After making the sci-fi adventure Chrono Quest, I thought my next GPT game should be all the way in the other direction, so Cruising For Love is a bit of a rom-com dating sim set on a cruise.
You are on a five-day cruise to try and find romance. You should have a new experience each time you play: new destinations, new activities, new people to meet, and hopefully new breakfast items at the buffet restaurant. You don’t have to tell the game your gender or what kind of person you’re into, but it doesn’t hurt.
You can simply play it like a choose-your-own-adventure game and pick from the multiple choices given to you at the end of each turn, or take the keyboard and start providing more detail about where you’d like to take things. You can double-time/triple-time, play hard to get, take someone shopping for diamonds, reveal your secret magic skills, or try to seduce the captain. Nearly anything you can dream of, as long as it’s related to finding love.
You may or may not encounter some surprises along the way, making your successful pursuit of a love interest not exactly a given. So turn on the charm, put your leisure suit on, and start cruising for love!
Why do people never rinse their mouths out after brushing their teeth in the movies?
Isn’t it misleading and bad for oral hygiene education if directors leave it out for pacing reasons?
What’s the recipe for a Vesper martini?
How might a wealthy Indonesian put their billions of IDR to work beyond investing? (asking for a friend, I swear)
Aside: ‘Asking the internet’ used to be our go-to phrase, but in an era where AI might be the one answering, does the term need revising? We used to be able to say ‘asking the internet’ but what about when you’re really asking an AI? They live on the internet and were certainly trained on internet content, but the old definition meant looking up content and new replies created by people; what do we call it when the answers AI generated? Keeping in mind that these answers may well be wrong, and in ways different from how a human might be wrong, it doesn’t feel like we should use the same terms. Or maybe we’ll keep referring to any hive mind as the internet?
Can I go a week without talking about AI? I think those days may be behind us.
Even iA Writer, the Markdown text editor I use for these updates, released a new update with an AI-related feature. No, it’s not automatically finishing your sentences or summarizing your essays. They’re all about the writing experience and process, and so they’re embracing how people use ChatGPT as a writing assistant, but helping them to preserve their own authentic voices. Text pasted from ChatGPT can be visually differentiated from text you wrote yourself, so you can see the Frankensteinian stitches on your monster. It also saves this info in the metadata for provenance.
This suggests that many users send text back and forth to ChatGPT so often that they end up forgetting which bits they wrote themselves, which isn’t a problem I’ve had so far, but going forward, who knows? It’s a good idea and one I’m glad they’re testing, but iA Writer has always been a niche tool for a certain kind of user. I thnk word processors with integrated AI are going to be so widely used and loved by the end of 2024 that no one will care about who did what part.
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I made and released a new GPT, a game called Chrono Quest where you go back in time to improve humanity’s chances of beating an alien invasion. You can read more about it in my post here, but there are many ways to succeed, limited only by your imagination and problem solving inclinations. As a kid playing text adventure games, I never thought I’d see the day they could write themselves as you played. It even creates illustrations along the way, although those aren’t strictly necessary.
I’ve got some other game ideas I’ll probably get on soon over the Christmas break. OpenAI announced yesterday that the GPT “App Store” meant to open in November was being delayed until early 2024. I guess that gives me more time to learn.
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It’s not accurate to say I didn’t get anything during the Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales. Pixelmator Pro for Mac was 50% off, and I thought it was time I upgraded to it from regular ol’ Pixelmator, which I must have bought over ten years ago for personal use as a substitute for Photoshop. Those were the days of per-once, use-forever software. To the developers’ credit, Pixelmator Pro is still offered through that model, although their newest app, Photomator, prefers a subscription pricing plan. The latter just won Apple’s Mac App of the Year award, by the way.
Pixelmator Pro is more than just a Photoshop-type editor now, it’s also a video and vector image editor, and comes with lots of templates for creating posters, logos, and so on. And like Photomator, it has useful ML-based features for correcting color, removing noise, and increasingly resolution of photos. These are pretty old-school and conservative by the standards of generative AI — see the recent development of Magnific AI, a tool confusingly billed as “upscaling” when it’s really closer to hallucination. It can subjectively improve the quality of photos by generating plausible (but inaccurate) pixels.
Check out this “upscaling” of Tomb Raider 1.
⚡ OK, this is impressive 🤯
I also wanted to try upscaling Lara Croft from PS1 to super high resolution! Mini step by step tutorial 👇
Stumbling into the New York jazz scene by accident, I found two jazz artists I’d like to recommend: Brandee Younger and Samara Joy. Both already have a couple of albums out.
Younger is a harpist who blends genres and leans modern. You’ll hear some hip-hop production, and it’s really not what you think when you hear the word “harp”. Her new album is Brand New Life, and is apparently based on and inspired the work of legendary harpist Dorothy Ashby, who I was also ignorant of. This is a weird observation, but hear me out. The opening track, the previously unrecorded, Ashby-written piece You’re A Girl For One Man Only, has a haunting melodic fragment that I think I recognize from… the soundtrack of the Japanese game/anime Steins;Gate of all things?!
Samara Joy is a much more traditional vocalist, but what an incredible instrument her voice is. I’ll leave a video of her covering Lush Life below and you’ll see what I mean. I’m about to put her Christmas EP, A Joyful Holiday, on and get some lunch. See y’all later.
(This week’s featured image was taken at a new mall that’s sprung up in Holland Village this weekend. It’s disconcerting; the massive development has been hidden behind hoardings for the past few years, and now revealed, it’s an unexpected contrast to the other old buildings and shopfronts, like a bionic arm of mediocre high street brands slapped onto an aging body.)
A thrilling adventure through time to give humanity a fighting chance!
Chrono Quest is an interactive fiction game, like the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure stories of old. There are occasional graphics generated by DALL•E, just like how those books would have illustrations every now and then. Unlike those books, it’s a GPT that writes a different story each time, one that responds to your inputs and imagination. You can stick to the provided multiple choice options, or respond freely with your own ideas.
The set up: An alien invasion threatens earth, and recently discovered time travel technology is our only hope. You must go back in time to change history and prepare humanity to meet this challenge.
Things I’ve tried (mild spoilers): I’ve done some ridiculous things in this game. I’ve gone back to find Jesus and recorded a video message of him appealing to people of the future to work together against the invaders. I prevented Hitler from taking power by stealing his playbook and being an even bigger Hitler. I imbued primitive cavemen with modern human DNA, to accelerate our evolution (and found myself the dumbest and shortest man in the world upon my return to the future). I also stopped the Fall of Constantinople with Semtex plastic explosives, prevented the Library of Alexandria from burning by building a firebreak , and became Leonardo da Vinci’s best mate after stumbling into his workshop with a fake stab wound. My colleague Brian played it and beat the aliens by uniting the world under a single market economy and rewriting property laws.
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This is the first game I’ve made since the launch of custom GPTs a few weeks ago. I played a bunch of text adventures as a kid, and just with books versus movies, they can be more immersive and fun than AAA games made for millions of dollars.
AI Dungeon blew my mind when it came out a few years ago, unstable and liable to forget or misunderstand context as it was, it fulfilled many childhood dreams by being a flexible “dungeon master” that could take a story almost anywhere you asked it to. Wanted to pull out a gun in a medieval story, or use diplomatic words to get out of a situation? It was up to you. That was three years ago and built on GPT-2. It’s now three years later, and anyone can make their own custom story/game powered by GPT-4 — with virtually every shortcoming of AI Dungeon solved. Stories are incredibly coherent, natural, and well written.
You can use normal ChatGPT to play interactive fiction games, and the story of Chrono Quest was one of the first I experimented with earlier this year. You can have a pretty good time even with GPT-3.5! But the advantage of custom GPTs is that you can craft a game world and share it with other people to play, specifying a certain style, and keeping an element of surprise when it comes to how the game plays out and interacts with the player.
I might make more, I don’t know! Your thoughts are welcome.
I used to (sporadically) log my mood and mental state in a great free app called How We Feel, but ever since iOS 17 came out with a similar feature in the Health.app, I’ve been doing it there. It’s nowhere as good, though, and the act of recording how you feel is (surprise!) so much better in How We Feel. Apple’s version makes you scroll a list of feelings like Anxious, Content, and Sad, sorted in alphabetical order.
The other app arranges feelings in a colorful 2×2 grid, from high to low energy, from unpleasant to pleasant. An example of a high-energy unpleasant feeling is Terrified, while a low-energy pleasant feeling might be Serene. This grid is a much more logical and visual way to find the right word and quickly record your feelings throughout the day. Anyway, the rumor is that iOS 17.1 will be out next week, and I’m hoping the new Journal app is part of it, because I want better ways to record and look back on my state of mind.
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We attended the local premiere of Martin Scorsese’s new film that everyone’s talking about online: Killers of the Flower Moon. In a theater, no less! It’s an Apple Original Film, and will be coming to Apple TV+ after this irl run is over. I can’t remember the last 3.5 hour film I saw under such circumstances, unable to take a break, forced to focus. If I’d seen it at home I’d probably have paused it no less than five times, and so I’m glad that I couldn’t, because it’s the kind of film that quietly spends its budget building a world so absolutely intact and complete that you’re left to focus on the people, the time, and the weight of its historical crimes. As a true story, it’s devastating. “People are the worst” is pretty much my 4-star Letterboxd review.
On the flip side, we saw disgraced filmmaker Woody Allen’s 2019 film, A Rainy Day in New York, which has pretty poor ratings online, and really enjoyed it. I’m aware that he has approximately, oh… one style? And a hallmark of it is neurotic, pretentious characters in awkward romantic situations who spout smart alecky jokes in an artificial, stage performance cadence… but I like it. It’s also amusing to see current generation stars like Timothée Chalamet and Elle Fanning as his stars, but playing their roles exactly like Woody. Is it because they’ve seen his old films and think they have to? Or do the scripts just demand that delivery? Also, Selena Gomez is in it, and I can’t help but see this performance as a superior version of what she does in Only Murders in the Building.
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I got jabbed for Hepatitis A & B on Friday, and it was a doozy. I felt lightheaded and weird all afternoon afterwards, and I have to go back for two more boosters over the next few months.
Contributing to the feeling all weekend has been my new contact lenses, the first ones I’ve worn in maybe 8 years? The right eye prescription is a little underpowered and so I’m suffering with blurry images that are driving me crazy. I’ll need to try and get them exchanged next week.
Why am I wearing them at all? I got an annoying pimple/scratch behind one ear, exactly where the arm of my glasses sit, and so I decided on some disposable dailies while it heals. On one hand, the feeling of freedom is amazing — I really miss this about wearing contacts, which I did regularly in my younger days. Just things like being able to do a spontaneous facepalm! But now everyone has learnt that “my look” is “guy with glasses”, and suddenly my normal face looks weird, even to me gazing in the mirror, and I don’t need to freak people out any more than necessary.
The blurriness has had a slight impact on my enjoyment of Super Mario Wonder, the latest and greatest Mario game which just came out. I wasn’t planning to buy it, because I wasn’t planning to play it any time soon, being still in the middle of another old Mario game on the Switch, Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Revenge. But peer pressure got to me, and talking to Jussi got me justifying it to myself that playing a 2D and 3D Mario game at the same time isn’t a problem — it’s like reading a fiction and non-fiction book at the same time!
Super Mario Wonder is the 2D one, for the uninitiated. It’s a modern take on the classic Mario games, far more inventive and deep-reaching than even the New Super Mario Bros. series of games that tried to breathe new life into the side-scrolling platforming formula. Wonder has incredibly detailed and expressive animations all throughout: Mario and friends move and react to things like characters in a proper animated movie (was this planned to coincide with this year’s film? I don’t know), bursting with character, while the levels and events are literally psychedelic festivals of invention. This is a blockbuster game that spends its budget conspicuously, gleefully.
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In playing with DALL•E 3 some more (within ChatGPT Plus), I discovered that it goes a great job of replicating the look of classic 80s anime. You literally just have to ask it for that. I tried some classic scenes, and then asked for couples hanging out near a 7-Eleven drinking Strong Zero, and then for screenshots from a movie about a female detective investigating a case of financial fraud, and it’s that last one that made me think this thing is a new milestone in tools for visualizing stories.
There was a period about a year ago when quite a few new moms all had ideas for children’s books, and wanted to use DALL•E or Midjourney to illustrate them. I got questions about whether it was feasible to do this, and if you’ve been talking everyone’s head off about this stuff too, you probably had the same conversations.
I think this level of natural language interface with GPT-4 and DALL•E 3 coming together is finally making it possible for anyone to direct images with consistent settings and characters. I read somewhere that Midjourney v6 is going to make prompting easier as well, so perhaps we’ll get a flood of storybooks next year.
There was also a thing going around on Threads that basically asked participants to “paste your Threads bio into an AI art tool” and see what comes out. I saw a few people doing this, all floored by the accuracy of the people they saw gazing back through the black mirror, I suspect afraid of how accurately they were seen from just a few keywords — one lady said “I own all of those tops”.
I think this is a pretty strong signal for the mainstreaming of generative AI, that a meme like this can spread without instructions attached. Everyone who is online enough knows what it means to invoke an electronic genie that grants image wishes, knows very well how to go find one and get the deed done. Next year is going to be wild.
But anyway I wanted to try it out, although my bio isn’t like “Founder/CEO (he/him), hustling 24/7 🇸🇬, new book out 20/12, always up for coffee ☕️ and meetups 🤝”; it’s currently “Designer, sense-maker, aesthete, imposter, garbage, scum.” which gives you results like this:
Remember the Leica Sofort (German for “instantly”) camera? It came out of nowhere years ago, an unacknowledged collaboration with Fujifilm that took their popular Instax Mini 90 model and rehoused it in a sleeker Leica-designed body (offered at a much higher price, nearly double if I recall right). Reviewers tried to discern a difference in the photos, but they were essentially identical cameras on the inside. For some reason, everyone danced around the similarities and at best said the Sofort was “inspired” by the Mini 90, as if it was a new Instax camera by Leica that somehow came out looking mighty similar, rather than a simple body swap at the same Fuji factory.
This week, Leica announced the Sofort 2, which is now a redesigned Instax mini Evo (a camera I bought myself for Christmas in 2021). Where the original Sofort was a fully analog Instax camera, the Sofort 2 is one of Fuji’s hybrids: a digital camera fused with one of their Instax printers, so you can take tons of photos and then decide which to print.
In my opinion, the mini Evo is the least ugly Instax camera Fuji has made, which is one of the reasons I was excited to get one when they came out. Oh, I noticed that Jurin from XG uses one, and some of their IG posts look like mini Evo shots. But the Sofort 2 is beautiful, streamlining the body to its essential elements and removing nearly all traces of fake plastic leather and silver-effect plastic.
Leica’s ability to wrap other companies’ cameras in minimalist industrial designs and sell them for more money is unmatched. I bought their D-Lux 7 precisely because I wanted Panasonic’s LX100M2 but could not get behind its rugged hiking shoe looks.
Where the mini Evo is a cute plastic facsimile of a Fujifilm X100 camera, and wearing one around on a shoulder strap makes you look like a kid who’s been placated with their very own toy iPhone, the Sofort 2 looks like a camera in its own right (far as I can tell from the images). And as little as I have used my mini Evo over the past two years, it will be very hard to convince myself not to “upgrade” to this version for Christmas. And to be clear, there are ZERO functional improvements from the Fuji version, apart from not looking like a toy.
Fujifilm makes their Instax cameras kid-friendly. They’re colorful, bulbous, fun, and recall the freewheeling sensibilities of product design before the 2008 financial crisis, when phones could look like tubes of lipstick and translucentplastics were everywhere (they’re coming back). The Leica partnership seemingly exists to provide the market with what the Japanese might innocently call “adult versions”. Why Fujifilm leaves money on the table by not doing this themselves is mind-boggling. Are they really incapable of producing understated designs? I don’t care about the Leica logo; it’s a joke on a product like this, I just want a clean-looking rounded rectangle.
Generational shifts in photography
And apropos of all this, I heard that Sean was getting into film photography and about to use an Olympus XA2 I once gave to Cien. Which got me talking to my Pi AI (we’ll come back to this) about old becoming new again in photography. Part of it was trying to convince myself that a Sofort 2 would be worth buying as an adult-friendly retro toy camera — a loving term for cameras with garbage image quality. I’ve owned many of the sort, like the Digital Harinezumi series, and they’re always plastic and cheap, or simply dusted-off vintage digital cameras. But this is a new! luxury! toy camera!
So Pi sorta made the “observation” that using an analog camera is an attempt to engage with photography more deliberately. Which I already knew? Because of course using a dedicated camera instead of a smartphone today is deliberate; a “slow photography” thing, a “real photographer” flex. Of course instant film is an extension of this.
But I’d not really appreciated it from the perspective of Gen Z people who grew up without them. Like why ordinary kids not into capital-P Photography would be interested in Instax/film cameras and old digital cameras beyond signaling coolness. Obviously we Xennials and Millennials grew up with photographic scarcity and have fewer photos of our younger days, but these kids grew up in an age of surplus, literally taking photos for granted. Phone cameras everywhere mean cheap and infinite memories. So naturally tools that force moments to be more precious, that force viewers to see events through wonky lenses, would hit different.
I noticed afterwards that Leica’s press release for the Sofort 2 sums this up with a simple statement: “Back then, the instantly printed photo symbolized acceleration, whereas, in today’s fast-paced world, it represents a moment of caution and relief.”
Next day update: I neglected to mention here that the mini Evo and Sofort 2 cameras are actually perfect bridges between these two approaches to photography. They are digital cameras that let you shoot in surplus, and print only the photos worth keeping in scarcity. Also, having two offerings serves buyers across the spectrum from fun/affordable to serious/expensive, which tends to be a generational divide. The hybrid instant camera is a tool that unifies photographers with different values (so long as they’re okay with 5-megapixel shots), and serves as a symbol of ‘making this moment count’.
The Pi personal AI assistant
Okay, so what’s Pi? It’s billed as a personal AI, a ChatGPT for your daily life. But isn’t ChatGPT already for daily life, as well as work life, I hear you ask? Yeah I know, which is why I’m giving this a go. The main difference is that instead of multiple chat threads for different topics, with Pi you just have one main chat. It tries to learn more about you and draws on past context to inform its responses. It’s built on a proprietary foundation model, so perhaps they have a way to get around the short-term memory and context collapse that I’ve seen with other generative AI text systems — so far it’s doing quite well after a few days!
It’s free, and their privacy policy claims they’ll never share or sell your information, but yeah sure what else would they say? I’ve found it quite pleasant, and its responses are tuned to be shorter and less formal than ChatGPT’s defaults. It does feel like talking to a friendly personal assistant.
So far I’ve had discussions with it about movies (we talked about Interstellar and why some Nolan films don’t work as well as others), python programming, economics, frameworks for building good arguments, as well as its own purpose and unique value proposition.
I just asked it to brainstorm what a Sofort 3 could bring to the table. It suggested more AI features (lol) and making it more user friendly. I said I’d go the other way and make it more unapologetically professional, with manual controls and higher quality. It was able to say that it sounded almost like an instant film version of a Leica M, and when I asked it to price such a product, it said $800 USD or higher. That’s pretty insightful!
Something about its simulated personality and the UX of having a single chat thread (where I don’t have to keep introducing my needs and context) makes this very pleasant to use, so much so that I might end up using it over ChatGPT for some queries.
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Media activity
I had Saturday all to myself so it was a movie day. I saw The Equalizer 3, which was much slower and less action-packed than you’d expect. But Denzel is still badass and he gets to have a nice Italian holiday. Just expect a chiller installment going in. I think this is the last one for Robert McCall.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny was nowhere as bad as I was led to believe. I’d say it’s actually very successful in closing out Harrison Ford’s role and setting up a possible future heir. The last one was roundly panned and tried to introduce the idea that he had a son, played by an awful human being, which failed so badly they wrote him out in the most delicious way possible in this film. I really hope Phoebe Waller-Bridge gets her spinoff out of this, but apparently she’s developing a Tomb Raider TV series for Amazon Prime? What a shame to work on the pretender when the original tomb raiding franchise is right there!
I forced myself to finish season 1 of Invasion on Apple TV+, just because season 2 looked good in the trailers and has a higher Rotten Tomatoes score. Season 1 is an awful plodding mess, which given Simon Kinberg’s involvement should not surprise anyone. If you’re interested in S2 and haven’t started on S1, I’d recommend you just go straight to it and try to fill in the blanks.
The Below Deck marathon continues. We finished seasons 5 and 6, started over with season 1 — it was disappointing in terms of production quality and crew likeability — and are now on the second.
Apple Arcade’s new James Bond game is quite entertaining. Cypher 007 is an isometric stealth-action game from the makers of Space Marshalls, and should scratch the itch for anyone who loves the franchise and/or Metal Gear games.
So much new music came out and I haven’t had a chance to hear it all yet. After hearing about how Sufjan Stevens’ Javelin is dedicated to his partner who died this April, I’ve played it through several times. I think it’ll be one I come back to over the years.
There’s also a new Drake album, For All The Dogs, which may not have the same longevity.
I enjoyed my playthrough of HOW DID WE GET HERE? by a 22-year-old Canadian pop artist named “young friend” while writing this post. Admittedly, I wasn’t listening to the words at all, but it was very pleasant and I’ll have to get back to it.
A new Omar Apollo EP, Live For Me, which I’ve heard one song off and am really excited for.
Caroline Polachek’s second album, Desire, I Want To Turn Into You, has been getting great reviews too, so I’ll get around to it next week hopefully.
After 71.5 hours of dungeon crawling, coffee brewing, curry cooking, high schooling, part-time jobbing, and maid cafe patronizing, I finally finished the incredible game that is Persona 5 Royal. If you count the 30 or so hours I put into the original non-Royal version on my PS4 back in 2016, this has been a long time in the making. There’s a remake of Persona 3 coming next year, so I’m looking forward to that.
For the uninitiated, Persona games are a spinoff series from another series of games called Shin Megami Tensei, which all involve harnessing the same stable of supernatural beings and doing turn-based battles. It’s Pokémon with demons. The SMT games are grittier and flirt with horror themes, but the Persona ones (at least the ones I’ve seen) incorporate more slice-of-life activities and are generally lighter.
What’s next? Not sure. For now I’m gonna pass a little time finishing the final episode in Ace Attorney Chronicles which I paused over a year ago. I still don’t feel up to Tears of the Kingdom.
On the TV front, we finished season 1 of Poker Face and it’s a show I’d recommend to almost anybody. Brilliant writing within a formula that is equally happy to revel in, but also subvert itself from time to time. The twists, the characters, the plays on genre, they’re straight out of an Ace Attorney game (minus the goofiness).
Netflix also released season 3 of Kengan Ashura, a hyper-violent manga to anime adaptation that I do not recommend to anyone, except I watched the first two seasons ages ago and feel invested in finishing it. Truly, the Venn diagram of people who make this and make Mortal Kombat games is just a circle of sickos. The people who enjoy this are probably in the same circle.
So I’ve partially fast-forwarded myself through it up to episode 9 now. Hilariously, the main character has been in a coma since the end of episode 1, and while the fight scenes (it’s centered around a Bloodsport-style martial arts tournament) are rendered in a 3D engine that simulates an anime look, all other scenes are drawn in traditional 2D, and boy does their lack of budget show! Some scenes (mostly flashbacks, to be fair) are literally sketches passed off as a stylistic choice.
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I got my new iPhone, and rejoining the Plus/Max club hasn’t been as bad as I feared. Granted, this is my first large iPhone with flat sides, a design I highly prefer to the rounded sides we endured for many years between the iPhone 6 and 11 series. Flat sides are simpler easier to hold, especially between fingertips when taking a photo in landscape orientation.
So now with the reduced weight, flat sides, and thinner bezels, I think the Max form factor is finally becoming something I can love. The benefits of the larger screen are undeniable and without a case on the whole thing feels amazing. It’s more of a joy to use for every task: watching videos, writing text and reading pages, editing photos, gaming, you name it. The increased battery life is also a great comfort, especially after the disappointment of the 14 Pro in that area. After a year of regular use, that one is down to 85% battery health.
There have been complaints about the build quality of the early iPhones 15, with reports of wonky antenna lines, discolored titanium frames straight out of the box, and so on. I did notice the same odd rectangular ghost lines at certain points on the sides of my Natural Titanium Pro Max, but they rubbed away with no issues. I commented a single word, Stains;Gate, on a Threads post from 9to5mac about it but sadly no one appreciated the anime reference.
Where I have more concern is the fit and finish where the back glass meets the metal frame. New this year are rounded edges, not angular, not chamfered, but with a curve in the metal and maybe even a little in the glass. Some areas on mine are quite well rounded and comfortable to touch, but unfortunately the lower left and right sides where my hand makes contact have a slightly sharper feel to them. It’s clearly a minor defect, with a gap between the glass and titanium that’s probably measured in micrometers, but I can feel it, and that’s that.
If I were a YouTuber I might make a video where I try to grate cheese with the edge or something. I’ll put up with it for now and see if it “settles in” after awhile, and try an AppleCare+ replacement if I can’t stand it.
It’s now emerging that the 15 Pro Max’s titanium frame is susceptible to overflexing when pressure is applied, causing the back glass panel to break with nothing more than force from one’s bare hands. You will recall the iPhone 6 Plus’s “Bendgate” issue, where YouTubers were able to bend and break the devices quite easily. Apple reinforced the following year’s iPhone 6S, I think with steel inserts, but doing that with the 16 Pro Max would defeat the purpose of this entire switch to titanium. In the video above, the smaller 15 Pro survives the same bend test. It’s just a problem with the larger models.
Anecdotally, there’s always some risk involved in buying the first Apple products out of the factory gate; I’ve experienced many odd defects over the years from underpowered speakers in the first-gen iPad Pro (was blown away by the actual volume when I got a new unit after a display fault)to battery and sound issues with AirPods Pro (even acknowledged with a replacement program). Usually waiting a couple of weeks will ensure you get perfect devices. But I haven’t got the patience for that!
But the cameras! They are indeed an improvement. More natural processing, less sharpening, and the 24mp files have more resolved detail. I’m enjoying the 5x reach, which as one reviewer pointed out, is a more meaningful role for an extra lens than 3x, given that the main camera is already capable of providing a good 2x image (at 12mp), which is close enough to 3x. Portrait Mode does extremely good segmentation now, and I haven’t taken any photos yet where the edges on people or objects were not perfectly recognized.
A pair of 5x photos, processed in Hipstamatic120mm (5x) through a window — sorry, stranger28mm low-light shot (not Night Mode)28mm close up268mm (10x digital zoom)
This week was a slog, like slowly pushing through a muddy swamp. I don’t know why, but maybe grinding through palaces in Persona 5 Royal and PowerPoint decks in real life had something to do with it. I thought I was nearing the end of the former, but nope, still have many hours ahead. I had to double check my last post to make sure I didn’t miss a week here; the presidential election felt so long ago it couldn’t possibly have been last Friday.
I went into work twice and discovered a new free snacks/drinks initiative, the kind that large companies everywhere once generously offered. I thought free food incentives were a low-interest rate phenomenon, but the return-to-office movement needs new soldiers. So there I was at my desk eating banana cake and trail mix, drinking VitaminWater, and getting calories I would normally have avoided.
The real work benefits are the friends we make along the way, though. This week an ex-colleague now based in Tokyo came back for a visit. That led to a three-hour Taiwanese hotpot catch-up last night, the effects of which I’m still feeling this morning. The chief reason is probably sodium, a thing I’ve become more acutely aware of since I wrote about eating Korean instant noodles.
Fun fact: Most Korean ramyeon contains between 1,800–2,000mg of sodium per serving, which is the recommended amount for an entire day. But Singaporeans tend to average 3,900mg daily, probably because of our proximity to hotpot restaurants.
And it’s a brilliant concept! You get a relaxing forest soundscape (the kind I put on sometimes anyway while working) along with a stirring piece of music performed by a master. I hope he does more like this.
The Rolling Stones put out a new single, Angry, and it seemed like all the old men on my timelines fell instantly in love with it. Eh, it’s okay at best? I didn’t get the hype, and the single-idea video with Sydney Sweeney on a car for four minutes didn’t do much to redeem it.
Imagine putting out something that mediocre in the same week as Olivia Rodrigo’s new album, GUTS. I believe it was the New York Times’ review that drew parallels to Lorde’s Melodrama, not stylistically but as a brilliant sophomore album from a 20-year-old breakthrough artist under immense pressure to deliver again. It’s so good, just give it a go.
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Next week is new iPhone week, so I’ll just say for now that if the rumors are true and the periscope zoom feature is only coming to the iPhone Pro Max, I think I’m going to be slightly torn. Apple hasn’t given the larger iPhones better cameras than the smaller ones in several years — that trend meaningfully ended with the iPhone 8 series, where the Plus model had two cameras and the regular had just one. The 12 Pro Max had a 2.5x zoom compared to 2x on the Pro, but that’s minor.
I think I’ve owned six larger iPhones: the 6 Plus, 6S Plus, 7 Plus, 8 Plus, XS Max, and the 11 Pro Max. And that one year in between when we had the iPhone X, which only came in one (small) size, felt like a relief because you didn’t have to choose a trade off.
The question will be how much more useful they can make this longer zoom seem. I’m quite happy with the 3x range on my 14 Pro. While the image quality could be better, the actual zoom range is fine! Do I want to put up with a cumbersome phone just to have a not-great-looking 5–10x zoom I’ll only use when visiting the zoo? If you’re currently using a larger phone and regret it, let me know!
The nation voted for a new president this weekend and the winner was Mr. Tharman Shanmugaratnam, which autocorrect changes to “That Man” (a tad disrespectful in my opinion). He got 70% of the vote which is pretty solid, but nobody’s surprised on account of how well liked and competent he is. It’s worth mentioning how painless the process was: my vote was in the ballot box less than three minutes after I showed up, and I was back home watching TV in 15.
Appropriately, we started Jury Duty on Amazon Prime Video and I think it’s gonna be great. It’s a pseudo-reality show where one man thinks he’s on the jury for an actual case but the whole thing is staged and everyone else is an actor. I’m watching this and wondering if everyone’s following a tight script or just improvising based on their characters, because there are events happening all the time whether the mark witnesses them or not.
That real-time play concept always makes me think of The Last Express, a classic but underplayed PC game by Jordan Mechner set on the Orient Express. It kicks off with a murder onboard and you have to move around the train investigating and staying alive amidst political intrigue and wartime spy stuff. Events are always happening, and if you’re not in the right place at the right time, you’ll miss crucial conversations. You can experience this for yourself on iOS but the app hasn’t been updated in five years and may be removed by Apple soon if they stick to their controversial plans.
A lot of other TV was seen. We finally finished season 3 of For All Mankind, an extremely strong show on Apple TV+. I binged all of the anime Oshi no Ko which is as great as everyone says; I don’t think I’ve ever seen a stronger (or longer) first episode. It’s a 90-minute movie in itself. I’m now midway through another highly rated anime: last year’s Lycoris Recoil, on Netflix. And on Michael’s recommendation we started on a Japanese drama, My Dear Exes, which is very enjoyable so far, maybe because it doesn’t feel like typical Japanese TV. It’s snappier and funnier somehow.
Oh, if Jordan Mechner sounded familiar earlier, it’s because he’s the man who created Karateka and Prince of Persia. And if you want to experience the making of a gaming classic, a new playable history lesson on The Making of Karateka is now out. And in a case of lovely things cosmically coming together, it was helmed by former Wired games editor Chris Kohler, who also wrote the article on Japanese curry that probably changed my life.
Staying on topic, we went down to the Japan Rail Cafe (operated by the actual JR East railway company from Japan, for some reason) in Tanjong Pagar because I’d heard they were doing a tie-up with the Kanazawa style Japanese chain, Champion Curry, for one month only. I had my first Champion Curry back in March, after meaning to check it out for years, and while it didn’t unseat my current favorites, it was still decent by Japanese standards and incredible by Singaporean ones. They sold a small sized plate here for S$19.90 including a drink, but it was sadly inauthentic. The curry’s consistency and deployment over the rice is not going to qualify for a Kanazawa cultural medallion any time soon, but I guess it was good enough that I’d take it any day over most local competition. But I still hope they open a proper operation locally someday and accomplish what Go Go Curry failed to do.
Champion Curry in JapanChampion Curry in Singapore
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I was suddenly inspired to make a new series of playlists, which will periodically capture what I’m listening to, sequenced like a proper mixtape. If I had the skills to make a DJ mix of them, I would! Here’s BLixTape #1 for my Apple Music fam.
And the tracklist for people still on *ahem* lesser services:
Gold -Mata Au Hi Made- (Taku’s Twice Upon A Time Remix) — Hikaru Utada (I said I wasn’t a fan of the regular version but this remix works!)
TGIF — XG
bad idea right? — Olivia Rodrigo
You Are Not My Friend — Tessa Violet
Dancing In The Courthouse — Dominic Fike
For Granted — Yaeji
Bittersweet Goodbye — Issey Cross
To be honest (SG Lewis Remix) — Christine and the Queens
Making this involved a detour into the world of NewJeans’ music videos, which are pretty conceptually twisted and seem to comment on the parasocial relationships fans have with them. For example, in the mostly sunny poppy video for ETA, the girls might only be hallucinations seen by a sick fan, telling her that her boyfriend is cheating on her with someone at a party. So she ends up murdering him and the girl with her car! I guess this is what it takes to stand out now.
Let’s end on a nice note with another video I came across on YouTube while checking out more electronic music. This guy Don Whiting also does a great job killing it on the road — performing a two-hour drum & bass set on a bike, accompanied by a huge entourage of other cyclists. It looks like an awesome day out, at a pace even I could probably handle.
sangsara.net 