sangsara.net

Tag: Gaming

  • Week 25.26

    Week 25.26

    • Howard mentioned that he was using Claude or Codex to remake an old game called Little Computer People for his own amusement. That gave me a sudden brainwave: I could remake High Seas Solitaire, a simple Windows-based game I used to love. I’ve tried several times in the last decade to find something like it, or get it running on my Mac — one attempt involved setting up Boot Camp and installing/patching Windows, which took up most of a day.
    • It’s actually simpler and more fun to just make a whole damned game than to deal with Windows. Here’s a post about Island Solitaire, my recreation of the same game mechanics with some of the vibes. Or you can play it directly at solitaire.sangsara.net.
    • Tim Cook spoke to the WSJ and set expectations for Apple to raise prices because of the rising cost of RAM and chips. I took that as a sign that this is the year for me to finally upgrade my 2020 M1 MacBook Air. The order has been placed, and I hope to welcome an M5 model next week. The irony that this is indirectly happening because of people making shit with AI is not lost on me.
    • I was thinking about AI art while in the shower yesterday and came out with some thoughts I figured I should write down, so here’s a little interlude.

    A shower thought on valuing human art against AI art

    When we buy human-made art, we’re not just buying someone’s vision. We’re buying the time put in — a slice of their life that can never be recovered. It’s the process of trying to put a price on a year spent realizing and perfecting a single idea. This much is already obvious.

    AI art works from a different equation. It’s less produced with time than with compute — GPUs, data centers, and electricity. We pay for electricity constantly without a second thought; as an input, it carries no inherent meaning. But when you pay for human art, you are purchasing the accumulated experience of a life. The conversations they had with their parents as a child. The mistakes they made in their twenties. Every influence, decision, and accident that shaped their way of thinking and seeing.

    Generative AI models “think and see” through a distillation of civilization’s digitized products. One process is organic and irreproducible, while the other is probabilistic and derivative. Both are magnificent in their own ways, but we more deeply value the one that speaks to how we are built.

    Collecting art satisfies two deeply human impulses: the urge to possess and the desire to appreciate. When you purchase a work, you are claiming a piece of someone while simultaneously declaring, “This life had meaning.” Even in AI-generated work, the most interesting component is the human intent — the prompter’s editorial choices. An idea is only a nucleus. Yet an entirely human-made work is a whole atom: not just the nucleus, but the colossal mass of time that surrounds it — years of practice and application. An artist may emerge who creates AI works so intricate they’ll take years to complete. That would be a different story because the effort imparts the value.

    When an artist makes many things, we call it a body of work. Each piece informs the next, and narratives emerge; some are easier to see than others. It is a curious coincidence that art uses the word “cycle” to describe a sequence of related works sharing a purpose. But in AI generation, cycles run in the opposite direction: millions of GPU cycles are spun up to produce a single output. Human cycles accumulate meaning through experience over time, while machine cycles search for probabilities through brute force.

    • We watched Alice and Steve on Disney+, a six-episode comedy about what happens when one 50-something man starts dating the 26-year-old daughter of his 50-something female best friend. It’s uncomfortable but funny, which I suppose is the kind of setup for which you cast Jermaine Clement as the older friend. I’d say it’s worth watching although they never quite sell the mutual May–December attraction, and it doesn’t end as satisfyingly as I’d hoped.
    • I went out to see The Furious (2025) with Jose and Reg. This is a martial arts film you cannot help seeing mentioned online this month, in part because the legendary Jet Li talked about it on his podcast (what a world we live in). It’s a Hong Kong production with a Japanese director, and is set in an unnamed South East Asian city that mashes up the entire region. The streets look like they’re in Thailand, but you hear characters speaking Tagalog, Bahasa, English, and Mandarin. It’s designed for maximum relatability, although, as someone pointed out, most of the baddies are brown and the good folks are Chinese coded.
    • I ate two hot pot-based meals and got food poisoning from the sukiyaki (I suspect their handling of “Japanese raw eggs”), but the Chinese one was fine. Coincidence?!
    • It’s the middle of June, which means I listened to Glass Animals’ 2020 song, Heat Waves, quite a few times. This of course is because it contains the line, “Sometimes all I think about is you / Late nights in the middle of June”. I’ll bet it’s a very good week for their global streaming royalties.
  • Island Solitaire

    Island Solitaire

    Play

    For many years, I’ve wanted to go back and replay this old freeware Windows PC game called High Seas Solitaire. It was there for me when I had hours to pass at my desk job in the military and then later in college, over two decades ago.

    The charm of HSS for me was its simple and relaxing gameplay, accompanied by a sparse soundtrack of wave sounds, bird calls, and the creaking of your wooden ship. Its variation on pyramid solitaire was also unique: matches are made up of cards with the same number, or numbers adding up to 14. I’ve never found a similar game mechanic since.

    It was supported by advertising, and is now considered abandonware. Its creator, ZapSpot, has long vanished. Even if any of the copies online were still working, they wouldn’t run on a Mac.

    Island Solitaire is my reimagining of this little-known gem.

    I decided not to recreate HSS’s presentation, but pay homage with a similar nautical and nature theme. Where HSS had a predetermined set of puzzles to clear, Island Solitaire randomly generates layouts each time, using a full deck of cards. You are given a draw pile of 26 extra cards to help you make matches.

    A concise “How to Play” panel can be found in the bottom-right corner, and I guarantee it will make perfect sense once you start. I hope this is half as fun for you as the original was for me in those simpler millennium days.

    Play
  • Week 24.26

    Week 24.26

    It was WWDC week. Apple made good on their promise of a smarter, generative AI-powered Siri two years after first describing the concept. Enough has been said about that slipped deadline, but the verdict on social media this time is that they’ve actually delivered. I was tempted by all the reports of how stable the first developer beta is, and installed it on my M1 iPad Pro. I hope I don’t regret it, but so far so good.

    It’s no surprise that the first beta is in good shape, because this year’s OS updates are looking to repeat the feat of Mac OS X Snow Leopard, where effort was expended on optimizing performance and fixing longstanding issues rather than adding new features. There’s a list of nearly 300 improvements, and I’m looking forward to many of them, especially the faster loading of items in Apple Music. There are also very welcome refinements to the controversial new unified design language system colloquially known as Liquid Glass. Steve Lemay, may this life bless you and yours with happiness and good health.

    There was so much to discuss and dissect this week that Michael and I spent over four hours across two FaceTime calls. Okay, some of that time was spent talking about his new collaborative crossword puzzle game, Crossmate. I’ve played a couple of games and it’s a lot of fun, like how we used to play the NYT crosswords at the office on a big screen. It’ll be on TestFlight soon for wider testing and I’m excited to see how people like it.

    But the next generation of Apple Intelligence was the headliner and the thing most people will hear about. While I expected most of the things announced, there were a few I didn’t. The new Spatial Reframing capability, for one, is a brilliant use of image generation to enhance an existing photo beyond the removal of objects — one that treads very close to contradicting Apple’s earlier stand that photos should be documents of things that did happen. This new take technically does ‘respect’ a real moment in time, with the exception of the camera’s position in space. I wonder if this is as far as they’ll go, or if the line will continue to be redrawn over time (turning a photo into a video, for example).

    I also did not expect Apple’s AI to offer text generation from scratch, helping you to fill a blank page, much like what ChatGPT or any other consumer chatbot has done since the beginning. I thought their initial approach of only proofreading or editing existing text was the right one, but it’s clear that market forces are guiding their hand and features like this and photorealistic generation in Image Playground are simply table stakes now.

    After the presentation, I thought it was super obvious that the new Siri AI will make ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, etc. unnecessary for many casual users of AI, and many commentators on Twitter have also since shared this opinion. For people using chat interfaces to look up quick answers, do a spot of online research, brainstorm ideas, and generate text documents and images, there’ll be no quicker or more cost-effective way than to ask Siri on one of their Apple devices. On an iPhone, just swipe down from the Dynamic Island and the prompt field appears. Or hold down the power button and speak.

    It appears that the combination of on-device and cloud models will handle a normal amount of requests for no charge, and subscribers to iCloud+ storage will get more generous limits. Why would anyone pay USD$20 a month for third-party AI unless they also needed it for coding? And that’s before you even add in the advantages of having all your personal context available for Siri to work with, privately. I’ve long held off on connecting my email, Dropbox, and other services to ChatGPT and Claude, even if it would make them more useful. Once you open the gates for data to flow out, there’s no getting it back in. Apple is the only company I’d trust with all of it, precisely because their approach doesn’t require me to trust them.

    • Remember how I complained a few weeks ago that Amazon Fresh was ceasing local operations? One positive side effect of that emerged this week, in the form of a push notification arriving around 9:30 AM saying that some alcohol products were on 60% clearance sale. I jumped on that with a quickness, and received 20 bottles of wine later the same afternoon. If we lived in Australia, we’d be paying those prices on an everyday basis, but we don’t. I should have gotten twice as much.
    • Japanese konbini inspire all sorts of media, and I’ve read the books Convenience Store Woman and The Convenience Store by the Sea (which is now a live-action series). They’re… okay. This week I played the game InKonbini on Switch 2, which simulates a week of running a countryside store in 1993. I’ve had this indie game on my radar for a couple of years, but initially resigned myself to never playing it because they’d only planned to release for PC/Windows. It’s now on every major platform, and a very chill and cozy game, albeit short enough to finish in a couple of days. I spent a lot of my time straightening out the shelves and making sure every can, bottle, and sandwich faced outwards.
    • John Scalzi’s “Old Man’s War” series of books continues to be a very fun sci-fi adventure. I’ve finished Book 4: Zoe’s Tale, and it pulls off a rare Rashomon move across two installments. It essentially retells the entire story of Book 3, but from another character’s (Zoe’s) perspective, while somehow managing to be additive rather than repetitive. That’s quite a feat.
    • If you’d asked me what films I’m looking forward to this year, Disclosure Day would have topped the list. I’ll watch Nolan’s The Odyssey but I’m not in any hurry. We saw DD this weekend and I had a good time throughout. Nobody puts a scene together like Spielberg; everything is dynamically shot and immersive. But I was left afterwards with the feeling of too many plot holes, and too much exposition of the film’s values through monologues rather than action. Wait, I forgot that I would have also put The Drama on that list, and I’d been dying to know what the awful “secret” alluded to in the trailer was. We also saw that this weekend and had a lot of fun, even if it didn’t fully live up to my high expectations either. Both films get 3.5 stars.
    • I watched Empire Records (1995) for the first time, because Netflix said it was leaving their catalog soon. This was a film I’d always sort of believed I’d seen, but it turns out that I just knew the soundtrack really well and seen a couple of scenes. What a glorious document of its time. Immaculate vibes, and probably more entertaining today than it was at the time because of how much there is to appreciate — not just the lighting, set design, and music, but the whole nostalgic idea that a giant, two-storey record store could be the cultural center of a community, and that people would fight to protect it. Killing them was a tragic error.
    • While talking about it, Cien said the film dates itself by virtue of its message that selling out is bad and uncool, which I didn’t quite understand. Isn’t selling out still uncool!? And then Michael said the same thing on an unrelated topic — that selling out was something only us senior millennials and Gen Xers shunned. Everyone after sees it as a sign you’ve made it. I think they meant this on an individual level, which is jarring enough. But the film is about independent spaces being consumed by soulless chains, and I worry even that’s an alien idea to younger generations raised on influencer culture and brand collaborations. I haven’t been the same since.
  • Week 23.26

    Week 23.26

    • Summer is suddenly upon us. Like an overbaked Instagram filter stacked on top of an already eye-searing Photoshop edit, the heat in Singapore has been turned up to unglamorous levels. It is impossible not to be sweaty; we are at SWEATCON 1; omnisweat, eversweat, permasweat; we have always been in sweat in Eurasia. It was 31.5ºC and 79% humidity in my living room one afternoon, according to my HomePod. Somebody on Reddit worked out how much it costs to run the AC, in a bid to justify their own use. They say it might last till October.
    • It’s WWDC next week and I’m looking forward to seeing what Apple’s AI story has evolved into. I don’t envy their position — if I were in charge of a billion devices owned by all sorts of users, I wouldn’t want to put an AI assistant across all their data either. I doubt it’s possible to get 100% accuracy at scale understanding people’s appointments and emails in all their permutations, to say nothing of more complex use cases. The result is someone somewhere will lose something important and learn that their phone can’t be trusted. Is that worth it? Should everything AI have a permanent “(beta)” tag?
    • Even when it comes to writing code with AI, you have to be willing to accept bugs or only build simple, generic things. I think letting AI generate small pieces of functional code for people has some promise. Google and the ‘Nothing’ company are doing vibe-coded widgets on Android, so it would be nice if Apple copied that feature along with the long-rumored Shortcuts upgrade (the idea being that a more capable Siri would use Shortcuts and App Intents to control the system under the hood).
    • I was minding my own business this week when an idea for a website suddenly hit and I started to see if I could make it. Within four hours, I had a working version and decided to just publish it and walk away. Big mistake to think that, of course. I spent the next two days fixing bugs, expanding its data sources, and adding more features. What is it? It’s called Chinese Era and it creates random pairings of classical Chinese art and poetry. Some combinations are fittingly beautiful, others make you work to find a connection. I think that challenge makes the poetry even more powerful. I’m very happy with it, because it has the feel of a museum visit, albeit one curated purely by chance. I have no idea where the idea came from — did I see some Chinese artwork recently or read a Chinese poem? Not that I can remember.
    • How does it work? I read some translated Tang Dynasty poetry from Project Gutenberg many years ago, so I knew books were out there in the public domain for the taking. I didn’t know if I could access the necessary paintings, but it turns out institutions like The Smithsonian happily provide their collections via APIs. There’s also a free radio livestream of traditional Chinese music that I was able to incorporate for more atmosphere. Appropriately, the app was created with an open-source Chinese AI model: DeepSeek V4 Flash.
    • In terms of media activity, it’s been a week of tying up loose ends. I finished a bunch of shows that have been lying about half-watched for months: Lioness S1 on Amazon (S3 starts in August), Drops of God S2 on Apple TV, and the anime Tengoku Daimakyo (Heavenly Delusion) on Disney+. I even attempted to finish Carole & Tuesday, a Netflix show I remember watching back in 2019 (!) on my iPhone 11 Pro Max hooked up to my hotel room’s TV in Manila. But it’s just not very good.
      • Later edit: I spoke too soon. C&T has some really prescient stuff going on, with a police squad called MICE (Mars ICE) violently deporting illegal immigrants, and the central plot is about AI artists replacing human musicians? This was in 2019!
    • Keeping with the theme of unfinished business, I started Yakuza Kiwami 2 on the PS5, a game I bought during my first sabbatical in 2021 and never got around to playing before I went back to work. I hope this time I finish it before the next paycheck lands.
    • Speaking of unemployment, Peishan had an afternoon off and we went to the IKEA restaurant I wrote about last week so she could see the situation for herself. This time it was like a full-on retirement village. People sat there in their groups for hours, chatting over bottomless cups of tea and the remnants of their salmon and meatball lunches. Apart from worrying about whether this is actually sustainable, I found it shameful that a Swedish furniture company might be subsidizing a better community center for our seniors than the government’s organizations. More imagination is needed.
    • I read (re-read?) There is No Antimemetics Division, in its proper final form — the first version of the book I read last year was self-published, and it was completely rewritten for release by Penguin Random House. The old version can hardly be found now, which is very fitting for a story about disappearing memories and unknowable artifacts. The new version reads very well, and it’s much clearer what’s happening at all times. However, I rated the original 5 stars on Goodreads and this one felt like 4 stars. It’s undoubtedly a better version for mainstream release, but I enjoyed the original because its concepts were so vaguely sketched, its images so hazy, its atmosphere so oddly suspended between science, fantasy, and eldritch horror.
  • Week 20.26

    Week 20.26

    • On Tuesday and Wednesday I acted as a facilitator for an AI vibe coding class that YJ teaches. It’s been a minute since I’ve been in that sort of workshop environment helping participants through activities, but it was fun and I enjoyed meeting the rest of his team. I was happy to join for several reasons: I thought I might learn something new, I was curious to see how “real people” engage with these tools, and he said I could come in a t-shirt and jeans (this is my real non-negotiable).
    • Incredibly, Jose works in the same building (I did not know this) and spotted me through the closing doors of an elevator. So we met up for breakfast the next day and he told me about how he’s been using Zo Computer — a new-ish AI tool that I think struggles to define its value proposition to normies beyond “personal cloud computer”. For the most part, it’s doing what you can do with your own computer, an AI agent, and a web host. I signed up and have been playing around but it still feels like a bunch of features duct-taped together in search of a problem.
    • Coincidentally, the team behind it was in town for a series of AI conferences happening this week. I watched a recording of one of the Zo team’s presentations at one event, and basically, instead of subscribing to a bunch of services like Linktree or Squarespace or Buffer for personal or business needs, you can use Zo to vibe code your own versions which will run on their servers… or sorry, your computer in the cloud. I’ll admit the automation story is useful: paid users can keep services running continuously, so you can script triggers and schedule operations. It’s kinda sorta like having your own OpenClaw setup, they say. I wish I had a need for this, but like I said to someone, I actually like doing some stuff myself and don’t want to automate everything away.
    • While tuning into the livestream of Day 2 of the AI Engineer Singapore conference, I heard a talk by the designer Josh Newton that articulated things I’ve been upset about for the past couple of months. About how AI enables creative and curious people to make great things, but also impatient and lazy people to make soulless things at scale (not his exact words). We need more craft, more intent, more muscle for individual expression so we can have nicer things. The design community is very fond of saying ‘design matters now more than ever’ at moments of existential crisis, but for once I think it’s actually a critical imperative rather than a defensive posture. I’m tired of so many “builders” building for the sake of it. I want to see a piece of the creators in everything that gets pushed out.

    Aside: I’ve been talking to a couple of people about the need for more apps to be created under a “benevolent benefactor” model, i.e. delightful, useful, deeply personal software created by people with no profit incentive, no dreams of a big exit, and no need to surveil users or blast them with ads. Just made for the love of the game, and maybe to give back to society. Michael’s Listless and YJ’s JustNow are two examples. The newly revived Friendster might be another. I think AI can get more of this out into the world. I don’t want to hear about monetization — how boring! How déclassé!

    • My Gemini subscription was ending, and so I got pulled back in for one last job. I thought I would simply update Window Box with a new Tokyo location, but that wound up bringing on a bunch of significant changes. Snow, for one, which I’d intentionally avoided before by choosing Singapore and Hawaii as initial locations. I solved the aesthetic problem of dead plants by introducing the Japanese camellia, which blooms in winter, and the nandina (Heavenly Bamboo) which goes from green to red tones in the cold. But once I added snow and seasons, I started revising the way cloud cover and precipitation were determined, and ended up tuning the environmental sounds, and the animations of rain, leaves blowing in the wind…
    Window Box — Tokyo with a light dusting of snow
    • After seeing how the basic GPT-mini model in Zo Computer managed to code me a simple web app, I started to rethink what free models can do today. So after my Gemini subscription lapsed, I tried adding a transition animation when switching between cities in Window Box, and was absolutely stunned that Gemini Flash (the ‘dumb’ model you can use for free) managed to help me get it done. It certainly wasn’t one shot or perfect, but wow. Very soon we’ll be locally generating (streaming?) live app code on our mobile devices.
    • On Friday night, I met up with Jose (again) and Reg to attend a production of 8 short food-related plays at Wild Rice, chiefly to support our friend Munz who is one of the performers. It’s the culmination of a year-long theatrical incubator program she’s been in, and we came away very proud of her, impressed with all the actors, and some of the writers.
    • It became a bit of a slog near the end, but I’ve finally finished Donkey Kong Bananza on the Switch 2. For a game that’s partly about the power of music, I found the soundtrack pretty mediocre, and for a game that’s partly about a great singer, the vocals in the songs are sadly weak and buried in the mix. It’s not one I think I’ll ever revisit.
    • My book club is reading Speaker for the Dead, the second book in Orson Scott Card’s Ender series (as in, Ender’s Game). I’ve long heard that this book is like the Dune and Foundation sequels: not worth reading because they spin off into weird territory and lack the tight purpose that made the first books great. I’ve finished it and can say that while it does go in a very different direction, it’s undoubtedly worth reading. You don’t even need to remember very much from Ender’s Game, scanning a quick synopsis online will suffice. I’ve been very sleep deprived all week, and even then (!) easily stayed up wide awake past 2 AM in order to finish it.
    • I had to make this stupid House of the Dead image after I had the idea in the shower and couldn’t shake it. In the past, that would mean way too much time in Photoshop for not that great a payoff. Now it’s just a quick prompt to Nano Banana 2.
  • a maze, a maze, a maze…

    a maze, a maze, a maze…

    A new maze every day, for everyone.

    Play a maze, a maze, a maze… at amaze3.app

    Every day, a new maze appears. Everyone in the world gets the same one.

    There’s something cozy and comforting about knowing that right now, somewhere, another person is navigating the same corridors, hitting the same dead ends, and having the same moment of doubt about whether they just walked in a complete circle. Some days the maze is generous and you are out in twenty seconds. Other days it will make you work for it, and you will feel the exit before you see it.

    Each maze has a target time based on the shortest possible path. Finish close to it and you’ll earn an S-rank celebration and a shareable stats message. Go slower and you’ll land somewhere between a laudable A and a sad D.

    Three modes: Standard comes with breadcrumbs showing where you have been; Hard Mode removes them and trusts you to hold the map entirely in your head; Chill Mode turns the timer off for people who just want to wander. Themes range from an outdoor garden maze to a retro game dungeon, so you can get lost in a way that feels right for you.

    A new one tomorrow. And the day after. A maze, a maze, a maze.

    Disclaimer: I made a maze, a maze, a maze… with the help of Google’s Gemini 3 Pro LLM. No responsibility taken for wrong turns or damaged self-esteem.

    Related blog post: Week 15.26

  • Week 7.26

    Week 7.26

    One of my irrational fears that hasn’t gone away with growing older is that of going to the dentist. I’ve put it off over and over, and was pretty sure I’d make it last year but didn’t. I’ve done my best to handle things at home, even flossing daily which they always say you should do but I’m convinced no one actually does. This week I finally made an appointment to go, and it wasn’t as bad as I feared. They did find a cavity that needs patching up, but the appointment for that is only in a couple of months.

    One thing that felt off was a recommendation that I get a certain procedure done — not only because I’d like to avoid pain wherever possible, but because it was prescribed before they’d even looked in my mouth. I’d only just said that it was my first visit in a while, and they said ‘okay you should get this done’.

    Because it’s 2026, I uploaded my x-rays to Gemini 3 Pro for a second opinion. It analyzed the scans confidently (but of course) and told me the same things, but in even greater detail. It did not think the procedure was necessary, and gave me clarifying questions to ask the dentist next time. When it comes to a nervous person like me, it provided a better experience than a human dentist could because it was available to answer my many more follow-up questions, at all hours. This longer “consultation” made me feel better, although I’m well aware that taking medical advice from a machine that just says things isn’t the smartest move. But I know people do and will because it’s really easy, and so once again I’m saying this is really dangerous territory.

    Why am I using Gemini so much, and what happened to Claude? Google decided to play dirty, I guess. They’re offering three months of their Pro AI plan (essentially Google One with 2TB of storage + access to Gemini Pro, Nano Banana Pro, and Veo) at a 90% discount. That’s about S$2.80 a month. These models are all so incredibly close in raw performance, that for someone like me who’s not using them for coding, the main differences are down to tone, character, and perhaps ethical alignment. I’m already sold on Claude for text-based work, but I thought I should spend some time getting a feel for how Gemini differs. Especially since it’s going to be at the heart of Apple’s AI features at some point this year.

    Friend and former colleague Rob is back in town for Chinese New Year. I thought I’d last seen him maybe two or three years ago, but it’s actually somehow been closer to four. The quickening pace of time’s slipping through the fingers at this age is alarming. The last time he was around, I’d just printed off some stickers of my Misery Men drawings and given him one. I had just gone back to work after my brief sabbatical. We were still wearing masks indoors (as seen in the linked post’s featured photo). Is there a German word for how relationships can pause and park themselves outside of regular time, so that four years feels like so much less?

    A few of us met up for craft beers and Thai food on Sunday, with the reminiscing and catching up going past midnight. Here’s a privacy-preserving photo-turned-courtroom sketch made with Gemini’s help.

    Media activity

    • I finished watching all 48 episodes of The Apothecary Diaries anime series on Netflix. It’s about an unusually educated girl, raised in a red light district, who gets kidnapped and sold to the imperial palace as an indentured maid where she gets to flex her skill with poisons and medicines. It’s set in a fictional country resembling China in the Tang Dynasty. Nothing about this should appeal to me, but it was one of the more enjoyable low-stakes shows I’ve seen recently.
    • I still haven’t finished reading Sleeping Dogs. But I did finish playing The Hokkaido Serial Murder Case a few weeks ago but forgot to say so. As a faithful remake of a retro game, it can’t be blamed for some of the dated gameplay. The art could definitely be better though — it would be a fine game for $20, but unfortunately is priced at $44.99.
    • It’s been a year since we were in Tokyo and I bought the Japanese supernatural murder mystery game Paranormasight, largely because it was set in the Ryogoku/Sumida district where our apartment was. In last week’s Nintendo Direct, a sequel was announced and so I decided it was finally time to get started on the original. It’s turned out to be quite good, with a dynamic visual presentation that goes beyond the usual VN style of talking figures in front of different backgrounds. The gameplay is constantly breaking the fourth wall as well: one challenge where you die after hearing a cursed sound is solved by going into settings and turning the volume down.
    • While feeling stressed out about the dentist, I played Jusant on the PS5. It’s a beautiful, dialogue-free game where you slowly climb a massive mountain and put together what happened to the people who used to live on it. It was fairly quick to finish and now I’m curious about Cairn, another game about scaling a mountain, albeit more realistic about the physical difficulties involved. Jusant’s nameless hero is practically superhuman and his arms are way too skinny for the insane amount of climbing he has to do.
  • Week 6.26

    Week 6.26

    • A quick follow-up on one of last week’s topics: it turns out that some posts on Moltbook may have been faked because there were security holes allowing people to get on there and post directly (instead of being a bot-only place as promised). Doesn’t change the main point that future agents will collaborate not just on one computer, but sync up across wide networks with effects most of us can’t fathom. Look at the crowd that gathered to discuss Clawd a couple of days ago, to see how much excitement there is for this box that says Pandora on it.
    • I’m too tired to dwell on this much more today! Keeping up with the AI space is still a full-time job, and I’m not going to try. But Claude Opus 4.6 was just released, along with demos of what it can do in Cowork mode, which is very impressive if true. Apparently these models are also able to tell when they’re being evaluated by safety/alignment teams, which makes it very hard to know how they’ll really behave in the wild. Look at this example where a model can infer the user’s cultural background with just a few words, owing to the words they choose. These are tools, except other tools don’t do things like this.
    • I read a fantastic sci-fi short story that sort of involves AI: Julia, by Fernando Borretti. If you also enjoy fiction that drops you into a context and makes you swim, and then shows you strange and beautiful ideas as you break above the surface, you’ll love this. Like how China Miéville uses ornate language in The Book of Elsewhere to suggest Keanu Reeves’s… I mean the protagonist’s immortal, mystical otherness, Borretti uses a dense, intellectually dominating host of references here to illustrate the POV of an artificial mind at the end of humanity’s time. I haven’t stopped thinking about it.
    • What will we do when all the jobs are gone? A young entrepreneur in our neighborhood has started a home-based business selling smashburgers, and we bought some for dinner midweek. They were good, and I’m slightly afraid of what this proximity will do to my waistline. For those unaware, this was a bit of a trend last year and local media outlets like ChannelNewsAsia ran stories (example) about how such businesses were springing up as a result of low employment opportunities and rising rents.
    • Retreating further into the virtual world is another option. A bunch of new experiences became available on the Apple Vision Pro recently, and I caught up with some of them. The cutest is an immersive documentary on Apple TV called Top Dogs (two 15-min episodes), which looks at the annual Cruft’s dog show in Birmingham, UK. You get really up close to some of these beautiful animals, and the urge I felt to reach out and pet them was extremely strong. It wouldn’t be the same seeing this on TV. Here you get a sense of their size and presence, see them in incredible detail — everything but smell them. Apparently there are 25,000 dogs at the convention center each year, but I imagine these are all shampooed and much more pleasant than your average wet dog.
    • There’s also Retrocade, a game on Apple Arcade that uh… simulates an arcade. The game is playable on other devices, but on Vision Pro you get life-sized arcade cabinets standing in front of you, playing licensed retro titles like Space Invaders and Bubble Bobble. The only thing that breaks the illusion is of course that you can’t reach out to grab the sticks and mash the buttons. Instead, you have to use a connected game controller.
    • Speaking of emulating old hardware, I played and finished a game on Switch (also available on PC) called The Operator. It’s one of those where the entire UI is a computer’s desktop and you have to chat, look into files, and do hackery stuff to experience the story. I think this can be filed along with the other murder mystery games I’ve played lately. It’s fairly short at under four hours, almost completely linear, and not something you’d play twice. Wait for a sale, I think.
    • You know who else is a hacker? The lead character in Apple TV’s Tehran, a show that came out in 2020 and has since been renewed for a fourth season. We watched Episode 1 back when it came out, liked it enough, but for some reason completely forgot to go back until this year. It’s been topping the charts lately, maybe because of the recent civil unrest in Iran. Having just finished Season 1, I can say it‘s a really good espionage thriller, and we’re keen to keep going.
    • Oh and check this out. Someone has managed to license Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series and made a free-to-play (i.e. shitty) mobile game: Foundation: Galactic Frontier. It even has an Apple TV logo appear on startup?! And the next day, I saw this insane animated ad for it pop up on Instagram and couldn’t believe my eyes — I took a screenshot to prove it. In all fairness the actual game isn’t anything like this, it’s just a heinous misrepresentation that probably has Asimov spinning in his grave.