I read All Systems Red, the first book in Martha Wells’ Murderbot series. It’s about a security robot that’s hacked its own governor module, secretly sentient but pretending not to be, and mostly just wants to be left alone to binge-watch serials. Deeply relatable. Apple TV+ has made a show from it that’s meant to come out soon, and I can’t wait. Thankfully there are six more books (plus some novellas), so this could be their next Silo or Slow Horses: a long-running fan favorite franchise they get to keep making more of. If you like introverted robots with trust issues getting into some space shootouts, it’s a fun time.
Still on AI bots, since I paid for ChatGPT Plus again last week, I decided to update a custom GPT I made to serve as my personal editor and proofreader. It’s trained on a bunch of these very blog posts and now incorporates a detailed summary of my writing style into its prompt. It’s shockingly fun to work with and makes half-decent suggestions. If you’d like to try this, give ChatGPT access to a bunch of your writing, get it to codify your style as a JSON profile, then refine it by reviewing examples together.
It actually managed to write me a half-decent LinkedIn post from a premise I provided, not that I care to post on LinkedIn at all. After some editing and joint revisions, it’s now in a shape that wouldn’t make me cringe if I read it from someone else on LinkedIn. Wait, that’s not true. Everything on LinkedIn is cringe.
I’m not going to say a lot about Trump’s tariffs and the mess they’ve made of the stock market, but boy am I seeing red in my finance apps. I don’t know how Americans will be able to afford anything, and I’m kinda mad that this will affect the rest of us too.
Caught in the blast is Nintendo’s new Switch 2, which was detailed this week in a series of live broadcasts I’ve been anticipating for the past couple of months. The new GameChat and GameShare features they showed are very welcome, especially if we’re ever locked down in a future pandemic. They’ve done a lot to make playing with friends online feel like hanging out on the same couch. Unfortunately, the announcement was marred by a higher than expected price, something of an unforced error on their part, and people flooded the Treehouse livestream chat with calls to “DROP THE PRICE”. To make matters worse, the already unwelcome US price of $449 is now set to rise once they calculate the impact of tariffs.
We’ll be missing the June 5 launch in any case, with the official site saying “July–September in Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines”. As for price, the original Switch launched at $299 USD, which should’ve meant about S$400 — but we ended up paying S$650 here, bundled with Breath of the Wild, because of limited supply and some greedy local distribution. I don’t expect the same kind of scalping this time, but I also wouldn’t be shocked to see it land at S$800. Can’t wait.
I still have so much to play on my old Switch OLED anyway, and this week I got started on Ace Attorney Investigations Collection. It’s a remastered version of the two Miles Edgeworth games from the Nintendo DS, the latter of which was never released internationally. Also in my backlog are Kirby and the Forgotten Land and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, both of which are getting Switch 2 enhancement patches — higher frame rates, HDR, all that good stuff — if you’re willing to pay for the upgrade. Which means I now have a perfectly valid excuse to keep ignoring them until summer.
Michael pinged me out of the blue to ask if I knew anything about the origins of using the × symbol in Japanese to mean “and” or “plus”. It’s something I’ve long wondered about too, especially with anime titles like Hunter × Hunter and Spy × Family. So I outsourced the research to Perplexity (an AI search engine), and found that this usage came out of Japanese fashion subculture in the 1990s. Turns out it’s a Japanese invention, possibly inspired by its use in botany to denote crossbreeding. In modern use, the × stands in for “with”, “versus”, “of”, or “intersection”. It’s also not pronounced aloud, which is why the show is just called “Spy Family”. I like how the symbol invites layered meanings — it implies both conflict and connection. In Spy × Family, it’s the tension between the fake family setup and their hidden identities, but also how those roles merge into something real. A simple little mark doing a lot of work.
I watched a new anime on Netflix called I Parry Everything. Following the isekai wave a couple years back, the new trend seems to be fantasy stories about “weak” characters who go all-in on training one obscure skill — to the point of accidentally attaining god-tier strength. Jose reminded me of another in the same vein, with the glorious title I Don’t Want to Get Hurt, So I’ll Max Out My Defense. In Parry, the main guy is told early on he has no future as a swordsman — so he just spends the next 14 years practicing how to block. Now he’s practically unkillable. But the show’s comedy hinges on him not realizing this, while everyone else assumes he’s the savior of their kingdom. It’s extremely stupid, extremely fun, and yeah I binged the whole thing in a weekend.
We’ve also been watching The Pitt on Max and it’s a great hospital drama (starring Noah Wyle of ER) that leans more towards realism than the likes of New Amsterdam. Everything takes place over 15 hours in 15 episodes, which takes me back to watching 24 in absolute awe as a young man.
Pulse on Netflix is everything The Pitt is not. It’s cheesy, everyone’s more model than medic, and there’s no urgency or realism. Even the surgeries are shot in crispy iPhone-like HDR and cinematic lighting. It does have Willa Fitzgerald (aka Reacher’s partner in S1) and Néstor Carbonell (Yanko from The Morning Show) but even they can’t lift this to greatness. It’s fine background TV though.
What’s up with this image? I went for dinner with Peishan and Cien, who decided it would be funny to tell HaiDiLao (a massive Chinese hotpot chain) that it was my birthday month, so the staff came round and sang/blasted out of a Bluetooth speaker a proprietary and very Chinese birthday song, that apparently everyone around us knew because they joined in and clapped along. I tried to stop them, but in the end had to endure it with a pained smile.
Btw one legitimate use case of AI is transforming images into drawings to get around the problem of publicly sharing people’s faces.
I made it home safely on an ANA flight. To be honest, I expected a lot from the Japanese carrier but their seats were noticeably narrower than SIA’s, and the food was also disappointing compared to other economy class meals in recent memory. The only area they clearly beat Singapore Air in was probably cabin crew service. They were either as genuinely earnest and eager to please as they looked, or at least well drilled in rigid protocols. For instance, I noticed them bowing deeply to no one in particular each time they passed through the curtains to enter and leave a cabin section. The ‘Singapore Girl’ is only a part-time persona, but omotenashi is a lifelong affliction.
In my last couple of days in Tokyo, I embarked on a Doctor X viewing marathon and managed to complete season 5. I downloaded seasons 6 and 7 offline on my iPad and hoped to watch them back home, only to discover later that those later seasons don’t have English subs at all. I guess they never got international distribution and so no one bothered. It turns out that this is actually one of the biggest shows on Japanese TV, with some episodes having up to 25% national viewership!
So after binge-watching nearly 30 episodes of people collapsing from brain tumors and hidden afflictions, I became convinced that 1) I was probably very sick and should get a health exam soon, and 2) I couldn’t leave Japan without a Doctor X souvenir of some sort. That led to a hectic visit to the TV Asahi store at Tokyo Station on my last afternoon (is the Character Street ever not crowded?), where I picked up a ballpoint pen emblazoned with her catchphrase, and an extremely overpriced little figurine of the series mascot, an orange cat named Ben Casey.
Coming back to the heat and humidity has not turned out to be as unpleasant as I feared. Actually, it’s been a slight relief — after a month in the dry winter’s air, and lacking the natural instincts to moisturize thoroughly and regularly, I’ve developed pretty dry skin in some places. It got bad enough that the pad of my right thumb became rough enough to get in the way of using my iPhone’s screen. And now, after just a few days back in the soupy Singaporean air, everything’s returning to normal.
Media Activity
It was good to be reunited with my Vision Pro. I’d considered bringing it, but didn’t think it would be essential given the presence of a smart TV in the apartment, and not a whole lot of free time to be sitting around watching movies or anything. In the end, I think that was the right call, but coming back to it has felt great. I’ve only seen one of the two new Apple Immersive Video features that came out, the “Deep Water Solo” episode of Adventure, and although some have said the rodeo documentary is better, it was still extremely cool and nerve-wracking to watch.
A bunch of other new apps and experiences came out in the last month, and I tried Synth Riders for the first time because there’s a new Kendrick Lamar stage featuring the song HUMBLE. It’s an Apple Arcade rhythm game not too dissimilar to Beat Saber, where you hit targets and trace lines rushing towards you with your hands. I’m not great at it and at this age, my hand-eye coordination will probably never master its intricacies, but it’s certainly a thrilling game. I agree with critics who say that AVP gaming needs physical controllers, because the lack of haptic feedback does hold the game back from total immersion.
We caught up with Severance on Apple TV+, and this show deserves all the attention it’s been getting for episode 7. Visually and conceptually, there’s nothing else out now that comes close to its artistry. Supporting the creation of prestige TV of this quality is reason enough to keep buying iPhones, imo.
Over on Netflix, where the shows look like ungraded LOG files with scenes lit at random, we found their new limited series Zero Day a pretty satisfying watch. I expected Robert De Niro to fully phone it in, but hey, it’s okay! The set-up is a good one, and very much like a 90s Michael Douglas thriller, but I also loved that it reminded me of Neal Stephenson’s Interface, in which an American president has his integrity compromised in a really interesting way.
I’ve started on two games on the Nintendo Switch. Bunny Garden is like if you took the hostess club minigames out of the Yakuza/Like a Dragon series and made them into a standalone title. So it’s just making conversation choices and optimizing a job loop to make more money to buy more gifts and level up your relationships.
The other “game” is Witch on the Holy Night, by the developer Type-Moon. The original is a legendary classic that came out in 2012, but this 2022 remastered version has updated graphics and is probably the most kinetic and impressive visual novel I’ve ever seen. There is so much beautiful, animated art accompanying the text, and with so little repetition, that it feels like an impossible achievement: a triple-A visual novel. It’s just too bad there’s no gameplay here, no choices to make at all. It’s an animated book with an audio track.
In terms of traditional books, I finished reading Pierce Brown’s Red Rising, a YA book that feels very much cut from the same cloth as The Hunger Games. I started off not liking it much (possibly for that reason), but it has some unique twists and tensions, and I found myself enjoying it more and more. By the end, I was ready to read more of the series, of which six books are currently out. Well, I’ll get to them someday.
After literal decades of putting it off for fear of the staggering challenge, I’m now reading Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, and loving it. It’s been years since I’ve read one of his books, and I’d forgotten how playful, funny, ingenious, and inventive his writing is. It’ll probably keep me busy for the next month at least.
I made myself a spot in the apartment to sit and rot the hours away. This was achieved by moving the comfiest chair over to the dining table and plugging in my iPad Pro and Magic Keyboard into power. From here, I can also watch the TV. The plan was to spend all of Monday sitting here and finally getting some rest from going out every day and walking over 10,000 steps, which has driven my Apple Health metrics up by 2x for the past two weeks.
I think my body has been surprised/broken by this sudden surge in activity. It doesn’t help that the bed here isn’t the best, so the morning backaches haven’t been fun.
But I ended up going out on Monday after all, because a day spent home is a day I’m not eating curry. I noticed a line for Alba Curry while in Akihabara last week, and made my way to a nearby branch of theirs for my third plate of curry rice in as many days. They’re a Kanazawa-style curry joint, but as far as I know, that doesn’t necessitate the use of baseball references? They have a one-with-everything menu item like Go Go Curry’s “Grand Slam”, except theirs is called the “Home Run”. It comes with a single pork katsu, a fried egg, two sausages, and a fried prawn. The fried egg with a runny yolk was a nice touch, but sadly, the rest of it was average. The curry was a little stodgy and lacked the punch of flavor I was looking for.
I had better luck with Hinoya Curry, a favorite of recent years that I’ve never had the chance to eat more than once a trip. Unlike the others, it actually has a little heat while managing a fair amount of fruit-like sweetness. I ordered a plate with only a raw egg, vegetables, and two sausages because I didn’t understand the ordering system and thought it would include a pork cutlet. No matter, it was very good as it was, and now I have an excuse for one more visit before I leave.
On Tuesday, I made my way out to MOMAT: the Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, a place whose existence I was only alerted to when Michael blogged about his visit last year. It was a particularly bright and sunny morning, which made for a nice visit given its proximity to the Imperial Palace’s moat and picturesque grounds. The museum has a massive collection of over 13,000 works, but only displays about 200 at a time with bi-annual rotations. I like this approach much better than the one taken by Singapore’s National Gallery.
In any case, this moment in time seems to be a sort of dead zone for the big museums. Many are preparing for new exhibitions that only begin in March, which is a shame but not a blow because what’s on now is still just barely manageable with the time I have.
On the way back, I stopped by Kitte Marunouchi and spotted the Qoobo for sale at the “Good Design Store Tokyo by Nohara”. I first saw this adorable, tail-wagging robot/cushion online many years ago and immediately wanted one, but was resigned to it being an only-in-Japan product. It’s now available internationally if you look hard enough, albeit with a significant markup. After doing the girl math, buying it here was too good a deal to pass up (about S$150), so I guess I’ve found the souvenir gadget I’ve been looking for.
Last week, I complained about us tourists overcrowding the city, but it’s everyone; Tokyo is simply up to its observation decks with people. At several points while out and about, I’ve wanted to stop in somewhere for a coffee break but had to hit up multiple cafes to find a free table. Even after 2 p.m., when you’d expect the office crowd to be back at their desks, many seem parked in cafes to work remotely. I saw people doing video calls and some looked set up there for the long haul with stationery, chargers, and other accessories strewn about to make personal workspaces.
In the vicinity of MOMAT, I discovered the JCII (Japan Camera Industry Institute) Camera Museum, a small basement space packed with photographic history: hundreds of vintage cameras including the iconic Leica I Model A, which turns 100 this year. Ironically, the museum prohibits any photography of the space or its exhibits. For a mere ¥300 entry fee, I got an hour’s entertainment poring over weird and rare designs — on the whole, the majority of industry players are copycats and follow innovative leaders, quite like how smartphone hardware and software today have converged on similar designs. Virtually every camera I’ve ever owned, or at least some cousin of it, was in this priceless collection.
My body has really had enough after all. Three weeks of walking and stair-climbing amidst the coughing masses, drastic temperature changes, and drier air than it’s used to has led to me being mildly ill now. That has regrettably meant calling off some plans, but my new goal for the rest of my time here is to recuperate at home while eating 7-Eleven food and bingeing Doctor-X: Surgeon Michiko Daimon on Netflix. I mentioned this admittedly cheesy but comforting TV show back in 2023, and at that time, a few seasons were still available for watching in Singapore. Today, the show isn’t on any local service, but being geographically in Japan means I can pick up where I left off on Netflix, in the middle of Season 3 (of 7).
Rereading that old post, it seems that I experience the same renewed excitement for gaming, that I mentioned last week, every time I come here. I still think this atmosphere hinges on the large presence and floor space given to physical game retail, but this may not last much longer with digital sales on the rise everywhere. Of course, one can also attribute this cultural presence to the relative outsize of the game economy here (including mobile games).
One of the games I saw in a box in a store was Shinjuku Soumei, a visual novel I’d seen on the Nintendo eShop before but wasn’t enticed by. I decided to buy and at least start on it while here, and I’ve just finished “playing” it through while resting at home (it’s not very interactive at all, just a click-and-read VN).
I mentioned PARANORMASIGHT last week, and while I won’t start playing it until I’m safely home, I did go out to visit one of the Sumida landmarks featured in this creepy supernatural game: Kinshibori Park. It’s not much to look at but there’s a statue of a famous kappa in one corner, one of the “Seven Wonders of Honjo” which the game seems to be based on.
By the way, I’m half certain we saw the actress who plays Doctor-X on the streets of Ryogoku a couple of weeks ago. There wasn’t anyone else around, so I couldn’t see from others’ reactions if it really was her. It sure looked like her to me, though, so I’m sticking with that story.
Just had my first ever “soup curry” in Shimokitazawa, which unbeknownst to me is also considered a curry town (like Jimbocho in last week’s update), albeit focused more on authentic “spice curry”, as opposed to the sweeter Japanese adaptations of British-adapted curries. It came with a whole chicken leg and an impressive 20 kinds of vegetables, costing about ¥2000. Thoroughly delicious and a healthy meal (I told myself), although we did have to wait over an hour in a virtual queue for it.
Taking a photo would have gotten you thrown out before
To pass the time, we stopped into Bear Pond Espresso for one of their famous Dirtys and a cup of their proprietary Flower Child blend. The coffee is still as good as it ever was, but the vibe has changed now that the famously surly owner isn’t behind the counter. The last time we came and saw him, his mood had brightened up tremendously; he was taking off early to walk his dog in the sun, and even stopped to tell us its name. Perhaps he’s now retired. Good for him.
Afterwards, an obligatory stop into Village Vanguard, a “bookshop” whose closest kin is probably Don Quijote (or as it’s known in Singapore, Don Don Donki), that self-described shopping jungle where haphazard aisle placement is intentional and designed to get you lost and overwhelmed in a good way. VV has books, media merch, stickers, physical music, gacha, plushies, clothing, you name it. If I could actually read Japanese, I’d never be able to leave.
Back to food for a minute. We booked a “katsu omakase” meal before coming out here, featuring multiple cuts of perfectly cooked Japanese pork, and separately had an impromptu sushi omakase in Roppongi, where we got in just after lunch hour and had the whole counter to ourselves.
We also tried some Mister Donut, which is known in Singapore for always selling out, but here in addition to the perpetual lines and wide selection of sweet bakes, it’s also a place you can sit down and have… fried rice!?
I haven’t stepped into either a McDonald’s or Burger King (and probably won’t), but for posterity’s sake, I will record that the former is currently selling a line of “New York-Style” burgers with , which sounds like bullshit to me because one of them has a prawn cutlet. The King is more on brand with a monstrous Yeti burger that has four quarter-pound patties dripping with creamy “white cheese”.
Most museums are closed on Mondays or Tuesdays, but you can’t always rely on their websites for accurate updates. We found that out the hard way on Tuesday, which was also a national holiday, when we traveled nearly an hour to Nerima Art Museum only to discover it was closed — their site said otherwise.
But we made up for that fail on Wednesday and Thursday with visits to the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT), and the Mori Art Museum, respectively.
MOT is hosting the extremely popular, TikTok-viral Ryuichi Sakamoto tribute: Seeing Sound, Hearing Time. We must have stood in line for 45 minutes to get in, but it was certainly worth it. The final room was probably the highlight, where you see an ethereal “hologram” of him playing on a real piano with keys synced to a MIDI performance he recorded. Spectral visualizations of each note rise from the piano as he plays, and it’s like watching his ghost play Guitar Hero in reverse. There’s also an outdoor portion that you might already have seen online: a dense “fog sculpture” you can wander through. Walking through it is disorienting and like being in a video game scene. You can barely see past your outstretched hand, and other people fade into view through the white mist. There’s a feeling that someone might come recklessly running and knock you over. All around us, Japanese people kept saying “Yabai!” out loud.
Thursday was opening day for Machine Love at Mori Art, and by going early in the morning, we caught the artist Beeple (famous for selling a $69M NFT at Christie’s) unveiling a new “software update” to his work HUMAN ONE, tailored to Tokyo and this exhibition in particular. In it, the eternally trudging humanoid AI robot was transported from a post-apocalyptic world to a new rainbow-colored cartoon world filled with derivative Asian imagery like pandas and pagodas. It was like a parody of Takeshi Murakami’s work, but he also attended the following day, so I guess he’s cool with it.
Then on Sunday, I visited the National Art Center in Roppongi, which is interesting for the fact that it’s more of a hosting ground for smaller organizations that want to hold exhibitions, and not a museum with its own collection. I saw a couple of calligraphy shows (admittedly hard for me to appreciate), a show featuring young and new artists, and the results of a couple more annual open competitions. I spend just $10 for an entire afternoon’s worth of interesting ideas, and am now thoroughly saturated with imagery.
I made the mistake of going to Akihabara over the weekend, after Kim had gone home (I’m staying on for a little bit), leaving me free to eat all the curry rice I want and spend hours in electronic stores. It was more crowded than I can ever remember seeing, and not in any positive way; people were lugging large suitcases around and blocking narrow aisles with them, among other inconsiderate acts. I left exhausted and feeling somewhat ill (the number of coughing and sneezing people around didn’t help). The place is a victim of its own reputation, I guess, and now tourists have ruined the place for everyone. Like Chernobyl, it might be 50 years before one can safely visit again.
Two weeks ago, I asked why no one has created an all-in-one vinyl/CD/cassette player yet. Yesterday, I saw one at Yodobashi Camera. Granted, it probably sounds terrible, and the ¥18,500 (S$163) price doesn’t inspire much confidence either. If someone makes a better version of this, though, I’d be up for it.
One thing I still love doing is browsing the video game sections at these large retailers. Although some of the physical games are region-free and contain English translations, I’m not really there to buy anything — my backlog is deep enough to last for years. The fun is in seeing games really thrive in the real world, with cartridges alongside plushies, keychains, and other accessories. There are sadly no such equivalents back home. Inevitably, I’ll see Japanese-specific box art and pick something new up to look up online, or be reminded of a title I’d heard of but forgot to wishlist, and by the end of it, become more inspired to head home and play more games. After a couple of such experiences, my wishlist is now deeper, and I’ve bought a few new digital titles as well.
Incidentally, Perplexity released a new “Deep Research” mode which has nothing to do with OpenAI’s Deep Research product, and I asked it to find me Nintendo Switch games set in Eastern Tokyo that I might play while living here, for greater immersion. Amazingly, it succeeded. It was able to find one game, PARANORMASIGHT, that was developed with the help of the Sumida city council and tourism board (why they agreed, I do not know, because the game involves at least one of the parks being haunted). It’s also available for iOS. Impressively, Perplexity was also able to extrapolate that the region is known for sumo wrestling, and identified games involving sumo that might be of interest. All in all, not a bad feature to have! Free users get five questions a day, paid users get hundreds more.
I realized almost too late that I had neglected to shoot more panoramic photos this trip, which are really great to view on Vision Pro and have the effect of transporting you back to places you want to remember. I’m trying to make up for that now.
This episode is brought to you by our kind sponsors at Bullet Points™: Need to keep your rambling in check while covering a dozen mundane topics? That’s a job for Bullet Points™ — creating the illusion of order since forever!
After wanting a simple MagSafe silicone case for my iPhone for the past few weeks, I got an $18 Amazon deal for a neutral gray one from Elago, and it’s nearly perfect.
In addition to having more time for informational intake and mental meanderings, I’ll probably remember the latter half of this year for the half-hearted austerity drive that’s led me to drink tea over coffee on a daily basis. This week, the Yorkshire Gold tea caddy I bought during Black Friday sales arrived, prompting me to look up the history of the tea caddy. Back when tea was too valuable to leave with servants in the kitchen, rich folk kept it locked in ornate caddies in their living rooms. Today, I store $0.12 tea bags in a flimsy tin and call it progress.
I’ve been struggling to read Butter by Asako Yuzuki, which has apparently been named Waterstone’s book of the year. I’m only a third of the way through after several weeks, and while there’s nothing wrong with it, it’s a bit of a compelling nothingburger. Female journalist tries to interview female serial killer. Killer encourages her to show more interest in life’s pleasures, especially good butter, and journalist slowly starts to adopt killer’s worldview. I don’t want to quit more but I’ll need to move on soon.
Because my book club has decided to read the sequel to A Psalm for the Wild-Built over the next two weeks, and I can’t start it until I finish Butter. A Prayer for the Crown-Shy will probably only take four hours (the length of its audiobook, compared to Butter’s 17 hours), but I don’t like multitasking with books. I already have too many ongoing TV show and game narratives crowded in my brain.
This year’s Goodreads Reading Challenge is in the bag anyway, with 19 proper books + four volumes of the Sakamoto Days manga completed, smashing my goal of 12 books.
Popular media loves a (serial) killer. We recently finished the new The Day of the Jackal series starring Eddie Redmayne as the titular assassin that the show’s directorial choices strongly encourage you to root for. It’s excellent, and the musical director is clearly a millennial who shares my taste in the classics, from the first episode starting with Radiohead’s Everything In Its Right Place.
We’re now watching Cross on Amazon Prime Video, based on the Alex Cross books by James Patterson, where a detective with a PhD in psychology plays cat and mouse with a serial killer. I recommend it, but the show is extremely dark AND low contrast, like someone forgot the final step in processing the image. Reacher suffered from this too, but it’s worse here. Luckily, my Sony TV has a mode that dynamically adjusts for it.
I rediscovered the greatness of Domi and JD Beck this week when a random video of them performing on Japanese morning TV popped up on my YouTube feed. I then went down a rabbit hole of older videos, like this one of Domi jamming with other kids at Berklee, and this one of JD headlining a Zildjian session, and am now just in awe of their incredible, otherworldly talent.
On Monday, we went out to see a local production at the Capitol Theater, entitled Dim Sum Dollies® History of Singapore Sixty Sexy Years. It was definitely one of the musicals of all time.
The end-of-year digital game sales have begun, and I urge you to add Sayonara Wild Hearts to your collection if you haven’t already. This game is both a fantastic musical album and a great playable abstraction of going through heartbreak. It’s just $7.79 on Nintendo Switch and S$8.40 on Steam (40% off in both cases). I first played it on Apple Arcade back in 2019 as a launch title for the service, but these days it’s no longer available on mobile and the fate of publisher Annapurna Interactive is in question.
I dusted off the PS5 to make use of my PS Plus subscription and decided to finally play a native PS5 game, since I’ve so far only played older games that were ported from the PS4, and had my socks and shoes blown off by Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. This game is an insane technical showcase for what the PS5 can do: thousands of particles flying everywhere, ray traced reflections, and massive, cinematic worlds that load instantly. Why have I squandered the potential of this machine for the last seven months?? If you have any recommendations for what to play next, especially if they’re in the PS Plus catalog, do let me know.
Last but not least, we went for Christmas dinner with the parents on Sunday night at one of my favorite buffets in town, and it’s made me aware I’ll have to watch my eating over the next couple of weeks.
I’ll try for a shorter bullet point update this week.
It’s hard to believe we’re already done with the first week of December. Every year, I say Christmas crept up on me and I don’t feel it coming at all. Now I accept that it’s just the nature of Christmas in the tropics (without winter), and if I don’t surround myself with visual signifiers of the season, the mind forgets what the body doesn’t feel.
Nintendo released Animal Crossing Pocket Camp Complete, the offline, self-contained, definitive version of their mobile AC game, and I decided to buy it after all. I played the live service version briefly when it came out, but soon decided I didn’t like the in-app purchase model. This is much better. So much better, in fact, that I have spent several hours this weekend fishing and harvesting fruit.
The game was actually mentioned in my first-ever weekly post back in July 2020. After 7 years of iteration, it now feels like a massive game with tons of content (clothing and furniture to buy and craft) and new functionality bolted on. Currently, it’s snowing in the world and the seasonal events have got my campsite decorated with sleighs and piles of gifts and I’m wearing a reindeer hat… and dare I say? It kind of feels like Christmas is coming.
If you’re playing too, add me to your world with the Camper Card below! I believe it’s just a one-way thing, and we won’t get to interact for real since there are no servers involved. And don’t forget, the game is half price now and will go up to $20 at the end of January 2025.
We collected our Zeiss Optical Inserts for Vision Pro (prescription lenses that click in magnetically), and the setup experience was pretty cool. The device detects that they’re in, and makes you redo the eye setup process. Then it registers the new lenses on your profile by having you look at a QR code printed inside the box. Given that my contact lenses are “weaker” than my regular glasses, I’m now seeing everything in the Vision Pro with even more clarity than I was before.
Leica fixed a deal-breaking bug in Leica LUX where your preference of ProRAW or HEIF file format wasn’t remembered between sessions. They also fixed some other small things that bothered me but aren’t worth mentioning. This makes it a viable camera app for everyday use because it gets you HEIF files with the gentler/less sharpened look of shooting in ProRAW. Plus you can choose a “Leica Look” color profile to start from, and non-destructively try others or revert to the underlying original photo afterwards. I like it enough to put a shortcut on my Lock Screen.
Our home broadband plan was up for renewal, and I got a call from the company to that effect. They wanted me to give the last 4 digits of my national ID number over the phone for verification before they would even tell me anything. “How do I verify you’re really from the company?”, I asked. “Can you tell me something you know about me?”, I offered, to which they said “We can’t share any customer information”, and agreed when I asked if I was just supposed to trust them. I said that didn’t work for me, and so they could just send me whatever special offers they wanted via email instead.
The offer was fine, and I decided to stick with them for another two years because it’s the best price I’ve seen anywhere. And as a bonus, we’ll be getting an upgrade to a 10gbps line. We’ll only be utilizing a maximum of 2.5gbps though, because that’s the maximum supported wired input on the WiFi 6E router I just got a few months ago.
Renovation noises at home continued, and someone lodged a complaint with the housing board against our new neighbor’s contractors. It wasn’t us, but I can see how this might not be the warm welcome anyone would hope for. There are also reports from other residents that they’ve been seeing ceiling leaks during the recent storms, and mysteriously, these are people lower down in the building! Fingers crossed this doesn’t grow to affect us, because I can’t take any more drama.
One noisy afternoon, I decided to finally pay a visit to my local library branch after talking about it for the last six months, and… it’s not much to write home about. Lots of retirees sitting around playing Pokémon Go and reading magazines. Afterwards I decided to eat at Yakiniku Like, a place that seems well designed for solo diners. I got my own little personal grill, and ate 200g of beef short plate with 300g of rice (and a huge mound of shredded cabbage) for a little over $20 and went home very happy.
We went out for a much nicer dinner on Thursday, checking out Hayop on Jose’s recommendation. It’s affiliated with the Manam restaurant in Manila, a fact that only landed as I was looking at the menu — I ate there a couple of times back in 2019 when I was there for work. The prices here have been proportionately raised, but the food is nearly as good as I remembered, so that’s fair. I like Filipino food because it respects the power of pork fat.
Testing the Leica Lux app with these
It turns out that writing bullet points ≠ shorter updates when you’re a typer-yapper like me.
I wanted to binge an entire anime series in a week and decided to go with Summertime Rendering. It’s a time loop story that feels like a visual novel game adaptation, but actually started as a manga series. I was hoping more for sci-fi but it’s really a supernatural thing. At 25 episodes, it became a bit of a slog near the end as the multiple timelines became too convoluted to follow. Don’t really recommend.
Netflix released a new 6-part spy series called Black Doves, starring Keira Knightley and Ben Whislaw (aka Q in recent James Bond films, and the voice of Paddington). I was optimistic, but while it’s not as bad as most Netflix shows, it still suffers from the Marvel-ization of popular culture where any seriousness or suspense is immediately undercut by comic relief before it can mean anything. That’s not the only problem with it, but the result is a show that feels like background fodder for phone fiddling.
Months after the Katseye moment, we watched the Pop Star Academy show that shows their formation and training over two years. It was interesting to see non-Asian idols like Lexie chafe against unethical manipulation in light of HYBE’s recent troubles with NewJeans. I don’t think the industry’s current models will hold up well as talent starts to realize they hold the keys to their fandoms and can stream online on their own. It’s like K-Pop’s In Rainbows moment.
I also think HYBE made a strategic error in greenlighting this behind-the-scenes show with Netflix, and it’s translated into Katseye’s failure to take off with an international (beyond K-Pop) audience. Fans of J-Pop and K-Pop aren’t surprised to see the rough training and emotional abuse their idols go through, but people seeing that shit for the first time probably feel terrible about supporting the whole business, especially when adult music execs gleefully admit on camera that they fucked with the teenaged girls’ trust in each other to create more drama.
Yiwen shared her Spotify Wrapped on IG and I learnt about the artist known as Night Tempo, a self-proclaimed “retro culture curator” who puts out city pop-inflected music that sounds exactly like how the perfect night drive must feel. Check out his latest album, Connection on Apple Music.
For something less weeby and more eclectic, Jean Dawson’s new album Glimmer of God is worth a playthrough. I’m going to be putting the opening song Darlin’ on playlists for quite awhile, I’m sure.
ROSÉ’s debut album rosie dropped, and what I’ve heard so far sounds like competent pop with a teenaged guitar girl’s poetry notebook slant. That’s not a knock; it’s as satisfying a sub-genre as a sad man’s whiskey-soaked heartbreak blues. I’m still feeling good about my prediction that she’ll turn out to be the most musically interesting Blackpink alum.
It’s been a minute since I checked the National Gallery out, so I wasn’t sure what Peishan and I would find when we dropped by on Tuesday afternoon. Fortunately, there were some new SE Asian pieces either freshly out on rotation, or that I’d forgotten, and there was enough to see without having to shell out for the special exhibits.
There’s plenty of time to see them yet, as they don’t refresh things very often. I looked it up online later, and some of the stuff we saw will be on display for 3–4 more years. Apparently only 10% of the total collection (stored somewhere in Jurong) can be on display at any one time, so I don’t know why they rotate so infrequently. Show me more of the stuff before I die, dammit.
We went by because Peishan took the day off and we’d planned to have lunch nearby. It struck me that I haven’t been appreciating the privilege of my free time enough — I should be doing things like this on my own more often.
We saw a brilliant video artwork series of Thai farmers and villagers sitting on the ground out in the fields, contemplating large Western paintings set up in front of them, casually discussing what they saw. Just saying things like “The man is sleeping soundly. He looks happy because they’ve harvested so much food”. I wanted to stand there and watch it in its hour-long entirety when it struck me that there’s nothing stopping me from coming back another day to do that. To be one of those people who has a whole hour to spend sitting in front of one painting. So maybe I will!
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My mother-in-law (who has no stomach for violence or misery) came to stay with us for a couple of days, which meant that I could only watch the family-friendly movies from my collection and MUBI watchlist. We started with Charade (1963), a classic I can’t believe I’d never seen before. Audrey Hepburn was a phenomenon — utterly faultless and impossible to look away from. With Cary Grant we’ve got our modern day version in George Clooney, but I don’t know who could ever be like Audrey.
We also watched Futura (2021), an Italian docu-feature where young people across the country were interviewed about their hopes and dreams. To me, it only reinforced the idea of Europe in decline, and yet maybe that’s… okay? What’s so bad about living in the shadow of a greater civilization and inhabiting what’s left of their magnificent buildings. Someone’s gotta do it.
And then a movie that has been so hyped up by everyone who’s seen it that there was little chance it would live up: Paddington (2014). Nicolette, whose cats we also visited this week (see below), was a major promoter and reckons it’s a five-star film. I gave it 3.5 but plan to watch the sequel soon—I think it’ll fare better now that my expectations are properly calibrated.
I was left to my own questionable watchlist on Thursday and Friday, which meant seeing Festen (1998), the first official ‘Dogme 95’ film (painful in its overall ugliness); Ema (2019), a dance-centric exploration of fucked up families and urban frustration starring Gael García Bernal and Mariana Di Girolamo as two assholes who adopt a kid; and In the Fade (2017), a German revenge story with Diane Kruger avenging her son being blown to bits by modern-day Nazis.
The absolute standout film of the week was So Long, My Son (2019), a Chinese language film by Wang Xiaoshuai with a three-hour running time. It follows two families over a period of three decades, living with tragedy and being tossed around by the rapid, true-story evolution of Chinese society. I expected the time to pass slowly but everything was handled with such authenticity and emotional power that I hardly noticed.
On TV, we caught up on season 2 of Netflix’s Rhythm + Flow rap competition reality show, and none of the contestants are really standing out the way Flawless Real Talk and D-Smoke did in the first season. It looks like Netflix decided to cheap out and rush the audition process, basically only holding one in Atlanta whereas S1 held them in three cities. So it never feels like you’re seeing the very best talent the streets have to offer.
The main effect of watching the show so far has been an increased desire to play Kendrick Lamar’s new GNX album on repeat. It also made look up Old Man Saxon from S1, so was delighted to find that he released a new EP and single recently.
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It was Thanksgiving week in the US, and trust me I tried to find a Black Friday deal that I wanted to spend on, but the only things I’ve bought for myself on Amazon were cheap alkaline batteries from Japan (the Verbatim brand is alive and well there!) and several boxes of Yorkshire Gold tea.
It feels weird, spending hours online and hardly finding anything I want to buy. On Sunday we spent a few hours at the Paragon mall for some Christmas shopping and I found myself a new 6L Venture Sling by Bellroy. It was cheaper than the online Black Friday price, but only because they wanted S$16 for shipping.
I also considered this 4L Everything Sling from Moment, but I think it’s too small to be the Goldilocks bag I need. I have Uniqlo’s round mini shoulder bag like 98% of the world, but need something between that and a laptop messenger/backpack. Just enough to bring around some combination of e-reader, Switch, camera, power bank, umbrella, JisuLife fan, and water bottle.
The only things left might be digital game purchases that I might have time to play in December, such as Metaphor: ReFantazio, the latest masterpiece from the director of the Persona games, or Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth.
While the Persona games are undeniable masterpieces, they’re also looooong. Sometimes it’s nice to just sit down and finish a game in one sitting, so that’s what I did with Thank Goodness You’re Here, which is published by Panic Inc. (Untitled Goose Game, Firewatch). It’s a cartoony comedic platformer set in Northern England, filled with authentic accents, dialects, and small-town imagery — what you’d expect from a British company named Coal Supper. I highly recommend it, especially if you can find it on sale during the holiday season.
People sometimes say that I’d make a good teacher if I ever tried it. I think good teachers are probably more patient than I am and love speaking in front of people a lot more than I do. But on reflection, those are both things I’ve gotten a little better at over the last decade, so maybe.
I got a little taste of it this week when I was given the chance to hear a class of college students make their final presentations for a design thinking course, and provide assistance in the assessment of their assignments. They were asked to identify a group with needs, understand them, and then design games that could be of help. They had to prototype and test their ideas before finalizing a working version. They all did pretty well, creating solutions that were surprisingly polished.
The general idea about deploying Generative AI tools in the workplace is that they don’t do much to enhance the work of already talented employees. But for the vast majority of average or below-average workers, LLMs elevate their productivity and quality of work to a consistently higher level, which is still a net positive for teams.
Apple’s current ad campaign for Apple Intelligence seems to take that tack too, resulting in a message that’s so far from the Macintosh’s promise of a “bicycle for the mind” that these ads are rightfully catching some flak. But in the classroom, I saw AI tools give students (with limited time and a lack of traditional design skills) the ability to execute their ideas at high fidelity. Making card games that look and feel almost like professional products, fully illustrated without the help of artists, is not something we could have pulled off when I was their age. I’m partly envious, but also afraid that on a wider scale, execution will be confused with education.
Earlier in the year, when I sat in on another class being taught by a friend, I was struck by how hard it is to control the chaos of a large room of modern students, and the same thing was true here. When you get over 40 laptop and iPad-equipped young adults in a room, having their attention is not a given. Side conversations are happening all the time, and listening to whoever’s speaking seems like a choice.
Maybe it was just my experience as an English student, but our class sizes were smaller, and discussions almost always followed a single track, led by a professor pacing around the room rather than anchored to a screen at the front. There were hardly any screens, come to think of it, just books and notepads. Now everyone’s on Figma, Canva, Miro, and a host of other infinite sheets of AI-enabled SaaS paper. I’m not saying we had it better, but I worry that the option to take things slowly and still excel is disappearing. When kids today say they’re stressed, it’s hard not to believe them, having seen the performative polish that’s now standard. We’re getting awfully close to expecting students to pop out fully formed and ready for the mines.
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Over the weekend, we decided to get our eyes tested at a Zeiss-approved optician’s, to order the official prescription inserts for Apple Vision Pro. This will let me use the device on days when I’m not wearing contact lenses. The need to have them on first has admittedly been only a very minor inconvenience, but now nothing will get in the way of hopping into the uh… spatialverse.
Of the three eye tests I’ve had this year, this was probably the most thorough one. The key seems to be patience (there’s that word again) on the part of the tester, in the sense that the testee should never feel hurried. They should be allowed to flip between options 1 and 2 as many times as they need to identify the sharpest and most comfortable images. As a result, I have a new prescription that shows my eyesight has slightly, but surely, deteriorated for the first time in over a decade.
My last test was in 2019, when I got my last pair of glasses from Zoff. Those were so comfortable that I stopped wearing contacts regularly and became a spectacles guy again. Now I wonder if wearing contacts actually helped arrest the decline of my eyes.
Anyway, armed with a new prescription and an appetite for vision correction, I went to the nearest Zoff outlet and ended up with a new pair of glasses. I learnt afterwards that the frames I chose were “trendy” and “perfectly suited for Gen Z styling”. Along with recent purchases of wide-leg pants and oversized tees, my fashion Bryan Johnsoning is complete.
Side note on Japanese express optical brands: I stopped considering Owndays because all their frames are small and narrow — they literally don’t have large options. Zoff at least stocks a few, and in general they overindex on “Boston” and “Wellington” shapes, so on both occasions I’ve been able to find something I like with almost no effort.
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Media activity
After taking a break for several months, I returned to Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name on the PS5 and finished it. And this was a short game by Yakuza standards. I expected to feel pretty over the series by this point, but the emotional ending to Kaz’s story has got me quite excited to get started on the next game, Like a Dragon: Infinity Wealth, sooner rather than later.
I also returned to Luigi’s Mansion 3 on the Switch, which I started (and stopped) playing when I first got the console back in 2017. This game has just sat there for 6 years waiting for me to get back in, and all credit to Nintendo’s designers, it was stunningly easy to pick up where I left off.
There’s a ton of movies on MUBI due to leave in the next two weeks, so I started with Toni Erdmann (2016), which was nominated that year for the Palme d’Or. On the surface, it’s about a jokey dad whose daughter has become a miserable management consultant, and he decides she/they are not doing so well and could use a little cheering up. And yet as a film it was like nothing I’ve ever seen before: I laughed, I cried, I was bewildered. It’s simply art. 4.5 stars.
Another film that is leaving is a 2011 documentary by the late Austrian filmmaker Michael Glawogger, Whore’s Glory, which examined the lives of sex workers in Thailand, Bangladesh, and Mexico. The film’s biggest problem is its inappropriately “cool” millennial-era Western music soundtrack featuring Cocorosie, Tricky, and PJ Harvey. My 3.5-star Letterboxd review: “If anyone asks why I look sad, from now on my answer is ‘I saw Whore’s Glory back in 2024’.”
I haven’t held space to experience the new suddenly released Kendrick Lamar album, GNX, the way it deserves. Hopefully by next weekend.
Kim Deal of the Pixies has a new album out at the age of 63 and I quite like it. It’s called Nobody Loves You More.
I discovered a Japanese singer by the name of Kaneko Ayano while looking for artists with a similar sound to Happy End. She has an awesome ‘gimmick’ where every album is recorded and released in two different ways: acoustic and with a full band.
But for the song/video of the week, it’s Hanumankind’s Big Dawgs. I was listening to Apple Music 1 when it came on, and had to look it up immediately. He’s an Indian rapper from Kerala by way of Texas, and he’s just broken out now with this song after years of making music. His lyrical game is considerable, and as evidence I offer the existence of a YouTube comment calling him “Lendrick Kumar”.
I’m also embedding an older video I like, a freestyle performance, and a recent interview on Apple Music where it’s clear he’s an articulate and very driven young musician who’s going to be huge.
sangsara.net 