sangsara.net

Tag: Internet

  • Week 43.25

    Week 43.25

    Vertigo (1958) is a great film, because Hitchcock was a master. It’s also the title of a mediocre stadium rock song, because I love hating on U2.

    Unfortunately, vertigo is also something I experienced for the first time this week — I’m fairly sure I jinxed myself at some point earlier this year by saying out loud “I don’t have any problems”. It hit me on Friday night in the form of extreme dizziness and nausea, and even the walk to bed to sleep it off was difficult without support. It got better the next morning with the help of something called the Epley Maneuver, which I found online.

    Asking around, I discovered that this is a more common human experience than you’d think, with several people I know having suffered episodes. Some of them had dizziness lasting days, and yet it’s strangely not discussed like, all the time? From what I can tell, it’s probably something called benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV), where calcium deposits in your inner ear become dislodged and move around, screwing with your balance. I’ll be seeing a doctor next week to confirm it, but in any case there’s no known cure and it might keep happening for the rest of my life. It’s crazy that so many are just quietly living with this.

    Have I been self-diagnosing with the help of AI? Maybe? I did just sign up for Claude Pro after all, which I’ve mentioned finding more agreeable than ChatGPT. I made vibe-coded two little apps before being laid low: a primitive prototype of my long-gestating stealth game, Cat Creeper, and a tool for my book club to figure out how many chapters of any given book we should read in the coming week. That one is called Book Splitter, and I offer it here for any book clubs out there with a similar need to figure out stopping points conveniently near chapter breaks.

    It’s been a unique experience using Claude’s impressive capabilities alongside reading Asimov’s I, Robot, which foresaw many of our modern discourse around AI safety, and The Optimist at the same time, which has finally begun to chronicle some of Sam Altman’s questionable and unethical moves both at OpenAI and in his private life. The sections detailing his gaslighty, ungenerous, and cruel interactions with his sister Annie ironically reminded me of reading about Steve Jobs’s treatment of his daughter Lisa, in her memoir Small Fry.

    I just passed the part where Dario Amodei and other employees left to start Anthropic. Just as I try to avoid Meta and Google products because of their comparatively weaker stance on privacy versus Apple, it makes sense that some prefer Anthropic over OpenAI for a more cautious approach to AI.

    ===

    My mother-in-law stayed with us this week, which meant getting the newspaper in for her because that’s how some people still get their news. I was shocked to see how thin the physical Straits Times is these days — almost completely devoid of advertising, and on the whole maybe having 20% of the heft I remember from the 90s. It’s also S$1.10 now, up from the 50 to 80 cents I thought it was. Still, it was kinda nice (nostalgic) to sit at the dining table and read the paper in the morning.

    It was also the week where my favorite retro-game-hunting IRL streamer, 4amlaundry, went on a 5-day trip to Kansai, checking out thrift stores and exploring Osaka and Nara. I didn’t want to miss watching it live, so I tried explaining the whole concept of streamers to said mother-in-law, and got her to watch him with me for awhile on the TV, the whole time silently praying that he wouldn’t go look at the display cases of half-naked anime figurines that he sometimes checks out in those stores.

    Thankfully, that didn’t happen, and instead we watched him walk down countryside roads, eat at chain restaurants, and get knocked down by the aggressive deer in Nara. All of that made for some good conversation, so if you get the chance to introduce an elder to Twitch, it’s not the worst idea if you can avoid the NSFW aspects.

    Speaking of shows that you would hope won’t be awkward to watch with your parents or in-laws BUT ACTUALLY ARE, add the latest season of The Diplomat to the list. There’s a lot of cursing (I kinda expected that), and some sex scenes that maybe the producers thought were hot and their audience wanted, but are so unnecessary and desperate that they come across as unintentional comedy. Apart from that, it’s still a fun series that leans into unrealistic political drama, with some unexpectedly good writing (for a Netflix show). Just watch it on your own.

    ===

    I somehow forgot to mention the slate of new Apple products announced last week: M5-powered iPad Pros, a 14” basic MacBook Pro, and a spec-bumped Apple Vision Pro. The product lineup is designed to lead you to the conclusion that you should buy everything, because how do you choose between an 11” and 13” iPad Pro, and a 14” MacBook Pro?

    The 11” iPad size is portable for couch use, but the 13” becomes an advanced desk computer for creative work when paired with the Magic Keyboard and Pencil Pro. But if you’re going to be using it while deskbound, why not get a MacBook Pro with 24 hours of battery life (versus just 10 on the iPad), and the possibility of running local AI models and all kinds of other software that isn’t allowed on iPad?

    Making things harder is the fact that a 13” iPad Pro with accessories costs more than an “equivalent” 14” MacBook Pro, and they’re too costly for an average user like me to justify buying both. So the final decision was to hold out a little longer with my current M1-generation gear, and see what upgrades the 13” iPad Air gets next year — hopefully an M4 or M5 processor, ProMotion, and the aluminum Magic Keyboard currently exclusive to iPad Pro models.

    But bringing the M5 to the Apple Vision Pro makes it a better system to use and own for the next two years, while we wait for the next big leap forward in miniaturization. However as a casual user who only clocks a few hours a week, I couldn’t see myself upgrading for a faster chip alone. The more compelling improvement is a new “Dual Knit Band” that comes as standard, which sorta combines the previous Solo Knit Band and Dual Loop Band into one much-improved design.

    The best part is that this new band is also available as a standalone accessory, so I ordered one immediately for my first-gen AVP. It’s simply a marvel of engineering and feels incredibly premium. The build quality is off the charts, and the Fit Dial they’ve created to independently adjust both the back and top straps might be the most Apple-y thing they’ve shipped on an accessory since the Stainless Link Bracelet for the original Apple Watch.

    Thanks to this more comfortable and ergonomic band, I’d planned to spend more time with the AVP this week, until the vertigo and unusual weekly routine got in the way. Not gonna lie, my first thought during the vertigo attack, after “What if this never goes away and I’m disabled for life?” was “Does this mean I can’t use the Vision Pro anymore?”

  • Week 41.25

    Week 41.25

    • The results from last week’s health screening came back clear of all major issues, so I’ll sleep soundly on that front for a little while at least! The only note was that I could cut back a little on the carbs and saturated fats, which makes me wonder what I’ve done differently since the last test. Could it be… that I was eating more healthily when I went to the office more often? Those downtown mall lunches were more expensive than the kopitiam/hawker fare I get more frequently now, but I didn’t expect them to be healthier. I’ll have to look into this a little more.
    • It’s no secret that one of the more reliable indicators we’re in a frothy bull market is a rising number of people mistakenly believing they can quit their jobs and live off day trading, and while that wasn’t my plan, I’ve certainly done a touch of it this year. What can I say? Gambling is fun! But then Trump declared another tariff war on China this Friday, troubling markets and triggering major liquidations on some altcoins. I know it was bad out there because my feeds were full of people urging others not to kill themselves. The coming week is probably going to be a very interesting one on Bloomberg, which I expect to have on the TV in the background all day.
    • That is, if the internet is even working. Our ISP has been struggling with at least two outages this week during waking/working hours. The connection is down right now as I write this bit on Saturday evening, which is surely an unpopular time for the net to go down. I’ll bet someone’s been called in to reboot a server rack somewhere right now. In times like these, I’m thankful for my irrationally large mobile data plan and our local NAS media server. There’s some kind of strategic error being made by governments here. Centralizing all the angry-mob-placating media on the cloud where it can go down in the middle of a crisis? The kind where you tell people to stay indoors and wait? I’ll bet DVDs actually played a role in maintaining law and order in the old days.
    • Speaking of shutting down a digital grid, I had the opportunity to see the new Tron: Ares film with Brian the night it premiered and had a great time despite Jared Leto taking the titular role. It’s not a franchise that aims to make sense, or be scrutinized for narrative integrity — it’s about the neon lights, banging electronic music, and videogame-ish eye candy, and this new one delivered on all counts. I can’t even get mad; it really is just a good time as long as the volume’s way up.
    • Quick aside: I’ve been using Claude more than ChatGPT recently to give it a fair shake, mostly spurred by curiosity after their recent marketing campaign, and honestly? The outputs seem more insightful, more strategic, and it’s a better writer. It feels more my speed, and I’m a new fan.
    • Still on the topic of digital networks, I got roped into helping start and moderate an online alumni group for the design agency I used to be part of, and we quietly launched it this week. What set this one workplace apart was the feeling of being a truly connected team where, for a brief period in time, absent any territorial agendas or business borders, people could share knowledge across (and even move freely around) the different global offices. And it’s been really nice to see many people say as they join the #introductions channel on our Slack that it remains the best job they ever had. Where does it go from here? I think that depends on how many atypically extroverted designers we can get to foster some sort of social infrastructure.
    • Coincidentally, I met one of those ex-colleagues for an overdue breakfast: our first intern and proper employee in Singapore, who’s also a regular reader of this blog. Hi Xin! I hadn’t seen her in a year, so even after 90 minutes of catching up it still felt like there was lots we didn’t get into. Anyway, you wouldn’t have known it was a random weekday morning from the line waiting to get into the suburban cafe/bakery we chose. Every table was occupied by both foreign and local-looking unemployed bums alike, all enjoying $28 breakfast plates and $18 slices of toasted sourdough topped with avocado. We’re constantly being told local restaurants are barely hanging on, but then you see the brunch scam still going strong and it’s like wha…?
    • More counterdata was encountered while celebrating a very belated birthday dinner for Kim at Cudo, a South-American-ish sort of restaurant in the Amoy Street area. It was fully packed out (albeit on a Friday night), and I highly recommend them on account of solid tropical cocktails (Bourbon! Coconut! Pineapple!), a really nice selection of starters (Romaine lettuce with blue cheese and anchovies; warm crab queso with tortilla chips; truffley torched yellowtail), and even better mains (wagyu rump; chorizo and ricotta pasta) at pretty palatable prices.
    • I can afford this baller dining-out lifestyle because I saved a ton of money on the Amazon Prime sales this week (yup it’s #girlmath). I bought replacement razor blades, a physical copy of The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, dental floss, a 1TB microSD Express card (finally!) for my Switch 2, protein bars, LED bulbs, LEUCHTTURM1917 notebooks, and a lifetime supply of Uni-ball Jetstream RT pens — only the best pens ever according to The Wirecutter.
    • I wasn’t planning to get any of this stuff soon — they’re all things I might have bought eventually. Like the 1TB card to replace the 256GB one in my Switch 2, for example, which I thought I’d upgrade to in maybe a year’s time. This made me realize that on top of driving impulse purchases, these sale events are actually about pulling forward purchases and recording future sales today to juice numbers (at slightly lower margins). Businesses are valued based on expected profits, individuals buy based on expected needs, and I guess I’ve been binging carbs and fat based on expected hunger!
  • Week 31.24

    Week 31.24

    It’s been about three months since I embarked on a break from full-time employment, but my subconscious seems determined to remind me of what I left behind. I’ve had about a half-dozen dreams about work: either I’m being called back to help fix something “for just a few days” and finding I can’t leave, or I’m being given some “urgent” problem that is really a big overreaction — I must stress none of them were actually based on real situations or people, which is the weirdest part. Each time, I wake up and realize it’s not just that the problems aren’t real, but I haven’t got ANY problems like them at all, and it makes the whole thing worth it despite opportunity costs.

    With Kim’s leg injury improving, my focus shifted from caregiver to caretaker of my own neglected digital life. The first task was reviewing my digital security practices: passwords were reset, new tools deployed, and unlikely edge cases considered and guarded against. Take this as your reminder to please sort this stuff out for yourself! You must get a password manager. Use 2FA and unique passwords for every website, no exceptions. Protect yourself with a Recovery Key for your iCloud account, and add some trusted people as Account Recovery contacts and Legacy Contacts so you/they can access your data in the event of a hack or your demise.

    Next: email migration! Whoo!

    Four years ago, I switched from Gmail to Hey.com, a $99/yr email service that offered an opinionated user experience which meant leaving behind nearly two decades of history for a fresh start. They don’t support you bringing your email archives along. They don’t even let you use your own choice of email app; their web app and hybrid apps are all you get. I wrote two posts about it back then, saying I would probably not continue with my free trial. But I ended up doing it anyway, and for the most part I’ve really enjoyed trying a new approach to such an ancient, core component of online life.

    For one thing, I never got spam in my inbox. Hey unfortunately lets a lot of spam through, but they land in a separate zone called “The Screener”, along with any mail from an unknown address mailing you for the first time. From here, you can either let them in or block them. It’s a small difference, reviewing a bunch of possible spam on a separate page versus seeing them mixed in with all your legit mail, but feels huge because your inbox becomes a serene, protected space. Admittedly, taking care of “The Screener” has become daily work because spam always gets in.

    From what I’ve seen of Gmail in the past four years whenever I log in for a peek, it’s a post-spam apocalyptic wasteland. It looks like Google has just given up on detecting and filtering spam because some data-driven PM decided it won’t hurt their bottom line.

    Since my current Hey subscription ends in September, I looked into whether it might be time to switch again. Three key reasons: Apple Intelligence, performance, and $99/yr is money I don’t need to spend on email right now.

    Apple Intelligence: I’ve never liked the Apple Mail app on iOS. It felt a little underdeveloped for handling the different needs of modern email — without the tagging and search filters of Gmail, or the segregation of personal mail, newsletters, and receipts that Hey.com built their UX around.

    But the new AI-powered Mail app in iOS 18 looks exactly like what I want, and I’ve decided to embrace the power of defaults. I’m bearish on some aspects of generative AI, but this stuff is where it shines. Because Apple Intelligence will be able to understand what emails are about, it can summarize and prioritize messages while sorting them into categories like “Updates” and “Invoices”, so you can tackle them with different mental modes. I’m hoping that AI will also bring spam filtering that really works. Sadly, because Hey.com intentionally won’t support IMAP and SMTP, I can’t use them with Apple’s new app and have no choice but to leave. The Hey manifesto also contains strong wording that suggests they won’t be adding any AI features soon.

    Hey.com’s performance: It was never blazing fast to use their apps because they’re hybrids with seemingly little caching, and it annoyed me to death every time I ‘backed out’ of a link to find that the whole thread of newsletters I was reading had refreshed and I was back at the top again, but lately things have gotten even worse. About a year ago, the Basecamp/Hey founders went on a crusade against cloud hosting services and decided that they could self-host their services and save millions. I have to assume their infrastructure is extremely Western world or US-centric, because speeds have become terrible for me here in Singapore. I’m talking about noticeably slow performance waiting for EMAILS TO LOAD. I got even more confirmation of this when I tried downloading my 1.6GB .mbox archive to move elsewhere: it was capped at 100kb/s and took me over five hours. I can normally download a file of that size in maybe a minute?

    Ninety Nine United States Dollars A Year: Yeah, I can’t justify paying this much to have my email load slowly AND miss out on exciting AI features. I’m already paying for iCloud+ with tons of storage, so it seems logical to just use iCloud Mail as well. Bless Hey though, they let you keep your @hey.com email address for life even if you leave, so I’ll continue using mine and forward everything to my Apple address.

    A note about concentration risk: I’m aware there are risks in letting one company handle your entire digital life. All it takes is one successful hack locking you out of your iCloud account and it’s game over. For that reason, I would recommend NOT using the new Apple Passwords app coming in iOS 18 if you know how to select and use a third-party one. It’s a great default for people who wouldn’t use a password manager otherwise, but if you can have another basket for that egg, do it. Email is particularly important to keep separate, as most of your account passwords can be reset in the event of a hack if you still control your email address.

    But like I said about the Vision Pro and its integration with Apple Services like Arcade and TV+, I’m finding myself getting even deeper into their ecosystem and liking it fine. Where I once subscribed to differentiated, prosumer-serving alternatives to Apple’s ‘good enough’ apps, these days I prefer their simplicity and constraints.

    I switched from Evernote to Apple Notes several years ago and haven’t looked back. Side note: I’ve been on an anti-Notion campaign ever since I saw an unsuccessful rollout in my last team; it’s another overpowered tool for fiddly people who like to overcomplicate their tasks. I’ve used iCloud Calendar since leaving Gmail. I’ve even ported a lot of ancient files from Google Drive and Dropbox to iCloud Drive. And now email, arguably the most crucial service of all.

    “Hang on, Apple Intelligence in the Mail app isn’t out yet and might not be until the end of the year! How will you live until then?”

    Thanks, little imaginary reader, I’m glad you asked! I’m using Spark Mail in the meantime, which I’ve dabbled with in the past using my Gmail account. It’s a mail client with a bunch of smart, AI features (for a price) that are pretty close to what Apple promises. For one, a smart inbox that works quite well at sorting your different mail types, and a feature called “Gatekeeper” that works just like Hey’s “The Screener”. Their asking price is less than Hey’s, but more than Apple’s (free, if you already pay for iCloud+).

    Just a couple of days into using Spark with iCloud Mail, and two things stand out: One, it’s so nice to use a native email app, and two, I’m actually reading my newsletters again. In Hey, newsletters are collected on a a separate, infinite-scroll page called “The Feed” which suffers from an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ problem. In Spark, received newsletters sit inside the main inbox, just collapsed into a single line. This seems to make a difference. It’s a visible nudge to check them out, and because they load and react instantly, you can actively triage them and unsubscribe/block/delete if you find yourself asking why you ever signed up for one. Where Hey’s endless stream of newsletters can get overwhelming, Spark’s (and I assume Apple’s) approach is more like a physical magazine or newspaper with a finite amount of content, which most people prefer.

    I should have taken my own advice in 2020 — it turns out Spark’s approach was always the better fit for me. I even made visual aids to explain it!

    This diagram above is how HEY is laid out, if you think of each column as a screen. In the Imbox and Paper Trail, each email is a single line item, while they are larger previews in The Feed, which is designed to give a peek into newsletters so you can decide if you want to expand and read them. This doesn’t work for me because I don’t want to keep all of Graniph’s new product announcements, but I do want to see them.

    And this is an illustration of how I’d prefer to handle my email. A single inbox view encompassing important emails and personal letters, newsletters, and updates/receipts/notifications from other services. Spark … is the closest thing I’ve found to this.

    All in, it’s been a week of fiddling with things that seemed to work just fine, but hopefully I’ve simplified and improved them for the future and not introduced more things to maintain.

    ===

    Media Activity

    • Before I could move off Hey Email, I had to finish my backlog of favorite newsletters. One of them was Craig Mod’s “Return to Pachinko Road” series from earlier this year. Over 18 days, he walked 694,942 steps and wrote close to 50,000 words in daily email updates. I read them while waiting those five hours for my mail archives to download. He’s such a good writer, and I can’t recommend enough that you sign up for his newsletters and/or membership if you can spare the money (regretfully, I can’t right now as a member of the unemployed class).
    • MUBI’s collection of films by Abbas Kiarostami is leaving the service over the next couple of weeks, so I prioritized watching them, starting with the Palme d’Or-winning Taste of Cherry (1997). God, I was not prepared for it on a Monday afternoon and fell to pieces during the old man’s monologue in the final third. Fortunately, I watched it on the TV because I don’t think Vision Pros have an IP rating. 5 stars.
    • Next was Through the Olive Trees (1994) which was very charming — the Iranian actors’ performances are fantastic, and perfectly naturalistic in keeping with the cinematography. I initially score this a 4, but it’s now a 4.5-star film for me.
    • The Wind Will Carry Us (1999) shares some landscapes and in-car camera angles with Taste of Cherry, but where the latter is heavy with life’s troubles, this one centers hope and rebellion against the narratives we find ourselves in. One could even read it as an anti-work parable: forced on a business trip of indefinite length, neglecting his family’s pleas to return home for a funeral, summoned to give gravely inconvenient (hur hur) updates to his boss at all hours, a workaholic asshole learns to relax, enjoy the local milk, and finally give his assignment the finger. 4.5 stars.
    • Fresh off Presumed Innocent, we were looking for another legal thriller to watch and discovered neither of us had seen The Firm (1993) starring Tom Cruise. Welp, it turns out there are no courtroom scenes in the film at all, and he’s a tax lawyer. Still, a very enjoyable 3.5 stars.
    • The Paris Olympics are on, and despite not caring much for sports I’ve found myself unable to resist watching competition on a global scale. Mostly tennis, but also archery, shooting, diving, gymnastics, and some athletics.

  • Week 48.23

    Week 48.23

    Some things I asked the internet/AI this week:

    • Why do people never rinse their mouths out after brushing their teeth in the movies?
    • Isn’t it misleading and bad for oral hygiene education if directors leave it out for pacing reasons?
    • What’s the recipe for a Vesper martini?
    • How might a wealthy Indonesian put their billions of IDR to work beyond investing? (asking for a friend, I swear)

    Aside: ‘Asking the internet’ used to be our go-to phrase, but in an era where AI might be the one answering, does the term need revising? We used to be able to say ‘asking the internet’ but what about when you’re really asking an AI? They live on the internet and were certainly trained on internet content, but the old definition meant looking up content and new replies created by people; what do we call it when the answers AI generated? Keeping in mind that these answers may well be wrong, and in ways different from how a human might be wrong, it doesn’t feel like we should use the same terms. Or maybe we’ll keep referring to any hive mind as the internet?

    Can I go a week without talking about AI? I think those days may be behind us.

    Even iA Writer, the Markdown text editor I use for these updates, released a new update with an AI-related feature. No, it’s not automatically finishing your sentences or summarizing your essays. They’re all about the writing experience and process, and so they’re embracing how people use ChatGPT as a writing assistant, but helping them to preserve their own authentic voices. Text pasted from ChatGPT can be visually differentiated from text you wrote yourself, so you can see the Frankensteinian stitches on your monster. It also saves this info in the metadata for provenance.

    This suggests that many users send text back and forth to ChatGPT so often that they end up forgetting which bits they wrote themselves, which isn’t a problem I’ve had so far, but going forward, who knows? It’s a good idea and one I’m glad they’re testing, but iA Writer has always been a niche tool for a certain kind of user. I thnk word processors with integrated AI are going to be so widely used and loved by the end of 2024 that no one will care about who did what part.

    ===

    I made and released a new GPT, a game called Chrono Quest where you go back in time to improve humanity’s chances of beating an alien invasion. You can read more about it in my post here, but there are many ways to succeed, limited only by your imagination and problem solving inclinations. As a kid playing text adventure games, I never thought I’d see the day they could write themselves as you played. It even creates illustrations along the way, although those aren’t strictly necessary.

    I’ve got some other game ideas I’ll probably get on soon over the Christmas break. OpenAI announced yesterday that the GPT “App Store” meant to open in November was being delayed until early 2024. I guess that gives me more time to learn.

    ===

    It’s not accurate to say I didn’t get anything during the Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales. Pixelmator Pro for Mac was 50% off, and I thought it was time I upgraded to it from regular ol’ Pixelmator, which I must have bought over ten years ago for personal use as a substitute for Photoshop. Those were the days of per-once, use-forever software. To the developers’ credit, Pixelmator Pro is still offered through that model, although their newest app, Photomator, prefers a subscription pricing plan. The latter just won Apple’s Mac App of the Year award, by the way.

    Pixelmator Pro is more than just a Photoshop-type editor now, it’s also a video and vector image editor, and comes with lots of templates for creating posters, logos, and so on. And like Photomator, it has useful ML-based features for correcting color, removing noise, and increasingly resolution of photos. These are pretty old-school and conservative by the standards of generative AI — see the recent development of Magnific AI, a tool confusingly billed as “upscaling” when it’s really closer to hallucination. It can subjectively improve the quality of photos by generating plausible (but inaccurate) pixels.

    Check out this “upscaling” of Tomb Raider 1.

    ===

    Stumbling into the New York jazz scene by accident, I found two jazz artists I’d like to recommend: Brandee Younger and Samara Joy. Both already have a couple of albums out.

    Younger is a harpist who blends genres and leans modern. You’ll hear some hip-hop production, and it’s really not what you think when you hear the word “harp”. Her new album is Brand New Life, and is apparently based on and inspired the work of legendary harpist Dorothy Ashby, who I was also ignorant of. This is a weird observation, but hear me out. The opening track, the previously unrecorded, Ashby-written piece You’re A Girl For One Man Only, has a haunting melodic fragment that I think I recognize from… the soundtrack of the Japanese game/anime Steins;Gate of all things?!

    Samara Joy is a much more traditional vocalist, but what an incredible instrument her voice is. I’ll leave a video of her covering Lush Life below and you’ll see what I mean. I’m about to put her Christmas EP, A Joyful Holiday, on and get some lunch. See y’all later.

    (This week’s featured image was taken at a new mall that’s sprung up in Holland Village this weekend. It’s disconcerting; the massive development has been hidden behind hoardings for the past few years, and now revealed, it’s an unexpected contrast to the other old buildings and shopfronts, like a bionic arm of mediocre high street brands slapped onto an aging body.)

  • Week 15.22: Location apps

    I’ve been a user of Foursquare, and then Swarm, for many years. Since November 2009, says my profile page. I know that I’m giving an advertising company too much information about my location, movements, and preferences. But there’s definitely a value exchange here. Without this “lifelog”, I couldn’t remember everywhere I’ve been, or the last time I was at such and such a place. And there have been occasions where I was able to, quite magically, summon the name of a great restaurant in another city and immediately see how it’s been doing since, so that I could recommend it to a friend.

    I’ve been a fan of location-based apps and social networks since maybe 2006 or 2007, when I got my first Nokia that qualified as a smartphone. I especially recall an app named Brightkite that existed briefly. It allowed for serendipitous moments like going to a foreign country and seeing tips and reflections left around the city (maybe in your hotel!) by a friend who’d come the same way years before. Swarm still allows for this experience today, and it evokes a kind of love.

    One day, Brightkite malfunctioned and read my GPS location as being in Tokyo, just for a moment. I think it allowed me to see people and their check-ins in the mistakenly assumed area, and so I interacted with some of them… giving them stars or a follow or whatever. One such stranger became part of my permanent friends’ list, and when I migrated to Foursquare, she ended up on my list there too. It’s now over a decade later, and we are still weirdly and peripherally aware of each other’s lives, on Swarm and Instagram, without ever having spoken. It’s a distanced closeness that could only happen with the internet. Once, when I happened to be visiting Tokyo on holiday, we were both checked in around the Ginza area at the same time. We may have crossed paths; I’ll never know.

    Screenshot of the Superlocal app, taken off their website

    This week, an app called Superlocal came to my attention via a crypto/web3 newsletter called Milk Road that’s worth subscribing to, if that’s your thing. Suoerlocal seems like an attempt to remake Swarm with a new revenue model. Like many web3 ventures, instead of selling your data to advertisers, it tries to support itself by being intrinsically financial: checking in and providing quality photos earns you tokens called LOCAL (which may someday have value), and being the mayor of a place doesn’t only earn you derision/respect, but also some LOCAL whenever people check in. How does money enter the ecosystem? Becoming the mayor of a place means minting an NFT for it. It’s currently in an early access phase, which also requires an NFT (or invite from a friend) to gain entry.

    I have mixed feelings about all this, as I do with NFTs and web3 in general. We should definitely explore new business models and build services that don’t rely on users making a privacy compromise. If a small group of super engaged users can fund the experience on behalf of everyone, and be happy doing it, all the better. But at least in this iteration, we’re just trading one problem for another. For instance, holding a bunch of mayorship NFTs in your Ethereum wallet doxxes your location and behaviors too, and probably in a worse way because they’re public for anyone (instead of just Foursquare Inc. and a couple hundred of their favorite clients) to see. This stems from the poor privacy design of Ethereum, of course, but it’s now the biggest smart contract blockchain so what are gonna do? There are still so many things that need to be done differently for this technology to scale and be safe and easy enough for everyone to use. That means I don’t believe Superlocal is going to become ubiquitous any time soon, but hopefully we’ll all learn what and what not to do as they keep building.

    Until then, I’ll still be checking in on Swarm.

    PS: I’ve been told about the virtues of using Google Maps’ Timeline, which also lets you keep a log of your movements each day, but without the social and gamey elements. I tried it briefly, but it was less fun, and I’ve been quite successful so far in cutting all the Google out of my life. Yes, I’m aware my rules seem arbitrary and illogical.

    Media activity:

    • Finally finished the book How To Do Nothing after about two months, which isn’t the positive review it appears to be. I found it such a joyless and obtuse slog that I fought myself every time I thought to pick it up and finish it. And because I have a dumb rule about not reading two books at the same time, that blockage has fucked up my Goodreads annual challenge for the year. A lot of catching up to do and I don’t think I will.
    • Started a new book anyway, Grace D. Li’s Portrait of a Thief, which is billed as Oceans Eleven meets The Farewell.
    • Watched Kenneth Branagh’s Death on the Nile. Dreadful. He’s done some work in the past that I truly loved, but this has little to recommend it. The art direction is slipshod, with CGI background compositing that looks straight out of the CD-ROM FMV games era, and the radioactive Armie Hammer is in one of the lead roles. Branagh’s Poirot is also mysteriously unlikable and inconsistent, with a couple of rude and temperamental outbursts that feel like if Superman suddenly gave someone on the street a middle finger.
    • Severance on Apple TV+ is not dreadful. Mild spoilers follow. I wasn’t expecting to be impressed, and the first episode takes awhile to get going, but it’s really excellent. This despite veering a little close to corny with some scenes on the “severed floor”. The sinister, faux 70s megacorp with forced cheerfulness felt copped from the environmental storytelling of games like Portal, Fallout, and Bioshock, and maybe the Dharma Initiative out of Lost.
    • Now out on Apple Arcade is Gear.Club Stradale which was teased during their last online event, and I’m very much enjoying it with my Backbone One gamepad. The original Gear.Club was an okay free-to-play racer on iOS which was later released on the Nintendo Switch as a premium game (no in-app purchases). It also got a sequel on consoles, but I don’t know how that went. This new iteration is streamlined: it’s all set in Italy, and the UI lets you move quickly around the workshop and upgrade your cars without having to fiddle around in too many submenus. Instead of the usual giant catalog with tons of cars to swipe through, a small selection of up to three cars for sale, refreshed daily. This is a superior design for a game intended to be played in short bursts over a period of time. Ping me if you want to join my crew!

  • Week 4.22

    First, some bad news. The Shake Salad vending machine that was meant to propel me back to better health… has vanished from the neighborhood. I suppose it didn’t make enough money to pass the trial, despite my best efforts at propping it up. Back to hot dogs and fried chicken, then.

    And speaking of food in the neighborhood, one of the best restaurants near us is closing down, so that’s another option gone, although it was always on the pricier end and more of a nice night out kinda place. We paid it a final visit earlier in the week and it was full (on a weekday). A shame they couldn’t make it work.

    I sold a couple more Misery Men NFTs and decided to get slightly more serious about the project. I’d started off playing with NFTs as a technological format, but needed to draw stuff to make it happen. Eventually that’s led to me becoming more invested in the drawing part, and now it seems a shame if that’s all these are. I know some people who don’t know anything about crypto but like the characters anyway. Since I’m having fun larping as an artist, it seemed time to expand horizons.

    The first step was to stop posting on my own Instagram account, which led to setting up a new dedicated account which you may now follow at @misery.men.

    Wondering what the next step should be, I thought it would be great to make some real-world merchandise. The last time I did this was back in my university days, offering some questionable t-shirt designs off CafePress. Obviously the dropshipping landscape has exploded since then, so I should be able to start pretty quickly, right?

    I looked into it on Thursday and went with Printful, one of the larger operations. However, they don’t actually offer you a storefront; they’re just the backend fulfilling your orders, although they can interface with your platform of choice e.g. Shopify or Squarespace. Since those come with regular monthly costs, I decided to go with Etsy, which I always thought was a sort of handicraft eBay. Turns out you can sell anything there, and Printful will handle the heavy lifting (and shipping).

    The Misery World™ Etsy shop was up and running by the end of the day with a handful of products I’d put together using the existing artwork. Oh wait, that’s not accurate. Logotype needed producing, and a couple of art-inclined friends/colleagues kindly reached out to give feedback. Unsolicited, if that gives you any idea of how disquieting the initial version must have looked to professional eyes.

    On Friday, in need of a URL to point both the new Instagram and Shop to, and a site to hold it all together (this domain didn’t seem like the right place), I bought the MiseryMen.com domain and set up a landing page and blog. That’s practically a new brand and sales channel set up in 48 hours with just a double-digit capital outlay. What a world we live in.

    I’ve made one product sale so far, and hey, as a struggling and unknown creator, that’s nearly made the whole exercise worth it! 🥲

    On Saturday, we popped over to the Keppel Distripark area to take in S.E.A. Focus, an exhibition that was part of Singapore Art Week 2022. There was an NFT gallery sponsored by Tezos, how à la mode. I took some pictures so I wouldn’t have to talk about my feelings.

    Media activity:

    • Not a whole lot! I guess it was more of a creative week than a consumptive one.
    • Some more Disco Elysium…
    • A few episodes of a TV show that I’ll talk more about when I can…
    • A British crime drama on Netflix called Paranoid that’s just okay…
    • And listening to Utada Hikaru’s new album Bad Mode, which has greatly exceeded my cautiously lowered expectations. It’s good to see them continue to work and put out what they want.

  • Week 33.21

    Am not really in the mood to write a post this week and have been playing music and shuffling around the room for half an hour to avoid it. I say this as acknowledgement that it’s not always fun or easy to keep traditions up, but we often do anyway. Even if nobody cares whether we succeed or not. We’re simply accountable to our own past decisions and future retrospectives.

    ~

    Rather than continue reading Firebreak this week, I looked into a few topics I’ve been feeling ignorant of: what’s going on with social tokens? What do people mean exactly when they say “metaverse”, since they can’t literally imagine it’s Snow Crash, (insert Princess Amidala face) right? And how exactly do NFTs and proprietary platforms fit into the theory of a unified metaverse? I’ve still got lots to learn about both, but I found this account of large European football clubs participating in Socios very surprising; I had no idea the tokenization of entertainment franchises was already a reality for some football fans, and it makes sense that this would be a much smoother gateway to digital assets for most people than cartoon animals trading for thousands millions of dollars. On the metaverse topic, I found this 9-part essay by Matthew Ball that was recommended by many to be an enjoyable and very helpful read.

    Twitter updated their design language, changing the font I look at for hours each day. I think I’m already used to it. To the chagrin of many users on my timeline, they also flipped the logic behind displaying buttons as either filled or outlined. It personally didn’t bother me past the first 30 seconds.

    I then had a brief conversation with some colleagues who build out design language systems for digital products. It occurred to me that teams today already have their hands full managing 2D screen-based designs, and the transition to an XR spatial future will probably explode the complexity of design systems as they are currently defined, and call for the further melding of multiple domains like branding, architecture, industrial/interface/interaction design, accessibility, visual communications. It might be an opportunity to tear up much of the bland, homogenous work we see now. I see this as a challenge for anyone recruiting to do design for enterprise/late-stage products. Who’d want to keep fiddling with round rects when the most interesting work is just around the corner?

    ~

    Now that some Beatles’ remasters are available on Apple Music with Dolby Atmos, I listened to Abbey Road and Sergeant Pepper’s on my AirPods Max. Never mind if it’s wrong; they sound so right. The spatial separation of each instrument helps you better appreciate what they did on those albums.

    Amazon Prime Video somehow got worldwide rights for all four Rebuild of Evangelion films, including the newest installment which never got a chance to screen here. I’ve been eager to see it, but there’s just so much homework to do first. I wouldn’t call myself a fan, but I saw all three previous Rebuild films in cinemas starting in 2007. They are now just an ancient, jumbled mess in my memory. Online guides recommend watching the entire 26-episode TV series on Netflix first, followed by the original movie, and THEN the four new films which are do-overs (but also maybe part of a meta-textual narrative on repetition and iteration?!) I decided to jump straight into the new films first, and pick up with the series on Netflix where I left it midway later, maybe.

    I’ve now seen the first three. What a depressing and senseless and infuriating but beautiful journey so far. One left to go, and it’s supposedly the best one. I’m lost half the bloody time. 3.0 in particular is a cautionary tale of what can go wrong if you don’t get crisis comms to survivors right, and they end up becoming your enemy. It’s PR training in pretentious anime clothes.

    You can’t be watching sci-fi biomech bible allegories all the time, so I also saw two Liam Neeson action films this week: The Commuter and Non-Stop. The former is about an ex-cop who has to play a bit of sleuthing on a train, and the latter is about an ex-cop who has to stop murders on a plane. They’re both by director Jaume Collet-Sera (who’s just done Disney’s Jungle Cruise) and I find their existence fascinating. He’s done two other films with Neeson, Unknown and Run All Night and I don’t think life would be complete without seeing them too.

  • Week 29.21

    • Don’t try this at home: Kim is away in the UK this week; not the most advisable travel idea. Cases there are rising sharply and I oop, I suppose the same could be said for Singapore. A couple of clusters have formed around illegal KTV operations (the comedy of that phrase!) and a fisheries port, which has led to fishmongers and wet markets across the country becoming danger zones. We had 88 local cases on Sunday, the highest since August last year. For the record, the UK had about 56,000 cases on Saturday alone. The mind boggles.
    • So until she gets back and clears the quarantine process 🤞, I’m on a sort of Sabbatical+, where I have more freedom to eat junk food and play games well into the night. I didn’t leave the house all weekend and it was the best.
    • I finished Root Film on the Switch, and while I still enjoyed it on the whole, it became needlessly convoluted and improbable in the final acts. Pick it up on sale maybe, but bear in mind it offers no challenge whatsoever. In any case, Root Film was always going to be the appetizer for the two games under Nintendo’s Famicom Detective Club banner, which I’ll try to buy and play next.
    • Thanks to the NYT’s SF Summer reading list curated by Amal El-Mohtar, I discovered the joys of the CatNet series (just two books at the moment). Catfishing On CatNet is the first, essentially about teens hanging out in online chat rooms and getting pulled into an adventure, and it was so much fun that I blazed through it in about a day.
    • I then missed hanging out in chat rooms so much I decided to give Discord another try and joined a few servers. The quality of conversation in most was a step down from what I remember of IRC in the early days of the net. Then, spending time in chats was a main attraction, not an alleyway off the main boulevard of social media. So I was disappointed until I found a server dedicated to older people, a distasteful category I now find myself in. Ah! There, I found people speaking in complete sentences and actually communicating with one another. I may continue this.
    • I saw Black Widow and felt it unnecessary and stupid. I’m kinda over Marvel the way I’m over Star Wars, except the first episode of Loki on Disney+ worked well with the pairing of Tom Hiddleston and Owen Wilson — I thought I’d be annoyed by his usual mannerisms but it’s actually been a long time and we’re in a pandemic, so you do your thing Owen, we’re here for it.
    • Installed iPadOS 15 Public Beta 3 on my main iPad. Haven’t run into any issues yet, and I’m relieved at finally being able to customize my home screens with only the icons and widgets I want, leaving everything else in the App Library. You can also have two of the same app icons up as well, so I have Photos on my first Home Screen but also on the page I’ve dedicated to photo editing apps a few swipes away. It’s the little things!
    All in a day’s work with Dreams
    • A feeling of being useless, sitting around consuming all the time without making anything, has been fermenting and I’ve consciously allowed it. Over the weekend, I made it my mission to begin prototyping a game I’ve had in mind for awhile, let’s give it a code name… Feline Fiddler? Nintendo’s Game Builder Garage was going to be where I’d learn the basics and try to start, but upon investigation, you have to use its built-in asset library, and if you can’t find what you need in there, too bad. So I ultimately went with Dreams on the PS4, and oh boy, is it a stupendously powerful tool for 3D modeling, animation, and visualization.
    • On Saturday, I started playing the demo game project that comes as part of it, Art’s Dream, which showcases what you can do with it. And then started doing a few tutorials. By Sunday afternoon, I was able to assemble something close to the scene I had in my head using models others have built and shared on the platform, light it, and walk around in it with a character. And it’s all achievable on a PS4! I don’t see any reason why there couldn’t be something like this on iPads, apart from the App Store rules. Maybe Roblox is something like this? I should check it out…