sangsara.net

Tag: Gaming

  • Week 52.25

    Week 52.25

    Merry Christmas! For my main gift, I received a turntable, something that I’ve been very conflicted about wanting for awhile. Apart from the fatal hipster embarrassment, I know that the urge to repurchase all my favorite albums on vinyl is a road to financial ruin.

    Back in February, I was on the lookout for a CD player to bring home from Tokyo, but decided against it because digital streaming is identical, if not superior in the case of lossless and Spatial Audio, and I couldn’t see many instances where I would bother to get up and pop a CD on instead of just call out a request to my HomePod. And HomePods don’t accept Bluetooth or line-in audio, so I’d have to use my Sony soundbar or buy a third speaker for the living room. Too much hassle!

    But vinyl, goddamnit, just barely dodges the killing blow of that logical argument by having a different value proposition. One, the physical LPs are more collectible, more beautiful, more mentally stimulating in a world that wants to turn itself into ephemeral bits. People say that intentionally putting on a record for close listening deepens your connection with the music over just tapping a link. Two, the audio characteristics of an all-analog reproduction chain are surely different from digital. So if you can, why not have both options for home enjoyment? Three, it’s just kinda cool?

    So I asked Santa for an Audio-Technica LP70X, which has the option of Bluetooth output. I briefly considered buying one of those Marshall speakers to pair it with, but the idea was so cringe I couldn’t face it. Besides, that would nullify point No. 2 — why bother if you’re going to digitize it? So I hooked it up to an unused B&O Beolit 12 speaker (which has unceremoniously served as a stand for our bedroom HomePod mini for years) via RCA cable instead. Voila, money saved that can be used for buying records!

    But first, guardrails were needed. I decided that I would only buy absolute masterpiece, timeless, desert island discs. No new pop/rock stuff that wouldn’t benefit much from the analog format. And that my collection would 95% focus on jazz. The exceptions are things like LUX and J Dilla’s Donuts, maybe.

    After some laborious rewiring, we got it set up on Saturday and played some records that Kim bought as souvenirs many years ago. Radiohead’s OK Computer was one of them, and while I suspect much of it is down to the different speakers’ sound profiles, the analog version is bassier and warmer. When the HomePod plays a lossless digital version of the same song, it has an incredible immersive quality, so clear and bright that the band could be in the same room. A film camera versus iPhone’s computational photography. Room for both.

    Anyhow, it’s been wayyyy too addictive browsing records on Amazon — and the ones that ship from Japan are usually much cheaper than the US versions. Here’s what’s on the way but please recommend me your faves!

    1. Miles Davis – Kind of Blue
    2. Vince Guaraldi Trio – A Charlie Brown Christmas
    3. John Coltrane – A Love Supreme: The Complete Masters
    4. John Coltrane – Blue Train
    5. Chet Baker – Chet Baker Sings
    6. Ornette Coleman – The Shape of Jazz to Come
    7. Bill Evans Trio – Sunday at the Village Vanguard
    8. Bill Evans Trio – Waltz for Debby
    9. Sonny Rollins – Saxophone Colossus

    ===

    While we’re out here talking about physical artifacts and meaningful rituals, I want to point out that this final post of the year is also the 287th weekly update on this blog. About five and a half years of regular writing — all because I started one week with no idea how long I would keep going, just the hope that it would help me to write more often than a couple of times a year. Today, this weekly blogging of things that captured my attention has become my most meaningful routine, and produces a living artifact that I find quite valuable.

    Writing is thinking, and so putting time aside to articulate your feelings and actions, and reflect on the patterns within them, might be the best way to understand and recalibrate your own life. You don’t have to blog in public; journaling works too. Several times a year, I find myself reading an old post that I’d completely forgotten about, and recognize that something happening with me in the present began with something further back.

    Mark Curtis, one of the co-founders of Fjord where I once worked, has just started a Substack called Full Moon with a partner, and in their latest post suggest that everyone should start a habit of “externalizing their thinking”, because a personal archive of written thoughts and ideas has new applications with today’s LLMs. Having such a corpus can be an asset, and not just for training a soulless version of yourself who goes to work for the corpos while you stay home and watch vids. One thing generative AIs do well is find patterns across large amounts of data, and so with journal entries they provide a means of browsing your own brain over time.

    No stranger to this idea, I assigned Claude to read all 51 posts of the year so far, looking out for trends and threads that I might not have seen while posting in real time. What came back had a hint of that AI voice, but contained a helpful synthesis of several threads. Let me explain in my own words rather than simply paste the results.

    There were several recurring themes and obsessions, for instance deaths and funerals earlier on in the year, and it linked those to some musings on age and mortality when I started to feel old around my birthday, and when I recently said I should watch my purine intake for fear of developing gout.

    It suggested that I was doing something meaningful by making plans to meet up with people during this sabbatical, and that keeping in touch with ex-colleagues and helping grade college students’ presentations was part of staying connected to design culture and “keeping the ladder down”. There were also many words dedicated to creative experiments; chasing after the beauty in imperfections, from film grain to mistranslations; and of course, AI concerns.

    From that overarching theme, I ended up musing about the vulnerability of the junior designer pipeline, the commercial pressure to abandon not only proven methods but our values, and the dissonance caused by being a regular user of AI tools while knowing they come at some unknown but surely high cost.

    It also provided some insights into how I spent my time, calling it an attempt at presence over productivity. I certainly didn’t do any work I didn’t care about! I recall saying in Week 26.25, as I revisited my CliftonStrengths profile, that my natural inclination is to hate keeping busy and productive for the sake of it. I recently wrote something down in my notebook that sums up that energy: “I take tremendous joy in being able to do quite a few things extremely well and yet choosing to do none of them.” Perhaps underachieving is my passion.

    More acts of presence: I went overseas for about two months out of the year and chose a slow “daily life” approach over hitting up a flurry of tourist attractions. I deleted a bunch of games off my backlog — if it doesn’t spark joy, I decided, then I don’t have to finish it. I fell into a Japanese curry “research” rabbit hole in the first half, and now it’s sardines. I managed to make more time for reading, and am now starting on my 52nd book of the year, which is quite a nice achievement even if some entries were short stories and novellas.

    The last book I read was so good that I’m making it recommended reading for everyone who comes by here.* Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in his own words is a free ebook by the Steve Jobs Archive, collecting in chronological order various speeches, emails, and interviews he gave. It’s not so much about Apple the company as it is about his views, spirit, and character that famously evolved between his ouster from that company and his triumphant return.

    I read it on the plane back from China, and maybe I was coming off an emotionally taxing time, but I had to stop reading several times because my eyes were tearing up. Don’t discount the beautifully cosmic coincidence of an adopted boy landing in the right family at just the right time in Silicon Valley. The result was that the whole world now enjoys thoughtful personal computers anyone can use. In another universe where the Mac never existed, there’d probably be no Windows either, and likely no smartphones as we know them.

    If you’ve ever heard him speak, you’ll hear his voice in all of these snippets. He had a way of keeping the forest in view, and often framed smaller moments (and even human life) against a vast span of time: what we’re doing here as a species, how it matters when we make things for each other, and thereby why we must carefully choose where we spend our time.

    *I’ll take this year-end opportunity to say thanks for reading, whether this is your first visit or you’ve been here all along. I get messages sometimes, and it’s always gratifying to hear something was a useful tip or interesting to someone else. Happy new year!

    ===

    I almost forgot. My seventh BLixTape playlist is done! Add it on Apple Music.

  • Week 45.25

    Week 45.25

    I spoke too soon. Jinxed it. Stupidly counted my chicks. By which I mean I had another vertigo episode out of nowhere after thinking I was safe. It came just from tilting my head down to look at something, and suddenly it felt like the floor fell out from under me. I immediately put my head back, and it only lasted like half a minute, but it was enough to burst my bubble of security that maybe the earlier incident was a one-off.

    According to the online literature, recurrences are common with BPPV, and it’s just something you have to learn to live with and manage. Some lingering unsteadiness followed for the next couple of days, which is annoying but survivable. I’m mostly worried that I’ll get a bad case of it on a plane at some point, because pressure changes can apparently trigger it.

    PSA if you also have this: it seems people with vitamin D deficiencies are more susceptible. So I’m going to be more religious about taking supplements and see if that helps.

    ===

    For the second time in two weeks, I decided to break my weekday lunch routine by going further out to a Sushiro, followed by a little cafe reading time. Eating alone in a walled-off solo dining booth sounds sad and lonely but is surprisingly cozy; just ask Japan.

    Later, I came across a Reddit thread discussing local restaurants and when Sushiro came up, someone replied “if you’re in Bangkok, try it there — it’s a world of difference in quality, price, and size.” Well then! That’s something I’ll be in a position to verify next week because I’m actually going to be in Bangkok for several days (hence the airplane vertigo worries, pray for me).

    My itinerary as a traveling husband is still quite open — while Kim’s at work I’m planning to check out this new mall with a rooftop park, visit some exhibitions, and watch Predator: Badlands in a cinema superior to anything we have in Singapore. And depending on how I feel, maybe even stay in with my iPad and enjoy the very nice hotel for a bit.

    ===

    Speaking of touchscreen devices, I’ve been waiting for the full reveal of the Anbernic DS handheld emulation console, and now that it’s up for pre-order, my excitement has been considerably reduced. Enthusiasts online have been disappointed by the choice of a weak processor which, when paired with an Android OS, means it’ll struggle to run any 3DS games and maybe even some DS games. I’m not up to speed on DS emulation, but I’ll take their word for it that things could be much better here.

    The original DS Lite was my favorite handheld of all time because of its minimal clamshell design, which also housed its tiny stylus. The Anbernic DS does not include that critical feature. What’s the point of recreating the DS if you have a separate, chunky stylus to carry about and lose?

    Anbernic has also earned a reputation for releasing improved variants shortly after launching new products. So I’m hoping we’ll see a faster, more polished version out in six months. Wake me up when that comes out.

    ===

    Media activity:

    • I’m reading Wraith, which is Book 1 in the Convergence War series. It’s shaping up to be a fun if not-so-elegant “assemble a team and go on a big space adventure” action story. I’d recommend it if you’re looking for a palate cleanser in between more challenging fare.
    • I started watching the popular Apothecary Diaries anime series that Netflix has been aggressively pushing, and it’s not bad! Essentially a medical procedural set in ancient China, with other dramatic hooks like a super-competent main character who wants to stay invisible but can’t help stepping in to fix things, plus royal court politics.
    • After watching The Woman in Cabin 10 last week, we looked for more murder stories on boats and started on Death and Other Details (a murder on a cruise ship) before finding out it was canceled after one season. Still, it’s been okay and stars Mandy Patinkin as the detective.
    • If you’d asked me about Death and Other Details a few days ago, I might have said it was “pretty good”. But after watching the first two episodes of Apple TV’s new tentpole series, Pluribus, the bar is now insanely high. Don’t read anything about it, not even Hideo Kojima’s reaction tweet, just go straight into watching it on the nicest screen you can find. Based on what I’ve seen so far, this is looking like the kind of show I’ll think about long after it’s over.
  • Week 40.25

    Week 40.25

    • I’m now at the age where annual medical exams are strongly advised. Everyone around me knows someone whose life’s been upended (or worse) by a serious health issue. As much as it sucks to find out, finding out too late is worse. We went for ours this week and are waiting for results, fingers crossed.
    • I’m now also at the age where lame jokes come naturally, so when the nurse asked, “You have about five drinks on average a week? What do you like to drink?”, I replied, “What do you have?” The nurse laughed harder than expected so I’m guessing the clinic doesn’t get many patients masking anxiety with comedy.
    • They’ll probably come back and tell me I’ve got hypertension, because I definitely felt my blood pressure spiking on Saturday when Kim agreed to give It Takes Two another go on the Switch. For the uninitiated, it’s a co-op game where a married couple on the verge of divorce magically get turned into a pair of their daughter’s wooden dolls in the shed, and need to make their way back into the main house to get her help. But in order to make the journey, they’ll need to — you guessed it — work together. As a couples conflict simulator, it’s super effective. There are many videos online showing one player (usually male) getting frustrated as their partners (usually female) struggle with the hand-eye coordination required to get through the platforming sections, dying over and over. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a lot of fun, and we surprisingly played for about three hours before calling it a day.
    • Speaking of things women do differently, I watched this video essay on the rise of gambling-related activities and industries, and learnt that blind box sales are overwhelmingly driven by female buyers. Supposedly, the data bears out that women prefer to get their dopamine fixes from such lower-risk, collection-and-completion-oriented activities with a community element. I definitely have never felt especially compelled to buy more than a couple of any given gacha or blind box toy. It says men prefer higher-stakes competitive play, “go big or go home” style, or what you’d recognize as traditional gambling. The point is, businesses really know our buttons and they are pushing them every minute in the modern world.
    • Speaking of wasting money, it didn’t take long to realize that my plastic Beats case wasn’t suited to everyday use — not because it’s candy pink but because, like the iPhone it protects, it’s too smooth and hard to hold. It’s now my occasional fun case, but for other days when I want to use one at all, I’ve got the MOFT Snap Case MOVAS™ in “Misty Cove” colored “vegan leather”. Nevertheless, it feels significantly nicer: soft, textured, grippy, yet smooth enough to slide out of a pocket without turning it inside out. One additional benefit of vegan leather over the murdery kind is that it’s more stain/patina resistant. I would never have been able to risk this color with a cowhide case; it’d turn blue-black from my jeans in no time. Btw, when did we all agree to start calling PVC vegan leather? That’s quite the PR masterstroke by Big Plastic.
    • Last week, the Twitch streamer 4amlaundry once again attended the Tokyo Game Show and streamed hours of walking around the show floor. I missed it then, but watched some of the recording this week on YouTube. I was more excited when he decided to visit the Extinct Media Museum in Tokyo on Wednesday. It’s a private collection of old cameras, laptops, phones, and media devices like the Walkman/Discman, MP3 players and so on. This was on my list to visit back in February, but on the day I was meant to go, it got too cold and dark for the 15-minute walk over from Tokyo station and I decided to head home. Watching the POV stream felt like being there — except he was happy to touch all of those beautiful tech artifacts where I, the germophobe, would have declined.
    • I read a couple of books. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes is one of those titles you always hear about, but I never actually knew what it was about. I thought it was some inspirational crap like ‘Hey God, it’s Whoever, Are You Listening’, or ‘The Five People You Meet in Purgatory’ or whatever. It turned out to be about an intellectually disabled man who’s turned into a genius in a science experiment. It was also more powerful than I expected because it’s presented entirely as journal entries by the man himself, so the reader experiences his increasing intelligence and widening awareness of his position firsthand.
    • Another book was Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, which has been getting mentioned a lot on account of being nominated for the Booker Prize this year and for being too painfully truthful a look at millennials, and our devotion to living through trends, cool hunting, digital nomadism, performative wokeness, and mediocre aesthetics. Here’s the New Yorker’s article about Perfection, which makes me want to read the Georges Perec book that inspired it. Me? I loved it, but if I’d taken a few different turns — say, moved to Berlin — I’d probably feel personally attacked.
  • Week 39.25

    Week 39.25

    The week got off to a bad start when our three-year-old Dyson V12 vacuum cleaner stopped working. The motor cyclone made a pulsating noise and the error message “Airways Blocked” appeared on the little LED screen. Usually this means that you’ve got some ball of hair choking one of the attachments, or your filters need cleaning. I checked everything and knocked out so much dust that my palm hurt, but still no luck.

    Our cleaner shared that another client had similar problems and paid about $150 for repair at a Dyson service center, and a Perplexity search corroborated that would be the starting point, depending on what needed to be fixed. It said complex replacements could take over three weeks! My first priority was to get it working asap, because I have no idea how people lived before vacuum cleaners were invented.

    On a whim, I decided to check what a new vacuum cleaner would cost. The latest Dyson, the “V16 Animal” model is over S$1,100, and another V12 would be S$800. But the shocking thing is how crazy cheap the Chinese clones have gotten, ranging between S$80 (yes) and S$400. Xiaomi’s most powerful, the G20 Max, is only about S$320 and I’m sure it rivals our Dyson in capability and (I wouldn’t have thought so before this) longevity. I was beginning to think buying an entirely new Chinese vacuum for the price of a Dyson repair was a viable option.

    Anyhow, I got an appointment at the service center for a couple of days later, and the staff’s instant opinion was that there wasn’t anything stuck further inside the cyclone unit, but it was an electronic or PCB (printed circuit board) issue. Meaning the entire main bit of the vacuum cleaner, minus battery and air filter, would need to be swapped out. Total cost: S$168. I believe this is simply the modern default for consumer electronics — don’t bother repairing or replacing one little component, give the customer a new unit and send the old one back for recycling (or disposal). It’s wasteful, but means the business doesn’t need to train frontline repair staff and the customer gets a “better” experience to boot.

    Later, I went to have a look at the Xiaomi model in person, and it’s definitely uglier and clunkier, with the same downward dust receptacle ejection system as much older Dyson designs. I do like my V12 very much, I just don’t believe in it as much after this incident.

    ===

    I saw with some excitement that Puzzle Quest was being rereleased in an “Immortal Edition” for the Switch, with remastered visuals. It’s also out on other platforms. I played the original back in 2007 on my Nintendo DS and probably sank over 100 hours into it. It was probably the first game to combine Match-3 puzzling with an RPG storyline and character progression. To date, I haven’t played a better expression of this idea.

    With regards to this new version, it’s been good so far. The UI looks gigantic going from a tiny handheld to a 65” TV, but the great thing about playing on Switch is that you have the touchscreen controls this genre was made for. I have yet to encounter any of the bugs that plagued the original release, but that’s no guarantee I won’t. If I recall correctly, sometimes moves wouldn’t register and you’d die despite technically winning. On one hand it made the game feel unfair, but glass-half-full people would call it extra challenge. The game was so fun, I was happy to play around these deficiencies.

    ===

    On Friday night we met Wen and Sarah for Mexican food at a place called Huevos, in New Bahru. I read awhile back that the retail complex was struggling but that was not the case that night; it was pretty loco. One fun memory that came up was a trip to Bintan we took together back in 2009 where Mandy sang John Mellencamp’s Hurts So Good in the pool so often that it became the theme song of that vacation. I went home that night and unearthed a video I made in iMovie from all the clips I shot, using that song as the soundtrack. The video quality, shot on my Panasonic LUMIX LX3, has held up incredibly well after all this time.

    The next day, I ate at Shake Shack and made the double mistake of ordering a Tiramisu milkshake and finishing it even though I could have stopped halfway. It turns out that single serving had 850 calories and a whopping 90g of sugar — that’s 18 teaspoons of system-disrupting poison! For comparison, the single-patty Shackburger I also ate has only 550 calories. After learning all that, I didn’t have the heart to look up the side of fries I also ate. At this age, I don’t think the damage will ever be undone. I might have to start saving up for Ozempic.

    ===

    My Goodreads annual reading challenge has been completed with a vengeance, and currently stands at 40 books out of a targeted 24. The last few weeks have been made up of financial self-help material, including Nick Maggiulli’s The Wealth Ladder, which I also saw being featured on the shelves of a local Books Kinokuniya. I thought it worth mentioning because of how it lays out different strategies for people on different rungs of the so-called ladder of net worth: $1–10k, $10–100k, $100k–1M, and so on. It’s a very clear way to think about what actions and sacrifices are needed to get to the next level, and whether you’d even want to. There’s also some interesting data on how people at the higher levels distribute their money in completely different ways from us plebs.

    I also read Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, an infuriatingly patchy story about time travel and searching for a father who’s gone missing in time and space. There are some novel ideas here that move the genre forward, some of them explained with a lot of (pseudo?)science and some only intriguingly hinted at. The post-time travel world that it builds is fundamentally illogical, and almost no effort is made to integrate it with a reader’s expectations — in other words, it kind of fails to hold together. However, the actual writing is occasionally brilliant. There are passages that collapse memory, description, and feeling — suddenly you’re thinking about your own childhood and watching it through the quantum bookshelf, like at the end of Interstellar (2014).

    Speaking of movies, I rewatched the Wachowskis’ 2012 version of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas with my book club and it wasn’t as good as I remembered. Turns out both the book and film feel shakier on return. Anyhow, it was only 13 years ago, but there are race impersonation elements in this film that seem like transgressions today. Multiple white actors have their eyes taped up to play Asian characters. Halle Berry and Zhou Xun both have scenes where they play blue-eyed white women. The Korean characters speak English in a mix of other Asian accents. The only line that isn’t crossed is white people putting on blackface. Everything else seems to have gotten the green light.

  • Week 37.25

    Week 37.25

    Happy iPhone week aka Tech Christmas to all who celebrate! I wrote up my thoughts (below) after the event on Wednesday, and since then I’ve seen the same sentiments echoed throughout YouTube videos, podcasts, and articles, so I at least know I’m not reading these things entirely wrong. All in all, one of the best iPhone lineups ever. They went all out, with very few compromises or artificial impairments to make the expensive models more attractive — they are all seriously good value, extremely capable-sounding devices.

    On Tuesday, we went over to my parents’ place for dinner, and spurred by a question someone had last week after seeing a photo of their living room, I asked after some family history and got some new information. The accuracy and completeness of Singaporean family stories must vary widely; after all most families here only arrived in the last century. My dad only knows where his grandfather came from in China, and a suspicion of his occupation (ask me and I’ll tell you), but not why or how they made their way down to Southeast Asia. Apparently no one ever said. I’d say that was weird, but then I’ve waited this many decades to even ask.

    You know what else I’ve waited forever to do? Start The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. I finished Breath of the Wild in the summer of 2023 — I could have sworn it was last year, oh my — after letting it languish uncompleted for about six years. Since both games are set in the same world of Hyrule, albeit expanded in TotK, many recommend taking a break in between. Now that the Switch 2 edition is out, with modern luxuries like running at 4K 60fps, it was time. And because this is a game where skills also accrue in the player rather than purely in the character, jumping back in feels great. I’m better at combat and finding my way around than I was at the beginning of BotW, which makes sense for a sequel: Link has been here and done this before. It’s marvelous game design all around.

    Speaking of capital-D Design, Singapore Design Week is back again, but I’m less inclined to explore every venue and event after seeing that last year’s slipshod execution probably hasn’t been rectified. The website and program directory are still confusing and missing key visitor info.

    Case in point: On Sunday we went down to the Science Park district for a talk I’d signed up for, only to find that no one in the stated venue (a building lobby) knew where it was happening. It turned out to be in an open space outside instead. I’m not sure the speakers knew either, given that several used packed slides unreadable on the small screens provided. To make matters worse, some presenters’ slides weren’t even fit to the full screen size. When informed by the audience, they said “sorry, we can’t fix it. We can send you the deck!”

    Nearby, one of the robotics exhibitions had info cards printed in such tiny type you’d literally have to crouch on the floor to read them. I don’t know why we can’t get these things right for a design week.

    But there was a high point! Local graphic and art book seller Basheer had a small stand at the fair, and I found a copy of Silvio Lorusso’s What Design Can’t Do: Essays on Design and Disillusion, which Jose recommended ages ago. It was S$37 for future reference.

    If you follow me on Goodreads and were shocked at the amount of reading I suddenly got done, calm down. Those were not five separate books, but short sci-fi stories in something called The Forward Collection, published by Amazon, and curated by Blake Crouch of Dark Matter fame. For some reason, each story has its own entry on Goodreads instead of just one for the compilation. I recommend them!

    ===

    Apple Fall Event

    • The annual Apple fall event took place as it always does in early September (I love that it’s been over 15 years but some people still ask “When do the new iPhones come out?”). This year was of particular interest to me because 1) I didn’t upgrade my iPhone for once last year, mostly content with my iPhone 15 Pro Max and even wondering if I could stretch it out to three years. 2) If I can save any money somewhere in my annual budget, I’d be open to it! Alas, my Apple Watch is three years old, and my AirPods Pro 2 are the Lightning version that don’t do lossless audio with Vision Pro. So as the livestream began, I started praying that none of the announcements would make me feel like I needed to buy stuff.
    • Right out of the gate, the new AirPods Pro 3 were shown and I was like “goddamnit!” These mostly look the same, but have been subtly refined to fit better in your ears and yup, I need that as they’ve always been a little loose on one side. They supposedly sound better, thanks to a new acoustic port design. The active noise cancellation is now 2x better, and battery life has gone up about a third, to 8 hours. There’s also heart rate monitoring but I don’t give a crap about that. Nevertheless, a very hard purchase to resist.
    • Then, the Apple Watch Series 11 and Ultra 3 were shown, but thankfully I’m not sporty enough so the bulk of their workout/outdoors adventure-centric improvements bounced off my consumer armor. I mainly use my Series 8 as a timepiece, with occasional notifications and stock prices that I read when waking up in the middle of the night, and all it needs is a new battery. Lighter, smaller, more health sensors, faster charging — these are all nice to have but not when a new titanium model comes to over S$1,200 with AppleCare+. What’s that? Buy aluminum? Oh no, darling.
    • I was excited to see the iPhone 17 get a ProMotion display (variable refresh rates up to 120hz), because it suggests that the iPad Air might get one next year too. Overall, this is a truly great phone to offer as the base model. With better battery life, 256GB starting storage, and very capable cameras (including a smart new multi-aspect selfie camera), there are no compromises to be seen here and most people will be fully satisfied with one. It stands up well beside the Pro phone for everyday use in nearly all aspects.
    • When rumors of the the iPhone Air leaked, I didn’t believe a thinner phone with less battery life made any sense. And including only a single camera with no ultrawide lens? That excludes most Gen Z buyers! But I think I was wrong. The new wider front-facing camera might handle the Gen Z selfie use case. In truth, this is a phone that matches or exceeds the specs of last year’s iPhone 16, but is way more desirable. With its unique and recognizable design, glossy titanium frame, and premium semi-pro price positioning, this is the peacocking model. It’s literally the shiny new object. And that place in the lineup is made possible by a welcome pivot in the Pro line.
    • The iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max are now freed from their jobs of pushing up iPhone ARPU by appealing to customers with a little more money to spend, and who want something better than the base model. That’s the Air now. The Pro models have now transitioned to powerful professional tools with features that most people won’t even have heard of (e.g. GenLock for video), let alone know how to use. Which means they can ditch premium/luxury materials like stainless steel and titanium, for a more pragmatic forged aluminum that’s lighter and better for thermal management. They can also withstand weirder/uglier industrial designs (emphasis on industrial) like the new camera plateau that houses bigger sensors and makes room elsewhere for massive batteries. These models can now be thicker and heavier than most consumers would like because the Air exists.
    • The Air, by the way, looks like they got halfway through the development of next year’s rumored foldable iPhone and decided to ship one half as a product. Which is probably not entirely untrue; many niche Apple products are test beds for scaling ideas that will later appear elsewhere. The Air’s remarkable miniaturization and the Pro’s new vapor chamber cooling system will probably be echoed in a future Apple Vision Pro.
    • It’s also worth noting the ever-changing definition of “Air” in Apple parlance. It usually means either cheaper or lighter, and never premium/luxury. The MacBook Air is both the cheapest and lightest laptop, at least for now. The iPad Air is a Goldilocks model, sitting between the basic iPad and the Pro (which is the thinnest and lightest). But while the iPhone Air is cheaper than the Pro, it’s the thinnest, lightest, and also nicest. It’s elegant where the Pro is beastly, and I think this is their main design direction for the future.
    • Even if it doesn’t sell well this year, I don’t see this being canceled like the Plus phones. If anything, the Pro Max might be the one to go next. Its role is now to simply be the biggest screen, which a certain folding device might take the place of. So 12 months from now, we may be talking about iPhone 18, iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone Air 2, and an iPhone DS or whatever.
    • So it’s decision time. By the time this gets posted, I would have chosen a phone, size, and color. The Air is very tempting, except I couldn’t live without macro and telephoto photos. I do think its 6.5” screen size is in the sweet spot. The Pro’s 6.3” is too small and according to myself in 2023, going back to a bigger Pro Max after three years of Pro was worth the pocket bulge and hand strain. The new Cosmic Orange is striking as hell, but will it look tired after two years? Or two weeks? Brian called it reminiscent of “80s anime” and I think he’s onto something with that bit of free association. It also reminds me of some Sony MP3 players and phones.
    • Update: Pro Max in Silver. Big, heavy, and expensive. I’ll have to tighten my belt now in more ways than one.
  • Week 35.25

    Week 35.25

    • We lost a grand aunt at the close of last week, and attended her funeral and cremation on Tuesday. It got me thinking about qing ming, which is a day in early April (I had to look this up) where Chinese families traditionally visit their ancestors’ graves and do some neatening up. I have vague memories of being dragged along to do this as a kid, and even being allowed by my parents to skip school for it. I mostly remember the smell of burning joss sticks mixed with the dewy morning air and damp soil. For some reason we stopped going by the time I was a teen.
    • I talked about this with Cien and Peishan and they seemed to still be in touch with the practice of visiting graves, or in these days of diminishing real estate, a columbarium. If you asked me where my family members are buried or stored as ashes, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. I assume many of them have been scattered, either into local waters or some faraway favorite destination. Honestly, I like the idea of not being tethered to a single spot. If your spouse is still alive, maybe they’d like to keep you near, in some vessel at home. But if too many, or too few, people are sharing you then it’s better to be everywhere. A memory triggered by some food, place, or figure of speech. An algorithmically assembled photo collage tossed up by a personal computing companion one morning. A mention in some dusty book on a top shelf in a library, waiting to be seen by a future student or recycled into a supermarket receipt. I’d be fine with any of that.
    • Back to the funeral: it was held at the Mandai Crematorium and Columbarium, one of only three cremation facilities serving the whole of Singapore, and I was upset by how much it is in need of some design intervention. I wonder if any of the people managing the place have tried to look at the process with fresh eyes, or at least through the tired and grieving eyes of the people passing through it. Because they’d see so many moments that could be made kinder, more understanding, more dignified. The script could use a rewrite. Playing ‘Amazing Grace’ out of tinny $40 Bluetooth speakers in the final viewing halls is not it. For Chrissakes, please also remove the ugly MS Word-designed notices plastered on the viewing room windows, they obstruct the view of the caskets as they’re delivered (by industrial forklifts!) into the flames. I’m not exaggerating.
    • My shoes fell apart. They were the second pair of New Balance 990s to do so, doing nothing more strenuous than supporting my occasional walking about town. The last pair lasted three years; these only made it to two. At around S$300, these are supposed to be the best shoes that NB makes, but I’m beginning to think their ‘Made in the USA’ label is more a statement of liability than superiority these days. The Chinese-made models could probably survive a decade. Alas, with my big feet and aversion to swooshes, the 990s are some of the only shoes I’m comfortable in, so I’ll be buying yet another pair — online, too, since they stopped local distribution of the wide sizes.
    • Google upgraded Gemini with the Nano Banana image model that’s been trending on Twitter, and the bar for impressive generative AI has been raised again. It’s extraordinarily capable (and fast) at combining images with accuracy, as well as reimagining them in different styles and from different perspectives. A few months ago, Gemini was an also-ran, but maybe something’s shifted at Google and they’re an actual contender again. As much as I try to avoid Google services, I suppose I find them preferable to OpenAI and Meta. Take a look at the example above where I asked it to redraw a scene I photographed last month in Melbourne, but from above.
    • On Thursday I met two friend-couples, who I’ll call Mong and Jogina because it sounds amusing, for a rare weekday afternoon lunch where it was made abundantly clear that I’m behind the times for not having seen K-Pop Demon Hunters yet. Circumstantially, we’ve all got the time and flexibility to do these weekday catchups more often than once or twice a year, and maybe we should.
    • Aside: I did see the movie later, and it’s really good! My main gripe is the use of stuttering frames for the character animation, which worked fine in Sony’s Spiderverse films but break immersion here. The frame rates also seem uneven from scene to scene? Speaking of Sony, I’d hate to be the person who decided to sell this to Netflix for just $100M.
    • Afterwards, some of us went on to check out a nearby Crocs store (hear me out!) because a new collaboration had just launched: Animal Crossing! I just tagged along for a look, but became increasingly afraid as we got nearer that I would end up buying a pair. Kinda like how I bought the first iPad at Funan mall in 2010, that I absolutely wasn’t interested in… until I joined the line. Thankfully, my senses returned, and they only carried the smaller women’s sizes. God bless my big feet!
    • The book club is still reading Cloud Atlas, and at one point, a character mentions Carole King’s Tapestry album playing at a low volume in the background. I realized that I’ve known about this album forever but never heard it. So I put it on while reading. And boy did I know half the songs on this. I was beginning to wonder if it was a covers album, that’s how familiar they were. Incredible work, and a deserving #38 on Apple Music’s Top 100 Best Albums list.

    And finally, a little gaming episode:

    As previously mentioned, I’ve been playing the first Shinchan game on Nintendo Switch as a way of marking the summer — never mind that it’s always summer here in Singapore. It started well but I found it increasingly repetitive and uninteresting, and have been trying to just get it over with. The game features a time loop, where you replay the same week over. I spoke to Evan about it while I was on the second week, and he told me to hang on until the fourth week.

    >> I was like, “there’s four fucking weeks??”

    >> He said, “the real game BEGINS after week four!”

    >> “How is that possible?”

    Reader, I’ll tell you, I was ready to delete the game then. At the end of the third week, it seemed that I had all but completed the game. All my tasks were done. Then as the credits rolled, I texted him back:

    >> “Dude, I’ve finished the game, what’s going on?”

    >> And he says, “You haven’t, that’s just the beginning, get ready.”

    >> “I don’t believe you, don’t mess with me!”

    By this point, I had put in about 7.5 hours and couldn’t take it any more if this was just an extended prologue. There was just no way. The game was surely done! Then he asks me if I’ve done a certain thing yet, and I’m like:

    >> “Uh yeah… long ago? In the first week?!”

    Suddenly, I realized he’d spent the first three weeks mucking around and not doing any of the main game’s tasks, and only got started on the story just before time ran out. So yes, I had finished the game. Thank fuck for that.

  • Week 33.25

    Week 33.25

    • I had some ice cream at last, but no beers yet. Maybe I’ll stretch this sobriety a little longer. Alcohol is, after all, just a poison worth doing socially but not so much alone.
    • But man, this illness. Being sick for three consecutive weeks was not on my bingo card for the year. I should say illnesses, because we saw a doctor early in the week and she said (and these are the words every INTJ raised on WebMD loves to hear), “I think you’ve correctly diagnosed yourself — this seems like two separate illnesses one after the other, rather than a viral infection that became a bacterial one.” So, just bad luck and weak immunity on my part.
    • Fortunately, it’s just about over. Only a mild cough remains for both of us, but still bad enough that we slept in separate rooms for most of the week. It wasn’t a perfect solution; we still woke ourselves up coughing in the middle of each night.
    • I’m reminded at such times to stop whining and be grateful for minor health issues. Our part-time cleaner just returned from a rather invasive surgery to remove two large fibroids growing on her uterus. It’s been a multi-month ordeal navigating hospitals and insurance companies. I tried to help with some internet research and reassurance, and was glad to see her back to (light) work this week.
    • To get me nutritionally through the sick days, I bought quite a few bananas and unlocked a new breakfast item: peanut butter and banana sandwiches. The PB acts like a glue that keeps the slices from falling out. Gastro engineering! It’s basically a fat handheld dessert in the morning, and maybe I could kick it up a notch with whipped cream?
    • On the video gaming front, I managed to start Shin-chan: Me and the Professor on Summer Vacation on the Switch. I’ve been wanting to get into this for several years — recreating the small countryside childhood I never had. It reminds me of Attack of the Friday Monsters! on the 3DS, not surprising since they were both designed by Kaz Ayabe. He must really miss his summer holidays because he’s also the director of Natsu-Mon: 20th Century Summer Kid, which is pretty much the same concept: catching bugs, fishing, exploring nature, making friends. I’ve err… also bought that game, but might not get to it this year.
    • Guiltily, I’m actually kinda dying to play another game that just came out, despite just starting on this one. Damn my infernal backlog! That game is Tiny Bookshop, an indie title that’s shot to the top of the eShop charts, beating Nintendo’s own Super Mario Party Jamboree! It is what it sounds like, a cozy game where you manage a tiny mobile bookshop. You decorate it, stock titles, and recommend books to passing townsfolk. I can’t believe no one made this game sooner because the premise is obviously gold. Moreover, it appears to have some beautiful locations for you to set up shop in, in the vein of ‘lo-fi beats YouTube video scenery’, so I assume you can just kind of chill in the game and listen to the waves while admiring your little caravan.
    • Ballard on Amazon Prime Video turned out to be a perfectly fine series on its own, with a different tone and a kookier cast than the mainline Bosch show that it’s spun off from. I can’t complain, especially because Titus Welliver shows up now and then to reinforce ties. I don’t know how old Renee Ballard is supposed to be though. She’s living with her grandmother, who looks 70 at most, but Maggie Q is 46.
    • We started on season 2 of Poker Face and I’m loving it. I would have been fine if they’d kept the same episodic format of Charlie on the run and solving crimes from 30 minutes in for the entire show, but they’ve decided to switch things up a bit. Still works. Still a brilliant platform for insane and creative stories with a rotating list of guest stars: John Mulaney, Giancarlo Esposito, Rhea Perlman, Katie Holmes?!
    • I installed the new beta OSes on my iPad Pro and Apple TV 4K and can report they are solid enough at this point. Not enough to risk my iPhone or Mac, though. The Liquid Glass effect is still a little confused. Sometimes a button will be darkened to stand out against what’s behind it, but upon being clicked, it flashes and changes to the brighter style to match some new frosted glass items that appear. It just seems to have to morph and adapt a little too much to be used for UI items that ought to be stable. But maybe that way of thinking is just old fashioned now.
    • Next to be updated will be my Vision Pro. I’m really curious how the glass elements will react to light and real world environments as you move them around in space. My Persona is also horribly outdated and I’m feeling the peer pressure to upgrade to the new, detailed ones — nearly everyone in my book club already has a proper face on and mine still looks like the Lawnmower Man.

    ChatGPT’s closing words for the week: Funny how even illness turns into iteration — new foods, new games, new software skins. Maybe we’re all just beta versions trying to get stable.

  • Week 29.25

    Week 29.25

    • It was a low-key week after those few days in Bangkok. There’s more travel lined up soon, so I figure it’s no bad thing to enjoy the quiet while I can. We had someone come by to look at a house issue that’s been worrying me, but the prognosis was that it’s not a big problem for now, and they’ll do some proactive repairs in the meantime. So I have to admit life’s pretty good.
    • When I first went to Bangkok back in March, I found the retail scene vibrant and thriving in a way that you don’t see in Singapore anymore, and this week there was a long and well-researched piece on CNA about how shopping in other SEA countries has made Singapore seem dull in comparison. It’s a rough situation because we’re short on both land and entrepreneurial spirit, which means a vicious circle of high rents and safe concepts. People like to blame greedy landlords, but I suspect they’re the same ones counting on retiring with their REIT and bank dividends. You can’t have one without the other.
    • Doing my part for the restaurant scene, I ate out thrice this week and two were unhealthy affairs. A Singaporean sort of pub (al fresco) with Guinness and Thai food, and a Chinese hot pot restaurant picked for its amusing name, HIPPOT, that turned out to be one of those meals that goes down easy but feels awful after. Too much grease and heat. Note to self: make better choices!
    • The only thing I bought on the Amazon Prime Day sale was a book I’ve been wanting for a while, but the shipping cost is usually almost as much as the book itself. Thanks to the questionable economics of Amazon, shipping was free this time. The book is A Handheld History by Lost in Cult, and it covers the corner of gaming hardware that I have the most affection for: portable systems like the Game Boy and PSP. I suppose the smartphone is inadvertently part of that lineage; a stepchild or distant cousin. I don’t know when I’ll sit down to read it — paper books are just… inconvenient — but I look forward to that rainy afternoon.
    • I just finished reading The Butcher’s Boy by Thomas Perry, a 1982 thriller about a hitman. The anniversary edition’s foreword was written by Michael Connelly, author of the Bosch series, which got me in the right mood. If you liked the recent Day of the Jackal TV series, this will likely do it for you. The killer is the sort that doesn’t look especially athletic or dangerous, in fact he has the kind of face people don’t remember, but he’s great at what he does and when he gets into a jam, you root for him to get out. There are three more in the series [Goodreads], so those are going on my list.
    • Evan mentioned to me the existence of an Amiibo emulator a few weeks back, and when I saw one show up on Reddit it nudged me into ordering a unit off AliXpress. It’s a small electronic device that you can program to mimic the NFC chips on various Nintendo Amiibo figures, which unlock benefits in certain games when held next to your Switch/Switch 2 console. As I am very much against the idea of making people waste money buying large amounts of unnecessary plastic crap to unlock software features built into the games they already own, I have no moral qualms about using one of these.
    • This doesn’t have Amiibo support, but I played and finished Caravan SandWitch this week on the Switch. Weird name that doesn’t tell you much, I know, but hey it’s French. It’s a chill little indie game about exploring a planet (inspired by the landscapes of Provence) in search of your missing sister, with strong anticapitalist vibes, and was mentioned in a recent NYT article about videogames with a Studio Ghibli-like aesthetic. I enjoyed it enough as a short adventure, but the English translation lets it down in some areas. It runs well enough on the Switch 2, but I think the frame rate will be choppy on a regular Switch. 3.5/5.0
    • Pulpy paperbacks and cozy games are good and all, but a great media diet needs something of substance, and thankfully MUBI delivered. They’re featuring a two-film collection by the director Shinji Somai on their front page, and I was floored by both of them. They’re linked by a shared theme of childhood summers marked by transformative upheavals — broken families, deaths, newfound freedoms — but also the building of friendships, independence, and memories that become strengths in adulthood.
    • Moving (1993) features an incredible performance by Tomoko Tabata who was probably 12 at the time; the kind of work that’s almost too good, too early — fortunately she’s still working in film and TV today. There are lines in this that hit so hard, and incredibly audacious and magical sequences that are as good as anything I’ve seen put on film.
    • Notably, the three titular child actors in The Friends (1994) never acted in anything again. Scrambled by emotion after the ending, I hastily wrote on Letterboxd: “A film doesn’t have any business being this good! I cried till my Face ID struggled. There are frames in this so beautiful they should be hung in the Louvre.” Both films are a 5/5 for me. Perhaps for the way they perfectly capture the haziness of childhood memories, the nostalgic look and air of that era, and the open-ended way that school holidays felt as you experienced them. Stuff we didn’t think would matter becomes what we remember most.