot! XG released Something Ain’t Right, the first single from their second mini-album (out 8 Nov) and it’s another banger!
  • Week 22.24

    Week 22.24

    I used to drink 3–4 coffees a day, measured in espresso shots, usually from our home Nespresso machine or the office’s barista. At Starbucks prices, that would cost $10 a day or more, depending on the drink formulations. At home, about $3.20 in Nespresso pods.

    While looking at where I could trim unnecessary expenses (which has resulted in pausing Netflix for the past month, I’ve barely missed it; and canceling YouTube Premium, much more painful because of how frequent the bad ads are, so perhaps a necessary expense after all), I thought perhaps I could drink more tea. After all, I like tea! It’s just a bit more bother, waiting for the water to boil and then standing there for 4–5 minutes while it brews, or at least having to remember to come back in time — I usually don’t, and then it stands there on the counter for 20 minutes becoming cold and uncommonly strong.

    So I got some UK supermarket brand teabags in, because local supermarkets don’t do tea much cheaper and can’t do it much better, I assume. And boy are they ridiculously cheap. A box of 80 Sainsbury’s gold label teabags runs about S$5–6 (and less than S$2 in the UK), making each hit of caffeine about 10x cheaper than Nespresso. If you do the math, simply switching to tea will save me enough to buy a new iPhone Pro every two years.

    Starbucks revenue is down, coincidence?

    ===

    I finally got the third and final dose of my hepatitis vaccine after recovering enough from Covid — that cough is still around though. For reasons too hard to explain here, I ran into YJ immediately after, and we managed to chat for about half an hour. It was my first time seeing him in years; I think the last time was a noisy fast-food lunch just before Covid happened.

    He runs a bunch of coding classes for kids and I got to sit in for a little bit of one. What I want to mention here is how astounding it is to actually watch young teens use their computers in a classroom in 2024. They swipe between desktop spaces on macOS: they’ve got windows for Discord, Telegram, YouTube, Figma, oh and some multiplayer FPS they’re killing their classmates in, casually multitasking between all of it while still participating in the lesson.

    I said to YJ either we’re really old and slow, or this generation’s brains are cooked. I assume the former. We were premature in calling millennials “digital natives” because the world they and Gen Zs grew up in were not sufficiently digital. I think these kids are there now.

    Media activity

    • I know I said I was committed to finishing Astral Chain on the Switch, but I lied. The graphics are good for the aging platform, but the story is not engaging, the levels waste my time, and the combat is over complicated for no reason. Cutting my losses.
    • Likewise, after 24 hours invested, I’m ready to call Yakuza: Like A Dragon the worst installment I’ve played in an otherwise brilliant series. Perhaps it’s the decision to make it more of a JRPG, with all the tedious combat and level grinding that comes with it. The city of Yokohama where you spend most of your time is so much blander than it is in Lost Judgment — just compare the maps and you’ll see Yakuza’s version is a barren wasteland where Judgment’s pops with shops and activities on every block. I’m at a stage where the game is telling me to level up before the next chapter begins, and I’m saying no to hours more of pointless street fights.
    • I went back to Lost Judgment to finish the add-on DLC adventure, The Kaito Files, which took about four hours. And then I deleted it along with the two games above. Clean slate and it feels good.
    • I decided to see more films each week, and to cut down on the decision paralysis, they don’t have to be great.
    • Firestarter (2022) was terrible. I was actually excited for it because I saw the original 80s film several times as a kid; it had horror vibes and terrified me. It was based on a Stephen King story and starred a child Drew Barrymore as a girl with the power to set things on fire with her mind. This new one has Zac Efron playing her dad, and there are nearly no redeeming qualities. 1/5.
    • I rewatched David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo over two days and loved it more than I probably did when it came out. Although it wasn’t as successful, it made me want to rewatch The Girl in the Spider’s Web too, but had to confirm my vague recollection that it was a new standalone story written after Stieg Larsson’s death ended the trilogy. Turns out there are now SEVEN books in the Lisbeth Salander series, and Spider’s Web is book #4. I’ll probably read the new books first to see if they’re any good.
    • In the Heights was a fun musical with Lin Manuel-Miranda’s fingerprints all over it. The songs were satisfying, with the occasional clever bars that make you go ‘ooooh!’, and Jon Chu (of the Step Up films) is obviously the guy you call to direct big dance sequences. Perfect Sunday afternoon viewing. 4/5.
    • Completely without meaning to, I saw an Anya Taylor-Joy triple feature this week: The Northman: I was prepared for a mid-budget Viking tale, but had no idea it would be a star-studded, intensely violent, artistic triumph (4/5); The Menu: I was prepared for cannibalism and risked watching it before dinner anyway, but instead it was an absurd black comedy wrapped in layers of detestfulness — it attacks pretension with a blunt weapon forged from pretentiousness itself (3/5); and Furiosa: Jesus Christ, George Miller has action cinema running in his veins, you can’t take your eyes off the screen for a minute. Anya is incredible in all three, a victim with hidden strength. I’d like to see her do some lighter comedic material. Maybe I’ll watch Emma next week.
    • YouTube recommended me a music video by Kenshi Yonezu and I want to know why no one told me about this guy. I’ve seen three of his recent videos now and they’re brilliant! They make use of practical effects, clever editing, and great art direction to keep you engaged throughout the songs. Take a look:
  • Week 14.24

    Week 14.24

    I’ve gone and given myself another sabbatical. I’m looking forward to getting ‘important’ things done, like reading till my Kobo dies so I can buy a new one with USB-C charging, finally playing the new Zelda, watching Tampopo for the first time, exploring our public libraries, drawing a couple more Misery Men, and listening to finance podcasts because I need to graduate from roboadvisors. This will also involve stepping into a sort of low power mode when it comes to spending: public transportation, teabags instead of Nespresso pods, no new TV or PS5, canceling YouTube Premium…

    Some people asked when I made the decision or started to think about time off, but I couldn’t realistically pin a date on the donkey. I started to look through recent updates and found that I mentioned needing more videogame time as recently as two weeks ago, but it was definitely on my mind before.

    Perhaps the seeds of this extended leisure were planted during the final weeks of my last funemployment break, as seen in this post where I suddenly found a bunch of new interests and projects just as my freedom time was running out. I’d forgotten so much about that period until I started to re-read old entries while writing this update; a sort of climbing back into a dream after visiting the bathroom at night. This is week #197, which means I’ve been at this for nearly four years, and I must say it’s been worth it.

    It’s safe to assume I’m looking forward to this break, but I’ll definitely miss many aspects of working with the team I’ve been part of for the past seven years — a side of my life I deliberately omit here, but consequently won’t have an extensive external memory of to revisit (apart from photos, chats, and remnants of the work we’ve done floating out in the world).

    On that note, a few of us attended a community-run service design meetup on Serangoon Road Thursday and were surprised by the large turnout. One lovely thing that happened: we met a young designer working at one of our earliest clients, in the experience team we had a hand in setting up. Hearing from her that the work I did is still being used and built upon, helping to drive customer experience at one of the best brands in its category, felt like a nice bookend to this phase of mUh cArEeR.

    I don’t know what I’ll do next, but have no plans to think about it for at least a few months.

    ===

    Media activity:

    • How are we supposed to build memories on digital copyright quicksand? I noticed that track 14 of Vultures 1 has disappeared from Apple Music, at least in Singapore. More than the fluctuating prices, algorithms influencing commerce influencing art, and the shitty business model for musicians, the impermanence and lack of ownership might be my least-favorite thing about the shift to streaming.
    • According to the song’s Genius page, the song was also removed from Spotify back in February owing to “clearance issues”. My relationship with music would definitely be different if I’d grown up with mixtapes that could suddenly have gaps of silence in them after you’d given them away.
    • We finished Season 2 of Below Deck Down Under, and as I’ve said before, these two Australian seasons show some of the best teamwork and leadership (although not without the drama that people watch this show for) out of all the Below Deck we’ve seen (easily over 100 episodes, oh my life…) and it’s simply down to Captain Jason and Chief Stew Aesha acting like adults, communicating openly, and not being lazy. We’ll probably head back to Season 8 of the main show after this and I’m dreading being back under the command of Captain Lee.
    • I tried to resume watching Three Body Problem on Netflix despite online comments that it gets too slow and boring. The fourth episode certainly was, and I almost gave up, writing in my notes that it was “such a shame an intriguing premise can be flatly shot, shoddily paced, and annoyingly acted into mere weekend background fodder.” And then I saw episode 5, which features a bonkers CGI-heavy set piece in the middle plus a lot more going on, and now I’m back in.
  • Week 12.24

    Week 12.24

    If you’re reading this on the web, you might notice that this site is now running WordPress’s new ‘Twenty Twenty Four’ theme, with a more traditional blog-like homepage (it has a sidebar) linking to single-column post pages. Navigation remains unchanged, but typography and minor details are improved.

    I’m happier with this than I was with the blocky grid of last year’s ‘Twenty Twenty Three’ theme, because this comes with the freedom to put up shorter posts without Titles or Featured Images. Over the years I’ve gone back and forth on microblogging here, or having all tweets mirrored here, but it’s never stuck. But at least I have the option again, especially since I haven’t properly posted on Twitter in a year and most people I want to follow are still scattered across Threads, Bluesky, Nostr, and Mastodon.

    ===

    We celebrated a little life milestone this week with a nature walk, a “Gold Class” viewing of Dune Part Two, a nice bottle of French Malbec, and a perfect Canadian pork chop with a side of the butteriest mashed potatoes. A mix of simple and simpler pleasures.

    I’ll expand: We were recently in New Zealand, and took a couple of walks in nature reserves. I’ve never bothered to attempt the same in Singapore because it’s ridiculously hot, but visiting the Rifle Range Nature Park in West Singapore was interesting for the stark contrast offered versus our recent experiences. Every step on its paths is sure footed by design; suspended walkways take you through the forest without trampling plants, and they’re so convenient all the monkeys we saw were using them as well, rather than walking in the dirt. You get the sense that everything is regularly inspected and all dangers have been scrubbed. It reflects the usual criticism of Singapore being a theme park, which is only a problem because living in a safe environment breeds complacency. At several points on the easiest routes at Te Mata Park in New Zealand, slipping off a path and tumbling into a ravine was a genuine possibility. I wonder what other metaphorical tumbles Singaporean life has not prepared me for.

    The new Dune is as superb as all reviews have indicated, and I could not imagine rating it any less than 5 stars in Letterboxd. The art direction and photography are flawless, and it looks twice as expensive as it is. Never once while watching did my brain check out and think, “oh, that’s CGI”. The only change I would dare suggest is Austin Butler’s casting, as he’s not anywhere as menacing as the movie treats him. His character is already a nepo baby who just enjoys killing defenseless slaves and servants, and Butler didn’t bring the presence to suggest he’s also one of the most dangerous people in a universe full of freaks.

    Another 5-star film for us this week was Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days (2023), which won a Best Actor award at Cannes last year for Koji Yakusho’s nearly wordless performance. I enjoyed it tremendously as a loving tribute to the city of Tokyo and its toilets (really), a meditation on repetition and routine, an ode to proud and purposeful work, and a parable about how avoiding the messiness of life might obscure living itself. The soundtrack is a Gen X dream. Visually, it’s filled with beautiful everyday moments so mundane as to be overlooked by most of us going about our daily busyness. The way all its themes and music choices come together in the film’s final minutes is worth half a star alone.

    Continuing the theme of Japanese films about appreciating life, we watched Living (2022), the transposed-to-England remake of Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952). I’ve never seen the original, but it’s now high on my list. Bill Nighy is fantastic in the role of a civil servant who learns he’s dying and wonders what it’s all about, and plays his deconstruction with impressive vulnerability. I looked at the trailer for Ikiru afterwards, and while Takashi Shimura’s performance in the same role is regarded as iconic, it was a little theatrical and may not have aged as well.

    Anyhow, the message in both these films is timeless: stop working so hard at meaningless things, smell the roses (or watch the shadows cast by leaves — ‘komorebi’ in Japanese, as the end credits of Perfect Days tells us), and make a difference to another human being’s life.

    Take a little forest bathing break with this video I captured.

    ===

    Additional media activity:

    • We finished Season 1 of Below Deck Down Under at last, and I was glad to learn that Captain Jason and Chief Stew Aesha return for Season 2, which we now must see. The leadership and teamwork these two have put Captain Lee and Kate of the mainline series to bottomless shame.
    • The new Call of Duty mobile version of Warzone has finally come out, after being delayed for about a year. As a somewhat devoted player of the original Call of Duty Mobile title, I’ve been waiting with very high expectations for this. Unfortunately, the launch has been a bit of a dud, with many complaints from the worldwide community. For one, Android devices seem incapable of running it well. On my iPhone 15 Pro Max, it runs at peak performance and the graphics are truly console quality; I was running around maps that I knew instinctively, but my brain was exploding from how different and detailed everything looked. Sadly, the phone runs hot and it drained the better part of my battery in maybe an hour. I’ll wait to see if they improve anything before calling it quits.
    • The new Kacey Musgraves album, Deeper Well, is not bad at all. It even has a song called Anime Eyes which drops a line about a “Miyazaki sky”. Very weird times we live in.
    • I started using a new social app that tries to be a Letterboxd for music: Musicboard. Unfortunately, it doesn’t automatically log/scrobble your listening activity, so rating music and broadcasting your taste is a manual affair. You also can’t start playing an album directly in Apple Music from within the app — it only supports Spotify at the moment.

  • Week 6.24

    Week 6.24

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

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

    ===

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

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

    ===

    Other activity:

    • I’ve started on a new book and only read two short chapters but I already know this is something special. It’s People Collide by Isle McElroy.
    • We are back watching Below Deck and I’m still sure that this is one of the best management trainings you can get for your time. Every single season is full of unnecessary crew drama because people don’t communicate expectations, don’t provide clear feedback, and allow emotional reactions to escalate. I get that it’s not easy, and I’m not sure I do it so well myself, but the lines between action and consequence are so clear here; they’re literally edited together for entertainment. Another lesson: everyone is flawed. The people you root for because they’re usually sensible? Sometimes they fuck up! Working relationships are rarely black and white.
    • Kanye West finally released Vultures two months its initial release date, with a new cover and possibly a different tracklist. I haven’t heard it yet. But once again, Apple Music has not recommended me music I’m interested in, although I’m quasi-certain it will be featured somewhere in the app in the next few days. Right now the Singapore ‘Browse’ page is full of Chinese New Year related music that I definitely do not care about.
    • After working too hard and not getting enough rest, Kim’s sort of fallen ill now, with me feeling a milder version of it. The timing could not be worse: we’re off on holiday soon, the kind where sneezing and aching and feeling weak might derail a complex itinerary.
    • Speaking of which, I used ChatGPT to help plan this vacation, and I’ve taken those instructions and made a custom GPT called AI-tinerary which might help you if you’re going someplace new and want to create a multi-day schedule of things to do. It can work off your individual interests and transport modes, as well as answer other travel-related questions you may have. At some point I’ll be able to make it plot your route on a map (if you ask it now, it’ll generate some wacky DALL•E map drawing that you should absolutely NOT follow).
    • You should know by next weekend whether these AI-generated plans worked out, or if we tried to stay in towns that don’t actually exist.
  • Week 36.23

    Week 36.23

    This week was a slog, like slowly pushing through a muddy swamp. I don’t know why, but maybe grinding through palaces in Persona 5 Royal and PowerPoint decks in real life had something to do with it. I thought I was nearing the end of the former, but nope, still have many hours ahead. I had to double check my last post to make sure I didn’t miss a week here; the presidential election felt so long ago it couldn’t possibly have been last Friday.

    I went into work twice and discovered a new free snacks/drinks initiative, the kind that large companies everywhere once generously offered. I thought free food incentives were a low-interest rate phenomenon, but the return-to-office movement needs new soldiers. So there I was at my desk eating banana cake and trail mix, drinking VitaminWater, and getting calories I would normally have avoided.

    The real work benefits are the friends we make along the way, though. This week an ex-colleague now based in Tokyo came back for a visit. That led to a three-hour Taiwanese hotpot catch-up last night, the effects of which I’m still feeling this morning. The chief reason is probably sodium, a thing I’ve become more acutely aware of since I wrote about eating Korean instant noodles.

    Fun fact: Most Korean ramyeon contains between 1,800–2,000mg of sodium per serving, which is the recommended amount for an entire day. But Singaporeans tend to average 3,900mg daily, probably because of our proximity to hotpot restaurants.

    ===

    I’m currently enjoying Yo-Yo Ma’s new release, Nature at Play: J.S. Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 (Live from the Great Smoky Mountains) on Apple Music. It was recorded outdoors in Dolby Atmos, near running water and singing birds, which means hearing it in Spatial Audio is a truly transportational experience.

    And it’s a brilliant concept! You get a relaxing forest soundscape (the kind I put on sometimes anyway while working) along with a stirring piece of music performed by a master. I hope he does more like this.

    The Rolling Stones put out a new single, Angry, and it seemed like all the old men on my timelines fell instantly in love with it. Eh, it’s okay at best? I didn’t get the hype, and the single-idea video with Sydney Sweeney on a car for four minutes didn’t do much to redeem it.

    Imagine putting out something that mediocre in the same week as Olivia Rodrigo’s new album, GUTS. I believe it was the New York Times’ review that drew parallels to Lorde’s Melodrama, not stylistically but as a brilliant sophomore album from a 20-year-old breakthrough artist under immense pressure to deliver again. It’s so good, just give it a go.

    ===

    Next week is new iPhone week, so I’ll just say for now that if the rumors are true and the periscope zoom feature is only coming to the iPhone Pro Max, I think I’m going to be slightly torn. Apple hasn’t given the larger iPhones better cameras than the smaller ones in several years — that trend meaningfully ended with the iPhone 8 series, where the Plus model had two cameras and the regular had just one. The 12 Pro Max had a 2.5x zoom compared to 2x on the Pro, but that’s minor.

    I think I’ve owned six larger iPhones: the 6 Plus, 6S Plus, 7 Plus, 8 Plus, XS Max, and the 11 Pro Max. And that one year in between when we had the iPhone X, which only came in one (small) size, felt like a relief because you didn’t have to choose a trade off.

    The question will be how much more useful they can make this longer zoom seem. I’m quite happy with the 3x range on my 14 Pro. While the image quality could be better, the actual zoom range is fine! Do I want to put up with a cumbersome phone just to have a not-great-looking 5–10x zoom I’ll only use when visiting the zoo? If you’re currently using a larger phone and regret it, let me know!

  • Week 31.23

    Week 31.23

    I fell ill with a fever that spiked Monday night, and then strangely subsided the next day, replaced by wrenching back pain and body aches after a night of hallucinatory dreams that felt perfectly sensible at the time. Then on Wednesday just as I thought I was getting better, I was struck by the worst bout of diarrhea I’ve had in recent memory. It lasted practically all day, even after I’d eaten nothing but white bread and water, even after there was nothing left to expel.

    What made things worse is one of our neighbors recently sold their flat and the new owners are doing renovations right now, with the few days of heavy demolition coinciding perfectly with my time in bed.

    The doctor I spoke to prescribed me some dubious medication: one of them, meant to be taken an hour before food, is normally prescribed to people with stomach ulcers or gastric reflux problems. I mean, it reduces the production of stomach acid, which surely helps, but I went online and one of the things it’s clearly not prescribed for is diarrhea. It even says that if you are experiencing diarrhea, you need to inform your doctor before they prescribe this. I stopped taking it after the first dose. Maybe I’m too much of a WebMD believer and should just trust real doctors but it was prescribed so casually along with four other things that I can’t trust it’s necessary.

    So I got on the so-called BRAT diet, which stands for Bananas, Rice, Applesauce, and Toast — basically all you can eat is bland stuff. I’m surviving on bread and bananas and a little peanut butter at the moment.

    Oh, I learnt the above neat trick on Twitter in the process. If you wrap the stems on a bunch of bananas with plastic, it prevents them from going black and rotting. They release some sort of gas while ripening (?!) and by blocking the rest of the bananas from it, they last much longer.

    Photo from @BrianLeeWow on Twitter

    Another thing I learnt from on the internet this week was the existence of an obscure Sanrio character turned internet darling, confusingly named “Big Challenges”. He’s an optimistic crocodile that was created in 1978 and then dropped off the map until fans petitioned in 2020 for his return. And now he’s made an appearance as an NPC in the new Apple Arcade game, Hello Kitty Island Adventure, which may have been named in reference to a 2006 South Park meme? (Disclaimer: the featured image on this post is not from the game; I made it with AI.)

    As for the game itself, it’s getting great reviews, and seems to be very much Animal Crossing but with Sanrio characters. So perhaps I’ll be spending some time with it next week while on my own island getaway.

    What island getaway? Well, by the time you read this scheduled post, I will (hopefully) be on a small secluded holiday island with nearly no internet connectivity, no television, and no air conditioning. To be honest, I’m a little worried we’ll get there after two boat rides and an hour’s drive only to be put into cages and executed on camera for the dark web. Barring that nightmare outcome (inspired by a book I read recently), it promises to be three days of unplugged relaxation: reading, floating in a private pool, looking out at the ocean, maybe gaming a little, and sweating my ass off.

    But first I’ll have to get over the anxiety I feel when I think of not being online and connected to everything. I mean, things are moving so fast these days, I could back next week to find the stock market’s crashed, or every country’s locked in a room-temperature superconductor arms race, or some new AI has decided I should do twice as much work for less money.

    On one of those topics, it’s now 6pm on Saturday and I’ve spent the last hour watching a YouTube livestream by the National Taiwan University’s science department, as they test their LK-99 sample for superconductive properties. That’s another thing that started this week (or last?), some Korean scientists released a paper on their attempts to fabricate a superconductor over the last 20 years, in the most confusing way possible with multiple releases, internal fighting, and not much clarity on whether this thing is real. But it’s gotten every backyard chemist online into trying to replicate their process, which is apparently not hard. It’s something the human race could have accidentally discovered a hundred years ago, which makes my skin tingle! Imagine an alternate universe where we’ve had this technology all that time.

    The stream started strong, but then I was appalled at their inability to present this in a camera-ready way. The lab is a mess, and they didn’t have their workspace prepped to work with the sample; it was being moved around with pieces of paper on a crowded desk, and at one point it looked like they were going to drop it on the floor. Watching it, I finally understand why all the videos and photos posted online so far by other enthusiasts have been so blurry and lo-fi. Scientists are not YouTubers!

    So far, it’s been a washout. The tiny sample they derived, in part because of a failure to neatly separate it from the quartz tube without resorting to the use of a hammer, has not responded to a magnet. They’re doing something called a SQUID test now, but I don’t think it’s looking good. Might have something to do with their decision to use different temperatures and baking times than cited in the original paper. In any case, other labs around the world seem to have been able to replicate LK-99 to some extent, so I’m hoping we’ll “be so back” by this time next week.

    Okay that’s enough from me. Here’s some music I liked this week.

    XG released the next song from their upcoming mini-album (I can’t wait), and it’s called TGIF, and it stands for “Thank God I’m Fly”. I love it.

    I discovered the Japanese ambient artist Haruka Nakamura, who came out of a hiatus to work with The North Face to create four albums of background music for their Harajuku “Sphere” store. One for each season. What a gig.

    Light Years
    Those Days, Light Years II
    From Dusk to the Sun, Light Years III
    Sun.Light, Light Years IV

    Utada Hikaru put out a new single called Gold — Mata Au Hi Made which I’ve only heard once but found sadly unengaging. I’ll have to get back to it later.

  • Week 29.23

    Week 29.23

    I’ve implemented a new blog theme, which you’ll notice if reading this on the web (as opposed to an RSS feed reader or the email newsletter — I’m surprised at how few people still use the former, and that people are using the latter). For the first time in many years, I’m experimenting with having a listing page instead of just having every post on a long page. Let me know if you think this is better.

    A new cafe opened nearby and we’ve made something of a new routine to go there on Saturday mornings and spend quality time together. The coffee’s good, I get to see and hear people in this community that I’m normally ignorant of, and most importantly, it’s a chance to see cute neighborhood dogs.

    After last weekend’s work commitments, I took Monday off to chill and fly my underused Mavic Mini 1 drone with my dad (who has a newer FPV model that he flies with a video headset). Hmm, I wonder if you’ll be able to use your Apple Vision Pro for such applications — I can’t see why not.

    Bookworm mode has been engaged: I finished Anthony McCarten’s Going Zero, and both started and finished A.G. Riddle’s Quantum Radio this week. Along with Daniel Suarez’s Critical Mass a month ago, that’s a big dose of SF — so I’m now halfway through Sayaka Murata’s Life Ceremony, a slim collection of weird short stories. Whenever life feels like a directionless mess, I always find reading to be the cure.

    Shitty films, such as the latest Fast and Furious installment (Fast X), where I couldn’t even make it past the halfway mark, don’t offer the same solace. It’s not only dumb and unengaging, it’s not even engaged with itself; the writing is awful and nothing makes you care at all. So instead, I watched Dwayne Johnson in Skyscaper on Netflix, and although it was a dumb and kinda bad action movie, it at least had a pulse.

    ===

    Now let’s talk Beats, baby.

    The long-awaited update to the Beats Studio over-ear headphone line finally dropped with the new Beats Studio Pro. My first pair was the Beats Studio 2 circa 2013, with that iconic Ammunition-designed silhouette (the original Studios were fugly, like everything from the early Monster-made Beats by Dre era) — all smooth swooping lines and a low profile on the ears. It’s a design so good they didn’t really change it in 2017 with the Beats Studio 3, and it remains untouched in 2023’s version.

    Throughout all incarnations, the sound quality was, to be blunt, crappy. I love a good design as much as the next guy, but when it comes at the expense of audio quality, it’s a hard sell. But somehow, I ended up buying three pairs. Go figure.

    After being acquired by Apple, there was hope that sound quality would improve, and indeed the entire Beats line has received significant upgrades, with two exceptions: the on-ear Solo series, which got a short-lived premium noise-canceling reboot with the Beats Solo Pro, and the Studio series. After the Beats Solo Pro was discontinued (my guess is Solo buyers are price sensitive and so the Pro model flopped), they went back to selling the pre-Apple Beats Solo 3 Wireless model and never bothered to update the Beats Studio 3 Wireless. Until now!

    The new Beats Studio Pro looks like a proper contender for anyone on Android and those okay with skipping the latest Apple features (e.g. adaptive audio is only coming to second-generation AirPods Pro later this year). It does however have the key ones: spatial audio with dynamic head tracking, improved ANC, and USB-C support including lossless audio over a cable. Given the improved sound quality of recent releases like the Beats Fit Pro and Beats Studio Buds+, I have high hopes for these.

    The Beats video aesthetic is still fresh, like an Apple design language from a parallel universe.

    Beats recently brought Samuel Ross onboard as “principal design consultant”. His job? Picking out colors. Sandstone is a good-looking warm shade of white; Navy seems like an improvement on previous versions, darker and less saturated; Black is, well, black; and Deep Brown is the interesting new addition here. It reminds me of the original Zune. Ross says in the product video that he was going for “elevated” looks, but man, these are plastic. Luxe colors on plastic? Personally, I would’ve preferred a bit more energy and attitude.

    However, a long-standing concern remains: the clamping force. These headphones have always been a bit tight, making them uncomfortable to wear with glasses. Early reviews indicate no change in this aspect, so that’s a good excuse to stop myself from getting them.

    If I do, Sandstone has my name on it.

    ===

    Someone mentioned how you could use ChatGPT as a therapist, which prompted me to try writing a prompt that anyone could use for this purpose. Keep in mind that you’ll get better results with GPT-4, and of course this is no substitute for real professional care and advice.

    That said! I tried it out on a couple of scenarios and it was pretty good at guiding a conversation, suggesting strategies like reframing your thoughts, and helping you to reflect on your situation. I’d suggest talking to it like you would a real person, and saying things like “see you next week, what do you think we should talk about then?”

    Here’s the prompt:

    ===

    New albums on my headphones this week:

    The last one came into view after watching her breathtaking performance of some Chopin on NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts of all places (embedded below). I only just learned that she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (like Jacqueline Du Pré, who I mentioned a few weeks ago) in 2018, but has apparently managed to overcome it for the moment. It’s a cosmic joke that bad things happen to the most incredible talents.