Every morning, everyone on the planet wakes up to the same handful of words. Drag them around the canvas. Arrange them into something — a poem, a phrase, a punchline, a prayer. Save it to show your friends, then come back tomorrow.
No scores. No wrong answers. Just you, today’s words, and whatever you make of them.
How it works
New words drop at midnight in your timezone. They’re a mix of nouns, verbs, and adjectives, enough to build something with. There’s a bin in the corner where you can drag unwanted words to, freeing up some space. You’ll also find a few connector words stashed in the bin every day to help you create your masterpiece. Tap words once to make them bigger. When you’re done composing, click the Share icon to save an image with the day’s date.
Three themes
CommonVerse comes dressed for the occasion.
Fridge Magnets puts you in front of a stainless steel door covered in letter magnets and a few decorative surprises.
Notebook gives you dot-grid ivory paper, a bookmark ribbon, and a handwriting font.
Typewriter goes analogue all the way — classic typeface, paper bail, wire mesh bin.
Everyone gets the same words each day. What will you do with them?
01/04/26: Added two new themes: Label Maker and Zine. Improved UX with swipe-to-dismiss and made the “trash can” into a pop-over tray. Removed tile collision so creative players can make up new words.
Disclaimer: I made CommonVerse with the help of Google’s Gemini 3/3.1 Pro LLM and take no responsibility for any damage or disappointment.
If you thought I was going to stop after last week’s two apps, I wouldn’t blame you. I’ve been having poor luck staying focused on new hobbies and pursuits over the past year; they all just seem like too much work for too little payoff and I drift off. Vibe coding seems different so far because it lets me start making weird things that I want to see, without being dependent on anyone else’s time or generosity.
If you think in terms of music albums/careers, then Collagen was the mixtape that I put together to see if I could be a real musician. Urban Jungles was a big leap forward, the debut album, if you will. It had way more polish and was usable by almost anyone (whereas Collagen had what you might call a niche audience).
Which brings us to the sophomore curse or slump. The second album tends to be over-ambitious, myopically conceived, and underwhelms audiences looking for more of what made the debut good. There are exceptions to this mythical rule, like Radiohead’s The Bends, Lorde’s Melodrama, and D’Angelo’s Voodoo. By this logic, my next app was statistically going to “fail” by being a harder one to get into.
I ended up making two apps again this week: SkySpotter and Library Supercollider. Each one has a separate page on this site that shows and explains what they are, so you should stop here and go read them before coming back.
Concept vs. Product
Like a sophomore album, SkySpotter probably reached a little too far. It took the real-time weather data angle from Urban Jungles, added the more complex dimension of real-time air traffic data, and then threw in rendering a first-person 3D world as a bonus challenge. I started refining the concept and prototyping it on Sunday afternoon, and then worked on it for two full days on Monday and Tuesday. I literally forgot to eat lunch, and was still messing with it at 11pm both nights. It was like a job.
Gemini 3 struggled. The Canvas chat became so long and convoluted that it won’t even load now in the iOS apps — I have to use the web interface. It hallucinated making changes, and introduced new bugs each time I made an improvement. It built planes with reversed wings and nose cones pointing backwards. Working with bugs in a 3D app was so blood-boilingly frustrating that I wanted to give up.
I actually did give up… on implementing a VR mode for Apple Vision Pro. We got it to half work but the skybox sphere was too far away and would keep turning black. Rather than risk corrupting the working regular version any further, I decided to cut it.
I’m proud of SkySpotter because it’s pretty damned cool to lie in the virtual grass and watch real planes go by. Even as someone who doesn’t care about planes more than the average person! But it was a technical challenge first and a passion project second. So if that was my over-produced sophomore studio album the label breathed down my neck for, then the next release would be its opposite: a scrappy, self-funded back-to-roots project recorded directly to tape in a Nashville studio over an inspired couple of days.
Concept vs. Product
Library Supercollider was an idea that came to me all of a sudden after I’d finished SkySpotter. I’d been interested in the concept of cut-up poetry since I was in university (popularized by Brion Gysin and William Burroughs around the 1960s), and I believe it occurred to me back then that someone could make a computer program to cut up and mash two classic texts. I just didn’t know it would be me, twenty years later.
I expected it would take me the next couple of days to get working, being that it requires the somewhat complex-sounding downloading and processing of entire ebooks in the background of a web app. I didn’t know if it could even be done. So imagine my surprise when I had a working prototype by lunchtime on Wednesday. But between polishing the experience and overcoming download limits with Project Gutenberg servers, I wouldn’t be done until Saturday morning, making it a longer project with different challenges — comparatively less frustrating, more educational.
I understand that it’s not an app for everyone — you might read a page and conclude that it’s worthless gibberish. Maybe it takes the sort of person who likes abstract art and free jazz. But personally I’m so pleased with this project that I’ve bought two domain names to go with it: librarysupercollider.com and the superior smashmybooksup.com, which I’ll retain for a year as a ‘marketing URL’.
In all seriousness, I think this is the finest work of my two-week career as a builder of software! The user experience for remixing and reading the resulting texts is brilliant, if I do say so myself. The steampunk UI and animations are completely unnecessary but bring me joy (notice the moving gears in desktop view). I had to come up with caching and proxy solutions to make the app more reliable under load. I even got a little into the weeds: installing node.js and Vite on my Mac, running scripts in the terminal, trying to compile a macOS port to get around problems (eventually unnecessary).
Even if I were a skilled and experienced developer, I can’t see how I would have made these apps in two weeks; from writing to designing and coding them up, plus preparing documentation and website copy (plus one very dubious video ad). Deploying Library Supercollider to its own domain made the reality click for me, a feeling kinda like publishing your first thing on the App Store. It says: this thing is now real and can be used by real people.
Then I came across this article in the NYT Magazine, entitled “Coding After Coders: The End of Computer Programming As we Know It”. It notes an interesting inversion of what we’re seeing in other fields — AI is taking away the drudgery of programming and leaving the human, soulful (and fun) parts.
“The work of a developer is now more judging than creating.”
In that way, I may not have magically joined the ranks of coders overnight, but I could probably say I’m developing. At my job, I used to direct the form of apps in a way so removed that I could only claim the role of design, but not the larger making. Part of the handwringing in design circles today is precisely about how designing and developing are merging, and soon only making will remain.
Not everyone will bother to turn their ideas into reality, and fewer still have the experience and vocabulary to prompt polished apps distinct from the models’ averaged-out defaults, but those who persevere will be bringing tools and toys into existence the likes of which you may have been waiting decades to see.
What’s next? Well, I might have a couple of ideas…
—
One thing all this app-making has done is bring me back to my Mac. I usually spend most of my computing time on my iPhone and iPad, but there’s no substitute for a Mac when it comes to managing local files, running scripts and compiling code. I’ve had coders like Michael make this point to me before, but I never got it because I never needed to sync a local repo with GitHub or anything before.
So a side effect of spending long stretches of time on my five-year-old and long-neglected M1 MacBook Air is that I’m wondering “Why did I ever stop? This thing is great!”
It’s worth noting that this week Apple’s newly released MacBook Neo has been getting a ton of praise on my social feeds for being an affordable and all-round capable machine at an unbelievable $599 price point. I got a tear in my eye as I read this essay by Sam Henri Gold: “This Is Not The Computer For You” — it perfectly encapsulates what it was like to grow up on computers and teach yourself things, even on PCs.
Too much screen time is awfully bad for you, so on the weekend I touched some metaphorical grass by taking our niece out to Disney on Ice at the Singapore Indoor Stadium. It’s extremely well-timed, with the world still coming down from Alysia Liu’s gold medal, and Singapore being in the midst of a Disney craze — a Disney Cruise offering has launched after delays and is now at the local docks, with fireworks and drone shows along the bay at night.
These were Live Photos of some stunts
I have no deep affection for Disney IPs but appreciate the amount of effort and coordination that goes into making magic, and it clearly works with so many adults into this stuff. What’s interesting is that while ice-skating can get pretty boring after awhile — it’s all the same moves over and over, around a static rink — adding a layer of characters and storytelling works to keep it fresh over an hour and a half.
Oh, and our niece is 9, and by way of introducing her to the MacBook Neo, I asked her what computer she uses. I swear, her response was not far off the punchline in that Apple ad that everyone but me seems to hate, in which a girl who’s been using her iPad all day for creative things is asked what she’s doing on her computer, and she responds “What’s a computer?” Will iPads become open enough to support kids learning to (vibe) code? Or will nature heal in a post-post-PC revival led by the MacBook Neo? In any case, that ad was prescient.
Bonus: Steve asks the same question in a different context (around 1:30). You must watch this video, it’s breathtaking. He’s 28 at this point. In addition to confidently describing things like Street View, mobile wireless computing, LLM chatbots, and the App Store, there’s a part near the end where he says “What we need to do is get away from programming. People don’t want to learn programming, they want to use computers.” He was talking about providing more finished software products to customers, because writing custom software was the norm then, but it’s an eerily relevant quote!
It was a rainy Chinese New Year week, which is a rare occurrence if our collective memory serves correctly. The holiday usually occurs sometime in late January, and my impression is that it’s always scorching when we’re out visiting relatives. The gloominess added to a feeling of intense tiredness, and I was glad to see the end of the week. If social batteries were like lithium-ion ones, I’d say mine is aged and doesn’t hold a charge like it used to (more on this later).
While my parents were visiting with my in-laws, the topic of where our dads got their haircuts came up, and I used Gemini’s Nano Banana model to visualize a bunch of alternative styles for them to consider. It was pretty funny to see our old men in dye jobs and top knots, with loud matching outfits like floral jackets. The real reason for this was of course to demonstrate how realistic and easy these deepfakes are in 2026, and hopefully they’ll be a little more wary of scams.
There are fewer kids and unmarried young adults to give angpows (red gift envelopes with cash) out to these days, but it still adds up. To try and make up the deficit, I decided to make a return to day trading (really just gambling) directly on my phone while out and about between appointments. I’m glad to report that I not only avoided losing all our money but managed to hit my goal by the weekend!
If you were wondering how the showdown between Gemini and Claude has been going since last week, I think Claude is still way ahead in terms of writing and editing. Not just producing output, but being able to understand what makes a piece work and replicate it. Gemini seems to take away the wrong conclusions when analyzing text.
I saw Rob a couple more times for beers and a visit to the National Gallery with his kids. We were joined by Aqila and her daughter, which was really nice. The whole outing tanked my social battery again, in part due to the swarms of Chinese tourists in town this week — the gallery was fully packed and some sections of the French Impressionists exhibition were painfully overcrowded despite allocated entry timings.
On my way home from that, I stopped by the record shops in the basement of The Adelphi and broke my 4-week no-vinyl streak. I picked up The Beatles’ Abbey Road and R.E.M.’s New Adventures in Hi-Fi, telling myself it was fine since these are some of my favorite albums. I should have known that once you open the door just a crack, there’s no shutting it. The next day, I ordered Mac Miller’s Circles and Lorde’s Melodrama off Amazon. Kanye’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is waiting in my cart. These are some of my favorite albums, okay!?
We decided that it was time to start on The Pitt, given that seven episodes are out. We binged them immediately and now it’s going to be hard switching to a weekly schedule. It’s more of what we liked about the first season, but I do wonder how they’re going to sustain this over the next few seasons. How many eventful single days is it realistic to have, and how much variety can you get within that constraint? These hospital shows are all built atop the same GSWs, industrial accidents, cancers, and mysterious illnesses, but the relationships and characters usually have time to develop over a season. The Pitt’s real-time concept doesn’t allow for that — the progression happens off-screen between seasons, and the audience puts the pieces together in the first few episodes. You can withhold a few characters’ reappearances until midway through (as in season 2), but that structure is too transparent to keep using every year.
I finished playing the first Paranormasight on the Switch, and it’s probably the only game with a branching narrative — as in, the kind where you are literally shown the story map — that I’ve actually enjoyed. These Japanese story-based games with the multiple endings that you have to keep replaying and retrying events to complete are usually a pain in the ass, but this one works because it embraces the meta-game angle completely. You’re an outsider, outside of time and space, and your jumping between the events is what unlocks progress. Characters in one “scene” might be stuck and paused until you motivate some others elsewhere to do something, which changes the circumstances in the first instance.
I read George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo, an “experimental novel”, on someone’s recommendation and let me just say I am not passing on this recommendation to you. It didn’t help that I know and care very little about Abraham Lincoln, or that aspect of American history, but it’s not really about him anyway. It’s about his son’s ghost being lost in the graveyard amongst hundreds of other ghosts, and through their archaically written little vignettes you get a sense of what life was like in that era and also how the author is a massive wanker. The New York Times ranked it the 18th-best book of the 21st century. Agree to disagree!
One of my irrational fears that hasn’t gone away with growing older is that of going to the dentist. I’ve put it off over and over, and was pretty sure I’d make it last year but didn’t. I’ve done my best to handle things at home, even flossing daily which they always say you should do but I’m convinced no one actually does. This week I finally made an appointment to go, and it wasn’t as bad as I feared. They did find a cavity that needs patching up, but the appointment for that is only in a couple of months.
One thing that felt off was a recommendation that I get a certain procedure done — not only because I’d like to avoid pain wherever possible, but because it was prescribed before they’d even looked in my mouth. I’d only just said that it was my first visit in a while, and they said ‘okay you should get this done’.
Because it’s 2026, I uploaded my x-rays to Gemini 3 Pro for a second opinion. It analyzed the scans confidently (but of course) and told me the same things, but in even greater detail. It did not think the procedure was necessary, and gave me clarifying questions to ask the dentist next time. When it comes to a nervous person like me, it provided a better experience than a human dentist could because it was available to answer my many more follow-up questions, at all hours. This longer “consultation” made me feel better, although I’m well aware that taking medical advice from a machine that just says things isn’t the smartest move. But I know people do and will because it’s really easy, and so once again I’m saying this is really dangerous territory.
Why am I using Gemini so much, and what happened to Claude? Google decided to play dirty, I guess. They’re offering three months of their Pro AI plan (essentially Google One with 2TB of storage + access to Gemini Pro, Nano Banana Pro, and Veo) at a 90% discount. That’s about S$2.80 a month. These models are all so incredibly close in raw performance, that for someone like me who’s not using them for coding, the main differences are down to tone, character, and perhaps ethical alignment. I’m already sold on Claude for text-based work, but I thought I should spend some time getting a feel for how Gemini differs. Especially since it’s going to be at the heart of Apple’s AI features at some point this year.
Friend and former colleague Rob is back in town for Chinese New Year. I thought I’d last seen him maybe two or three years ago, but it’s actually somehow been closer to four. The quickening pace of time’s slipping through the fingers at this age is alarming. The last time he was around, I’d just printed off some stickers of my Misery Men drawings and given him one. I had just gone back to work after my brief sabbatical. We were still wearing masks indoors (as seen in the linked post’s featured photo). Is there a German word for how relationships can pause and park themselves outside of regular time, so that four years feels like so much less?
A few of us met up for craft beers and Thai food on Sunday, with the reminiscing and catching up going past midnight. Here’s a privacy-preserving photo-turned-courtroom sketch made with Gemini’s help.
Media activity
I finished watching all 48 episodes of The Apothecary Diaries anime series on Netflix. It’s about an unusually educated girl, raised in a red light district, who gets kidnapped and sold to the imperial palace as an indentured maid where she gets to flex her skill with poisons and medicines. It’s set in a fictional country resembling China in the Tang Dynasty. Nothing about this should appeal to me, but it was one of the more enjoyable low-stakes shows I’ve seen recently.
I still haven’t finished reading Sleeping Dogs. But I did finish playing The Hokkaido Serial Murder Case a few weeks ago but forgot to say so. As a faithful remake of a retro game, it can’t be blamed for some of the dated gameplay. The art could definitely be better though — it would be a fine game for $20, but unfortunately is priced at $44.99.
It’s been a year since we were in Tokyo and I bought the Japanese supernatural murder mystery game Paranormasight, largely because it was set in the Ryogoku/Sumida district where our apartment was. In last week’s Nintendo Direct, a sequel was announced and so I decided it was finally time to get started on the original. It’s turned out to be quite good, with a dynamic visual presentation that goes beyond the usual VN style of talking figures in front of different backgrounds. The gameplay is constantly breaking the fourth wall as well: one challenge where you die after hearing a cursed sound is solved by going into settings and turning the volume down.
While feeling stressed out about the dentist, I played Jusant on the PS5. It’s a beautiful, dialogue-free game where you slowly climb a massive mountain and put together what happened to the people who used to live on it. It was fairly quick to finish and now I’m curious about Cairn, another game about scaling a mountain, albeit more realistic about the physical difficulties involved. Jusant’s nameless hero is practically superhuman and his arms are way too skinny for the insane amount of climbing he has to do.
A quick follow-up on one of last week’s topics: it turns out that some posts on Moltbook may have been faked because there were security holes allowing people to get on there and post directly (instead of being a bot-only place as promised). Doesn’t change the main point that future agents will collaborate not just on one computer, but sync up across wide networks with effects most of us can’t fathom. Look at the crowd that gathered to discuss Clawd a couple of days ago, to see how much excitement there is for this box that says Pandora on it.
I read a fantastic sci-fi short story that sort of involves AI: Julia, by Fernando Borretti. If you also enjoy fiction that drops you into a context and makes you swim, and then shows you strange and beautiful ideas as you break above the surface, you’ll love this. Like how China Miéville uses ornate language in The Book of Elsewhere to suggest Keanu Reeves’s… I mean the protagonist’s immortal, mystical otherness, Borretti uses a dense, intellectually dominating host of references here to illustrate the POV of an artificial mind at the end of humanity’s time. I haven’t stopped thinking about it.
What will we do when all the jobs are gone? A young entrepreneur in our neighborhood has started a home-based business selling smashburgers, and we bought some for dinner midweek. They were good, and I’m slightly afraid of what this proximity will do to my waistline. For those unaware, this was a bit of a trend last year and local media outlets like ChannelNewsAsia ran stories (example) about how such businesses were springing up as a result of low employment opportunities and rising rents.
Retreating further into the virtual world is another option. A bunch of new experiences became available on the Apple Vision Pro recently, and I caught up with some of them. The cutest is an immersive documentary on Apple TV called Top Dogs (two 15-min episodes), which looks at the annual Cruft’s dog show in Birmingham, UK. You get really up close to some of these beautiful animals, and the urge I felt to reach out and pet them was extremely strong. It wouldn’t be the same seeing this on TV. Here you get a sense of their size and presence, see them in incredible detail — everything but smell them. Apparently there are 25,000 dogs at the convention center each year, but I imagine these are all shampooed and much more pleasant than your average wet dog.
There’s also Retrocade, a game on Apple Arcade that uh… simulates an arcade. The game is playable on other devices, but on Vision Pro you get life-sized arcade cabinets standing in front of you, playing licensed retro titles like Space Invaders and Bubble Bobble. The only thing that breaks the illusion is of course that you can’t reach out to grab the sticks and mash the buttons. Instead, you have to use a connected game controller.
Speaking of emulating old hardware, I played and finished a game on Switch (also available on PC) called The Operator. It’s one of those where the entire UI is a computer’s desktop and you have to chat, look into files, and do hackery stuff to experience the story. I think this can be filed along with the other murder mystery games I’ve played lately. It’s fairly short at under four hours, almost completely linear, and not something you’d play twice. Wait for a sale, I think.
You know who else is a hacker? The lead character in Apple TV’s Tehran, a show that came out in 2020 and has since been renewed for a fourth season. We watched Episode 1 back when it came out, liked it enough, but for some reason completely forgot to go back until this year. It’s been topping the charts lately, maybe because of the recent civil unrest in Iran. Having just finished Season 1, I can say it‘s a really good espionage thriller, and we’re keen to keep going.
Oh and check this out. Someone has managed to license Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series and made a free-to-play (i.e. shitty) mobile game: Foundation: Galactic Frontier. It even has an Apple TV logo appear on startup?! And the next day, I saw this insane animated ad for it pop up on Instagram and couldn’t believe my eyes — I took a screenshot to prove it. In all fairness the actual game isn’t anything like this, it’s just a heinous misrepresentation that probably has Asimov spinning in his grave.
This week’s vinyl purchase was the album that restarted the whole idea of buying physical music again for me at the end of last year: Rosalía’s LUX. The digital/streaming version is intentionally incomplete, with 15 tracks instead of 18. Purportedly because she wanted to highlight the importance of ownership. The first thing I did after hearing that fact was to hunt down an MP3 rip of the CD and upload it to my Apple Music library. But it never felt right, and so I wanted to buy the CD, which led me to look at CD players, and then… you know the story. That’s it, no more. For real this time.
You know which company or live service does the best Wrapped/Replay/Year-in-review thing? It’s Nintendo, because they actually wait for the entire year to be over before sending theirs out. I think Apple Music gives out the Artist of the Year award in November. As a borderline OCD pedant, that shit doesn’t sit right with me.
So my Nintendo 2025 report says I played just 172 hours, spread across 43 games. I believe the first number but the second seems high. Maybe it erroneously counted some games I reinstalled after getting my Switch 2. In any case, that’s an average of half an hour per day, which is kind of a sweet spot: not high enough to be called a good-for-nothing bum, and not low enough that I’d question my life choices. My top game was The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, which I likely won’t return to and finish for another couple of years, if the previous game was anything to go by.
I started on a new game this week and discovered that an old-school adventure game was just what I’ve been needing. The kind where you don’t have to physically walk a character around, but instead choose options from menus to prod at scenes and investigate murders. This is its actual full name, btw: The Hokkaido Serial Murder Case: The Okhotsk Disappearance ~Memories in Ice, Tearful Figurine~.
If you remember the Famicom Detective Club games, this is similar in that it’s a remake of a classic NES-era Japanese adventure game, with updated graphics and music — albeit nowhere as lavish as the treatment that Nintendo and MAGES gave to their versions. Where the Hokkaido murder game justifies its asking price is in its scope. It’s actually two games in one; the original story set in the 80s, and a new sequel set in 2024 where your character returns to wrap up loose ends.
Ah that reminds me, when I was in Japan around this time last year, I saw a similar Switch game for sale that I didn’t recognize. I took a photo of the cover to follow up on later, and found out it’s my kind of murder mystery but hadn’t been translated for global release.
Then a few months ago, I remembered to look it up again. This is where that new feature in iOS that lets you tap and select text in a photo comes in super useful, especially when it’s a language you can’t read. I discovered that it’s been given a new title Path of Mystery (originally Mystery Walk in Japan) and a global release date: Feb 26, 2026.
This one has a unique feature that I’m excited for: while the story unfolds in both the past and present (similar to the Hokkaido game I’m playing), there are two separate UIs and gameplay styles. The past has retro pixel art graphics, menu-based commands, and outmoded gameplay conventions; while the present portion looks like a new game with modern controls.
Let’s round up all this game talk by making a list of the other titles I bought on sale over this holiday season. I fear there were quite a few, but I won’t know how many until I do this, and maybe this will keep me honest.
Videoverse — A game set in the early days of the internet where meeting new people online was wholesome and helped shape your identity for the better.
Okay, maybe I do have a problem! It’s going to take me all year to get through these alone — this is who you’re asking to get a regular job, by the way.
I read Network Effect, Book #5 in the Murderbot series for our book club, and I think this will be the last one I waste my time on. The writing is artless, soulless, and mainly serves to perfunctorily describe actions that the characters take. Surely reading this blog already gives you your recommended weekly allowance of that. Making matters worse is this installment being ‘normal novel length’ where the rest up to this point have been relatively short little stories. It’s definitely overstayed its thinly premised welcome.
One of the fun things my book club does is watch film adaptations whenever a book we’ve read has one, and they recently read Ready Player One. I already read the book once when it came out, so I skipped this one, but joined for the movie watch party. Most of us rented the 3D version for Vision Pro from iTunes/Apple TV, which was worth the six bucks.
The 3D presentation is spectacular, helped a lot by the fact that no one blocks action sequences like Steven Spielberg. Even when almost everything is CGI with billions of particle effects flying on screen, he’s an absolute master at keeping the eye focused on what matters. But time and growing up in general has not been kind to Ernest Cline’s writing.
The dialogue was so cringe, the heroes have zero aura, and honestly I’d forgotten the story and was convinced the genius game developer god Halliday was a bad guy because of how toxically narcissistic he was. I mean, he built a library of his own life story for “scholars” searching for clues to win the in-game prize he left behind. And in one scene, he actually says the words “I’m a dreamer” to the co-founder who wants him to take more responsibility for the online world he created. If I’ve learnt anything in this life, it’s not to trust any douchebag who calls themselves a ‘dreamer’ or ‘visionary’, especially if they’re involved with a metaverse project.
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.
I spoke too soon. Jinxed it. Stupidly counted my chicks. By which I mean I had another vertigo episode out of nowhere after thinking I was safe. It came just from tilting my head down to look at something, and suddenly it felt like the floor fell out from under me. I immediately put my head back, and it only lasted like half a minute, but it was enough to burst my bubble of security that maybe the earlier incident was a one-off.
According to the online literature, recurrences are common with BPPV, and it’s just something you have to learn to live with and manage. Some lingering unsteadiness followed for the next couple of days, which is annoying but survivable. I’m mostly worried that I’ll get a bad case of it on a plane at some point, because pressure changes can apparently trigger it.
PSA if you also have this: it seems people with vitamin D deficiencies are more susceptible. So I’m going to be more religious about taking supplements and see if that helps.
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For the second time in two weeks, I decided to break my weekday lunch routine by going further out to a Sushiro, followed by a little cafe reading time. Eating alone in a walled-off solo dining booth sounds sad and lonely but is surprisingly cozy; just ask Japan.
Later, I came across a Reddit thread discussing local restaurants and when Sushiro came up, someone replied “if you’re in Bangkok, try it there — it’s a world of difference in quality, price, and size.” Well then! That’s something I’ll be in a position to verify next week because I’m actually going to be in Bangkok for several days (hence the airplane vertigo worries, pray for me).
My itinerary as a traveling husband is still quite open — while Kim’s at work I’m planning to check out this new mall with a rooftop park, visit some exhibitions, and watch Predator: Badlands in a cinema superior to anything we have in Singapore. And depending on how I feel, maybe even stay in with my iPad and enjoy the very nice hotel for a bit.
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Speaking of touchscreen devices, I’ve been waiting for the full reveal of the Anbernic DS handheld emulation console, and now that it’s up for pre-order, my excitement has been considerably reduced. Enthusiasts online have been disappointed by the choice of a weak processor which, when paired with an Android OS, means it’ll struggle to run any 3DS games and maybe even some DS games. I’m not up to speed on DS emulation, but I’ll take their word for it that things could be much better here.
The original DS Lite was my favorite handheld of all time because of its minimal clamshell design, which also housed its tiny stylus. The Anbernic DS does not include that critical feature. What’s the point of recreating the DS if you have a separate, chunky stylus to carry about and lose?
Anbernic has also earned a reputation for releasing improved variants shortly after launching new products. So I’m hoping we’ll see a faster, more polished version out in six months. Wake me up when that comes out.
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Media activity:
I’m reading Wraith, which is Book 1 in the Convergence War series. It’s shaping up to be a fun if not-so-elegant “assemble a team and go on a big space adventure” action story. I’d recommend it if you’re looking for a palate cleanser in between more challenging fare.
I started watching the popular Apothecary Diaries anime series that Netflix has been aggressively pushing, and it’s not bad! Essentially a medical procedural set in ancient China, with other dramatic hooks like a super-competent main character who wants to stay invisible but can’t help stepping in to fix things, plus royal court politics.
After watching The Woman in Cabin 10 last week, we looked for more murder stories on boats and started on Death and Other Details (a murder on a cruise ship) before finding out it was canceled after one season. Still, it’s been okay and stars Mandy Patinkin as the detective.
If you’d asked me about Death and Other Details a few days ago, I might have said it was “pretty good”. But after watching the first two episodes of Apple TV’s new tentpole series, Pluribus, the bar is now insanely high. Don’t read anything about it, not even Hideo Kojima’s reaction tweet, just go straight into watching it on the nicest screen you can find. Based on what I’ve seen so far, this is looking like the kind of show I’ll think about long after it’s over.
sangsara.net 