sangsara.net

Tag: Design

  • Week 34.25

    Week 34.25

    In a week that didn’t feel like a lot of forward motion, I realized I spent it looking back on and revisiting old experiences to see if they’ve changed, or if maybe I have.

    • Upon my return from the UK back in 2005, I realized that it was extremely hard to find good fish and chips in Singapore. No one seemed to like splashing malt vinegar and lashing salt over everything; it was always tartar sauce and lemon slices. And then a little place called Smith’s opened at Balmoral Plaza and it was as close to the real thing as you could find here.
    • Earlier this year, it seemed like Smith’s would close down after nearly two decades, another victim of high rents, rising ingredient costs, and a weakened consumer. But the regulars cried out, social media amplified it, and they got a lease extension into the summer. In a recent turn for the better, the landlord capitulated and they got a good price on the place for another year. That’s about the time I started seeing more advertising from them on Instagram.
    • You can guess what happened next (for someone who used to make ads, I’m surprisingly susceptible to suggestion). I dragged my parents down for dinner — my first visit since 2018, according to my records on Swarm. Yes, I was part of the problem, but here in Singapore I don’t exactly feel like eating it every week the way I once did! Prices are indeed a lot higher than they used to be; S$30 for a cod and chips stings like lemon in the eyes, but I don’t blame Smith’s. The Guardian made a whole video showing things aren’t much better back in the UK. The food was good, by the way, save for some watery curry sauce that I wouldn’t bother with again. I know it looks a little light on the chips above, but we all left satisfied.
    • As promised last week, I threw caution to the wind and upgraded my Vision Pro to the developer beta, mostly motivated by the need for a more realistic Persona. And it really is a huge upgrade in resolution and fidelity from exactly the same scanning process. There’s even a pair of glasses in there that looks just like mine. Disappointingly, the UI looks exactly the same, and neither the new design language nor the Liquid Glass material have been implemented. This is a curious state of affairs: all other platforms have a new look and feel that were purportedly inspired by visionOS, but they’re now “further ahead” than visionOS itself, which risks looking dated with more opacity and frosting. I sure hope this isn’t because glass elements don’t actually hold up in a mixed reality setting. I can see how the bright chromatic aberrations might actually be too distracting when they’re 8-feet high in your living room.
    • One of the earliest apps that I installed upon getting my Vision Pro was Explore POV. It’s a library of immersive (16K, 180º, 3D) videos shot in some of the world’s wildest and most beautiful environments. Think forest trails in New Zealand, blue Caribbean waters, the Swiss Alps, but also the Eiffel Tower. As the name suggests, they’re first-person POV and mounted on someone actually hiking the mountain’s edge and so on. Depending on your relationship with heights and VR motion, the effect can range from thrilling to nauseating. When it first came out, there were maybe just three videos on offer, and I didn’t really take to it because of all the other apps and content I wanted to check out first.
    • I went back into the app this week after hearing that they were running a summer sale, and decided to pay S$50 for six months of access. They’ve leveled up their video production game, and the latest videos are shot with Blackmagic URSA Cine cameras. Their crew are actively shooting around the world and there’s even a community poll for people to vote where they should go next (I voted for Nepal). It’s third-party stuff like this that we really need to see succeed for the long-term success of the platform, and unlike some casual iPad game ported to 3D, it really shows off the magical qualities of this device.
    • Thanks to my book club voting to tackle David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas next, I’m breaking three of my usual rules. One, I don’t really make time to re-visit books I’ve already read, but given that the last time was in 2014, I’m interested to see if it’ll feel different now. My memory of it is roughly “very good, sort of like The Fountain (2006), but also claustrophobic and harrowing somewhere in the middle”. Two, I usually cheat at book club and read the whole book at once rather than stopping where agreed each week. I thought it’d be nice to experience it at the same time as everyone else for a change, which leads to my third broken rule: Only reading one book at a time. Since Cloud Atlas is going to take about six weeks, I’ll have to read another book in parallel if I’m going to read anything else at all.
    • I just finished Nick Harkaway’s Tigerman, which is such an odd duck I don’t know how to tell you about it. It’s only my second book of his that I’ve read, and so different in setting and language from Gnomon, which I also enjoyed. He blends real-world references with imagined details that create a sense of — not fantasy exactly, but unreality. Within that space, absurdist humor sits comfortably alongside themes of family, colonialism, mental health, geopolitics, and bursts of comic-book action. 4 stars.
    • The year has so far seen a lot of exciting music releases, and there are even more to come. I’m really hyped for the next few drops from the “Legend Has It” series. The albums from Raekwon and Ghostface Killah have already dropped, but new material from De La Soul? Nas and DJ Premier? Oh my.
    • Despite (or because of?) all the great stuff coming out, I feel like I haven’t spent enough time listening to music this year. Maybe it’s the lack of commuting time, which is where I would normally get to put an entire album on and listen closely. So it’s also taken me from January till now to finish BLixTape #6, the latest in my poorly named series of “currently listening to” playlists. Hopefully the next few will be quarterly. Here it is on Apple Music.
  • Week 28.25

    Week 28.25

    • Despite a brief setback, we ended up going to Bangkok for a few days as planned.
    • After spending hours in traffic the last time, I stayed within a smaller radius this time and walked a bit more. There wasn’t any agenda, really; Kim had some things to do and I wanted a change of scenery.
    • There was a jam coming in from the airport, of course, but we were thankfully in a very comfortable ride provided by the hotel. Ours was one of many cars squeezing down the narrow side lanes on the freeway — those buffer zones you don’t normally think cars should (or could) be using. Other cars in the ‘proper lanes’ skooch over to make way for this to happen, and it struck me as a neat metaphor for designing permissive, flexible systems with a normal mode but hiding ample bandwidth to accommodate emergencies.
    • Amidst more news of layoffs and economic rockiness, I think using AI in design (or most things, maybe) should be the side lane to ‘proper lanes’ of humans doing work, but we’re trying to do the opposite. Someone showed me a new customer research platform called GetWhy, where AI personalities conduct interviews over video calls with people, and synthesize some manner of insights automatically. They call it “human depth at survey speed”, which I knew AI would eventually enable: a merging of qualitative methods with quantitative scale. I saw it coming a couple of years ago but didn’t have the strength to look at it directly and figure out the pros and cons. At a gut level, I think it’s a shame that companies will now be able to insert another artificial layer between the people working on services and the people they’re supposed to be serving (or, more cynically, extracting profit from).
    • Anyway back to Bangkok. I saw three films to pass free time in the afternoons. Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning for a second time; Jurassic World Rebirth, which was so terrible and completely lacking in the magic of the original film, the lasting fumes of which this franchise is still somehow able to sustain itself on; and James Gunn’s Superman, which I accidentally saw in Thai, without subtitles. I decided to sit through the whole thing and get by on just the visual language of it, and I think the experiment went okay! I probably couldn’t watch Tenet (2020) this way, though. 3/5 stars with the above qualification.
    • On Brian’s suggestion, I visited the Thailand Creative & Design Center (TCDC) which is a government office in a historic postal service building, mostly notable for its extensive resource library. You have to be a member to enter, although day passes are available for about S$4. It was a good way to pass a couple of hours, and I flipped through some interesting books that are now on my Amazon wishlist.
    • One of them was For the Love of Peanuts, by Elizabeth Anne Hartman, which covers the Peanuts Global Artist Collective — a project where seven artists reimagined Schulz’s characters through public art and exhibitions. There’s more information and photos through the link above. I was coincidentally thinking about learning to draw Snoopy recently, the “correct” way, and seeing this book was such a jolt to my narrow way of thinking — it had simply never occurred to me that I was free to recreate Snoopy however I wanted. Lots of new synapses to build here.
    • At the last minute, I decided not to bring my Switch 2 and it was fine. I always imagine hours of downtime on vacation where I might actually want to play a game, but it never happens. I did use my iPad Pro and am going through a sort of second wave of love for it. I recently got a third-party Smart Folio-type case, for just $12 off Amazon, which makes it much thinner and lighter than Apple’s Magic Keyboard case. The original Smart Cover (launched with iPad 2) is/was such a brilliant and minimal design, giving the device a perfect midpoint between versatility and portability, and having it again with this case is great for traveling.
    • It’s worth mentioning that each night back at the hotel I’d get into a trashy reality tv cable channel dedicated to “courtroom cases”. The quote marks are because I don’t know if you’d call these actual legal courts (but with the US, who knows?), but the two series I saw were awful and entertaining. Paternity Court sees couples come in and argue about their children, usually born on the side with another man or woman, culminating in the results of a DNA test revealing whether the man really is their father. Divorce Court is better, because you get other sorts of relationship issues being worked out, and the judges are sassier and give out strong advice. The name is a misnomer; some of these couples aren’t even married or looking for a divorce, they’re just airing their shit on TV. You can watch full episodes on their YouTube channel.
    • On the flight home, I caught Doctor-X: The Movie Final (2024), the supposed concluding chapter to the long-running Japanese medical drama that’s so bad I fell in love with it. Back in February, I spent an absurdly cost-inefficient chunk of my Tokyo trip watching Seasons 4 and 5 on local Netflix. Seasons 6 and 7 don’t have English subs, so I don’t know when I’ll get to see them — unlike Superman, this is too important to risk rawdogging in a foreign language.
      The movie… well, they went for higher stakes: explosions, AI, helicopters, the works. But that also meant less of the dumb fun and weird humor that makes the regular show a cult favorite. Or maybe not so cult at all — maybe it’s unironically loved in Japan. I kinda hope so.
  • Week 24.25

    Week 24.25

    • My Switch 2 finally arrived on Monday, praise be. It turned out to be an imported European unit, so it has the right kind of power plugs, but the included download code for Mario Kart World would only work with an EU eShop account. It didn’t take long to make one, but it’s yet another needless fragmentation of my digital footprint.
    • It’s a fantastic improvement on the original Switch. It feels more solidly built, and the magnetic Joy-Cons don’t creak and give as much when supporting the console’s weight. The screen is enormous but since the original wasn’t exactly pocketable anyway, who cares? It seems powerful enough to keep up with game requirements for easily another five years. The only regression is battery life, which they’ll surely fix with a new model two years from now.
    • I have yet to play anything on it that graphically pushes into PS5 territory with ray tracing and photorealism; although running Mario Kart World at 60fps in 4K is definitely not something the old Switch could do. That same smoothness extends to Splatoon 3, which got a Switch 2 upgrade patch on Thursday for the franchise’s 10th anniversary, and it feels amazingly fast and fluid on the new hardware. The once painful load times have been reduced to almost nothing, which is nearly worth the price of admission all by itself. At the very least, reviewers agree it’s more powerful than a Steam Deck.
    • Bert was back in town on a last-minute trip, so we met up with some of the old gang for beers and the kind of talk that middle-aged people will get up to if you let them: aging parents, how everything was much better before, and how we’d like to retire voluntarily before AI forces us to. Jussi was once again unable to make it, but he had the acceptable reason of being out of the country.
    • It was WWDC week, and with the comprehensive OS updates that were announced, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that every Apple product experience will be changing this fall. I’ve had several conversations about the new cross-platform design language system they unveiled, which doesn’t have a name but is anchored by a new digital material called Liquid Glass, so people have just been calling it that. I wrote last week that I hoped the new look wouldn’t come with regressions in usability, specifically thinking about legibility and interaction clarity, but those are exactly the issues that everyone has been pointing out in the first developer beta. I’m hopeful that they’ll be able to moderate some of the more extreme decisions before the launch, but there’s no turning back. Like it or not, this is just how things are going to be for us users. What are you going to do, move to Android?
    • While talking to Michael again, one of us offered that Liquid Glass is simply a flex. It’s Apple building a visible moat with their superior silicon. Every iPhone, iPad, and Mac made in the last five years possesses power-efficient cycles to spare, which can’t be said of Android devices, save for a minority of the highest-end flagship phones. So when you look over someone’s shoulder in public and see morphing glass buttons accurately refracting the light coming off other elements on their screen at 60 to 120 fps, you’re looking at the digital equivalent of fine stitched leather. Luxury pixels. Veblen UI. Android manufacturers can’t follow Apple down this road without bifurcating the experience into cheap and premium versions, or forcing tradeoffs like reduced battery life and jankier animation.
    • The iPad got the most extreme makeover of all the platforms, and I’m a mixture of relieved, disappointed, and excited. Relieved that they’ve given up on trying to define some new paradigm for managing multiple apps on a screen; turns out the answer is just the same overlapping windows we’ve had since the first Mac. Mildly disappointed that if they couldn’t crack it after some 15 years, then maybe there just isn’t a better way. The universe might be more constrained than we’d hoped. And excited that the iPad will now be a truer laptop replacement for the majority of people, and with that increase in adoption perhaps we’ll get developers excited to build new kinds of experiences for it.
    Screenshot from Apple.com
    • As a Vision Pro owner, I can’t wait for the improved Personas, sharing virtual spaces with people nearby, and the new “spatial scene” rendering from 2D photos. I’ve already spoken to some people in inSpaze who are rocking the new Personas, and they look 10x better and more realistic than the old ones. In fact, it’s given rise to a weird social dilemma that can only exist in this age. I’ve known these people for a while and we’ve talked with each other quite a bit, but suddenly overnight, their faces have changed and it feels like I’m meeting them for the first time — or realizing I never really had. One person in the group chat looked younger now that his Persona got more accurate. Another person looked older and more intense than his previous Pixar-esque Persona suggested he was. They mentioned feeling slightly uncomfortable with how realistically they’re now presenting — the opposite of the safety that I described back in August last year: “the use of Personas creates psychological distance; it’s you, but it’s also more a puppet that looks like you.” Well, now it’s just your real face for everyone to see. I apologize in advance.

    I’ll leave you with two videos from Pulp, whose comeback album More continues to surprise me by being actually good, as if the band hadn’t gone anywhere for the last two decades. The first single has a great video (above) that uses generative AI in the best way possible. The second video below is a live performance of an old favorite, one of many appearances they’ve been making in support of the new stuff.

  • Week 21.25

    Week 21.25

    • This week’s installment is update #256! That’s a big deal for fans of computationally significant numbers.
    • Oddly, just as Michael blogged that his family was down with gastroenteritis last week, a similar bug hit our household. Kim got a bad case of what we thought was food poisoning, and then, of course, I came down with it two days later. It’s a weird one: the stomach trouble comes with headaches and fatigue. Fearing that it was contagious, plus being all tired out, I had to skip one meetup and a wedding dinner over the weekend.
    • So not that much happened with me this week, but I suppose we can talk about the mess out there?
    • Google held their annual I/O event and showed off their latest AI achievements. Tl;dr, some of this stuff is just gross. From a technical standpoint, yes it’s remarkable that pretty realistic video (with sound) can be generated from text, and Google can now use your personal context from documents and emails to help with tasks — similar to what Apple promised (but has yet to deliver), with the important distinction that one centers privacy and on-device computation while the other will do it on their servers. I don’t know if I trust Google to let an AI crawl all my documents, and for that reason, minimized my exposure to Google years ago.
    • I remember when Gmail first came out and pioneered showing contextual ads next to your emails. There was an uproar, and the company had to calm people by saying ‘no one is reading your emails, it’s just automated keyword matching’. Well, with LLMs, it’s much, much worse. No human would be able to go through all your messages, photos, location data, and search history to piece together an invasive psychological profile about your vulnerabilities, and make it actionable for advertisers. Trust that an AI will. Just look at how a version of Claude 4 Opus in testing tried to blackmail an Anthropic engineer over an affair it believed they were having.
    • Beyond the business model of Google’s AI products, it’s their designed intent that feels particularly bleak. One example they proudly demoed: a friend emails asking for holiday recommendations at a place you’ve visited. Instead of writing them a thoughtful reply, you let Google AI scour your photos, emails, documents, and receipts to auto-generate a message, using words chosen to sound like you. Sundar Pichai even had the nerve to say, “With personal smart replies, I can be a better friend”. With friends like these, don’t even bother writing. Just ask Google directly and it can snoop the inboxes of a billion other customers to give you the statistically “best” itinerary.
    • And this is where a company’s lack of imagination and care makes itself plainly apparent. Instead of designing an AI system that writes replies in your place, they could have made one that recaps your holiday with a little presentation showing you where you went, what you did, and what you enjoyed most. Then, memory suitably refreshed, you could sit down and write your friend a reply that shows you actually give a shit about them, and both of your lives would be richer for it. I’m beginning to think that Apple, by failing to ship their AI features on time, might be saving us from a future I don’t want to live in. Maybe they’ll never ship. Maybe that was the plan all along.
    • Then a man who many would expect to know better — who sits on stages and professes the importance of values in technology, and is arguably the most famous designer of this century — announced a new venture (also called io) with Sam Altman and OpenAI. And the vibes, my friends, were off. The 9-minute launch video came across as a thin PR exercise to polish Altman’s spotty public image and reassure OpenAI’s investors. It struck an uncharacteristically self-congratulatory tone for the usually humble Ive while announcing, essentially, nothing. Sterling Crispin tweeted a biting Marxist read of the video in the style of Slavoj Zizek. Many saw it as Altman angling for a Steve Jobs comparison, with critics pointing out that he’s not enough of a product person to be a true partner (and necessary editor) to Ive. In any case, I have no doubt that the io team will deliver some beautifully designed hardware. But I fear even they can’t summon enough thoughtfulness or optimism to divert AI from its current trajectory, or prevent the cultural and societal wreckage it’s likely to create.
    • Speaking of nice devices, one of my fondest gaming memories involves my last year at university, when I switched from my PC to a Mac that was relatively useless for playing games. I couldn’t imagine not having any games (this was before smartphones, mind you), so I bought myself a Game Boy Advance SP — the pinnacle of the series, in my opinion. It’s hard to imagine a more perfect form factor for a handheld console. The clamshell design protects the screen; the vertical layout keeps your arms and hands close together, even when squeezed into an economy flight seat; the screen was sharp and self-lit, which was not a given in those days. I would lie in bed in the dark on cold nights and play Final Fantasy I until I was bored to sleep. To this day, I still fall asleep during boring turn-based battles — one of the reasons why I want to try Clair Obscur Expedition 33, since it blends turns with real-time actions. Pretty sure I traded in my GBA SP for store credit to buy the Nintendo DS (DS Phat) when it came out later that year, and I regret it.
    • Anbernic, the China-based maker of retro emulation handhelds, released a clone of the GBA SP last year, the wonderfully named RG35XXSP. It runs a Linux-based operating system and may or may not come preloaded with thousands of classic gaming ROMs from the NES to the PS1 — you should only play the ones you actually own, of course. I didn’t get one because Anbernic doesn’t have the best rep when it comes to build quality, and I wasn’t sure they’d get it right the first time. Fast forward to today, and the new RG34XXSP (yes, it went back a model number) looks to be the one to get, even over the competing Miyoo Flip V2. DYOR (do your own research) though! They made it slightly smaller, dampened the button clicks, added two analog thumbsticks for wider compatibility, and came up with some better colorways. Now that it finally sounds more like a product than a prototype, mine’s on its way in the mail, and I can’t wait to relive some old games while waiting for the Switch 2 to arrive.
    • Meanwhile in Japan, Fujifilm decided to get in on the nostalgia cash grab game with a new camera release, the long-teased “X half”. Many expected this to be based on the X100 or GFX series, that is to say, employing an APS-C or medium format sensor. But no, it’s a 1-inch sensor, vertically oriented to resemble 35mm half-frame photos. A major selling point is the ability to shoot “in-camera” diptychs (a two-photo collage). The overall camera concept is fantastic: it has a 32mm lens, is very small, and features a “film camera mode” that is basically a physical version of those iPhone apps that try to simulate the fun limitations of analog photography. When activated, you are locked into a chosen film simulation look until you’ve used up a virtual roll of film, ranging from 36–72 half-frame shots. You can’t see any photos until you finish, and you can’t even use the digital screen to compose shots, only the optical viewfinder.
    • I would be down for this, except that early reviews show many corners were cut between concept on paper and the final product. Firstly, it’s made of plastic painted to look like metal. There are no words for how much I hate this when done badly. There’s also a visible seam on the front face that ruins the look. Then the processor seems to be slow, and it ruins the illusion of the film advance lever which you need to crank before taking the next shot; it’s reportedly unresponsive until the last photo has saved. If you’re going to fake analog mechanisms then it has to be perfect! The flash unit, a big part of the analog film camera look, is a weak LED rather than a xenon bulb. Then there are the cheesy overlay effects, like light leaks and “expired film” color casts, which seem borrowed from the company’s Instax evo cameras rather than its premium X series. The camera costs S$999, which many are calling too high, but honestly if they had to charge S$200 more to actually do the concept justice, I’d be on board. If some random startup made this for half the price, the flaws would be forgivable. But this is Fujifilm, and if you’re going to carry this faux film camera around and look like an old douchebag with more money than sense, it had better be good.
    • Until they do a better job, I’ll get by with the Diptic app I bought in 2010 which makes similar collages with just my iPhone (see featured image above), which also shoots vertical orientation photos by default!
  • Week 13.25

    Week 13.25

    A massive 7.7 quake hit Myanmar and Thailand on Friday, causing several hundred deaths so far. It was chilling to pull up the news and see reports of buildings swaying in Bangkok and having to be shut down for safety inspections, buildings that I had just been in a week ago. Thankfully, everyone we know is unhurt, but I’ve heard accounts of the traffic becoming even more unworkable (someone spent over 5 hours getting to the airport), and with some having to walk miles home instead.

    It was my Apple Watch that alerted me to this earthquake, via a notification from the environment ministry’s MyENV app, which usually likes to tell me about quakes in places so far away I don’t see what possible need there could be for an alert. I was in the middle of watching Jason Statham’s film, A Working Man (2025), in an almost empty theater with Peishan, and was about to swipe it away when I saw that it was actually kind of nearby. And then afterwards, the feeds were full of videos showing swimming pools at the tops of condominiums raining their contents down onto the streets below. Who decided we should start putting pools up there, anyway?

    The movie is terrible, by the way, and makes the mistake of trying to NOT be the predictable vengeance-by-numbers Statham vehicle that the trailer makes it out to be. It looks like our man Jason is just your regular ex-military deadly killer who’s decided to take on an unassuming identity and retire to a life of normalcy as a construction worker when one of his new friends falls afoul of the mob and needs rescuing. This is a setup rooted in at least a little realism, which is needed for the audience to suspend disbelief when the righteous murdering starts. However, this film is co-written by Sylvester Stallone, who is now at a stage in life where he writes really ridiculous scenes, silly and clichéd to the point of surrealism, as evidenced in the last installments of his Rambo and Expendables franchises.

    The latest season of Reacher, a series on freaking Amazon Prime Video, is more believable and enjoyable in almost every way, which is a hell of a red flag for whoever produced A Working Man. When reading any of Lee Child’s novels, Reacher comes across as a stoic avatar of justice, almost featureless in terms of personality. But as played on TV by Alan Ritchson, he’s endearingly a bit of an awkward and pedantic weirdo, as you would expect someone with his physicality to be after moving through a world that he doesn’t comfortably fit into. I like that change.

    We also watched the critically acclaimed show Adolescence on Netflix, and it’s an absolute marvel of filmmaking and acting. I’ve never seen a British TV production with this level of craft; it just leaves you wondering how they pulled it off — how they had the energy, even. Each episode is an hour-long performance that often involves moving between multiple locations, with the actors having to ramp up the emotions from anger to fear and the sorrow in between, and they did this how many times? For the final episode, they apparently used Take #16. It’s unfathomable talent. Stephen Graham and his co—stars deserve awards for this.

    ===

    This week will also be remembered for the wave of Studio Ghibli-styled images that washed up on social media after the release of ChatGPT’s new image generation capabilities in their 4o model. People turned personal photos, memes, and historic images alike into ripoffs of Miyazaki’s instantly recognizable style, and I have to say I enjoyed many of them whilst simultaneously feeling uneasy about what this means.

    The new model seems to be a milestone that’s arriving a little sooner than I expected. It can render text with good enough quality and aesthetic precision. It can process a multi-step prompt such as “create a print ad for the product in this picture”, and it will write some pretty workable ad copy, re-imagine the object you’ve given it, and merge them into a single image that looks right at a glance. There may be minor imperfections, or it may fail to nail a critical detail depending on your object. But the fact that it can be completely right some of the time is startling. I’d say it’s most of the way to fucking the creative industry over, but who knows if the last mile will take a quarter, a year, or a decade to close.

    While discussing the possible outcomes of this development with some people, specifically whether this would retard the growth and success of any new visual ideas — take for example the iconic look of Studio Ghibli, or Peanuts and Snoopy — why/how could any new artist launch and evolve their style if it can be snatched away from them early on and proliferated across the web in ways they haven’t even thought of yet — I wondered aloud if the only way forward left for them will be to use AI to scale their work, to generate more variations of it themselves, and to speed it to its logical conclusion (or demise) before anyone else does.

    At this point, I remembered an abandoned “art project” of mine (if it could be called that) from a few years ago, and got very excited about enlisting ChatGPT’s help with it.

    In late 2019, just before COVID hit, I had the idea to draw a series of cute animal characters and make some products. They would be called the Fluffy Hearts Club, and the story was that they were all research animals who were having horrible tests done on them, but who banded together and escaped from the lab. So they’d all have little scars and visible reminders of humanity’s awfulness on their bodies, but they’d be extremely happy and positive in their freedom eras.

    I drew the first one with great difficulty, a rabbit with a scar on his chest, printed him on something like 50 tote bags, and gave them away to friends that Christmas. I started to draw the next one, a cat, along with some other angles of the rabbit, but eventually shelved it… owing to COVID or lack of skill, I don’t know. As you can see they are pretty rough.

    But when I realized that I could use ChatGPT to “learn” this style and concept to help me finish the rest of it, I got excited enough to plonk down $30 and upgrade my account to Plus. Ethics check: Would I have paid a human artist to do this for me? Unlikely. I’m not made of money, and it’s just a silly side project. Should I have? I can’t see how; I want to explore this on my own without another human in the mix.

    I’ve spent a little time on it so far, and it’s grasped the core idea and even brainstormed other animals and their visual signatures with me — it felt eerily like collaborating with a person, as we discussed possibilities and complimented each other along the way. It has trouble following instructions about very minute details, which it explained as a shortcoming of the way its models were trained (it leans towards cartoon conventions, which one of my notes contradicts), which one can take as proof that this is all built on the back of awful copyright violations.

    But with its help, I’ve managed to produce more versions of the rabbit and even imagined the cat in various art styles, so I’d say this has been a half success. I might use it as a foundation for tracing/drawing new ones myself, or as inspiration for different scenarios.

    I only wish I was using this renewed subscription to explore how to stay relevant in my own job domain rather than in the lane of starving artists. Yuk yuk.

    Speaking of the design field, I went back to the same college I visited last November to help give feedback on the work from a class of students doing a design thinking course taught by my former boss and mentor, and was again struck by how much of what we do and prescribe as designers, the responsible way to move in the world, is naive and vulnerable to the at-odd incentives of everyone in the AI business. They’ll throw a synthetic persona at a problem for $10 in compute before they spend a dollar on asking a real person what they need to lead a better life.

    And that brings me to Careless People, the Facebook tell-all book by Sarah Wynn-Williams that I’ve just finished reading. The one that Zuckerberg and his lawyers tried to quash before it was published. I thought I knew enough about Facebook’s bad behavior, but I was still stunned by some of her anecdotes.

    I haven’t made many rules about what kind of work I’ll do, and when I used to smoke, I believed that I could consult on work for tobacco companies because to do otherwise would be hypocrisy (I’m wiser now), but “never work for Facebook” was a promise I made maybe a decade ago. I simply do not understand or respect anyone who chooses to, and this book should be required reading for those who think they might.

    ===

    I listened to Alessia Cara’s new album Love & Hyperbole a couple of times, hoping that something would finally click, because I did want to like it. But I was left without much of an impression. I’m probably coming off R&B in general because listening to SZA’s deluxe edition of SOS on the plane home last week was quite excruciating.

    But then I put on Jessie Reyez’s new album PAID IN MEMORIES and I loved the one playthrough I’ve heard. Maybe it’s the millennial in me but there are some samples for old people in here, including the Smashing Pumpkins’ 1979. She makes it work, and the melodies are strong.

  • 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.

  • Zine: B’Fast

    I mentioned last week that I’d started making a zine about breakfast using AI tools to write all the text and make the pictures, leaving the final job of laying it out to my own (inexperienced) human hands.

    Well, here it is. It was a lot of fun to put together, and I got a crash course in print design while trying to evolve it from a word processor document into something a little more creative and fun. You can sort of see the gradual improvement from beginning to end, as things become a little neater and more coherent — much like the mind in the morning as you make your way through breakfast.

    I’d say the final content is 98% AI generated; I made some cuts and changed just a handful of specific phrases: in one place to avoid possible offense, and most of the others were in a poem at the end, to make it suck less.

    I did it with the help of my custom GPT: InstaZine, which I encourage you to check out if you want to do something like this. It will brainstorm a bunch of different article ideas for your approval, then write them in a range of different authorial voices, hopefully giving the final product more diversity and interest than if you just did it the normal way with ChatGPT.

    You can read the zine below in the embedded Issuu viewer, or download the PDF. Let me know how you like it!

    bfast-compressedDownload

    Some additional tips for using InstaZine: Start by telling it what the subject of the zine should be, and describe what it should be like if you know. Ask it to create a list of article ideas — it should suggest a bunch of titles with a short abstract of each one, usually with a fictional author’s name and some description of the style and approach it will take. If you’re happy with this list, you should copy it off to the side in your own notes and play these descriptions back to the GPT before asking it to write each one. The reason is… the context window still isn’t great with ChatGPT as of Dec 2023, and it won’t necessarily do a great job if you don’t remind it of the brief after 20 messages of writing other articles and generating the images for them. By default, it creates colorful minimalist illustrations suited for a certain kind of magazine I like, but you should override this with whatever style you want.