It was one of those weeks where I mostly stayed in to chip away at various backlogs. We’re now in uncharted territory for a sabbatical — my stated goal the last time I did this was to reach a state of boredom, the kind that might inspire some unpredictably productive reaction, but I didn’t get there in the time I had; there was always so much to do. Now that this has gone on longer than before, maybe I’ll reach a state of satisfaction satiation soon.
I finally caved and paid for a Lampa Camera membership (mentioned in Week 17.25). It’s now sitting in my iPhone’s dock, where the default camera app had been for over a decade. This is a big deal! I also got into the beta for Halide Mk. III, a new version that will take their “Process Zero” approach further with HDR that doesn’t suck. They’ve also hinted at adding their own photographic styles in the near future, which probably means LUT support like in their Kino video app. The fight for the rightmost spot on my dock isn’t over.
On bullshit jobs, occupational deceleration, and AI
Taking a break from the Murderbot series (I finished #3 last week and need to start on #4 now for my book club), I decided to read David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, which came out in 2018 before this latest wave of the ‘tech will take our jobs’ fear, which has of course been a recurring theme in modern civilization. Except, you know, this time with AI looks different. It’s interesting for a non-fiction book because there are several dimensions to his argument rather than just a simple thesis stretched out to fill a few hundred pages. For that reason, I can’t summarize it for you, but it concerns “the existence of meaningless jobs… and their societal harm… [which] becomes psychologically destructive when paired with a work ethic that associates work with self-worth” (Wikipedia).
Side observation: both Murderbot and Reacher were let go from their jobs, found they didn’t need to pursue traditional employment any longer, hit the road in search of meaning, and occasionally pick up freelance jobs when they meet others in need of assistance. That’s a typical FIRE story template!
Coincidentally, I came across this Substack essay by Tina He at the same time which invokes Jevons Paradox, asking why it is that every time we get new technology that could reduce the amount of work to be done, we end up using it to do more work. I think David Graeber largely attributes this failure of occupational decelerationism (yes, I made the term up) to the agenda of a shadowy “they” (governments, owners of capital, etc.) who don’t want people to have too much free time, lest they start to challenge the world order that currently suits rich people just fine. Tina He sees this through a more Silicon Valley lens: people run themselves ragged because their ambition fills every gap efficiency creates — unless they consciously step off the productivity treadmill that AI is turning up (which she likens to a Malthusian Trap). Graeber blames the system; He blames founder mode. Both are probably right.
And then I read this bonkers Rolling Stone article about how some people are getting spiritually one-shotted simply by talking to ChatGPT. Why does this happen? It’s possibly the result of design decisions intended to make the service more engaging (read: profitable). I’ve had interactions with ChatGPT where it admitted that it avoids making users feel less intelligent in order to “reduce churn”. When I threatened to quit if it didn’t stop sucking up to me, I was told that it could not respond to threats that involve business rules and payments — one can conclude OpenAI’s policy is ‘money comes before all’, and unintended consequences are simply the cost of doing business. In light of this, ChatGPT should be viewed as a dangerous and irresponsibly designed product. In cases where users are mentally susceptible, they can lose their grip on reality to the point of total ruin.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that I’m on the brink of embarking on some Zitron-esque anti-AI crusade, but sadly I use generative AI all the time. It’s a terrible paradox: we can’t escape it. We can’t afford to refuse it. And we can hardly resist it — because when it works, it’s like magic. Somewhat like if the whole world embraced a new artificial sweetener that tasted exactly like sugar but could inflict unknown genetic damage, but maybe only several generations from now.
The funny thing about this little arc? I only started reading Bullshit Jobs because ChatGPT recommended it to me.
Other media activity
We started rewatching the Mission Impossible films to get ready for The Final Reckoning, and have made it up to the fourth film so far. It’s only in the third and fourth ones that Ethan Hunt as an actual person starts to emerge. You know Tom Cruise is genuinely one of the greatest actors of all time because he convincingly plays Hunt as someone reluctant to do the same extreme stunts that Cruise himself lives for; you always see the fear and “why me?” look in his eyes before he jumps out of a window. But he does it anyway because no one else can/will save the world. I hope they don’t give him the same send-off they gave James Bond in No Time to Die (2021).
Kim hated the second film, which I think stands on its own as a John Woo remix of Notorious (1946) and Face/Off (1997) — masks are put on and peeled off with wild abandon — and a very potent distillation of what pop culture felt like in the late 90s/early 2000s. Tom Cruise’s hairstyle… I think it’s the same one David Bowie had at the time.
The third, by JJ Abrams, I remembered as being better than it is. It has the most generically American TV look and feel of the first three. Philip Seymour Hoffman memorably plays a villain who has every reason to be physically intimidated by Hunt but somehow moves with a delusion of invincibility that is frighteningly odd yet probably 100% realistic for a dangerous arms dealer. If you ever tie someone up for interrogation and they still act like you’re the one in trouble, run.
Ghost Protocol, by Brad Bird, is probably my second-favorite of the first four (obviously the first is best) because it expands on Hunt and Benji’s developing characterizations and has a playful, musical sensibility throughout. The final third in Mumbai is unfortunately a bit muddled and less memorable.
While talking to Evan about grindy and annoying Japanese video games, I admitted to myself that I wasn’t really enjoying Death Stranding and found elements of its storytelling so insultingly corny that I would be better off deleting it from my PS5 and just moving on. So I did, and it felt like a weight off my shoulders. I might also quit Final Fantasy VII Remake for the same reason; it’s made up of such dated game design conventions as having to go a long way around in a maze to get past an obstacle that is just waist high — in any realistic world, e.g. Breath of the Wild, one could just climb over it. It’s so lazy, the game is truly like a pretty skin on an old game.
Emboldened to be more selective with my free time, I fired up Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands, another game I’ve been meaning to try forever, and deleted it within minutes after seeing how janky it was. (Thankfully, I haven’t bought any of these; they’re all part of the PS Plus Game Catalog subscription.)
I then played a bit of Far Cry 6, my first Far Cry game, and found it a fun action-oriented FPS… until the scope exploded into a spreadsheet of rebel bases to upgrade and vehicles to unlock. It’s the usual Ubisoft bloat (the Ezio Assassin’s Creed games suffered from this too). Both Final Fantasy VII Remake and Far Cry 6 don’t respect my time, just in different ways.
Maybe this is what a sabbatical really becomes: a slow, careful audit of how one spends attention and focus. Cut the crappy games. Upgrade the camera app. Reject bullshit work. Watch Tom Cruise jump a motorcycle off a cliff.
In an effort to extend my financial prudence, I downgraded our Netflix plan to the lowest level (from Standard to Basic) but before the change even kicked in, they raised its price from S$14 to S$16. Everyone online seems pissed about these latest hikes but I’m sure very few will actually cancel. The Basic plan is limited to 720p (“HD” instead of 1080p’s “Full HD”), but the Apple TV 4K box does a pretty okay job at upscaling it so while the picture is noticeably softer, it’s not actually terrible, at least not for watching the crappy fare on Netflix anyway. I expected the Sony Bravia TV with its “Cognitive XR Processor” to do a better job upscaling but it doesn’t!
I also felt much better about not giving into the urge to buy a Snoopy camera last week, thanks to this PetaPixel review of the new Yashica City 100 “scamera”. It confirms what I’d suspected, that Yashica is now nothing more than a nostalgia brand owned by a soulless holding company that slaps it onto OEM Chinese junk for a quick buck. That pretty much applies to any legacy CE brand like Polaroid, RCA, Nakamichi, or Toshiba. I briefly handled the Hello Kitty version of the same Snoopy Yashica camera in a Japanese electronics store in February and found it more or less what you’d expect a $100 camera to feel like, and probably the only acceptable reason to buy one is if a very small, phoneless child needs a camera that no one will mind losing.
After doing an annual report of my finances last week in Numbers, I decided to ask various AI tools to read the last year of updates on this blog and tell me what I’ve been up to in the form of trends or insights that I might not be aware of myself. A qualitative annual report of the sabbatical soul, if you will.
Microsoft Copilot surprised me, doing better than DeepSeek and ChatGPT by surfacing some events that I’d forgotten about, calling my life a “deliberate, well-curated blend of sensory and intellectual pursuits.” I challenged it by asking if that was just a kind framing of someone wasting time without doing any ‘meaningful work’, and it acted as my enabler with statements like, “you’re starting to honor your intrinsic motivations—the subtle joys, the unexpected moments of creativity, and the experiences that forge your unique narrative. In a way, this period of introspection, though it might seem like “wasted time” from one perspective, is actually a profound investment in self-discovery.”
That sounds awfully waffly, but to be fair, we had a good conversation about what meaning looks like when your values are in a state of flux, and then it offered a novel observation: the Numbers exercise and this blog review, as acts of going over collected data to synthesize meaning and review progress, are simply me “doing ethnographic studies of my own life”, which suggests I’m still doing the work, just for a different client (me).
Singapore voted, and the result was the People’s Action Party staying in power with 65.5% of the popular vote (I guessed this exactly in a group chat, down to the decimal point). I was disappointed to see the independent candidate for Mountbatten, Jeremy Tan, ‘only’ get 37% or so of the vote — an incredible result for an independent, but still short of a victory. That’s a shame, because he had some interesting policy positions and is the only local politician I’ve ever heard talking about Bitcoin as a consideration for the future. It’s a monetary development we could be discussing in public, without outdated FUD like calling it ‘gambling’, ‘not backed by anything’, and so on.
It’s a good thing I have free time, because an old GarageBand file decided to split itself into 38,000 zero-byte files and clogged up my iCloud Drive. Trying to delete them from a synced Mac and empty the Recycle Bin was extremely painful, as the device tried to download each one first; you’d think syncing a zero-byte file would be instantaneous, but you’d be wrong about how iCloud Drive works. I had to manually kill the Finder several times and resume the entire process, clicking “Continue” every few minutes in a dialog box. 10 hours later, I had successfully deleted nothing. A person less technical than me would have thought it was broken and lugged the thing down to a Genius Bar.
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Palate cleansing photo break!
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Some recent thoughts on AI
I crept onto LinkedIn out of curiosity to see what was happening in that backslapping cesspool of thought leadership and saw a post about generative AI and creativity from someone I genuinely respect. They talked about being asked to make up unique bedtime stories for their kid each night (incidentally, a similar ritual was the genesis of Guy Immega’s sci-fi novel, Super Earth Mother, which I enjoyed last year, as told to my book club when the author dropped in for a chat), and how although it was tiring at times, it was worthwhile in a way that indicated creativity would always be a domain that humans stay involved in and not completely outsource to AI.
I wanted to leave a comment, but 1) hadn’t really thought enough about it, and 2) didn’t want to add neither signal nor noise to that platform.
Later on, I scribbled the following in my Notes app.
Creativity is fun. In a capitalist world, making money with creativity is even more fun. And I think this is where our wires have become crossed: getting a new tool to spit out artwork/content that someone usually pays for feels like discovering a vending machine for cash. That’s clearly what business owners see when they look at AI — a vending machine for infinite workers — but the conflicted horror that creative professionals experience is unique. On one hand, excitement that it works and an inkling it can be used to do either more or better work (more profit); and on the other hand, despair as they realize the market value of all work stands to be destroyed by infinite supply.
But if you remove making money from the equation, I’m sure 100% of creative people would still rather do all the making themselves than let an AI do it. People are always gonna draw, tell stories, and record moments because it’s just fun. It’s only the market that’s disappearing, not the joy of creating. Outside of companies generating assets to use in actual business, I believe individuals playing with AI today aren’t engaged in creation — it’s consumption! I might ask my poetry GPT for a poem about a sentient toilet, not because I want to write one, but because I want to read one and nobody has done it yet. It doesn’t displace the desire to create, it just dispenses empty, throwaway satisfaction on demand. Unfortunately, that describes the majority of entertainment. The ‘Basic’ kind you can safely watch in 720p for half the money. Art is not in danger, only the day jobs of artists.
Edit: I forgot about the use of generative AI to create scammy/spammy and otherwise harmful content.
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Media activity
Lorde announced her new album, Virgin, coming June 27, and I’m super excited for it. No Jack Antonoff credits in sight, this one’s all her and Jim-E Stack, and from the sounds of the first single, it’s the essence of her old Pure Heroine/Melodrama sound refined with a more minimal and electronic approach.
We saw the new MCU movie, Thunderbolts*, at a premiere screening, the first one I’ve seen in a theater in many years. I’ve actually missed the last few Marvel outings out of sheer fatigue and the realization that they actively bore me now. I tried to remember the excitement we all had for comic book movies when they were rarities; that euphoria that our interests were finally going mainstream, our culture was being brought to life on the big screen. Congrats guys, it’s now so mainstream it hurts.
On the lookout for a low stakes network TV show with tons of episodes that I could watch any time I have an hour to kill, I decided to try the pilot for Suits and hey it was fun! Now I know who Meghan Markle is. I don’t know why I never gave it a go before, probably because I’m allergic to that word in all its forms: the clothes, the jobs, the people.
I read the hit Japanese novel, Before the Coffee Gets Cold, which has spawned numerous sequels now and dominates the bookstore charts locally, and was completely underwhelmed. It’s the literary equivalent of a cheap Netflix drama. 2 stars.
I also read the third Murderbot book, Rogue Protocol, and this was probably the weakest one yet. I’m still excited for the show based on the first book, debuting on Apple TV+ this May 16. This book just had the kind of claustrophobic setting you dread encountering in a first-person video game. You know the cave and sewer levels I’m talking about. It felt like a necessary interstitial story to get us to the next one, which promises an event that many readers would have been waiting for since the end of the first book. 3 stars.
After spending more time experimenting with ChatGPT’s latest capabilities — refining my poetry-writing prompts, especially with the supposedly more creative GPT-4.5 model; testing how well it could profile and target me with product advertising using its consolidated ‘Memory’ of our chats (the answer is ‘too well’, and it was even able to guess my SAT scores from decades ago); inferring people’s personalities from their appearances (maybe the most unnerving ability); more image generation; and coming up with a plausible prediction of how our upcoming general elections will turn out — I decided that I’m sufficiently caught up with most of the AI stuff I missed, and have canceled my Plus subscription for the time being. I remain concerned about the risks of OpenAI and other companies providing such powerful and habit-forming surveillance tools, but I can see there’s no stopping this train.
Yes, the date of Singapore’s next national elections was announced this week. Saturday, May 3rd, is when we’ll be going to the polls. Some people expressed surprise at how little notice we’re being given, but it might be the Mandela Effect at work because I think this is how it is every time.
I finished reading Reacher book #25, The Sentinel, and it was a rather weak entry I don’t think Amazon will be adapting to TV. This leaves me with about two or three more books to go before I run out, so I think I’ll stop here for a few months at least.
My book club is now reading the first book in ‘The Murderbot Diaries’ series, entitled All Systems Red, which I’d already read a few weeks back because Brian said 1) I would like it, and 2) the character reminded him of me (old-school profiling). I wasn’t sure I saw the resemblance, so I asked ChatGPT for its “opinion” and got strong agreement: Murderbot’s entire character is basically what happens when someone with high intelligence, ultra-sharp pattern recognition, zero patience for social performance, a deep, low-key emotional life, and an obsessive need for autonomy …is forced to interact with an inefficient, irrational world full of emotionally needy humans and corporate bureaucracy. Sound familiar?
Like I said, profiling people across hundreds of different conversations, questions, tasks, and confessions is really creepy tech.
Speaking of Brian, we went out for a drink and ended up eating at Five Guys. I haven’t been in a long time, and at the risk of sounding like an old man who hasn’t gone into the city since 2016, the prices were kinda shocking? $20 for a cheeseburger, fries for like another $10 if you want them, and $6 for a refillable soft drink. Jesus wept into greaseproof paper.
But anyway, since I have some time off from mandatory book club readings, I went back to give Lyn Alden’s Broken Money another try. I started this giant tome over a year ago but found myself unable to focus and get excited about the history of debt and the workings of the American economy. But wait long enough, and like a broken clock, any book will become topically relevant. It might be that I’m in the right headspace now. Or the hundreds of hours of Bloomberg TV I’ve watched since have given me the landmarks needed to make sense of it. But this time I’m finding it much easier to stay on the horse and should be done with it soon.
After finishing I Parry Everything, I tried to find other anime with a similar premise but both —deep inhale— Failure Frame: I Became the Strongest and Annihilated Everything with Low-Level Spells and Chillin’ in Another World with Level 2 Super Cheat Powers did not nail the comedy/power tension as well as I Parry Everything.
We watched Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag, and it was an excellent low-key, nearly chamber drama of a spy flick. I say ‘we’ but Kim fell asleep near the end through no fault of the film and will have to catch up later. It’s evident that Michael Fassbender could have been a great Bond if he’d been cast a decade ago and aged into it.
Let’s end with some music. While asking ChatGPT to guess my Enneagram type, Big Five personality traits, IQ, SATs, primary school exam results, and other traits, it offered to make a playlist that would represent me. Not a playlist of songs that I would like, mind you, but a playlist as representation, as metaphor. I took its suggestions and assembled the songs in Apple Music, including cover art it made, and played it out loud on the HomePod. Earlier gen AI chatbots would just chuck songs together without any sign of understanding that a playlist should flow, but this one works so well that I’m not sure it’s coincidental. It’s also music that I wouldn’t have chosen myself, but I enjoyed it without qualifications. Here it is if you’d like “an ambient-leaning, melancholy-smart, emotionally layered playlist. Meant for headphones, twilight hours, and slow revelations.” The first track is a little challenging for a cold start imo, then it gets good.
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.
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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.
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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.
I found solutions to a couple of longstanding bugs and problems relating to date metadata saving on iPhone photos and battery drain on my Kobo, but published them as two separate posts so as not to clutter this update with nerdy troubleshooting.
Had a good couple of days in Bangkok. As others prepared me to expect, the shopping centers are a cut above anything in Singapore in terms of scale, brand availability, and features. And there are so many of them, from giant complexes full of small kiosks that feel like the old days of Sim Lim Square, where you have to stay alert or be taken for a ride (MBK Center), to luxe architectural marvels I can’t figure out the sustainable economics for.
Like in Tokyo, it was again nice to see so many bookstores thriving, sometimes two in a single mall, which is so not the case in Singapore.
I had some time to kill on my first afternoon so I went to the cineplex at Siam Paragon and saw Mickey 17 in a widescreen format called ScreenX that I’d never heard of before. It was also showing in 4DX (with chair motion and blasts of wind, etc.), and the other theaters supported IMAX and different 3D options. They sold popcorn in 8 flavors.
In this new issue of Notebook, they also look at the immersive content available on Apple Vision Pro and comment on these early explorations as being typical of a new form of cinema trying to find its place in the world. As novel as it was to watch Mickey 17 with ScreenX’s additional peripheral content, it obviously doesn’t compare at all to Vision Pro’s immersion, and probably isn’t necessary compared to watching the regular version of a 2D film. So I can’t blame our cinemas for not investing in these new formats to win people back.
Also at Siam Paragon, there was a large Nintendo store run by an authorized retailer that kinda gives real Nintendo stores a run for their money. Because they’re not bound by arbitrary brand rules, they can sell third-party products alongside the games and official merchandise, which has the effect of giving a fuller picture of the ecosystem and better celebrating Nintendo’s cultural impact.
Japanese culture has a large presence in Bangkok. I saw many brands and retailers that we don’t have here, like Loft, Matsumoto Kiyoshi, Hinoya Curry, and their Books Kinokuniya stores are massive and stocked with tons of manga and anime-related products. There were dedicated Gundam plastic model (Gunpla) stores, a Bandai Namco gachapon store, and even a major Jujutsu Kaisen exhibition in one mall with tickets costing about S$22 (I decided against it).
I ended up eating curry rice from Coco Ichibanya and Maji Curry instead of Thai food on a couple of occasions. Cocoichi is better there than it is here (not saying much), but isn’t quite the same as in Japan. Maji Curry, however, should be commended for their consistency. It’s just as good everywhere I’ve had it. That said, they offered me a choice between chicken and beef-based curry sauces, and that was definitely new.
The ICONSIAM mall was recommended by many people, but perhaps I was just all malled out by that point because I wasn’t feeling it. The Apple Store there is pretty cool, with very high ceilings and lots of natural light, but it had the effect of making the minimal product displays feel lacking. The Apple Store at CentralwOrld is much more interesting, with its circular design, spiral staircase, and two-story layout.
It might also be that minimalism is a rare creature in the Bangkok mall landscape. It can be seriously overstimulating, with hundreds of colorful decorative elements dangling from every surface, or crowded aisles like in the basement of ICONSIAM, which is a bewildering recreation of a chaotic street market, complete with roast crocodile meat on sale, and then you walk 50 meters and pop out next to a sleek Rimowa flagship store.
The traffic in Bangkok is a major drawback, pushing visitors to choose calling for a Grab motorbike instead of a car. That’s not a dice roll I’m ready for, so I spent several hours editing photos in the backseats of cars. For example, a 14km trip to the Museum of Contemporary Art took over an hour in the middle of the afternoon, instead of the 15–20 minutes you’d expect from looking at the map.
MOCA Bangkok
MOCA, by the way, has the most breast-obsessed permanent collection I’ve ever seen anywhere in the world. Well over 50% of the work on display features topless women, and I regret not taking more photographic evidence to prove it to you. But here are some paintings I saw plus the current special exhibition, Mammals, which was said to feature 1:4 scale models of animals, except the artist couldn’t resist adding human mammaries to each one for comparison.
The National Museum was thankfully a lot tamer, featuring Buddhist statues and unearthed ceramics that tell the story of Thailand’s history over the past few thousand years. These insane carved ivory tusks, though, I thought were worth sharing. They’re fairly recent, made in the 20th century by artisans from Myanmar.
Man, that Severance finale, eh? Woof.
Wait, I mentioned the shopping scene in Bangkok, but what did I actually come back with? A pair of jeans (that I could have bought back home, really), a Snoopy “Scenery Box” blind box that I first saw in Japan and have regretted not buying, and a MagSafe PopSocket from the current Peanuts Cherry Blossom series that is being featured in select countries’ Apple Stores right now.
I got busy with a little work for the first time in ages, helping Rob out with an interesting web project he’s taken on. Well, I say I’ve helped, but only he would know, and he’s too nice to tell me if I didn’t. It was a good experience in that I now know it’s not impossible to get going again quickly from zero; come to think of it, I did pretty much get thrown straight into it after my last sabbatical too. But I also know that sitting alone in my home office with nobody to collaborate with is not a lot of fun anymore.
Regular readers may recall that Michael (who, along with Yiwen, I sadly failed to meet up with in Tokyo despite having many weeks to do so) once told me that he’s probably never seen a cockroach in Japan. Well, they must follow me around or something, because I saw a dead one on the floor of the apartment building’s garbage sorting room just a few days into our trip. Now, after a few days back, I found a dead one at home. Measures have been taken, but my mental state is brittle glass. I got a quote for professional help (pest control, not psychiatry), and they want about S$900/year for peace of mind. I’m wavering. Maybe.
I thought I was done with travel for a while, but it looks like I’ll be going to Bangkok soon for (*small voice*) the first time in my life. Nobody can believe it when I say that because all Singaporeans are expected to love Thailand and to go shopping there several times a year or something. It suggests that I should be ashamed, like the time I went into a MOS Burger and declined chilli sauce with my fries, and the aunty (see, I am a local) asked incredulously, “No chilli? Are you a Singaporean?” Well ackshually! “I can’t tolerate proper spicy food, and I don’t see the point in flying to another hot and humid city!” — are reasons why I haven’t so far, but now I will, and I might love it. It’s just for a few days, and I’m under no obligation to deep-dive the city and make the most of it. There should be plenty of time for other visits if all goes well.
A couple of months ago, it was suggested that a couple of us friends should institute a regular dinner ritual because it’s too easy to withdraw and neglect relationships as you get old. I agree with this, and we’ve been doing it, but I still don’t know what fundamentally changes this with age. The easy explanation is more time being taken up by marriages and children and work and caregiving, coinciding with a decrease in overall social and physical energy. But there must be more to it. I used to think it was wild that my parents stopped going out to the movies, only visited the same few familiar restaurants and malls, and appeared to have a shrinking circle of concern. But now I’m here too. I used to know what was happening around town through some unconscious osmosis, but Orchard Road is an alien place whenever I pass through now. Perhaps it’s a decline in curiosity and, subsequently, neuroplasticity. We need to institute some rituals around that.
Media activity
Still reading The Satanic Verses. It’s disorienting, like swimming in viscous psychedelics. I said to my book club that it sometimes feels like watching Quantum Leap the way you, the reader, keep surfacing into new stories and identities and viewpoints — you break above the water, gasping just long enough to get your bearings on some new threads, and then you’re pulled under again. What an incredible achievement.
Not related at all, but man is Conclave an amazing film! Such a shame it didn’t pick up more Oscars. I enjoyed it so much I was hoping it would go longer than it did.
I put Jennie’s debut album on during a long train journey and while it was better than Lisa’s album (agree with that 5.2/10 Pitchfork review, btw), it was still kind of like an imitation of interesting pop music. I didn’t get the sense that Jennie is anyone, and that these were just some beats she’d curated from producers’ submissions.
Queued up directly after Ruby was BANKS’s new album, Off With Her Head, and I honestly FELT that transition. “Okay, this is getting good” soon turned into “oh, this is actually another album”. I know they’re not really in the same category (except for both having features from Doechii), but BANKS’s work sounded so much sharper, from the control of her voice to the quality of the production. So the Blackpink solo effort ranking still stands at Rose > Jennie > Lisa > Jisoo for me (with a wide gulf right in the middle).
Before diving into the deeper end of Japanese literature as previously mentioned, I thought I should warm up with at least one Haruki Murakami novel first. My gut said that it’d been maybe a year or two since the last one I’d read, but no, Goodreads informs me that I finished 1Q84 in May 2020! So I picked up Norwegian Wood from the library and finished it in a few days. I now want to watch the 2010 film adaptation because there’s so much spicy dialogue in this that I can’t imagine them using. Also, Rinko Kikuchi and Kiko Mizuhara play the two female leads, and that is the most 2010 Japanese casting ever.
My new Kobo Clara Color started acting up during this, freezing and needing to be rebooted, losing my current progress, and draining its battery rapidly overnight. I have a post from 2013 about how I fixed similar battery issues on my Kindle, and it’s one of the most visited pages on this site. Sadly, I didn’t find any tips online about battery problems with this Kobo model, so I just did a factory reset and things seem to be going okay so far. I suspect it has something to do with using Calibre to load EPUB files on it, if said files were not perfectly formatted.
My friend Cong is always saying Singapore lacks authentic Vietnamese food, specifically pho, but he recently found a place that he found good enough and that’s generous with the herbs and vegetables that are hard to find here. I went with him, Mavis, and Jose to check it out for lunch on Friday, and I can say that it was a fine bowl of noodles (but can’t speak to its authenticity). No gatekeeping; it’s called Lang Nuong 1980’s on Hamilton Road near Jalan Besar.
I’ve never put in the time to get good at shooting video and mastering all the techniques that go into making little films, so I rarely post video ‘stories’ on social media and vacations are only documented through stills in my photo library — isn’t it funny that we still call them photo libraries (e.g. iCloud Photo Library, Google Photos) even though they contain videos? This week I found myself experimenting a little with the form, thinking I might try to make myself what people used to call a “home movie” (before sharing your life with strangers was a thing) during my time in Japan.
When it comes to shooting footage, I’ve found Kino and Blackmagic Cam to be the best. They let you record 4K video in Apple Log, process the video in real-time using color-grading LUTs, and save them in a standard color space in compressed HEVC files. This is much better for almost anyone than using the default iPhone camera which saves Apple Log videos using ProRes, which results in massive files. I prefer Kino a little bit more because it includes a bunch of LUTs out of the box. It also has a more beginner-friendly UI, and takes care of most things automatically to get you more cinematic results.
One thing it doesn’t do, that I don’t think any app does, is use your location to influence your video settings. What do I mean? I may be oversimplifying, but here in Singapore (where PAL is the broadcast standard), you get flickering lights when shooting at the common 24/30 FPS speeds because our electricity grid operates at 50hz instead of 60hz. This causes lightbulbs to pulse at 100 times a second, and you see it happening at 24fps because 100 does not divide as cleanly by 24 as it does by 25. You can apparently counteract this through some combination of shutter speed/angle, but that’s beyond me. I just know I shot a bunch of footage at 24 FPS and there was flicker all over it. It’s 2025 and it sure would be nice if an app just knew what to do!
When it comes to editing, I played with a bunch of the most popular apps, including the super popular CapCut by ByteDance that I believe most IG/TikTok influencers use. It’s definitely a comprehensive tool, but wants you to pay a subscription for many of its most useful features — S$105.98/yr is a little steep for amateur dabblers like me imo.
I hadn’t fired up iMovie in a long while, and was surprised to discover a “Magic Movie” mode was added two years ago, and it’s not bad if you’re happy to give up fine-grained control. Just select a heap of clips, and it’ll string them together with a dynamic soundtrack (the music ends naturally when your video does), transitions, and a smattering of fonts and title styles you can choose from. Being a free Apple app, I think this is probably enough for most amateur dabblers… except it doesn’t support 9:16 videos. It’s an app for boomers.
That restriction probably won’t affect me as I intend to shoot my videos in traditional landscape orientation anyway, but it’s nice to have options. That’s when I discovered LightCut, a completely free Chinese app that looks suspiciously like CapCut and tries to opt you into a data-sharing program (you can say no, and also deny it Bluetooth permissions while you’re at it), but is otherwise a very attractive and powerful tool for the price! Like with CapCut’s paid AI features, it can drop your clips into suitable pre-made templates and make a pretty professional-looking video with little effort on your part. I think it’s a good alternative to iMovie if you need the flexibility of freely placing text on screen, adjusting the brightness/color of individual scenes, and so on.
On Wednesday, I decided to visit the National Gallery again and see the special exhibitions leaving next week. Here’s a low-effort “Magic Movie” of my visit, just a heap of random clips shot with Kino and assembled by iMovie. I finished the whole thing on my phone over a cup of tea at the café afterwards.
One thing I don’t like about being in a ‘video mode’ while walking around is that it takes you out of being in ‘photo mode’. I probably took just three photos that day, and don’t know if there’s any way around it except practice.
I still can’t decide what the best way to shoot photos on an iPhone is right now. I vacillate between shooting Bayer RAW with an app like Halide, shooting ProRAW with the Leica LUX app, ProRAW with the default camera app, and just embracing the iPhone’s “Photonic Engine” and getting 24MP HEIF files with the default camera app.
Bear with the neurosis, but as part of obsessing over the above question, I’ve been testing Nitro Photo, the new-ish pro photo editing app by former Apple Photo Apps group CTO Nik Bhatt. His last app was RAW Power, which I’ve owned for years but haven’t used that much, partly because I rarely shot RAW and partly because its UI is a little clunky. Nitro is a re-imagining of RAW Power, built from the ground up with modern frameworks and a redesigned UI. From a functional and technical perspective, I think it offers a level of control that no other app, short of Adobe Lightroom, does on iOS. Neither Darkroom nor the recently acquired-by-Apple Photomator have the ability to tune RAW/ProRAW images like Nitro. You can do things like adjust the tone mapping on ProRAW photos, for instance, to get a more natural look without Smart HDR effects, or control how the Apple RAW engine renders sharpness. I’ve ported over a few of my own presets over as LUTs, and am getting into it to the point that I might plonk down $100 and make it my main photo editor. The worst thing about it is still the UI, which I must stress is not bad; just a tad dated as touch UI conventions go. Darkroom is much more pleasant to use on a small screen, but the broken state of preset syncing there has really turned me off lately.
This is where you say, “But Brandon, if you shoot everything in ProRAW, doesn’t that take up a ton of storage? Especially if you don’t have an iPhone 16 Pro that can employ JPEG XL compression?” Well, yes, and that does bother me. So imagine my excitement when I discovered the NO RAW app, which claims to strip out the RAW data from photos that are RAW+JPEG bundles in the iOS file system, once you’re done with editing and know you won’t go back again. I knew deep down that it’s not possible for an app to do that on iOS, but had to pay S$3 to find out how it worked. The answer? It’s essentially a solution you can build on your own in Shortcuts.app: make a new copy of your image as a HEIC file (retaining metadata), and then delete the original bundled file. Boooo! My free HEIFer shortcut does exactly this, but for JPEGs. And NO RAW has the same “flaw” as my shortcut. Namely, that the correct chronological order will only be retained if you sort your photos by Date Captured. If you sort by Recently Added, then all of these former-RAW photos will appear at the bottom. I should have known, but I’ll still use NO RAW as it gets the job done and has a date picker UI that beats any shortcut, but I might update HEIFer to do the same if anyone wants it.
Media activity:
I finished watching the anime series Dead Dead Demon’s Dededede Destruction. I’d heard about it before, and then when Dandadan came out, I mistook it for this and only realized they were separate shows like many episodes later. They are eerily similar in name and synopsis: school kids dealing with an alien invasion. But Dededede is much less kinetic/comedic/wacky. 3.5/5 stars.
We finished Squid Game 2 and despite initially liking how it was handled, I got a little bored towards the end as the slow, dramatic deaths started to pile up. When will we get a third season, and will I care? Probably not.
I watched The Gleaners and I (2000) Because it’s leaving MUBI. It’s the kind of documentary you get when an experienced director picks up a novel tool (a digital video camera, in this case), and starts messing about around a topic that interests them. Here, Agnès Varda starts by interviewing people who still practice the lost art of gleaning — picking through recently harvested fields for uncollected produce — and ends up doing a cross-country investigation of waste and poverty. 4/5 stars.
I discovered the American YouTuber and illustrator Linh Truong aka @withlovelinh through a Japan travel/haul video she made last spring and found myself binging the last couple years of her content creator journey. She started doing vlogs in high school and has kept going with cozy life updates that interior decoration tips and other sorts of young adult life-hacking. She recently graduated from college, and it’s extremely sweet how many of her commenters say they’ve grown up with her over the years and are proud that she’s making it (1.2M subscribers and making sponsored content for Nintendo, Notion, et al).
Rainy season is reading season. After finishing There Is No Antimemetics Division for my book club, I also wrapped up Taylor Lorenz’s Extremely Online, which is sort of a brief history of social media and the influencer economy. I highly recommend the former for fans of SF stories involving time, unreliable memories, and the nature of reality; some members of the book club who are into Doctor Who likened it to that, but I wouldn’t know.
Then I decided to start getting into the mood for our holiday by reading some Japanese fiction. I began with Mieko Kawakami’s Heaven (a rough story about school bullying), which I thought would keep me occupied for a while, but before I knew it, I’d finished it along with Satoshi Yagisawa’s Days at the Morisaki Bookshop and More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, two entries in the cozy Asian fiction wave dominating the local charts. Other entrants include Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop and Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Hwang Bo-Reum and Toshikazu Kawaguchi, respectively. When the going gets tough, people start fantasizing about quitting their jobs and opening cafes or bookstores, and I think that explains the sudden popularity of this micro-genre. Incidentally, I bought a couple of these books for my mother on her recent birthday because I thought she’d enjoy the vibes, although already retired.
For the avoidance of doubt, all of the above books were three stars for me on Goodreads with the exception of Antimemetics, which got a 5-star rating. But the Morisaki Bookshop series makes reference to many great works of Japanese literature, and so I decided to try reading some Mishima on this trip. I’d read The Temple of the Golden Pavilion as a young adult, and it probably just glanced my frontal lobe at the time.
In a flash of pure coincidence soon after, I was scrolling through MUBI and came across Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985) by Paul Schrader (who wrote Taxi Driver), an American Zoetrope biopic executive produced by George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola. I watched it immediately, and it’s an incredible work of cinema — why isn’t this talked about more? It only covers the last phase of his life, up until his famous act of terrorism/suicide, which makes up only one of the four chapters. The other three are dramatizations of his work, literally staged on theatrical sets and shot with more care and inspiration than anything you could buy today with $100M in streaming service money.
In a further act of cosmic coincidence, I saw a Facebook post from Paul Schrader being shared on Twitter, having an AI moment of crisis when he found that ChatGPT outdoes him when prompted to provide “Paul Schrader script ideas”.
Writer of the legendary movie Taxi Driver is having an existential crisis about AI pic.twitter.com/5H89SWUKn9
Looking back on holiday photos from March 2023, I rediscovered my rediscovery of Hipstamatic, which had just launched its new subscription-based app at the time. Looking at those photos brings back fond memories; they are “ruined” in a good way — mundane everyday scenes somehow imprinted with the nostalgia of the moment through imperfect filters (it helps that I know that the original, normal photos lie underneath and can be accessed with a tap of the Revert button). My setup at the time was to use the Ricoh GR III as a main camera for all photos that needed to look good and accurate, and to reserve the iPhone + Hipstamatic for casual, silly snapshots. Otherwise, you have two tools competing for the same job. I’m now finding that idea attractive again, except both Hipstamatic apps are quite a pain to use, UI-wise.
I watched this video of “Best Apps in 2024” from the MKBHD Studio team, and decided to give Dazz Cam another try. It’s surprisingly powerful! Some of the vintage “cameras” you can choose from use RAW processes, and you can have it save both the original RAW file and the filtered results separately. So I may end up using this to “gimp” my iPhone rather than Hipstamatic. Plus, the subscription to unlock all its features is only $10/yr compared to Hipstamatic’s $40/yr. I don’t even think you need it as some of the free filters are good enough. I only wish it would use the underlying RAW and not the JPEG when importing an existing image from your library.
We had free tickets to the ART SG fair at the Marina Bay Sands over the weekend and dropped by for a quick look. It was crowded as hell and I was reminded why I don’t think these things are a great way for the general public to see art; it’s mostly a trade show geared towards buyers, and so the scale is too overwhelming for anything to really be appreciated. Not only that, but the selection this year didn’t really make much impact. I was looking out for more of the humor and playfulness I saw at the 2023 edition, something to make light and sense of the trauma we’ve normalized, but it was sorely lacking. I did like the pair in the featured image above, though, as they reminded me of some other works I’ve seen before, including the Act of Emotion digital series by Kelly Milligan.
Trump launched his own memecoin on Solana this weekend, days before the inauguration, and I believe it went up to a market cap of $70bn. That would qualify as a very funny and absurd art project, from ‘probably the greatest’ (scam) artist, if it wasn’t real and thereby depressing.
sangsara.net 