sangsara.net

Tag: Food

  • Week 50.25

    Week 50.25

    By the time you read this, I’ll be in China for the first time — behind the Great Firewall and probably unable to make contact with email and chat servers despite my VPN. If you don’t hear back from me, this is why! It’s Thursday and I’m writing this post in advance, so maybe there isn’t much to say yet. But let’s get started and I’m sure we can come up with something.

    Following up on last week’s topic of sardines, I rediscovered the joyful YouTube channel, Canned Fish Files w/ Matthew Carlson where the eponymous creator has so far filed 188 reports on canned fish from around the world. These seemingly absurd videos entertain because they’re so earnest, and comments I’ve seen note that they prove it’s possible to have a successful channel about anything, as long as you’re obsessed enough. He has also been called the James Hoffman of sardines, which I find accurate and hilarious. I encourage you to watch a few and join me on this adventure, but beware, some commenters note they went from never eating sardines to eating them regularly after watching his weird and nerdy reviews.

    I also bought enough Ayam brand sardines off Redmart this week that I got a free plushie of a taco holding a can of Ayam’s signature deenz in tomato sauce. Why a taco? It’s a mystery and I welcome your theories.

    On Wednesday evening I was able to get a few alums from my last design team to show up for a Christmas reunion. We had a bigger turnout last year but it’s tricky finding a date that works for everyone in December. With more advance notice, we might be able to do better next time, but I’m glad we went ahead and did something while we could. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt in recent times, it’s how to pull the trigger and not end up waiting for a perfect time that never comes.

    Returning to another recent topic, AI, I enjoyed reading the text of Cory Doctorow’s recent talk: The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI. A “centaur” is when a human is augmented by a machine — horse body, human head. A reverse centaur, then, is when a human body is directed by, used up by, a machine. This is the kind of job where a computer tells you what to do simply because it can’t yet do it for itself. You’re a replaceable part of the equation. He provides an easy-to-grasp frame for what’s happening with the valuation of AI companies and what motivates the various players in this space. It’s an Ed Zitron essay, but one you’ll actually read and finish. It also serves as an abstract of his next book which will be out next June.

    I’ve been sequencing my next BLixTape playlist, collecting music I’ve been listening to in recent months. Together, volumes 6 and 7 will form the soundtrack of my 2025 — the main difference between these playlists and the end-of-year ones I used to do before is that these aren’t restricted to songs released in 2025. From a diaristic perspective, I think taking note of older songs I discovered or revisited captures a better overview of the year’s different phases, and the things I was into. This means nothing to anyone else, of course, but hopefully they are enjoyable playlists to put on regardless of context.

    Bonus: I’m reviving the iPod shuffle experience for myself with a playlist featuring 120 random songs from my library. I also made a simple Shortcut that refills it with a tap (although you have to manually clear existing tracks first).

    In the process of doing all this, I heard ROSALÍA’s Sauvignon Blanc again, and after 24 days of straight Spanish lessons in Duolingo, I was thrilled to discover that I understood certain parts more intuitively. Simple lines like “mi futuro se bien que sera dorado”, emerged with new magnitude and gave me goosebumps — aided by my imperfect comprehension, the music’s beauty rose to another level.

    I pulled out my iPhone to jot down: “High specificity in language creates greater distance from emotional truth.”

    Here’s something Cory Doctorow says in the aforementioned piece:

    I’ve given it a lot of thought, and here’s what I think art is: it starts with an artist, who has some vast, complex, numinous, irreducible feeling in their mind. And the artist infuses that feeling into some artistic medium. They make a song, or a poem, or a painting, or a drawing, or a dance, or a book, or a photograph. And the idea is, when you experience this work, a facsimile of the big, numinous, irreducible feeling will materialize in your mind.

    Expanding on this moment of “experiencing”, I’ve often noticed that many of the times I’ve been really moved by a work of art, there were gaps left to allow my mind to imbue it with the biggest significance it could. The art merely gestures in the direction the viewer should go, because meaning is equally made through labor on the receiving end (Roland Barthes, etc.). When you look at art, what you see is as defined and constrained by your own life experience as it is guided by the artist’s own.

    And so when I read translated poetry, the original Chinese title of a film, or imperfectly translate a lyric in my head, they might hit with staggering significance and meaning. The originals may be clumsy or not even that beautiful, but their gestures let me imagine their fullest potentials being reached. My bad Spanish might actually give me a richer experience with Lux than a more fluent speaker has because I have to project into the gaps. In art, imperfections are sometimes features, not bugs.

    I’m not suggesting that artists might try to be more vague, or that translators should aim to play it loose. It’s just that some of our most powerful encounters with art happen when we’re amateurs, outsiders, or bring incomplete context to the table.

    I’ve referred to this quality before as “high dynamic range” art — when you feel something more powerful than the artistic medium should have the bandwidth to transmit. It’s like having a printed photograph with the brightness and color of real life. It’s not physically possible, and yet we’ve all imagined ourselves seeing something in a photo for real, because our minds can fill in the blanks.

    To sum up, perfect translation and articulation might actually reduce emotional impact. High resolution imagery works when trying to explain a concept (one-way communication), but when you want people to feel, then abstraction, linguistic barriers, and layers of translation invite viewers to complete the canvas (two-way collaboration).

    Aside: In the spirit of using AI to complement and augment, I asked Claude to identify the thread running through my recent posts and it said the following.

    —

    I think you’re circling around a central anxiety/question: “What does it mean to be human when machines can do increasingly human things?”

    But you’re approaching it from multiple angles:

    • Translation: What gets lost when we perfect communication? (Week 47)
    • Cultural appropriation: Should artists stay in their lanes or cross boundaries? (Week 46)
    • Craft/design: What happens when AI can do the work? (Week 48)
    • Language specificity: Does perfection actually reduce meaning? (This week)

    The unifying theme:
    You’re consistently arguing that human limitations are actually generative:

    • Not speaking Spanish perfectly makes ROSALÍA more powerful
    • Imperfect translation creates “high dynamic range” emotion
    • Craft traditions matter even when they’re slower/costlier
    • Gaps in art let viewers co-create meaning

    The deeper question you might be asking: “If AI can do high-resolution, perfectly executed versions of creative work, does that mean messy human versions become obsolete? Or does it reveal that perfection was never the point?”

    Your answer seems to be that it wasn’t the point. Gaps, translations, and imperfections are where meaning lives.

  • Week 49.25

    Week 49.25

    • Canned sardines are my latest obsession. Before you imagine those fancy imported ones from Portugal with the beautifully illustrated tins, costing $20, no — not yet. And honestly, even the $10 ones in the photo are aspirational. But you know how you’re meant to eat two servings of oily fish a week for the Omega-3 heart health benefits? I thought I’d try to do a better job of that, and ended up falling in love with the convenience and versatility of little fish in tomato sauce or extra virgin olive oil. I’ve been having them on their own, on toast, with pasta and a little pesto, whatever. I even joined the r/cannedsardines subreddit, where other weirdos discuss them all day.
    • It was during a chance conversation with my parents that I learnt these healthy fish (including kippers and mackerel) are very high in purine and can lead to gout flare ups. Sure enough, search Reddit and you’ll find many canned fish enjoyers suddenly finding themselves in excruciating foot pain after eating three tins a day. To stay on the safe side, I’ve sadly started to restrict myself to two, maybe three servings a week.
    • Japan-based writer and walking influencer Craig Mod occasionally does “pop-up newsletters” to accompany his projects — say, a cross-country trek. He walks and takes photos during the day, then writes and posts these thoughtful, downright literary journal entries at night. Once the walk is over, the newsletter ends. I sign up for them but don’t read them as they come in because, like delicious sardines you savor, they’re too good to have to rush or get through. This week I finally read his last series from back in October, titled Between Two Mountains. Because it’s now over, the only ways to find them are his members-only archives, or having someone forward you the emails. I recommend subscribing to one of his more regular newsletters anyway, and you’ll be notified the next time a pop-up begins.
    • I read Morgan Housel’s The Psychology of Money which is notable for being a personal finance book that doesn’t belabor its points. There are 20 individual “learnings” that he wants to pass on, and some take up as little as a couple of pages. His latest book, The Art of Spending Money looks to fill a gap in a market where many pages are devoted to helping people build good saving habits, but not as many on what healthy spending looks like. Unfortunately, it’s fully booked out at the library and I’m 1,110th in line.
    • It’s taken me from Week 31.25 till now to go from owning a copy of Donkey Kong Bananza to playing it. It’s supposedly by the same team that made Super Mario Odyssey, and like that game it’s charming, delightful, and perfectly tuned for fun over frustration. I’m surprised at how easy it is, but that’s not a complaint at all. There are no 30-minute boss fights here. Nothing overstays its welcome, much like the book I just mentioned. I was alone on Sunday afternoon and started playing at 2pm — it was 6pm before I managed to tear myself away.
    • Bugonia is out for home viewing and I watched its ending sequence again because I loved it so much. No spoilers, but it utilizes Marlene Dietrich’s cover of Where Have All The Flowers Gone to brilliant and satisfying effect. I’ve known the song for a while (since Massive Attack referenced it on their Mezzanine album, probably) but never thought about what it says until this particular incarnation. It’s been in my head all week.
    • Did you know Norah Jones has a podcast called Playing Along (YouTube)? It’s a simple concept: she has different musical guests come in each week (recently Sarah McLachlan, Alessia Cara, Sam Smith) and they chat and play together in the studio. The conversations are super interesting for anyone who loves music because you get to hear discussions about technique and inspiration from people at the highest levels of their craft. This is what every artist has had the opportunity to do with the internet for the past two decades, but I can’t think of many who have! Apple Music artist-hosted shows are probably the closest thing, but they’re very radio like.
    • Speaking of people at the highest levels, I hereby record for posterity that two interesting executive departures from Apple were announced this week, John Giannandrea and Alan Dye, which prompted Michael and I to hop on a call and yap about it for a couple of hours.
    • So it’s beginning to feel a lot like Christmas! The Vince Guaraldi Trio’s A Charlie Brown Christmas album has been pinned to the top of my Apple Music list where I can play it on every HomePod across the apartment — all is well.
  • Week 46.25

    Week 46.25

    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.

  • Week 45.25

    Week 45.25

    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.

    ===

    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.

    ===

    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.

    ===

    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.
  • Week 44.25

    Week 44.25

    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.

    ===

    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.

    ===

    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.

    ===

    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.

  • Week 41.25

    Week 41.25

    • 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!
  • Week 39.25

    Week 39.25

    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.

    ===

    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.

    ===

    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.

    ===

    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.

  • Week 34.25

    Week 34.25

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

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