The results from last week’s health screening came back clear of all major issues, so I’ll sleep soundly on that front for a little while at least! The only note was that I could cut back a little on the carbs and saturated fats, which makes me wonder what I’ve done differently since the last test. Could it be… that I was eating more healthily when I went to the office more often? Those downtown mall lunches were more expensive than the kopitiam/hawker fare I get more frequently now, but I didn’t expect them to be healthier. I’ll have to look into this a little more.
It’s no secret that one of the more reliable indicators we’re in a frothy bull market is a rising number of people mistakenly believing they can quit their jobs and live off day trading, and while that wasn’t my plan, I’ve certainly done a touch of it this year. What can I say? Gambling is fun! But then Trump declared another tariff war on China this Friday, troubling markets and triggering major liquidations on some altcoins. I know it was bad out there because my feeds were full of people urging others not to kill themselves. The coming week is probably going to be a very interesting one on Bloomberg, which I expect to have on the TV in the background all day.
That is, if the internet is even working. Our ISP has been struggling with at least two outages this week during waking/working hours. The connection is down right now as I write this bit on Saturday evening, which is surely an unpopular time for the net to go down. I’ll bet someone’s been called in to reboot a server rack somewhere right now. In times like these, I’m thankful for my irrationally large mobile data plan and our local NAS media server. There’s some kind of strategic error being made by governments here. Centralizing all the angry-mob-placating media on the cloud where it can go down in the middle of a crisis? The kind where you tell people to stay indoors and wait? I’ll bet DVDs actually played a role in maintaining law and order in the old days.
Speaking of shutting down a digital grid, I had the opportunity to see the new Tron: Ares film with Brian the night it premiered and had a great time despite Jared Leto taking the titular role. It’s not a franchise that aims to make sense, or be scrutinized for narrative integrity — it’s about the neon lights, banging electronic music, and videogame-ish eye candy, and this new one delivered on all counts. I can’t even get mad; it really is just a good time as long as the volume’s way up.
Quick aside: I’ve been using Claude more than ChatGPT recently to give it a fair shake, mostly spurred by curiosity after their recent marketing campaign, and honestly? The outputs seem more insightful, more strategic, and it’s a better writer. It feels more my speed, and I’m a new fan.
Still on the topic of digital networks, I got roped into helping start and moderate an online alumni group for the design agency I used to be part of, and we quietly launched it this week. What set this one workplace apart was the feeling of being a truly connected team where, for a brief period in time, absent any territorial agendas or business borders, people could share knowledge across (and even move freely around) the different global offices. And it’s been really nice to see many people say as they join the #introductions channel on our Slack that it remains the best job they ever had. Where does it go from here? I think that depends on how many atypically extroverted designers we can get to foster some sort of social infrastructure.
Coincidentally, I met one of those ex-colleagues for an overdue breakfast: our first intern and proper employee in Singapore, who’s also a regular reader of this blog. Hi Xin! I hadn’t seen her in a year, so even after 90 minutes of catching up it still felt like there was lots we didn’t get into. Anyway, you wouldn’t have known it was a random weekday morning from the line waiting to get into the suburban cafe/bakery we chose. Every table was occupied by both foreign and local-looking unemployed bums alike, all enjoying $28 breakfast plates and $18 slices of toasted sourdough topped with avocado. We’re constantly being told local restaurants are barely hanging on, but then you see the brunch scam still going strong and it’s like wha…?
More counterdata was encountered while celebrating a very belated birthday dinner for Kim at Cudo, a South-American-ish sort of restaurant in the Amoy Street area. It was fully packed out (albeit on a Friday night), and I highly recommend them on account of solid tropical cocktails (Bourbon! Coconut! Pineapple!), a really nice selection of starters (Romaine lettuce with blue cheese and anchovies; warm crab queso with tortilla chips; truffley torched yellowtail), and even better mains (wagyu rump; chorizo and ricotta pasta) at pretty palatable prices.
I can afford this baller dining-out lifestyle because I saved a ton of money on the Amazon Prime sales this week (yup it’s #girlmath). I bought replacement razor blades, a physical copy of The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, dental floss, a 1TB microSD Express card (finally!) for my Switch 2, protein bars, LED bulbs, LEUCHTTURM1917 notebooks, and a lifetime supply of Uni-ball Jetstream RT pens — only the best pens ever according to The Wirecutter.
I wasn’t planning to get any of this stuff soon — they’re all things I might have bought eventually. Like the 1TB card to replace the 256GB one in my Switch 2, for example, which I thought I’d upgrade to in maybe a year’s time. This made me realize that on top of driving impulse purchases, these sale events are actually about pulling forward purchases and recording future sales today to juice numbers (at slightly lower margins). Businesses are valued based on expected profits, individuals buy based on expected needs, and I guess I’ve been binging carbs and fat based on expected hunger!
The week got off to a bad start when our three-year-old Dyson V12 vacuum cleaner stopped working. The motor cyclone made a pulsating noise and the error message “Airways Blocked” appeared on the little LED screen. Usually this means that you’ve got some ball of hair choking one of the attachments, or your filters need cleaning. I checked everything and knocked out so much dust that my palm hurt, but still no luck.
Our cleaner shared that another client had similar problems and paid about $150 for repair at a Dyson service center, and a Perplexity search corroborated that would be the starting point, depending on what needed to be fixed. It said complex replacements could take over three weeks! My first priority was to get it working asap, because I have no idea how people lived before vacuum cleaners were invented.
On a whim, I decided to check what a new vacuum cleaner would cost. The latest Dyson, the “V16 Animal” model is over S$1,100, and another V12 would be S$800. But the shocking thing is how crazy cheap the Chinese clones have gotten, ranging between S$80 (yes) and S$400. Xiaomi’s most powerful, the G20 Max, is only about S$320 and I’m sure it rivals our Dyson in capability and (I wouldn’t have thought so before this) longevity. I was beginning to think buying an entirely new Chinese vacuum for the price of a Dyson repair was a viable option.
Anyhow, I got an appointment at the service center for a couple of days later, and the staff’s instant opinion was that there wasn’t anything stuck further inside the cyclone unit, but it was an electronic or PCB (printed circuit board) issue. Meaning the entire main bit of the vacuum cleaner, minus battery and air filter, would need to be swapped out. Total cost: S$168. I believe this is simply the modern default for consumer electronics — don’t bother repairing or replacing one little component, give the customer a new unit and send the old one back for recycling (or disposal). It’s wasteful, but means the business doesn’t need to train frontline repair staff and the customer gets a “better” experience to boot.
Later, I went to have a look at the Xiaomi model in person, and it’s definitely uglier and clunkier, with the same downward dust receptacle ejection system as much older Dyson designs. I do like my V12 very much, I just don’t believe in it as much after this incident.
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I saw with some excitement that Puzzle Quest was being rereleased in an “Immortal Edition” for the Switch, with remastered visuals. It’s also out on other platforms. I played the original back in 2007 on my Nintendo DS and probably sank over 100 hours into it. It was probably the first game to combine Match-3 puzzling with an RPG storyline and character progression. To date, I haven’t played a better expression of this idea.
With regards to this new version, it’s been good so far. The UI looks gigantic going from a tiny handheld to a 65” TV, but the great thing about playing on Switch is that you have the touchscreen controls this genre was made for. I have yet to encounter any of the bugs that plagued the original release, but that’s no guarantee I won’t. If I recall correctly, sometimes moves wouldn’t register and you’d die despite technically winning. On one hand it made the game feel unfair, but glass-half-full people would call it extra challenge. The game was so fun, I was happy to play around these deficiencies.
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On Friday night we met Wen and Sarah for Mexican food at a place called Huevos, in New Bahru. I read awhile back that the retail complex was struggling but that was not the case that night; it was pretty loco. One fun memory that came up was a trip to Bintan we took together back in 2009 where Mandy sang John Mellencamp’s Hurts So Good in the pool so often that it became the theme song of that vacation. I went home that night and unearthed a video I made in iMovie from all the clips I shot, using that song as the soundtrack. The video quality, shot on my Panasonic LUMIX LX3, has held up incredibly well after all this time.
The next day, I ate at Shake Shack and made the double mistake of ordering a Tiramisu milkshake and finishing it even though I could have stopped halfway. It turns out that single serving had 850 calories and a whopping 90g of sugar — that’s 18 teaspoons of system-disrupting poison! For comparison, the single-patty Shackburger I also ate has only 550 calories. After learning all that, I didn’t have the heart to look up the side of fries I also ate. At this age, I don’t think the damage will ever be undone. I might have to start saving up for Ozempic.
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My Goodreads annual reading challenge has been completed with a vengeance, and currently stands at 40 books out of a targeted 24. The last few weeks have been made up of financial self-help material, including Nick Maggiulli’s The Wealth Ladder, which I also saw being featured on the shelves of a local Books Kinokuniya. I thought it worth mentioning because of how it lays out different strategies for people on different rungs of the so-called ladder of net worth: $1–10k, $10–100k, $100k–1M, and so on. It’s a very clear way to think about what actions and sacrifices are needed to get to the next level, and whether you’d even want to. There’s also some interesting data on how people at the higher levels distribute their money in completely different ways from us plebs.
I also read Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, an infuriatingly patchy story about time travel and searching for a father who’s gone missing in time and space. There are some novel ideas here that move the genre forward, some of them explained with a lot of (pseudo?)science and some only intriguingly hinted at. The post-time travel world that it builds is fundamentally illogical, and almost no effort is made to integrate it with a reader’s expectations — in other words, it kind of fails to hold together. However, the actual writing is occasionally brilliant. There are passages that collapse memory, description, and feeling — suddenly you’re thinking about your own childhood and watching it through the quantum bookshelf, like at the end of Interstellar (2014).
Speaking of movies, I rewatched the Wachowskis’ 2012 version of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas with my book club and it wasn’t as good as I remembered. Turns out both the book and film feel shakier on return. Anyhow, it was only 13 years ago, but there are race impersonation elements in this film that seem like transgressions today. Multiple white actors have their eyes taped up to play Asian characters. Halle Berry and Zhou Xun both have scenes where they play blue-eyed white women. The Korean characters speak English in a mix of other Asian accents. The only line that isn’t crossed is white people putting on blackface. Everything else seems to have gotten the green light.
I type this while listening to Sam Fender’s last album, People Watching. I’ve been meaning to hear this through for awhile, but it got buried in my ever-growing library of new music. Thankfully, with the latest update to Apple Music in the OS26 series, you can now pin up to six albums or playlists to the top of your screen. I’ve wanted this sort of ‘Now Playing’ or ‘Heavy Rotation’ virtual shelf for the longest time — it’s the first feature I’d add if designing a music player app. So this album and five other neglected ones are now sitting up there, and I can give them the attention I want.
I’ve been listening on both my new AirPods Pro 3 and an original pair of AirPods Pro, and dare I say the difference is quite obvious. Louanne asked me what I do with old pairs of headphones when I get new ones, and the answer was “put them in different rooms!”, of course. I’m fast running out of rooms. The new model sounds much more Beats-like than ever (modern Beats, not OG Monster Beats). That is to say, a bass-forward sound with a very clear, almost sparkling high end. It’s a fun sound, and I think they’ll be very popular for all kinds of music, if not audiophile-grade neutral. They appear to fit better than before too, and the difference in body shape will strike longtime AirPods users as soon as they pick them up.
Then my new iPhone arrived, and before you judge, the old one is being returned to Apple’s Trade In partner in a few days, where it will hopefully be responsibly refurbished or at worst recycled. They’ve suggested that I’m likely to get nearly half the original cost back, which is an astounding deal for a two-year-old model! I’ll believe it when the deposit lands in my bank account.
I’m very happy I decided to stick with the Pro Max size instead of switching to a Pro. The slight increases in height and width are visible if you put them together, but isn’t really noticeable in the hand. The increase in thickness IS, but combined with the new gentler corners on the seamless aluminum body, I think thicker is actually better? This might be the best feeling iPhone ever.
I’ve yet to put the new camera system through its paces, but I’m excited and very pleased after a couple of days with it. Images look cleaner, and the redesigned front-facing camera is a revelation. I took a test selfie and could scarcely believe how presentable I looked. Coming from the iPhone 15 series, I’m also new to the new Photographic Styles that were introduced last year, and am getting a lot out of them. I compared photos shot in RAW with Halide and in HEIC with the default camera using a tweaked “Natural” style, and they’re extremely close in both SDR and HDR. This is a big deal! Along with the revised Photonic Engine this year, the dark days of overprocessed iPhone photos may be behind us.
When reviews get creative
One thing I’ve noticed this year is how bland and predictable the video reviews from the usual tech YouTubers and influencers have been. They go through the spec sheets while speaking to the camera, do a few test shots, and end without any thoughts you couldn’t have pulled out of ChatGPT. But then I saw a couple of videos from the Chinese-speaking side of the internet, and that’s when I realized Western civilization is well and truly finished.
Take a look at these and tell me you’re not duly impressed by the storytelling creativity, production skill, points of view, and passion on display — even if you can’t understand a word (but most of them have English subtitles you can enable). They could just shoot the phones on a stand while swinging a light overhead, but they instead they go hard with CGI, costumes, sets, comedic sketches, and cinematic editing. And they do these in the WEEK they’ve given between the phones being revealed and launching.
We visited a local art sales event for works based on the Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex franchise, just to have a look. The metal-printed pieces were going for upwards of S$4,000, so there was never any chance we’d buy one — but I got a little acrylic plate standee for my desk (S$25). Above are some snaps straight from the iPhone 17 Pro Max, using only Photographic Styles.
Afterwards, we visited the SG60 Heart&Soul Experience which is being housed at the site of the old library@orchard. Supposedly it will be renovated and return as a downtown library next year, which is great news. From what I can gather, it’s meant to inspire people about what Singapore’s future might look like, and what place they’d have in it (employing lots of tech to personalize the journey). Criticisms I’ve heard are that it doesn’t go far enough, and the future shown looks kinda like the present: delivery drones, working in VR headsets, greenery everywhere. Visit and see for yourself. Bookings are required, but the tickets are free. It’s quite an involved production with each visitor being given a guide device (an encased Xiaomi smartphone) to wear around their necks, and human facilitators bringing them through the stations.
Oh, speaking of cases, we went by Apple Orchard Road after the show to have a look at the iPhone Air, and I haven’t seen that store so packed in years. I picked up a rather loud Beats case in “Pebble Pink”, mostly because I really wanted a Beats case last year but they only made them for the iPhone 16 series. It’s hard plastic with a matte finish that’s slippery when your hands are dry but tacky enough if there’s a bit of moisture.
Check out my reel with the Pink Panther theme:
And while we’re on the subject of great directors, I finally sat down with Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers (2003) on MUBI. More explicit than I expected, it’s easy to see why people call it pretentious with its heavy callbacks to classic cinema, but it’s never boring and it sure knows how to use mirrors. I gave it 3.5 stars on Letterboxd, mostly because there’s “altogether too much time spent lying on floors for my liking”. There’s also one truly revolting moment where, out of money, they raid the apartment building’s trash for scraps of food and assemble the world’s grossest bento.
Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest (2025), now on Apple TV+, is a remake of Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963), which I’ll embarrassingly only get around to watching after this homage. But this is a fine film that stands on its own: a sharp, sometimes experimental exploration of class and morality, constantly playing on the gulf between generations — Motown vs. modern rap, film vs. digital, Kurosawa vs. Lee.
We lost a grand aunt at the close of last week, and attended her funeral and cremation on Tuesday. It got me thinking about qing ming, which is a day in early April (I had to look this up) where Chinese families traditionally visit their ancestors’ graves and do some neatening up. I have vague memories of being dragged along to do this as a kid, and even being allowed by my parents to skip school for it. I mostly remember the smell of burning joss sticks mixed with the dewy morning air and damp soil. For some reason we stopped going by the time I was a teen.
I talked about this with Cien and Peishan and they seemed to still be in touch with the practice of visiting graves, or in these days of diminishing real estate, a columbarium. If you asked me where my family members are buried or stored as ashes, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. I assume many of them have been scattered, either into local waters or some faraway favorite destination. Honestly, I like the idea of not being tethered to a single spot. If your spouse is still alive, maybe they’d like to keep you near, in some vessel at home. But if too many, or too few, people are sharing you then it’s better to be everywhere. A memory triggered by some food, place, or figure of speech. An algorithmically assembled photo collage tossed up by a personal computing companion one morning. A mention in some dusty book on a top shelf in a library, waiting to be seen by a future student or recycled into a supermarket receipt. I’d be fine with any of that.
Back to the funeral: it was held at the Mandai Crematorium and Columbarium, one of only three cremation facilities serving the whole of Singapore, and I was upset by how much it is in need of some design intervention. I wonder if any of the people managing the place have tried to look at the process with fresh eyes, or at least through the tired and grieving eyes of the people passing through it. Because they’d see so many moments that could be made kinder, more understanding, more dignified. The script could use a rewrite. Playing ‘Amazing Grace’ out of tinny $40 Bluetooth speakers in the final viewing halls is not it. For Chrissakes, please also remove the ugly MS Word-designed notices plastered on the viewing room windows, they obstruct the view of the caskets as they’re delivered (by industrial forklifts!) into the flames. I’m not exaggerating.
My shoes fell apart. They were the second pair of New Balance 990s to do so, doing nothing more strenuous than supporting my occasional walking about town. The last pair lasted three years; these only made it to two. At around S$300, these are supposed to be the best shoes that NB makes, but I’m beginning to think their ‘Made in the USA’ label is more a statement of liability than superiority these days. The Chinese-made models could probably survive a decade. Alas, with my big feet and aversion to swooshes, the 990s are some of the only shoes I’m comfortable in, so I’ll be buying yet another pair — online, too, since they stopped local distribution of the wide sizes.
Google upgraded Gemini with the Nano Banana image model that’s been trending on Twitter, and the bar for impressive generative AI has been raised again. It’s extraordinarily capable (and fast) at combining images with accuracy, as well as reimagining them in different styles and from different perspectives. A few months ago, Gemini was an also-ran, but maybe something’s shifted at Google and they’re an actual contender again. As much as I try to avoid Google services, I suppose I find them preferable to OpenAI and Meta. Take a look at the example above where I asked it to redraw a scene I photographed last month in Melbourne, but from above.
On Thursday I met two friend-couples, who I’ll call Mong and Jogina because it sounds amusing, for a rare weekday afternoon lunch where it was made abundantly clear that I’m behind the times for not having seen K-Pop Demon Hunters yet. Circumstantially, we’ve all got the time and flexibility to do these weekday catchups more often than once or twice a year, and maybe we should.
Aside: I did see the movie later, and it’s really good! My main gripe is the use of stuttering frames for the character animation, which worked fine in Sony’s Spiderverse films but break immersion here. The frame rates also seem uneven from scene to scene? Speaking of Sony, I’d hate to be the person who decided to sell this to Netflix for just $100M.
Afterwards, some of us went on to check out a nearby Crocs store (hear me out!) because a new collaboration had just launched: Animal Crossing! I just tagged along for a look, but became increasingly afraid as we got nearer that I would end up buying a pair. Kinda like how I bought the first iPad at Funan mall in 2010, that I absolutely wasn’t interested in… until I joined the line. Thankfully, my senses returned, and they only carried the smaller women’s sizes. God bless my big feet!
The book club is still reading Cloud Atlas, and at one point, a character mentions Carole King’s Tapestry album playing at a low volume in the background. I realized that I’ve known about this album forever but never heard it. So I put it on while reading. And boy did I know half the songs on this. I was beginning to wonder if it was a covers album, that’s how familiar they were. Incredible work, and a deserving #38 on Apple Music’s Top 100 Best Albums list.
And finally, a little gaming episode:
As previously mentioned, I’ve been playing the first Shinchan game on Nintendo Switch as a way of marking the summer — never mind that it’s always summer here in Singapore. It started well but I found it increasingly repetitive and uninteresting, and have been trying to just get it over with. The game features a time loop, where you replay the same week over. I spoke to Evan about it while I was on the second week, and he told me to hang on until the fourth week.
>> I was like, “there’s four fucking weeks??”
>> He said, “the real game BEGINS after week four!”
>> “How is that possible?”
Reader, I’ll tell you, I was ready to delete the game then. At the end of the third week, it seemed that I had all but completed the game. All my tasks were done. Then as the credits rolled, I texted him back:
>> “Dude, I’ve finished the game, what’s going on?”
>> And he says, “You haven’t, that’s just the beginning, get ready.”
>> “I don’t believe you, don’t mess with me!”
By this point, I had put in about 7.5 hours and couldn’t take it any more if this was just an extended prologue. There was just no way. The game was surely done! Then he asks me if I’ve done a certain thing yet, and I’m like:
>> “Uh yeah… long ago? In the first week?!”
Suddenly, I realized he’d spent the first three weeks mucking around and not doing any of the main game’s tasks, and only got started on the story just before time ran out. So yes, I had finished the game. Thank fuck for that.
I was 95% recovered last week. But I must have come into contact with a new virus on the plane because I got sick again, and spent this week in an ever-evolving state of misery.
At first it was just mild chills and fatigue, then came a pretty congested cough, blocked sinuses, and conjunctivitis. The cough is the worst part because it keeps me up at night, and according to my sleep stats, I’ve gotten zero deep sleep on some nights, which makes recovery that much harder.
Too wiped out for books or games, I’ve been grazing Netflix for watchable junk: a crappy Japanese murder investigation drama called Unnatural, starring Satomi Ishihara; and half the second season of Shoshimin: How to Become Ordinary. We also finished watching the ITV series Red Eye, which is a mediocre production carried by one of my favorite setups: intrigue on an international flight.
We also sick-binged the entire season of Stick, on Apple TV+, starring Owen Wilson as a has-been golf pro who mentors a young kid with incredible potential. It’s a feel-good sports comedy thing with some solid needle drops and more heart than I expected. Some of it shouldn’t work as written, but Wilson’s trademark delivery and guileless charm lands each one neatly on the green.
Hopefully next week will see the back of this prolonged summer flu spell, because I’m kinda dying to get back to ice cream and beers!
It was a low-key week after those few days in Bangkok. There’s more travel lined up soon, so I figure it’s no bad thing to enjoy the quiet while I can. We had someone come by to look at a house issue that’s been worrying me, but the prognosis was that it’s not a big problem for now, and they’ll do some proactive repairs in the meantime. So I have to admit life’s pretty good.
When I first went to Bangkok back in March, I found the retail scene vibrant and thriving in a way that you don’t see in Singapore anymore, and this week there was a long and well-researched piece on CNA about how shopping in other SEA countries has made Singapore seem dull in comparison. It’s a rough situation because we’re short on both land and entrepreneurial spirit, which means a vicious circle of high rents and safe concepts. People like to blame greedy landlords, but I suspect they’re the same ones counting on retiring with their REIT and bank dividends. You can’t have one without the other.
Doing my part for the restaurant scene, I ate out thrice this week and two were unhealthy affairs. A Singaporean sort of pub (al fresco) with Guinness and Thai food, and a Chinese hot pot restaurant picked for its amusing name, HIPPOT, that turned out to be one of those meals that goes down easy but feels awful after. Too much grease and heat. Note to self: make better choices!
The only thing I bought on the Amazon Prime Day sale was a book I’ve been wanting for a while, but the shipping cost is usually almost as much as the book itself. Thanks to the questionable economics of Amazon, shipping was free this time. The book is A Handheld History by Lost in Cult, and it covers the corner of gaming hardware that I have the most affection for: portable systems like the Game Boy and PSP. I suppose the smartphone is inadvertently part of that lineage; a stepchild or distant cousin. I don’t know when I’ll sit down to read it — paper books are just… inconvenient — but I look forward to that rainy afternoon.
I just finished reading The Butcher’s Boy by Thomas Perry, a 1982 thriller about a hitman. The anniversary edition’s foreword was written by Michael Connelly, author of the Bosch series, which got me in the right mood. If you liked the recent Day of the Jackal TV series, this will likely do it for you. The killer is the sort that doesn’t look especially athletic or dangerous, in fact he has the kind of face people don’t remember, but he’s great at what he does and when he gets into a jam, you root for him to get out. There are three more in the series [Goodreads], so those are going on my list.
Evan mentioned to me the existence of an Amiibo emulator a few weeks back, and when I saw one show up on Reddit it nudged me into ordering a unit off AliXpress. It’s a small electronic device that you can program to mimic the NFC chips on various Nintendo Amiibo figures, which unlock benefits in certain games when held next to your Switch/Switch 2 console. As I am very much against the idea of making people waste money buying large amounts of unnecessary plastic crap to unlock software features built into the games they already own, I have no moral qualms about using one of these.
This doesn’t have Amiibo support, but I played and finished Caravan SandWitch this week on the Switch. Weird name that doesn’t tell you much, I know, but hey it’s French. It’s a chill little indie game about exploring a planet (inspired by the landscapes of Provence) in search of your missing sister, with strong anticapitalist vibes, and was mentioned in a recent NYT article about videogames with a Studio Ghibli-like aesthetic. I enjoyed it enough as a short adventure, but the English translation lets it down in some areas. It runs well enough on the Switch 2, but I think the frame rate will be choppy on a regular Switch. 3.5/5.0
Pulpy paperbacks and cozy games are good and all, but a great media diet needs something of substance, and thankfully MUBI delivered. They’re featuring a two-film collection by the director Shinji Somai on their front page, and I was floored by both of them. They’re linked by a shared theme of childhood summers marked by transformative upheavals — broken families, deaths, newfound freedoms — but also the building of friendships, independence, and memories that become strengths in adulthood.
Moving (1993) features an incredible performance by Tomoko Tabata who was probably 12 at the time; the kind of work that’s almost too good, too early — fortunately she’s still working in film and TV today. There are lines in this that hit so hard, and incredibly audacious and magical sequences that are as good as anything I’ve seen put on film.
Notably, the three titular child actors in The Friends (1994) never acted in anything again. Scrambled by emotion after the ending, I hastily wrote on Letterboxd: “A film doesn’t have any business being this good! I cried till my Face ID struggled. There are frames in this so beautiful they should be hung in the Louvre.” Both films are a 5/5 for me. Perhaps for the way they perfectly capture the haziness of childhood memories, the nostalgic look and air of that era, and the open-ended way that school holidays felt as you experienced them. Stuff we didn’t think would matter becomes what we remember most.
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 interestingbooks 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.
It’s getting hot down here, and reluctant as I am to use air-conditioning during the day while just sitting indoors, I’ve had to have it on in short spurts to bring the temperature down at times. Depending on the fates, I might be off to Bangkok again next week, where the heat’s reportedly even more brutal. Let’s see.
It was Apple Music’s 10th anniversary, and they’re doing some things like opening a new studio in LA, releasing a Top 500 list of the most-streamed songs, and — this one I especially enjoyed — a two-hour show with Zane Lowe and Ebro Darden, founding DJs of the Beats 1 (now Apple Music 1) radio station. It’s mostly Zane reflecting on their experience and telling behind-the-scenes stories from the frantic early days, backed by some all-time great tunes. For example, how they had just three months to find studio spaces around the world and go live, how the first song to be played on-air was chosen, and how the difficulty of recruiting DJs led to them having artists host their own shows (the best things usually start as hacks).
The show reminded me why I still love Apple Music, flaws and all: it’s here for the culture. It’s the one streaming service where passion for music is clearly evident, and it comes from the people helming the shows, both the DJs and the artists as mentioned, like Elton John, FKA twigs, Anderson .Paak, Jamie xx, and The Weeknd, to name a few. Shows and playlists put together by artists are such a cool (and obvious!) way to connect with fans, it’s hard to believe they weren’t really a thing before Apple Music.
I remember exactly where I was (Reykjavik) the day Apple Music launched, and how absolutely furious I was that the Beats 1 radio station wasn’t available in Singapore. It’s just goddamn internet radio, so why!? It was only after a year that it finally launched for us. I never found out the reason, but I assumed censorship and broadcast licensing hoops had to be jumped through, and welp I guess that’s the cost of being Singaporean. Still, I switched over from Spotify on day one and haven’t looked back. While looking through the archives, I found this post in 2014 before the acquisition, where I was pretty sure Apple would keep the Beats brand on their headphones but turn Beats Music into the backend of an “iTunes Unlimited” service. I sorta called it.
A Japanese mobile game I’ve been waiting for had its global launch on July 3: Persona 5 X (P5X). When you hear that, you might expect a gacha-based Persona 5 spinoff, based on some crappy mobile game squad battle mechanics. So I was surprised by how close it is to an actual Persona game, despite the necessary gacha and mobile elements. The graphics look and feel so close to the mainline titles that I’m convinced they could port them to iPhone if they wanted. However it’s mostly a solo adventure game, and I would love to see a different, massively multiplayer social game design uniting the world to fight shadows in the “metaverse” (don’t blame me, it’s the actual term they use).
However, the Japanese mobile game recently launched globally in English that’s been blowing up on my timeline is Umamusume: Pretty Derby, which is a horse racing game based on actual legendary champion horses, except they’re personified as idol girls who perform in full-blown concerts after winning. I’ve downloaded it for kicks, but I think it’s a neigh for me.
I came across a new drawing app for iPhone/iPad called Graintouch, and instantly bought it for S$15 after seeing its lovely Risograph aesthetics (a sort of Japanese photocopier from the 80s). It’s wonderfully minimal, to the point of restricting you to just 18 predefined colors, and simulates the look of paper prints. You can even hit a “misalignment” button that offsets the layers at random. It’s a welcome change from the overly powerful Procreate, which makes me feel like a learner driver at the wheel of a Ferrari.
I decided I might use this for the drawings I’d planned on doing, and started doodling around to get a feel for it. The result is a bunch of silly characters with googly eyes, and I kinda like them! Maybe I’ll do more and try to improve them.
“Valentine”
I took my parents out to see F1 The Movie in a cinema, and found that senior citizens only pay S$5 per ticket on weekdays. If I had that benefit, I’d see every movie. Anyway, the film was great, and I say that as someone who doesn’t give a damn about F1 (my dad, on the other hand, is a total fanatic who watches every season). Apple did the right thing putting this out in theaters properly before streaming; it really deserves the big screen and too-loud speakers. An incredible popcorn movie, so good that for two hours you’ll find Brad Pitt likable despite everything we’ve heard about how he’s fallen out with his kids and maybe isn’t such a great guy. 4.5 / 5 stars.
We binged Season 4 of The Bear over the weekend. It made me wonder if there really are people out there like these characters, raised in so much chaos that their primary mode of communication is shouting and clashing with increasing intensity. I love watching it happen in 30-minute bouts, but by god it’s tiring. Overall, I think this was a slightly stronger season than the last one, and while I still love the directors swinging for the fences with concept episodes, they are becoming a little too expected. The best thing they could do in Season 5 would be to subvert those expectations and deliver a full-heartedly commercial happy ending.
sangsara.net 