sangsara.net

Tag: Gaming

  • 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.
  • Week 25.25

    Week 25.25

    • Lots of reading this week, but not the traditional sort. I decided it was time to cross Emio: The Smiling Man off my Nintendo Switch backlog — that would be the murder mystery sorta-visual novel published by Nintendo (developed by Mages) last year. It’s the third installment in the ‘Famicom Detective Club’ series that laid dormant for decades (the clue’s in the name; they were made for the original Famicom aka the Japanese NES) until remakes of the first two games were released in 2021.
    • I played the first remake back in Week 31 of 2021, and apparently felt it was “a crock of shit”. When Emio came out, I wrote more about the series in Week 36.24, and watched a YouTube playthrough of the second game rather than pay good money to torture myself some more.
    • Thankfully, Emio is much better than those two. Perhaps because it’s a new game with a more sophisticated and complex story than was possible in the 80s. But I suspect it’s also because I’m now familiar enough with, and more forgiving of, the series’ game design ideas that I’d called “archaic and frustrating”. In any case, it has the most lavish animation production values I’ve ever seen in a visual novel, and the detective vibes are a lot of fun. I was let down by the mystery’s resolution, but the journey was definitely worth the time.
    Japanese workplace sexism in Emio The Smiling Man
    • Rather than dive into Zelda Tears of the Kingdom (can you tell I’m afraid of the commitment?), I decided to continue down the VN path by starting on TSUKIHIME A piece of blue glass moon, a decision I will probably soon regret. This is a remake of a supposed masterpiece by the developer Type-Moon, and involves some 30–50 hours of reading, which is about 3x longer than Emio. It is, however, much less interactive and more like reading a novel with visuals and sound to set the mood. I’m only a little while in, but finding it a pleasant ‘multimedia’ midpoint between watching a show and reading a book. Luckily, I played Type-Moon’s Witch on the Holy Night back in March, and because TSUKIHIME takes place later on in the same universe, it feels like a continuation.
    • There was a real book, though! What You Are Looking For Is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama is a charming collection of five little stories centered around a community library, where people stuck in different ruts meet a librarian who has a knack for recommending books that set them off and thriving in new directions. I wrote in my Goodreads review that on top of being above average as translated Japanese books go — most of them come across sounding dumber and more boring than I’d hope they are in the original texts — but the extremely healing nature of these stories warranted a five-star rating from me.
    • It looks like I’ll be going to Bangkok again next month, but this time the heat will be even more unbearable (a RealFeel of 40–45ºC?), so please pray for me. In preparation, I’ve purchased a white t-shirt for the first time in several years.
    • Over the weekend, we dragged ourselves out to see the City of Others exhibition at the National Gallery despite not being fully in the mood. I thought it would be healthy/helpful to just wander through it anyway, even if not fully attentive, and I did find some things unexpectedly inspiring. I may start a new project soon on the back of one idea!
    • While looking at some artifacts behind glass, I remembered that I’d installed Adobe’s new iOS camera app, Project Indigo, which was apparently developed by some of computational photography’s living legends, and promises “SLR quality” images by combining up to 32 frames at a time. It includes an AI-powered feature that removes reflections by inferring what the subject is, and generating detail to fill the less-visible areas. I tried it out on a couple of artworks and got a warning that my phone was overheating — I guess I’m upgrading to an iPhone 17 Pro this year! Anyway, see how it did for yourself.
    • For a free app, Project Indigo is a great deal. I’m sure it’ll eventually be shut down and folded into a paid Adobe offering, but for now, everyone should try it out for a bit. It takes very clean and likely superior photos to the default camera, and does super-resolution oversampling to give you more zoom reach than the iPhone’s lenses will. But the outputs still have that hyperreal HDR look that comes with computational photography, and for the moment that’s something I’m a little tired of. A little grain goes a long way in making a phone photo feel more like a real moment.
    • After the gallery visit, we had lunch at a Cafe&Meal Muji where I was shocked to see the latest inflation-adjusted menu; a massive downgrade from when I used to visit frequently during office lunch hours. The “4-Deli” meal of two hot and two cold dishes alongside rice and soup used to cost maybe $17.80 pre-Covid, then crept up to $20.80 in the years after. Today, it’s been entirely removed from the menu, and $20.80 only gets you a “3-Deli”: one hot and two cold dishes. To try and obfuscate the loss in value, they’re now throwing in a half-boiled egg (which can’t cost more than 30 cents).
    • I probably should have expected it, because for breakfast that same day we stopped by a Toast Box for some kaya toast, which I honestly haven’t done in years, and the breakfast set (coffee, two eggs, a sandwich) is now S$7.60, or about 50% more than in the pre-Covid era. You can of course get this sort of thing cheaper elsewhere, but these prices are still wild.
    • In Craig Mod’s nearly three-hour book tour interview on Rich Roll’s podcast, which I’m listening to in small doses, he mentions the ¥300 breakfast set, a Japanese coffee house staple, and how apologetic businesses have been about having to raise prices by even ¥20 or ¥50. That’s what the kaya toast set is to Singapore, and I wonder if Japan is going to see a ¥500 or ¥700 breakfast set before too long.
    • Speaking of Japan, the Blue Bottle chain arrived in Singapore back in April. While I know they’re American, I’d only ever had their coffee while in Japan. Now that two months have passed, I thought the hype would have died down enough to try and visit the branch here in Raffles City’s tiny LUMINE department store. It was still packed, but I got an iced NOLA-style coffee to go for S$8 — lightly sweetened and flavored with chicory, it was pretty good tbh! But you can see Nestlé’s dirty fingerprints all over the brand now. It feels like the stores only exist to justify selling merch through other channels. Do a search for “Blue Bottle NOLA” and instead of a store menu or info page about their drink offerings, you’ll get tons of spinoff products like NOLA Nespresso capsules, brew-at-home kits, tumblers, instant coffee mix, foamers, and so on. Even Starbucks, synonymous with the mercenary scaling of coffee, looks kinda restrained in comparison.
  • Week 24.25

    Week 24.25

    • My Switch 2 finally arrived on Monday, praise be. It turned out to be an imported European unit, so it has the right kind of power plugs, but the included download code for Mario Kart World would only work with an EU eShop account. It didn’t take long to make one, but it’s yet another needless fragmentation of my digital footprint.
    • It’s a fantastic improvement on the original Switch. It feels more solidly built, and the magnetic Joy-Cons don’t creak and give as much when supporting the console’s weight. The screen is enormous but since the original wasn’t exactly pocketable anyway, who cares? It seems powerful enough to keep up with game requirements for easily another five years. The only regression is battery life, which they’ll surely fix with a new model two years from now.
    • I have yet to play anything on it that graphically pushes into PS5 territory with ray tracing and photorealism; although running Mario Kart World at 60fps in 4K is definitely not something the old Switch could do. That same smoothness extends to Splatoon 3, which got a Switch 2 upgrade patch on Thursday for the franchise’s 10th anniversary, and it feels amazingly fast and fluid on the new hardware. The once painful load times have been reduced to almost nothing, which is nearly worth the price of admission all by itself. At the very least, reviewers agree it’s more powerful than a Steam Deck.
    • Bert was back in town on a last-minute trip, so we met up with some of the old gang for beers and the kind of talk that middle-aged people will get up to if you let them: aging parents, how everything was much better before, and how we’d like to retire voluntarily before AI forces us to. Jussi was once again unable to make it, but he had the acceptable reason of being out of the country.
    • It was WWDC week, and with the comprehensive OS updates that were announced, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that every Apple product experience will be changing this fall. I’ve had several conversations about the new cross-platform design language system they unveiled, which doesn’t have a name but is anchored by a new digital material called Liquid Glass, so people have just been calling it that. I wrote last week that I hoped the new look wouldn’t come with regressions in usability, specifically thinking about legibility and interaction clarity, but those are exactly the issues that everyone has been pointing out in the first developer beta. I’m hopeful that they’ll be able to moderate some of the more extreme decisions before the launch, but there’s no turning back. Like it or not, this is just how things are going to be for us users. What are you going to do, move to Android?
    • While talking to Michael again, one of us offered that Liquid Glass is simply a flex. It’s Apple building a visible moat with their superior silicon. Every iPhone, iPad, and Mac made in the last five years possesses power-efficient cycles to spare, which can’t be said of Android devices, save for a minority of the highest-end flagship phones. So when you look over someone’s shoulder in public and see morphing glass buttons accurately refracting the light coming off other elements on their screen at 60 to 120 fps, you’re looking at the digital equivalent of fine stitched leather. Luxury pixels. Veblen UI. Android manufacturers can’t follow Apple down this road without bifurcating the experience into cheap and premium versions, or forcing tradeoffs like reduced battery life and jankier animation.
    • The iPad got the most extreme makeover of all the platforms, and I’m a mixture of relieved, disappointed, and excited. Relieved that they’ve given up on trying to define some new paradigm for managing multiple apps on a screen; turns out the answer is just the same overlapping windows we’ve had since the first Mac. Mildly disappointed that if they couldn’t crack it after some 15 years, then maybe there just isn’t a better way. The universe might be more constrained than we’d hoped. And excited that the iPad will now be a truer laptop replacement for the majority of people, and with that increase in adoption perhaps we’ll get developers excited to build new kinds of experiences for it.
    Screenshot from Apple.com
    • As a Vision Pro owner, I can’t wait for the improved Personas, sharing virtual spaces with people nearby, and the new “spatial scene” rendering from 2D photos. I’ve already spoken to some people in inSpaze who are rocking the new Personas, and they look 10x better and more realistic than the old ones. In fact, it’s given rise to a weird social dilemma that can only exist in this age. I’ve known these people for a while and we’ve talked with each other quite a bit, but suddenly overnight, their faces have changed and it feels like I’m meeting them for the first time — or realizing I never really had. One person in the group chat looked younger now that his Persona got more accurate. Another person looked older and more intense than his previous Pixar-esque Persona suggested he was. They mentioned feeling slightly uncomfortable with how realistically they’re now presenting — the opposite of the safety that I described back in August last year: “the use of Personas creates psychological distance; it’s you, but it’s also more a puppet that looks like you.” Well, now it’s just your real face for everyone to see. I apologize in advance.

    I’ll leave you with two videos from Pulp, whose comeback album More continues to surprise me by being actually good, as if the band hadn’t gone anywhere for the last two decades. The first single has a great video (above) that uses generative AI in the best way possible. The second video below is a live performance of an old favorite, one of many appearances they’ve been making in support of the new stuff.

  • Week 23.25

    Week 23.25

    • Last week when I said ‘God willing, my Switch 2 will be delivered on Friday’, I actually meant to say ‘inshallah’, and so, as punishment, it didn’t arrive. And because Saturday was a Muslim public holiday, the postal service didn’t deliver it over the weekend either. Why didn’t it come as promised? The seller made a real mess of things, opting for Standard instead of Express delivery (one working day vs. two hours), but that wasn’t even the worst part. They canceled one of my two orders at the very last minute, one I’d made for a friend, and offered no apologies apart from saying it would come at the end of the month when it’s officially released locally. They obviously took more orders than they had supply for! The name of the vendor is “Unrival SG” on Amazon, so use that knowledge how you will.
    • Ironically, I ordered a Japanese import Pro Controller 2 off Shopee on Thursday, and that arrived on Friday with no issues. As everyone has reported, it feels amazing — possibly the best-feeling controller I’ve ever used, especially its buttons and thumbsticks. Everything is dampened and silent; the amount of tension seems just right. The only thing that could improve this (for me, with my big hands) would be making it more like the PS5’s DualSense in size and hand feel.
    • I’m hoping it’ll come on Monday instead, which would make that a jam-packed day what with WWDC after midnight. I’m not expecting any new hardware or life-changing software features, so the main thing for most people will probably be the unified redesign. I really hope they smash it, and not ship a visual refresh that turns out to be a regression in usability.
    • Without a new console in hand, I thought I’d pass the weekend by starting on Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth (PS5), the 8th game in the Yakuza series. It’s one of the highest rated RPGs of all time, sprawling in scope and packed with too many things to do, including “minigames” that are basically full-on Animal Crossing and Pokémon parodies.
    • But it turns out I still like the idea of console gaming more than the reality. Within an hour, I’d quit and gone back to reading manga and watching a guy hunt for retro games in Book-Off.
    • Kim is/was away for work again, and the weather has been rough (forecasted to touch 35ºC at some point this month), so I’ve mainly stayed in most days. Exceptions were made for a Korean chicken meetup and a couple of evening walks. The Vision Pro got an above average amount of use this week as I’ve woken up early enough to meet the American users I know on inSpaze, and because I wanted to watch a bunch of films in a theatrical environment.
    • The first I should mention was Sinners (2025), which was probably overhyped because I didn’t think it was the greatest film of the last decade or anything, although it was very good. What took me out of the moment was thinking about how it’s so structurally and thematically similar to From Dusk Till Dawn (1996), another film that delightfully switches gears halfway to become a vampire story out of nowhere. When I saw that as a teenager, my mind was blown. I didn’t think they put money behind films with premises that audacious. I suppose Sinners is that for a new generation.
    • The next was The Zone of Interest (2023), an A24 Jonathan Glazer film that got a lot of buzz at Cannes the year it came out, but I put it off because the subject matter seemed too heavy. It shows the unnervingly normal family life of the commandant at Auschwitz, with wife, kids, and servants in a home just outside the camp’s walls. As screams and gunfire are heard in the background throughout the day, and the ovens pump out smoke and fire at night, they just pretend like nothing’s wrong and it’s probably a more effective horror than setting vampires loose.
    • I was primed to finally confront it because I watched Alain Resnais’s concentration camp documentary Night and Fog (1956) on MUBI last Sunday — I didn’t mention it at the time because I was honestly too traumatized. For a 30 minute film, it packs a lot of unspeakable horror, images of brutality on a scale that you’ll desperately want to believe are a one-time aberration in history. Sadly, while the efficiency and nature of the gas chambers were perhaps unique to Nazi Germany, you just know that this is no different from any of the genocides that have taken/continue to take place. Watching it, you’ll believe that something is intrinsically broken in human nature, because even the victims of such crimes can’t even be counted on not to do the same to others.
    • I’ve been enjoying three new albums. The new Counting Crows which I’d been saving, Butter Miracle, actually might be a return to form based on my few spins so far. Its main issue is the difference in vocal sounds between the two halves, maybe owing to the fact that the latter half was recorded and first released as an EP a couple of years ago. But I’d say it’s their strongest work since Hard Candy.
    • Pulp is also back with their first album in 23 years, More, and it’s also a very strong comeback. The kind you don’t expect from an old band putting something out in the post-Covid era: they’re usually forgettable and anaemic, you know, like U2 albums after the 90s. But More might be classic Pulp — playful, raunchy, cynical yet open-hearted — with just a couple more decades on top.
    • Shura is also back with a new one, I Got Too Sad For My Friends, and it’s got some lovely songs as usual, recalling Fleetwood Mac (and by extension, recent Clairo) and even a little bit of Prince, with her use of synths.

  • Week 22.25

    Week 22.25

    • I was listening to Apple Music 1 (the radio station) and a song came on with a melody that I knew, but couldn’t place. It was To Ease You by the indie pop band Men I Trust, and a couple of days later I placed it. The main hook is basically a sped-up bit from Now And Then, the recent “new” Beatles song. I’m mostly glad I answered the question for myself because I hate that feeling of recognizing but not being able to remember.
    • I went out three nights this week to catch up with people, maybe drank too much, maybe ate too much fried food, and it’s been so warm here even after dark — I could be falling ill again, or at least kinda tired out.
    • Kim’s going to be away again so I only have two things on my agenda for the coming week. The first is another evening appointment for drinks and fried food, and the second is a big one: Nintendo Switch 2 release day! God willing, my delivery will arrive on Friday. I’m fully expecting at least three hours of painful setup and migration from my Switch OLED, because Nintendo isn’t the best at this stuff. The official local release date has been set for June 26, but pricing has still not been announced. I figure it might be S$50 less than what I paid, but screw it, early access and a guaranteed unit is worth paying for. Some fine print on the local website suggests they’re not confident the Nintendo Switch Online service will even launch in Southeast Asia this year! Taiwan’s website says it’s coming to them in 2025, while ours has nearly the same text saying they’re working on it, but not mentioning the year.
    • In the meantime, my Anbernic RG34XXSP arrived from China and it looks and plays pretty great. I mostly bought it as a fun toy and collectible, so I’m not planning to get stuck into an old RPG properly just before the Switch 2. I’ve booted it up, played a few platformers, and overall think it’s a neat device for the relatively low price ($60 USD at launch). It’ll be a nice thing to have on planes or short trips where I might want to play on physical controls, and the Switch is too cumbersome to bring along.
    • Trying to charge the Anbernic did lead me to learn something new, though. It wouldn’t charge with my USB-C to C charger and cable, only with the supplied USB-A to C cable, so I looked it up online. Apparently this is an intentional design choice that some makers of low-cost products make — supporting USB-C to C charging requires more expensive components, such as a chip to negotiate the power supply with the charger (getting it wrong might start a fire). Limiting charging to USB-A sources solves this because the output is fixed and lower-risk at 5V. So, if your cheap Chinese device comes with a USB-A to C cable in 2025, it’s actually an instruction on how to charge it. This solves the mystery of why one of my older JisuLife fans refuses to charge sometimes.
    • Michael and I somehow got into a long discussion about something other than Apple, spending a good hour on the phone going over why the Mission Impossible film series has ended up the way it is, with Christopher McQuarrie seemingly having lost his touch for writing a tight script with The Final Reckoning. I believe you can lay the blame for all the things I complained about before at Tom Cruise’s feet. The man wants to do his crazy stunts, and he’s so powerful as a producer and movie star that nobody can really push back on his ideas, not even the director (at this point just a person hired to enable Cruise’s dreams). So the story gets written after the set pieces are decided, and when time is short, two things happen: exposition gets inserted, and series hallmarks are leaned on to suggest you’re having a good time. So in between lots of talk about what’s going to happen, you get a scene where the team goes over their plan while you see flashes of it happening for real, there’s a heist-like entrance into an impenetrable space, some McGuffin gets stolen and lost and recovered again, maybe someone peels a mask off, etc. etc. But does anyone really understand what’s happening in the final action scene of TFR? Why they’re there, what the antagonist wants? How Hunt’s plan is supposed to work? It’s pretty cool, if you’ve ever wanted to see what a totally abstracted action movie would look like.
    • If you want to go further back up the blame chain, you could say it’s all because JJ Abrams decided to build out Ethan Hunt’s personal life back in MI3 to raise the emotional stakes, while defanging the main stakes by introducing a Mystery Box/McGuffin approach. It might have been Tom Cruise’s direction all along, but the result is that every subsequent movie has had to raise the stakes to nuclear armageddon and give Ethan Hunt the same “this is the result of your actions” multi-film existential hero’s crisis that Nolan’s Batman and Craig’s Bond also endured.
    • On his recommendation, I rewatched Rogue Nation (film #5) and it was even better than I’d remembered. There were also several scenes that reminded me of bits in TFR, like how a character pulls a flash drive out at a crucial moment — you can call them callbacks, but maybe we’ve strained the limits of McQ’s vocabulary and that’s why no single director should do four straight installments (of a series that didn’t conceive).
    • Don’t get me wrong, we both liked The Final Reckoning, but we’re sad about all the Mission Impossible experiments that we didn’t/won’t get because they gave up on the early anthology approach where each film had a different director’s touch. But for now, I’d love to have a prequel TV series that sits between the original and the first film; the early days of Hunt’s career. I think the world of the IMF is one franchise that would actually benefit from being owned by Disney, as they have no qualms about trying spinoffs and milking a brand to death. A mini-series about a rookie IMF team in Asia? A real-time one following another team in crisis, à la 24? Yes, please! I love it when a plan comes together, so just keep doing that.
    • A couple of weeks back I mentioned reading MW Craven’s book, Fearless, and said perhaps it’ll be a TV series someday. Well, I finished the book (good fun), and the acknowledgments page mentioned that a major streaming network has already bought the rights. No idea who, but it’d be funny if it was Amazon, home of Reacher, so that they can totally own the ‘dangerous ex-military investigator/vagabond who kills a small army per season’ space.

    And here are some photos I took on my iPhone this week, still favoring the portrait orientation to pretend I bought a Fujifilm X half.