After listening to ROSALÍA so much last week, I decided I wanted to experience LUX closer to the reality it was conceived in. So I reinstalled Duolingo, which I haven’t touched since maybe 2017? After several days, I’m now at Level 9 in Spanish, whatever that means. The biggest obstacle to Español perfecto is my inability to roll my ‘R’s, which I will simply need to practice out loud until it clicks. I can only do this while alone because Kim tells me to please stop por el amor de dios.
I met up with some old friends and acquaintances this week: one about to have their second child in the midst of questioning their career trajectory (aren’t we all?) and another who’s just come off living on a boat with their family for the past seven years, sailing from port to port in an unusual nautical retirement. Their youngest child practically grew up on water but will now have to stay in one place, join a normal school, and get accustomed to land life. In thinking about both situations, I reflected that personal freedom might be the most valuable asset to have when dealing with difficult times.
Later, I mentioned the old D&D character alignment framework to Cien and Peishan, and how it related to our personalities which I thought were evenly spread across Lawful to Chaotic. It hadn’t crossed my mind that Chaotic was actually about valuing freedom, but it kinda is — freedom to follow your whims instead of rules and expectations?
Then I visited the Artscience Museum on a weekday afternoon for a futurism exhibition called Another World Is Possible – a hopeful title promising alternative models for living, maybe even freedom from our current constraints. My expectations were high because it was yet another collaboration with ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image) out of Melbourne. Alas, I left feeling rather annoyed and unfulfilled.
The space itself is inadequate for multimedia shows. There’s not enough surface area, and the adjacent rooms without doors bleed sound into each other at an atrocious level. Near the end, there were some screens with a peaceful computer-generated nature scene meant for reflection, but all you can hear is music blaring from another video installation.
But regarding the actual show, several of the items presented were clearly AI-generated slop, unlabeled. The wall text just says things like “12-minute audio/video presentation” or “14-inch giclée print.” I don’t want our institutions of culture to charge $20 for mediocre renderings one could Midjourney at home. Hard to feel like ‘another world is possible’ when the medium represents what’s wrong with the present one.
Racism came up during my book club meeting this week, which gave me a chance to traumatize the Americans with “Darkie” toothpaste. It’s a brand that’s been ubiquitous in these parts since I was a kid. The name is bad enough, but they also put a minstrel on the box, highlighting the contrast between black skin and white teeth. It rebranded to “Darlie” at some point and made it somewhat arguable that the man wasn’t black, but we all know. It was only in late-2021 that its Chinese name changed from 黑人牙膏 “Black Person Toothpaste” to 好來 “Bright Future” (my translation). Reading the Wikipedia page, I was surprised to learn that it had a market share as high as 50% in Singapore in the 80s!
But hey, cultural theft isn’t just about race. Kill Bill is getting a theatrical re-release next month — both volumes cut together with unseen footage into the 4hr 40min epic Tarantino originally intended. Maybe no cinema in Singapore will take it up, but this means there’s hope for an updated digital release at some point.
That iconic siren when the camera zooms into Uma Thurman’s rage-filled eyes? Sampled from the Shaw Brothers film Five Fingers of Death aka King Boxer (1972), which I saw for the first time this week on MUBI. The Chinese title 天下第一拳 translates to “The Greatest Fist Under Heaven” — not “in the world” but “under heaven,” which is somehow more evocative and poetic.
A bunch of these old Shaw Brothers wuxia flicks are leaving MUBI in the next few days so I’ll be on a little martial arts marathon in the coming week.
And since we were talking about cultural appropriation last week (I’m cool with it), you know who else loves sampling kung-fu movies and helped Tarantino put the sound of Kill Bill together? That’s right, the RZA aka the Abbott, who resurfaced this week with the release of Japanese rapper Awich’s new album Okinawan Wuman, which he produced.
Apart from a little cringey self-caricaturing from Awich — the usual “we say arigato” shit, not unlike Utada Hikaru singing “You’re easy breezy and I’m Japanesey” back in 2005 — it’s a solid album on first listen. Maybe I’m being too critical about someone trying to break into another market by dumbing down their own culture, but she’s already got the RZA in her corner. She doesn’t need to prove anything. Feel free to switch up languages and drop the most obscure Okinawan slang! ROSALÍA’s success has proven that you can trust listeners to find their way to you.
Awich’s promotional video has a Japanese hip-hop expert explain, by way of establishing how monumental it is that RZA has produced this Japanese lady’s album, that the two most important acts in history were the Wu-Tang Clan and De La Soul. What good fortune for us, then, that this week saw the latter’s first new album in 9 years, Cabin In The Sky! We eating good, mi familia.
The knives are falling at my feet and I’m supposed to catch them by the handles. I don’t succeed. This is a free “immersive Predator experience” at a Bangkok cinema complete with atmospheric sets, film props, and physical challenges to prove you’re predator not prey. I fail the blade catch but nail the laser rifle and poison plant maze. The whole setup probably cost more than most Singaporean theaters make in a week, which is why we’ll never see anything like it back home. Small markets can’t justify this kind of spectacle when nobody goes to movies anymore.
The market size thing keeps coming up. Sushiro here is cheaper with bigger portions — the mackerel and tuna noticeably better than Singapore’s. But a local friend sent me to Katsu Midori instead, which claims to be Japan’s “number-one” conveyor belt sushi brand. The quality and generosity made me understand why Singaporeans fantasize about moving to Thailand. It’s not only the cost arbitrage; it’s having enough customers to support real competition and excellence at every tier.
I saw Predator: Badlands before the knife-catching humiliation. It’s not like any other Predator film — a young Yautja (Predator) is the protagonist, Elle Fanning tags along being delightful, and if you’ve been watching Alien: Earth you’ll catch a Weyland-Yutani reference. It’s almost too much fun for this franchise but I had a good time.
Then Now You See Me, Now You Don’t: schlocky heist nonsense with too many characters and Magic Castle consultants providing magician’s jargon nobody asked for. The absolute best trick here is Rosamund Pike’s South African accent. Watching her joyfully inhabiting the villain squares the ticket price.
Then Bugonia. Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone, remaking the Korean Save the Green Planet! Don’t look anything up, just watch it. I’ve avoided their recent work but Stone is so good here I felt like I was seeing her for the first time — not the competent actress I knew but someone operating on a completely different level. The film makes pretentious orchestral choices that annoyed me until the final sequence paired music and image so perfectly I forgave everything. That experience of an artist asking for your trust and then paying it back in spades is something special.
Which brings me to ROSALÍA.
I’ve never paid attention to Spanish-language music beyond casual exposure. Ricky Martin and Shakira. Didn’t even know how Latin American and European Spanish differed until this week. But her new album LUX kept appearing in my feeds and so I listened. Then I listened to MOTOMAMI. Both of them, over and over.
With this, I think she’s up there with Lorde, Billie Eilish, FKA twigs, Kendrick Lamar, Janelle Monáe — artists creating boundary-pushing work that questions everything while being unapologetically emotional. Maybe necessarily spiritual. LUX’s multilayered beauty and complexity feels like an impossible accomplishment. You don’t need to be a musician or watch her Zane Lowe interview to know it took years to create. You can hear it.
Then I found an angry essay calling her a colonizer. It claims she (and her fellow Spaniards) stole flamenco from Romani people, conveniently rebranded herself as Latina to enter the Latin Grammy awards, and now that ICE is deporting brown people, the evil ROSALÍA is finally revealing her true face: a White European plumbing the Christian-orchestral tradition with an album where she poses as a fair and chaste nun on the cover.
I found it very tiring, and wondered if policing cultural appropriation is just another form of gatekeeping. Because it turns out the Latin Grammys are open to all Spanish-language artists — more about language and tradition than ethnicity. But my real issue is this idea that curious minds have no right to explore and remix the world they encounter. It’s like saying Yo-Yo Ma shouldn’t play Bach because he’s Chinese-American, rather than celebrating how his contributions have enriched the canon. ROSALÍA’s reverence for these traditions is obvious in the music itself. I don’t need a sworn affidavit listing her inspirations to hear it.
When you discover something this good — something you should have found years ago — you don’t want to be told it’s problematic. You want to understand why it works, why it moves you, why someone else’s cultural exploration can become universal art. That’s what great artists do. They don’t stay in their lane. They take what they love from everywhere and make something new that can belong to everyone.
I spoke too soon. Jinxed it. Stupidly counted my chicks. By which I mean I had another vertigo episode out of nowhere after thinking I was safe. It came just from tilting my head down to look at something, and suddenly it felt like the floor fell out from under me. I immediately put my head back, and it only lasted like half a minute, but it was enough to burst my bubble of security that maybe the earlier incident was a one-off.
According to the online literature, recurrences are common with BPPV, and it’s just something you have to learn to live with and manage. Some lingering unsteadiness followed for the next couple of days, which is annoying but survivable. I’m mostly worried that I’ll get a bad case of it on a plane at some point, because pressure changes can apparently trigger it.
PSA if you also have this: it seems people with vitamin D deficiencies are more susceptible. So I’m going to be more religious about taking supplements and see if that helps.
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For the second time in two weeks, I decided to break my weekday lunch routine by going further out to a Sushiro, followed by a little cafe reading time. Eating alone in a walled-off solo dining booth sounds sad and lonely but is surprisingly cozy; just ask Japan.
Later, I came across a Reddit thread discussing local restaurants and when Sushiro came up, someone replied “if you’re in Bangkok, try it there — it’s a world of difference in quality, price, and size.” Well then! That’s something I’ll be in a position to verify next week because I’m actually going to be in Bangkok for several days (hence the airplane vertigo worries, pray for me).
My itinerary as a traveling husband is still quite open — while Kim’s at work I’m planning to check out this new mall with a rooftop park, visit some exhibitions, and watch Predator: Badlands in a cinema superior to anything we have in Singapore. And depending on how I feel, maybe even stay in with my iPad and enjoy the very nice hotel for a bit.
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Speaking of touchscreen devices, I’ve been waiting for the full reveal of the Anbernic DS handheld emulation console, and now that it’s up for pre-order, my excitement has been considerably reduced. Enthusiasts online have been disappointed by the choice of a weak processor which, when paired with an Android OS, means it’ll struggle to run any 3DS games and maybe even some DS games. I’m not up to speed on DS emulation, but I’ll take their word for it that things could be much better here.
The original DS Lite was my favorite handheld of all time because of its minimal clamshell design, which also housed its tiny stylus. The Anbernic DS does not include that critical feature. What’s the point of recreating the DS if you have a separate, chunky stylus to carry about and lose?
Anbernic has also earned a reputation for releasing improved variants shortly after launching new products. So I’m hoping we’ll see a faster, more polished version out in six months. Wake me up when that comes out.
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Media activity:
I’m reading Wraith, which is Book 1 in the Convergence War series. It’s shaping up to be a fun if not-so-elegant “assemble a team and go on a big space adventure” action story. I’d recommend it if you’re looking for a palate cleanser in between more challenging fare.
I started watching the popular Apothecary Diaries anime series that Netflix has been aggressively pushing, and it’s not bad! Essentially a medical procedural set in ancient China, with other dramatic hooks like a super-competent main character who wants to stay invisible but can’t help stepping in to fix things, plus royal court politics.
After watching The Woman in Cabin 10 last week, we looked for more murder stories on boats and started on Death and Other Details (a murder on a cruise ship) before finding out it was canceled after one season. Still, it’s been okay and stars Mandy Patinkin as the detective.
If you’d asked me about Death and Other Details a few days ago, I might have said it was “pretty good”. But after watching the first two episodes of Apple TV’s new tentpole series, Pluribus, the bar is now insanely high. Don’t read anything about it, not even Hideo Kojima’s reaction tweet, just go straight into watching it on the nicest screen you can find. Based on what I’ve seen so far, this is looking like the kind of show I’ll think about long after it’s over.
I saw a doctor about last week’s vertigo episode, and they concurred with my internet research that it was most likely a case of BPPV. Apparently, it really does “just happen” to anyone and they see quite a few cases of it. I was told to watch my salt intake and blood pressure, and see if the vertigo occurs “too often”, which might indicate a need for further scans.
The doctor was surprised when I explained that we’d performed the Epley maneuver at home with a YouTube video, and said that it was probably what they’d be doing for me now if I’d still had symptoms. I didn’t explain that it had essentially been an AI consultation, because I didn’t want to get lectured about how they can be wrong. Not saying it’s a good idea, but it helped until I could get an appointment with a real doctor.
After the doctor’s visit, I decided to have breakfast at Starbucks, a thing I used to do too often when I went in to the office. But in light of the advice I’d just been given about eating less sodium and watching my blood pressure, I opted for an egg white wrap instead of the rosemary chicken croissant that I really wanted, and it was unsatisfying. Is that what I have to look forward to now in old age? Just healthy compromises and remembering the good old days of eating crap?
As if eating in revenge, we had a huge dinner with Alex at a place called “La Vache!” the following night. They run a simple concept: S$68/person for a salad, ribeye steak, and unlimited French fries. Cocktails are S$26 and pretty substantial. There are also desserts if you have room, including gelato from Messina down the road. Reader, I had a lot of fries and thereby a lot of sodium. So much so I’ve spent the rest of the week trying to up my water intake to make up for it.
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The MOFT brand iPhone case I got a few weeks ago has been impressing me so much with its soft material and quality construction that I blinked and found that I’ve now bought more products in their MagSafe-compatible lineup.
The Snap Phone Tripod Wallet folds out into an adjustable stand that could be useful for anyone needing to shoot photos, make video calls, or watch media handsfree. Like I said, I’m barely conscious of why/how I bought these things, because that doesn’t describe me. I suppose I’ll just have to become a content creator then! It also holds up to 2 cards, although in hindsight I should have gone with the thinner version that doesn’t.
That’s because a few days later, I also ordered their Snap Field Wallet which holds 8 cards and even some folded bills, coins, and a SIM card tool. There’s a version of this that includes a built-in stand, but I decided against it since I already have the “tripod” for stand-related needs.
Happily, this shopping spree concludes my search for a new minimal wallet to replace my worn and aging Bellroy. Every bearable option I’ve found has been over S$120, and because carrying a wallet is such an antiquated concept for me these days with everything on the phone, I wasn’t thrilled to spend the money. But the MOFT Field Wallet’s low price and novel origami design made for an easier and less risky decision. It’ll mainly stay in my bag, but the option of attaching via MagSafe is a nice bonus.
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I haven’t seen many films lately, so this week was a corrective period. I saw a Korean arthouse film on MUBI that I don’t regret but can’t recommend, called Woman Is the Future of Man (2004), and a more mainstream Korean thriller called The Old Woman With the Knife (2025). The titular trifecta was pure coincidence, but I also saw the new Keira Knightley vehicle, The Woman in Cabin 10 (2025). None of the above are really worth your limited time on Earth, if we’re being honest.
Usually, whenever a three-hour film pops up in the queue, I push it down to the bottom. But this time when I saw Martin Scorsese’s Casino (1995) was leaving Netflix, it seemed like a sign to just sit down and do it. I can’t believe I waited so long though, because it’s something of a masterpiece despite the gangland tropes, and I don’t normally even like these kind of stories.
I subscribed to Disney+ Premium to watch Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) in 3D on the Vision Pro, another three-hour movie. While the story isn’t worth the time, the immersive experience and quirky filmmaking tech was absolutely worth my money. My Letterboxd review: “The story of a Saturday morning cartoon with the technical complexity and execution of a space mission. Big failure on the part of our entire species that we can’t produce a director who can do both parts equally well. Not a film I want to see again.”
As an example of how this is a film that you can’t really watch traditionally, it constantly switches between 24fps and 48fps shots, often within a single scene. It feels like a videogame, where you’re watching a cinematic cutscene and then it suddenly transitions into ultra-smooth gameplay. The 3D also pops in HDR clarity on the Vision Pro, where it would be dimmer on an IMAX screen. Sitting at home with Disney+ in a headset is oddly the definitive way to experience James Cameron’s shallow deep sea epic, which probably wasn’t what he envisioned.
I swore I wouldn’t read or watch any of the Dan Brown/Robert Langdon stories, but it’s been almost 20 years so I put The Da Vinci Code (2006, only 149 mins) on one night and it wasn’t terrible. It helps that it’s a Ron Howard film, and I think I might actually see the next two films, Angels & Demons (2009) and Inferno (2016), before they leave Netflix. There was also some positive press for the new Dan Brown book in this series, The Secret of Secrets, so I’ve added it to my reading list. Younger me would be so disappointed.
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It wasn’t just me that visited the doctor this week — I brought my 2021 iPad Pro (M1) down to the Apple Store over the weekend. When the Apple Genius came up to me and asked, “So what’s wrong with your iPad?”, I answered “It‘s just old.” For a while now, I’ve suspected it of falling short of Apple’s promised “all-day battery life”, but sending it in for a replacement felt like such a hassle that I kept putting it off.
Because this iPad model doesn’t report battery health in Settings, I figured it was easily below 80% capacity, and was prepared to pay maybe $120–150 for a new battery. So they ran their diagnostics app on it, and told me it’s actually at 86%. Huh. That’s pretty good for 4.5 years! I asked how much it would cost to replace anyway, and was told just shy of S$200, but it would be a full unit swap rather than just a new battery.
If the battery health had been 70%, I would probably have paid the money and then had to use this for at least another two years. But at 86%, I can probably make this work for another year and then see what the new models look like. So by building a product that actually ages well, Apple has… increased the likelihood of me upgrading even sooner. That’s the 4D chess game that Tim Cook plays, folks.
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.
sangsara.net 