sangsara.net

Tag: Games

  • Week 20.24

    Week 20.24

    It’s been a full week since I fell ill but this virus seems to have booked a late checkout, so we have no choice but to wait. Once they’re gone, housekeeping can get to clearing out the sinuses and emptying the phlegm bins. Even worse, it’s now Kim’s turn on the back of some work travel to Bangkok, so maybe I’m headed for Round 2. Is/was it Covid? A test said no, but anything’s possible. The news is reporting a doubling of local cases last week, at a rather alarming 26,000 cases.

    Fortunately, I haven’t had much occasion to leave the house. I did go out to the nearby supermarket once to get some supplies, but despite leaving Kim a message that I’d gone grocery shopping, she also dropped by on her own way home and bought some. So now we have about 29 eggs knocking about the house. 😑

    The awards show shortlisting is going well and has become a regular afternoon activity, but there’s so much of it to do. I don’t know how anyone with a full-time job is managing this without giving up a weekend or two. Looking forward to sharing some of the more impressive work I’ve seen when this is over.

    Speaking of the industry, I saw an ad for Merge Mansion (a Candy Crush sorta mobile game) starring Pedro Pascal a few months back and downloaded the game, but forgot all about it without even playing. Well, I did this week and now I’m bloody hooked. It’s monetized on a timer and energy-based system, meaning you run out of moves and have to wait for more (or pay), so I’m constantly hitting that wall and checking the app several times a day to make a little progress. Games like these are cruelly designed to exploit those with a lot of free time throughout the day: children, homemakers, the jobless, me.

    Another gaming loose end is Lost Judgment , which I bought for the PS4 the last time I was on sabbatical but then I ran out of time and never started. The purchase included the PS5 version, so when I got the console last week I decided it would be my first game. After some 20+ hours, I’ve completed the main story and don’t feel excited enough to play through the DLC or remaining side quests. It might be because it repeats much of what was in Judgment, its predecessor, or because I’m anxious to get on with the rest of the ‘Like a Dragon’ series in my backlog (of which the Judgment games are a part).

    For reference, I’m planning to play

    • Yakuza: Like a Dragon (#7)
    • Like a Dragon Ishin! (a spin-off set in about the same era as the recent Shogun TV series)
    • Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name (#7.5)
    • Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth (#8).
    • And that’s skipping Yakuza 0, Yakuza 2 Kiwami, and the remastered fourth and fifth games! Those might have to wait for the next time.

    As if that wasn’t enough, I’m also committed to finishing Astral Chain on the Switch, which plays fine but looks like an Xbox 360 game in visual terms, and really can’t compare to the current generation. I don’t think it maintains 30fps and the characters’ faces don’t even move during in-game cutscenes. I need to play all these ancient action games before I get spoiled by the likes of Stellar Blade on the PS5, where every surface gleams in ray-traced splendor.

    If I had to describe the Switch’s value proposition in light of now owning a PS5, it’s a fantastic portable console better suited for indie games (and Nintendo exclusives, of course), especially 2D platformers and puzzlers. For example Animal Well, which just came out to overwhelmingly positive reviews; and the poker roguelike everyone says is digital crack, Balatro. Oh, and visual novels too. I powered through and finally completed an awful one this week that I’ve been “playing” for the last couple of months, which has prevented me from doing anything else on the Switch. I’m glad it’s finally over, and no, I don’t recommend it (Our World is Ended – 59% on Metacritic).

    ===

    Side note: OpenAI showed off an impressive demo of a new GPT-4 model that is omni-modal, smarter, and works in nearly real time. I’m also pleased that these features will supposedly be coming to free users too, along with the use of custom GPTs like the ones I’ve been making. I recently canceled my ChatGPT Plus subscription since I don’t have any regular jobs for it to do at this time, apart from helping me edit this blog, but now I may even be able to keep doing that.

    ===

    Media Activity:

    • Started on two episodes of Sugar on Apple TV+, and I’m locked into its modern LA noir mystery. There’s something weird going on beneath the surface with its meta-Hollywood thing, but what I immediately loved was how visually fresh and uninhibited it is.
    • After languishing unfinished for what feels like a year, we recently picked up season 1 of Acapulco again and can’t recall why we ever stopped. Just like its setting, it’s sunny, breezy, and takes your mind off everything — perfect end-of-day TV. The best part is there are two more seasons just waiting now.
    • I started watching the anime movie Blue Giant on Saturday and was halfway through before realizing I wasn’t in the right mood and should save it for later in the week. It’s based on a manga about an earnest guy who moves to Tokyo to be a jazz musician, and is just steeped in the jazz culture there with the kissas and live houses. I saw a bunch of promotional art for it in Tower Records a whole year ago when we were there, and I’ve been wanting to watch it since. It’s just that I’d read something about it not having a huge budget, and so wasn’t expecting too much from the animation. But it turned out well and sounds amazing!

    There’s so much new music out this weekend that I have to break the format.

    Let’s start with an album I enjoyed back in the day and have just rediscovered through Michael’s weeknotes, Tourist by St Germain. I didn’t even know it received a digital remastering and Deluxe Version re-release in 2012, but it sure sounds great. This could come out today and make waves, apart from having some light Cafe del Mar vibes.

    Billie Eilish’s new album HIT ME HARD AND SOFT is out now. I played it once through in the background and plan to give it some closer listening, but it’s already surpassed my expectations. I was afraid she’d settled into consistently making very samey music, but sonically this sounds fresh and does some interesting things.

    Apple Music is doing a list of their “100 Best Albums” (of all time), and I was happy/disappointed to see Portishead’s Dummy land at #67. There’s no overstating the impact of that band on my tastes, and Beth Gibbons’ voice is a huge part of that. So I’m really afraid to put her new (second) solo album on. Even the title, Lives Outgrown, gives me goosebumps of nervous anticipation.

    There’s also a new Kamasi Washington album, Fearless Movement! A new Andra Day album, CASSANDRA (cherith)! A new A.G. Cook TRIPLE album, Britpop! A new reworking of a 2020 Childish Gambino album that I never heard, Atavista! And a Deluxe version of the last self-titled Bleachers album that I didn’t like that much!

  • Week 19.24

    Week 19.24

    I’ve been sick for days, probably a bug I picked up coming back from Hong Kong. There were quite a few coughing people in the airport and on the plane. It started with a sore throat, moved to a crushing headache and tiredness, and is now in the final stage (I hope) with a phlegmy cough.

    The ongoing headaches are the worst part, making it hard to do anything that involves looking at screens, so I’ve had to listen to podcasts to pass time outside of trying to sleep, which incidentally has been one fever dream after another soundtracked by the latest Kendrick Lamar songs. I dreamt of eating fried rice at New Ho King. My brain won’t shut up and keeps playing the BBL Drizzy refrain on repeat.

    I surprisingly made it through a three-hour episode of the Accidental Tech Podcast talking about the new iPads, which I would normally never have the patience for. I think I learnt just one new thing: the 256GB version of the iPad Pro has only a single RAM bank, resulting in slower performance compared to the other models. Three hours is pushing it for me, I think an hour is an ideal length for a regular podcast. But I’m really impressed they’ve kept the show going for so long. Editing it weekly must be a bitch.

    I also mostly enjoyed an episode of a show I’d never heard before, Normal Gossip, which tells/stretches out banal real-life stories submitted by listeners. It was an episode about “the joy of being a hater” which obviously spoke to me. And in the spirit of hating, I need to say that I find the host annoyingly chirpy and fake, but she was offset by the dour and acerbic guest she happened to have this week. At times the storytelling and incredulous laughing of the listener felt a bit like Reply All, which I used to enjoy when I listened to podcasts more.

    A better thing I brought home from Hong Kong was a brand new PS5 of the Slim variety! When the original PS5 came out, I was disgusted by its form factor and massive footprint. It was more like a PC that went under your desk than a console that sat on your, er, TV console. So I’ve been waiting patiently for years with my PS4 Pro (barely touching it in favor of the Switch tbh), for the inevitable slimmer and smaller edition to be announced. Which happened earlier this year.

    It retails for about S$650 here on average, so I hadn’t rushed out to get one given my deep Switch backlog — a whole other platform of games wasn’t exactly urgent. But on our last morning in Causeway Bay, we stopped by the Times Square mall and found that they go for about S$520 in Hong Kong. Wtf?! It was an instabuy followed by a brisk walk back to the hotel to repack our luggage.

    Our new Sony TV automatically detects the PS5 and configures itself to work with it, which is nice! It also supports all the fancy stuff like 120hz variable refresh rate, but the games I’ve got to play first are kinda last-gen ones that have been ported with some PS5 support: Lost Judgment and Like A Dragon 7, both from the series formerly known as Yakuza in the West.

    The best feature of the PS5 so far? Incredibly quick loading times, nearly instantaneous, such that moving from one area to another in Lost Judgment doesn’t break the immersion like it would when I played it on PS4. With a single “Resume” command from the system’s Home Screen, you can even cold start up a game, load the last save, and get back to it in under 10 seconds. Compare this to last-gen consoles where you’d have to do all that manually, waiting, pressing buttons, and waiting some more — probably for up to a minute.

    You can tell the Panadol has shut my headache down now because I’m rambling far more than I thought I would. This was supposed to be a quick two-paragraph update! See you next time.

  • Week 15.24

    Week 15.24

    It was Hari Raya Puasa here on Wednesday, which, along with the city’s oppressively hot and humid weather, left those of us who don’t celebrate the holiday feeling somewhat unsatisfied upon returning to work on Thursday. More than one person slipped and called it a Monday, or asked how the weekend was. So instead of a four-day workweek, it felt like two weeks in one.

    Perhaps the depressed mood was justified. Earlier in the week, tragedy struck a colleague who lost their father to a heart attack — a feeling all too familiar within our team as the same thing happened to another young designer just over a year ago. And you may recall just 9 weeks ago, another friend lost their dad too. At the same time, my thoughts have been occupied by a family friend, virtually family, currently recovering from surgery with an as-yet-unquantified cancer running loose in her body.

    I’m tired, but feeling better about the recent decision to make room for more important things than my current work. I came across this poem about mortality that captures the suddenness of loss and how we take everything for granted: If You Knew, by Ellen Bass. I was also reminded of this Zen concept that a glass always exists in two states, whole and broken, while reading responses to a tweet asking for “sentences that will change your life immediately upon reading”.

    Hitting the books

    Speaking of reading, I picked up Isle McElroy’s People Collide again after months of sipping its beautiful phrases through a tiny time straw, finishing it quickly. It’s the best thing I’ve read in many months; a profound questioning of what it means to be a particular person in a specific body, and how much of you makes up who you are to everyone else. At its core it’s a Freaky Friday body swap story. I don’t know if it’s because McElroy is trans that these perspectives and insights are so tangible, but I felt them. Even though the story didn’t go where I wanted at all, I gave it five stars on Goodreads because the final page is a triumph. I had to fight back tears of admiration while reading it on the bus.

    Right after that, the book train was rolling again and I read After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul by Tripp Mickle, which had some inside stories and gossip I’d not heard before, and an interest in how Jony Ive “neglected” his design leadership role in the later years, a story I’ve been interested in hearing. Still, it’s one of those non-fiction narratives that dramatizes and assumes a lot about what its subjects did and felt at key moments, things nobody can know for certain.

    Here it comes, the AI part

    Meanwhile, the Apple Design Team alums who decamped to Humane launched their first product, the “Ai Pin”, to largely middling reviews from tech outlets like The Verge. Quick recap: this is a camera-equipped, voice-enabled wearable you attach to your clothing, letting you access a generative AI assistant so you can ask general questions and take various actions without getting your phone out. In theory.

    Most of its faults seem to stem from issues intrinsic to OpenAI’s GPT models and online services, on which the Pin is completely dependent. It’s a bit tragic for Humane’s clearly talented startup team. I’m inclined to see the hardware as beautiful and an engineering accomplishment, and what parts of the user experience they could customize with the laser projector and prompt design are probably pretty good, but it doesn’t change the fact that the Pin’s brains are borrowed. A company with financial independence and the ability to make its own hardware, software, and AI services would have a better chance. Hmm… is there anyone like that?

    Meanwhile, a new AI music generation tool called Udio launched in public beta this week and I spent some time with it. I’ve only played with AI models that do text, images, and video, but never audio. It’s currently free while in beta and lets you make a generous amount of samples, so there’s no reason not to take a look.

    Basically you describe the song you want with a text prompt, and it spits out a 33-second clip. From there, you can remix or extend the clip by adding more 33-second chunks. It generates everything from the melodies to the lyrics (you can provide some if you want), including all instruments and voices you hear. Is it any good? It’s very impressive, although not every song is a banger yet. Listening to hip-hop instrumentals featured on the home page, I thought to ask for a couple of conscious rap songs and they came out well, with convincing sounding vocals. I then asked it to write a jazzy number about blogging on a weekly basis and you can judge for yourself if the future is here.

    At present, I see this as a fun toy for the not-so-musically inclined like myself, and as an inspiration faucet for amateur songwriters who work faster with a starting point. So, pretty much like what ChatGPT is for everything else. And like ChatGPT, I can see a future where this threatens human livelihoods by being good enough, at the very least disrupting the background music industry.

    Comfort sounds

    One musical suite that stands as a symbol of human ingenuity’s irreplaceability, though, is what I’ve been playing in the background on my HomePods all week while reading and writing: the soundtrack to Animal Crossing New Horizons. Because Nintendo hasn’t made the official tracks available for streaming, I’ve been playing this fantastic album of jazz piano covers by Shin Giwon Piano on Apple Music. It takes me right back to those quiet, cozy house-bound days of the pandemic. Could an AI ever take the place of composers like Kazumi Totaka? I remain hopeful that they won’t.

    Maggie Rogers released her third album, Don’t Forget Me. I put it on for a walk around the neighborhood on Saturday evening and found it’s the kind of country-inflected folk rock album I tend to love. One song in particular, If Now Was Then, triggered my musical pattern recognition and I realized a significant bit sounds very much like the part in Counting Crows’ Sullivan Street where Adam Duritz goes “I’m almost drowning in her sea”. It’s a lovely bit of borrowing that I enjoyed; putting copyright aside, experiencing a nostalgic callback to another song inside a new song is always cool. It’s one of the best things about hip-hop! But why is it okay when a human does it but not when it’s generative AI? I guess we’re back to Buddhism: Everything hangs on intention.

    ===

    Miscellanea

    • I watched more Jujutsu Kaisen despite not being really blown away by it. Mostly I’ve been keen to see the full scene of a clip I saw posted on Twitter, where the fight animation looked more kinetic and inventive than you’d normally expect. I decided that it must have come from Jujutsu Kaisen 0: The Movie, because movies have bigger budgets and the animation in season 1 looked nothing like it. And I had to finish season 1 in order to watch and understand the movie.
    • Well, I saw the movie and it was alright, but it didn’t have that fight scene. So where is it?? That got me watching more episodes of the TV anime, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a jump in quality like this between two seasons of a show. It seems a new director came on board (maybe more money too), and suddenly the art is cleaner, the camera angles are more striking and unconventional, and everything else went up a notch. I guess I’m watching another 20+ episodes of this then.
    • I finished Netflix’s eight-episode adaptation of Three Body Problem. I’m not invested enough to say I’d definitely watch a second season, assuming they pick it up at all.
    • On that topic, Utada Hikaru released a greatest hits compilation called Science Fiction, with three “new” songs, and 23 other classics either re-recorded, remixed, and/or remastered in Dolby Atmos. I don’t really know these songs in that I have no idea what many are actually about, but I’ve heard them so much over the last 25 years, I probably know them more deeply than most.
  • Week 14.24

    Week 14.24

    I’ve gone and given myself another sabbatical. I’m looking forward to getting ‘important’ things done, like reading till my Kobo dies so I can buy a new one with USB-C charging, finally playing the new Zelda, watching Tampopo for the first time, exploring our public libraries, drawing a couple more Misery Men, and listening to finance podcasts because I need to graduate from roboadvisors. This will also involve stepping into a sort of low power mode when it comes to spending: public transportation, teabags instead of Nespresso pods, no new TV or PS5, canceling YouTube Premium…

    Some people asked when I made the decision or started to think about time off, but I couldn’t realistically pin a date on the donkey. I started to look through recent updates and found that I mentioned needing more videogame time as recently as two weeks ago, but it was definitely on my mind before.

    Perhaps the seeds of this extended leisure were planted during the final weeks of my last funemployment break, as seen in this post where I suddenly found a bunch of new interests and projects just as my freedom time was running out. I’d forgotten so much about that period until I started to re-read old entries while writing this update; a sort of climbing back into a dream after visiting the bathroom at night. This is week #197, which means I’ve been at this for nearly four years, and I must say it’s been worth it.

    It’s safe to assume I’m looking forward to this break, but I’ll definitely miss many aspects of working with the team I’ve been part of for the past seven years — a side of my life I deliberately omit here, but consequently won’t have an extensive external memory of to revisit (apart from photos, chats, and remnants of the work we’ve done floating out in the world).

    On that note, a few of us attended a community-run service design meetup on Serangoon Road Thursday and were surprised by the large turnout. One lovely thing that happened: we met a young designer working at one of our earliest clients, in the experience team we had a hand in setting up. Hearing from her that the work I did is still being used and built upon, helping to drive customer experience at one of the best brands in its category, felt like a nice bookend to this phase of mUh cArEeR.

    I don’t know what I’ll do next, but have no plans to think about it for at least a few months.

    ===

    Media activity:

    • How are we supposed to build memories on digital copyright quicksand? I noticed that track 14 of Vultures 1 has disappeared from Apple Music, at least in Singapore. More than the fluctuating prices, algorithms influencing commerce influencing art, and the shitty business model for musicians, the impermanence and lack of ownership might be my least-favorite thing about the shift to streaming.
    • According to the song’s Genius page, the song was also removed from Spotify back in February owing to “clearance issues”. My relationship with music would definitely be different if I’d grown up with mixtapes that could suddenly have gaps of silence in them after you’d given them away.
    • We finished Season 2 of Below Deck Down Under, and as I’ve said before, these two Australian seasons show some of the best teamwork and leadership (although not without the drama that people watch this show for) out of all the Below Deck we’ve seen (easily over 100 episodes, oh my life…) and it’s simply down to Captain Jason and Chief Stew Aesha acting like adults, communicating openly, and not being lazy. We’ll probably head back to Season 8 of the main show after this and I’m dreading being back under the command of Captain Lee.
    • I tried to resume watching Three Body Problem on Netflix despite online comments that it gets too slow and boring. The fourth episode certainly was, and I almost gave up, writing in my notes that it was “such a shame an intriguing premise can be flatly shot, shoddily paced, and annoyingly acted into mere weekend background fodder.” And then I saw episode 5, which features a bonkers CGI-heavy set piece in the middle plus a lot more going on, and now I’m back in.
  • Week 12.24

    Week 12.24

    If you’re reading this on the web, you might notice that this site is now running WordPress’s new ‘Twenty Twenty Four’ theme, with a more traditional blog-like homepage (it has a sidebar) linking to single-column post pages. Navigation remains unchanged, but typography and minor details are improved.

    I’m happier with this than I was with the blocky grid of last year’s ‘Twenty Twenty Three’ theme, because this comes with the freedom to put up shorter posts without Titles or Featured Images. Over the years I’ve gone back and forth on microblogging here, or having all tweets mirrored here, but it’s never stuck. But at least I have the option again, especially since I haven’t properly posted on Twitter in a year and most people I want to follow are still scattered across Threads, Bluesky, Nostr, and Mastodon.

    ===

    We celebrated a little life milestone this week with a nature walk, a “Gold Class” viewing of Dune Part Two, a nice bottle of French Malbec, and a perfect Canadian pork chop with a side of the butteriest mashed potatoes. A mix of simple and simpler pleasures.

    I’ll expand: We were recently in New Zealand, and took a couple of walks in nature reserves. I’ve never bothered to attempt the same in Singapore because it’s ridiculously hot, but visiting the Rifle Range Nature Park in West Singapore was interesting for the stark contrast offered versus our recent experiences. Every step on its paths is sure footed by design; suspended walkways take you through the forest without trampling plants, and they’re so convenient all the monkeys we saw were using them as well, rather than walking in the dirt. You get the sense that everything is regularly inspected and all dangers have been scrubbed. It reflects the usual criticism of Singapore being a theme park, which is only a problem because living in a safe environment breeds complacency. At several points on the easiest routes at Te Mata Park in New Zealand, slipping off a path and tumbling into a ravine was a genuine possibility. I wonder what other metaphorical tumbles Singaporean life has not prepared me for.

    The new Dune is as superb as all reviews have indicated, and I could not imagine rating it any less than 5 stars in Letterboxd. The art direction and photography are flawless, and it looks twice as expensive as it is. Never once while watching did my brain check out and think, “oh, that’s CGI”. The only change I would dare suggest is Austin Butler’s casting, as he’s not anywhere as menacing as the movie treats him. His character is already a nepo baby who just enjoys killing defenseless slaves and servants, and Butler didn’t bring the presence to suggest he’s also one of the most dangerous people in a universe full of freaks.

    Another 5-star film for us this week was Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days (2023), which won a Best Actor award at Cannes last year for Koji Yakusho’s nearly wordless performance. I enjoyed it tremendously as a loving tribute to the city of Tokyo and its toilets (really), a meditation on repetition and routine, an ode to proud and purposeful work, and a parable about how avoiding the messiness of life might obscure living itself. The soundtrack is a Gen X dream. Visually, it’s filled with beautiful everyday moments so mundane as to be overlooked by most of us going about our daily busyness. The way all its themes and music choices come together in the film’s final minutes is worth half a star alone.

    Continuing the theme of Japanese films about appreciating life, we watched Living (2022), the transposed-to-England remake of Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952). I’ve never seen the original, but it’s now high on my list. Bill Nighy is fantastic in the role of a civil servant who learns he’s dying and wonders what it’s all about, and plays his deconstruction with impressive vulnerability. I looked at the trailer for Ikiru afterwards, and while Takashi Shimura’s performance in the same role is regarded as iconic, it was a little theatrical and may not have aged as well.

    Anyhow, the message in both these films is timeless: stop working so hard at meaningless things, smell the roses (or watch the shadows cast by leaves — ‘komorebi’ in Japanese, as the end credits of Perfect Days tells us), and make a difference to another human being’s life.

    Take a little forest bathing break with this video I captured.

    ===

    Additional media activity:

    • We finished Season 1 of Below Deck Down Under at last, and I was glad to learn that Captain Jason and Chief Stew Aesha return for Season 2, which we now must see. The leadership and teamwork these two have put Captain Lee and Kate of the mainline series to bottomless shame.
    • The new Call of Duty mobile version of Warzone has finally come out, after being delayed for about a year. As a somewhat devoted player of the original Call of Duty Mobile title, I’ve been waiting with very high expectations for this. Unfortunately, the launch has been a bit of a dud, with many complaints from the worldwide community. For one, Android devices seem incapable of running it well. On my iPhone 15 Pro Max, it runs at peak performance and the graphics are truly console quality; I was running around maps that I knew instinctively, but my brain was exploding from how different and detailed everything looked. Sadly, the phone runs hot and it drained the better part of my battery in maybe an hour. I’ll wait to see if they improve anything before calling it quits.
    • The new Kacey Musgraves album, Deeper Well, is not bad at all. It even has a song called Anime Eyes which drops a line about a “Miyazaki sky”. Very weird times we live in.
    • I started using a new social app that tries to be a Letterboxd for music: Musicboard. Unfortunately, it doesn’t automatically log/scrobble your listening activity, so rating music and broadcasting your taste is a manual affair. You also can’t start playing an album directly in Apple Music from within the app — it only supports Spotify at the moment.

  • Week 11.24

    Week 11.24

    Kim was away for work this week so that meant a return to pandemic routine for me: I worked from home every day, mostly staying in our ‘office’ room hopping on calls, flopping from chair to couch, picking up my Playdate* to kill a minute here and there, scrolling feeds (#WhereIsKateMiddleton), and mostly eating simple, low-cost, not entirely healthy meals.

    I did, however, pay attention to the bottle of olive oil in our kitchen, which is now past its best-before date, and looked into what a good replacement would be. In the process, I watched some YouTube videos on the supposed benefits of having two or more tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil a day, which can be summed up as reducing your risk of dying from several awful diseases by up to 19%. One video made a case for buying the better stuff thusly: imagine you’re visiting a friend’s home; you’d typically bring along a bottle of wine that costs between $20–30 (people who show up empty handed are so weird, right!?), which will be drunk within the first hour and followed by the opening of another bottle, and maybe another — that’s fair and normal, so why is it so hard to pay the same amount for a bottle of olive oil that you’ll use for months?

    That sold me, and I’m pledging to only use quality oil from now on. I was already aware of most of these benefits and how seed oils are comparatively terrible, but the comparison to a bottle of wine really hit it home for me and I don’t see why anyone wouldn’t spend a few extra bucks for tastier, healthier stuff if they could. Pro tip: try drinking a spoonful on its own, and see how much of that prickly, peppery sensation you get in the back of your throat. That’s a sign of the polyphenol content, which gives the antioxidant effects you want.

    At nights I accomplished shockingly little of the movie marathoning I’d imagined for my bachelor week. I saw two episodes of Red Queen on Amazon Prime Video, a series based on a “Spanish literary phenomenon” involving a woman with an IQ of 242 who helps the police catch serial killers in between psychotic episodes. And that’s about it? The rest of my viewing time was spent on YouTube watching Bloomberg, CNBC, and video podcasts over lunch.

    When Kim got back, we tried to make plans for Dune Part 2, but couldn’t find a time slot that worked, and did you know IMAX tickets are S$50 now? Even the nearest theater to us is charging nearly S$40 for their premium “Gold Class” seats, which gave me pause to wonder if we should just wait for it to come out on streaming.

    And then we watched Oppenheimer at home, on our nearly 10-year-old HDTV (that’s right, no 4K or HDR), which is totally not the way Nolan imagined. Despite the technical limitations of our screening, it was an extremely cinematic and immersive experience, and made me think some things are definitely worth the IMAX. So, maybe Dune next weekend.

    Music was just as neglected as the other arts, and the only new album I heard through was Ariana Grande’s latest: Eternal Sunshine. I didn’t register a single word, but it’s actually fantastic background R&B. That’s not a slight! It sounds good, doesn’t do anything crazy, and after a few more listens I’ll probably get into it for real.

    However, I am listening to Chick Corea’s Now He Sings, Now He Sobs (1968) as I write this, if you want something a little more challenging/rewarding.

  • Week 9.24

    Week 9.24

    I finally got my hands on a Playdate! This is the tiny yellow handheld gaming device that was announced by Panic Inc. back in 2019 and came out in 2022. Longtime Mac users will know Panic as a software development company that in recent years started to dabble in games publishing — Firewatch was their first, followed by the smash hit Untitled Goose Game — and the Playdate is their first foray into making hardware. Which we all know is 1) hard, and 2) what people who are serious about software do. In this case, the industrial design came by way of the very trendy outfit, Teenage Engineering, who can hardly do any wrong and certainly didn’t slip here*.

    It’s a tiny little thing, about the size of a Post-It note and about as thick as an iPhone minus the camera bump. The screen is designed for young eyes and has no lighting: it’s purely reflective and relies on ambient light, so you won’t be playing this in bed late at night. Did I mention the screen is in black and white? Keeping things simple is exactly what a little thing like this should do, but it adds a unique input method with a little crank on the side; a gimmick so obvious and versatile it feels like something Nintendo would have done on a Game Boy in some parallel universe. Everything feels solid and extremely well put together, as it should for US$199.

    You might think this is a niche luxury retro gaming gadget, and while there are chiptunes, the software experience is very contemporary. Fluid animations, an eShop with elevator music à la Wii menus, and a catalog of modern, inventive indie games by luminaries such as Zach Gage, Chuck Jordan, and Shaun Inman. Included with your purchase are 24 original games that automatically unlock at a rate of two each week, keeping the thing fresh long enough to form a habit. After that, there’s a whole online catalog to shop from. Have a look to see if this is your sort of thing, but the first two games (Casual Birder and Whitewater Wipeout) from “Season 1” are promising and I’m eagerly waiting to see what’s next.

    When the Playdate was first released, I didn’t buy one because they didn’t ship to Singapore, but my friend and colleague Jose ordered two through a freight forwarding service, so he’s had his for a while. He offered to sell the other one to me, but I declined. My stance on companies snubbing Singapore with their shipping policies is simple: if you’re not selling here officially, you’re not getting my money. That’s why I never had an OG iPhone and don’t have an Apple Vision Pro or Steam Deck.

    * I put an asterisk above because it’s worth pointing out here that the intersection of millennials who love gaming and millennials who are drawn to Teenage Engineering products is probably very large, with Jose and myself squarely in it.

    Then a couple of weeks ago, I got an email from them to say they finally worked through their very long production and shipping backlog, so if you ordered one now you’d get it almost immediately, plus sales were open to many more countries, including Singapore. And this is ironic because the thing is manufactured in Malaysia, prominently stated on the back of the device, which is just a short drive away.

    So far my only problem with it is that I may have gotten a dud battery, or it needs some cycling before it lasts as long as it’s supposed to. File this one under Brandon’s Battery Curse: it happens (objectively!) on nearly every device I’m excited to buy, and I end up getting a replacement or just learning to live with it. It’s happened with iPhones, iPads, headphones, fitness trackers, you name it. Maybe I just notice it more than most and it drives me crazy.

    ===

    Ever since I got back from New Zealand, I’ve been thinking a lot about fragrances. I think this happened because I was mindlessly shopping at duty-free stores at airports on both sides and started looking for a good deal. I’ve been wondering if it’s finally time to freshen up my cologne collection, so to speak. I currently use just a handful (three, really) and never really think about buying new fragrances except for once every three or four years when it’s finally time to throw them out and get some new ones in.

    If you’ve been to Fragrantica.com, you’ll know what a terrible rabbit hole this can be. Instead of buying something really expensive, I decided to scratch the itch by blind buying a bottle of Davidoff Cool Water Intense EDP, because I always wanted the original Cool Water as a teenager. This one is a new fragrance altogether, characterized by green mandarin and coconut nectar notes, and is quite aggressive and long-lasting. Haters say it has nothing to do with Cool Water, but I think the idea is that it’s in the same conceptual territory — warm summery vibes, casual like a linen shirt, worn poolside at a four-star resort. It’s not bad!

    Unfortunately for me, the itch was not fully scratched, and I’ve still been looking. I’m keen on this idea of revisiting classic fragrances from the 90s with new incarnations, and it seems the industry is too: Acqua di Gio (there’s a new EDP formulation), CK All (a sort of midpoint between One and Be), and Issey Miyake’s L’eau d’Issey Pour Homme EDT (no change here, still the original). Is this a mini midlife crisis? Will it end with me smelling like a teenager?

    ===

    Media activity:

    • We finally finished Season 1 of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters on Apple TV+ and I’m gonna do a Hideo Kojima-style review here and leave it at that.
    • We also finished Season 1 of Mr. And Mrs. Smith on Amazon Prime Video and really enjoyed it. It’s the rare 8-episode season that felt like the perfect length, given the creative choice to show most of their missions as excerpts and focus on the spaces between.
    • I read on William Gibson’s Twitter account that a Neuromancer TV series is underway, and it will be only 10 episodes long. Seeing as Neuromancer was the blueprint for so much of what came after with The Matrix and other cyberpunk-indebted stories, I’m low-key hoping they’re not very faithful to the source and use this as an opportunity to go big with some fresh futurism, and draw up a new world the likes of which we’ve never seen before on screen, like Spielberg did with Minority Report. Spend that Cupertino money!
    • In line with my olfactory return to the 90s, I’ve been listening to Counting Crows again. They released a new album of two live performances from ’93 and ’94, entitled Feathers In My Hand, which has brought me back. This is a band that deserves some 20th anniversary or super deluxe edition remasters!

  • Week 4.24

    Week 4.24

    A little while ago, I learnt that an ex-colleague of mine has received a stage 4 cancer diagnosis, and he’s only a few years older than me. Despite the fact that more “young” people seem to be getting cancer, it was still a deep shock because Tony was always incredibly fit and dedicated to his health. He’s been writing openly about his thoughts and experience on his Medium account, which I read before meeting him for lunch with some other former colleagues this week. It was tough seeing him in poorer shape, but true to his personal brand, he seemed extremely pragmatic and matter-of-fact about it all.

    We worked on the same team for about a year back in 2018, but were only on one project together as peers, leading design activities and client workshops together over a few months. I count myself fortunate to have had that experience, and learnt a lot from his confidence and wealth of technical knowledge when it came to UX matters — which was not my area of focus. Even then it was clear he had a knack for facing reality, and a passion for making sure the younger generation had their eyes open to the inequities of working life. Not always a popular topic, but life sucks. He mentioned that whenever he finds the strength these days, he works on his own design education materials that prepare students for non-ideal situations, and I thought that made perfect sense for him.

    Many of the things we talked about over lunch echoed other conversations I’ve been having with other friends. Maybe it’s the return of tech layoffs in the news, but negative sentiments seem as high as they were during Covid, with the questioning of boundaries and priorities taking place again. Tony understandably tried to impress upon us that some things aren’t worth having as regrets, and that we should make better choices while we still can. When I asked him what else he does now on days that aren’t lost to medical interventions, the answer was surprisingly similar to how I spent most of my year off work: reading, writing, and drawing.

    Peishan shared this Guardian article about people with cancer who’ve found the clarity to spend their remaining time meaningfully, and I thought Mark Edmondson landed the point that some people have trouble getting: the work that gives you purpose today isn’t the only purpose you’ll have.

    People (usually millennials) also mention the difficulty they have switching off from work. On a daily basis, but also when they go on vacation — taking half the holiday to get into holiday mode is a terrible inefficiency. I recall it took me months to unwind from a state of nearly burning out and to stop worrying about my “sabbatical ROI”. We should be like newer hybrid vehicles that can shut their engines down when idling at traffic lights and spring back to life quickly when needed, but instead us older cars only know how to burn gas all the time. I want to be a disused school bus just rusting in a field, bright yellow and unbothered.

    ===

    • I visited the Prix Pictet photo exhibition that’s part of Singapore Art Week (maybe it’ll be the only event I attend from this year’s edition) and found it beautiful but gosh it was mostly depressing. The theme was “Human” but it may as well have been “Human Suffering” — from communities devastated by the effects of mining and metal poisoning, to the plight of illegal refugees trekking 66 miles through jungle in search of better opportunities, they seemed to comment that there’s not much joy in being human these days. I joked halfway through that I hoped there would be a series of mundane birthday party photos at the end. There wasn’t.
    • Kim spent most of her week preparing an elaborate, successful Indian dinner from the Dishoom cookbook, but that’s really a story for her own weeknotes if they ever happen. The takeaway for me has been that, after seeing how the proverbial samosa is made, the Indian takeaways we usually get are probably quite unhealthy and we need to cut down.
    • Nintendo is having a January sale on the Switch eShop and I considered getting the remake of an apparent classic time loop visual novel, YU-NO: A girl who chants love at the bound of this world, yes, that is its title. It’s apparently the spiritual forebear of games such as Steins;gate, but after watching a short gameplay video on YouTube, I decided that since life is too short, I really didn’t want to punish myself. An anime adaptation was made a few years ago, so I will simply watch that instead.
    • We are enjoying the new British police drama Criminal Record on Apple TV+. Peter Capaldi is really good in it, although all the police work and cornering of baddies with their secrets is carried out really incompetently.
    • Can you believe that The Smile dropped a new album a couple of days ago and I had to find out from YouTube instead of Apple Music? Seriously, I’m looking at my For You page and it’s not mentioned under New Releases. This music video, where the band plays a new song for an auditorium full of young children — most of them bewildered or bored out of their minds, but with a couple really into it — is such a simple and charming concept I can’t believe I can’t name another time it’s been done.