This post is delayed on account of the Lunar New Year weekend; hope you had a good one if you celebrate!
After two years of restrictions and fear (not to mention peace and quiet), we returned to the old chaos with a few family gatherings and house visits. Unfortunately, one of my favorite parts of the whole thing, a large reunion dinner on the Eve with some of our most senior relatives, was still off the table on account of their mounting health issues. I wonder if we’ll ever get a chance to see everyone on that side of the family all together again.
I brought my GR III out to capture some of these moments, and fortunately Ricoh released their previously mentioned new Diary Edition model just the day before, which meant the firmware update for older models to get their new Negative film-inspired “Image Control” mode was also released. After some experimentation, I’ve settled on these settings: Saturation +1, High Key +2, Contrast +1, Shadow Exposure -1. Am looking forward to using it for more everyday snaps in 2023.
While hanging around with some relatives in the afternoon of Day 1, a few of us downloaded the Dimensional personality test app and began answering its slew of profiling questions to compare our toxic traits, love languages, and all that. It co-opts a bunch of well-known existing frameworks like the MBTI and so on into one gigantic pile of traits. Does that constitute a unique and proprietary offering? I don’t know, but it’s fun enough and free. Be warned, completing all available questions can take over an hour.
Speaking of apps, my advance pick for 2023’s game of the year launched this week on Apple Arcade: Pocket Card Jockey Ride On. It’s a remake of the Nintendo 3DS eShop exclusive now fixed up with better graphics and subtle gameplay tweaks. If you never played the original, do yourself a favor and give it a try. It’s an addictive solitaire-based game; the main downside (for me) is it’s time-based and needs some concentration and so isn’t something you can play while in a noisy environment.
My Mastodon use has fallen off a little. I actually prefer Twitter’s algorithmic timeline to a chronological one because I tend to follow too many people to keep up, and need some help sifting out the “best” content from the rest. Mastodon is beginning to give me the uncomfortable feeling of a full inbox, but perhaps I should simply follow fewer people.
The general rule around here is to avoid talking about work — although it is usually such a big cost center for my time — but we had a new colleague relocate from Shanghai, and it was nice welcoming them to town and having a couple of impromptu beers on a weekday night.
Last episode, I mentioned seeing some Tezos NFT art at Singapore Art Week. Well I came across one of the pieces for sale (entitled D-909 Groove Arcade) and decided to go through the trouble of creating a Tezos wallet and getting some funds in so I could buy it. It’s one edition out of 167, and so was only like USD$20, but I’m super happy to have it. Can art be absolutely adorable and funky at the same time? Provably yes!
D-909 Groove Arcade
I also continued generating non-existent videogame screenshots using Midjourney, expanding the fictional timeline to include modern-day remakes of old games. I should spend more time pushing this idea further but so far I’ve only done it in spare moments or when I should really be doing something else.
Civilization: Flat EarthDuck Hunt Remake, PS4 (2018)Drone Hunt, NES (1984)Theme Hospital: COVID EditionNeed For Speed: Self-Driving Edition
Everything But The Girl is back after what feels like decades, and the video for their new single is an incredible piece of choreography and one-take execution. I could only think of the immense pressure on each person not to fuck up. Dimensional seems to concur, reporting that my main motivation is Security.
I am quickly finding out that owning a cat can be expensive (and this is even before the cat has arrived). So far we have purchased a grooming brush, a more extreme grooming brush for shedding season, a pair of nail clippers, a litter box and accessories, a motorized drinking fountain (TIL cats have evolved to prefer fresh moving water instead of stale water, so a regular drinking bowl will not suffice), an assortment of toys, a cat carrier, a reusable lint roller for our couch and other surfaces, a scratching pad — with still more to come, e.g. an automated feeder, a bed, anti-parasite medication, probiotic supplements, and on and on.
In the name of research I joined a couple of subreddits devoted to cats, and soon found myself sucked into a web of paranoia and anxiety. One poster said their “mental health plummeted after adopting a cat”, not because of any feline misbehavior, but their own neuroses — feeling chained to the cat and a routine of feeding it, playing with it, and cleaning up after it, afraid to leave it alone and feeling guilty whenever they stayed out late. While not feeling as unstable as them yet (there was a mention of crying all the way to the vet’s), I can definitely see myself having a miniature form of that reaction.
Add to that the cornucopia of diseases and mishaps that could threaten the life of our cat, and I’ve just bought myself a whole new world of things to worry about. Many of our house plants are also toxic to cats, and getting rid of them is starting to be a point of domestic disagreement. Cats are cute and companionable, they say, but no one mentions the conflict and debilitating despair.
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We saw local band Sobs play live at the Esplanade on Friday, in an annex theater I didn’t even know existed on the premises, and this being Singapore of course it’s been named “The Annexe” — a word so vile my autocorrect tried twice to stop it happening. It was probably my first standing-only show since the pandemic began, and honestly plus a few more years on account of age.
But oh yes, Sobs were great! They played their new album, Air Guitar, which comes out digitally next Wednesday. The sound was, unfortunately, poor as is usual for the Esplanade: muddy, vocals obscured, keyboards absent; amateur hour. These artists deserve better, and I don’t know when they’ll do something about it. It’s honestly crossed my mind to switch careers to sound engineering and give it a go myself.
I tried taking some photos and video with my iPhone 14 Pro just to challenge it. The photos suffered from the same grainy artifacts around moving objects that I noticed before, where sharp but low-quality images are presumably getting stacked onto long exposure images of higher quality and lower noise. It’s an issue with the Photonic Engine process, probably, and maybe one that can be fixed in an update. I would rather have motion blur than such unevenness, but that’s subjective. The 4K video was surprisingly good: stable, clean, and bright even with the 3x lens.
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I got some nice Twitter feedback from the devs on my Darkroom presets, and shared two more.
CPB: Short for Cross Process (Basic), a replica of the effect you get from the camera app Cross Process, a favorite of mine from the early days of the App Store by Nick Campbell. The app is still available for sale but is under new ownership now. This look is not subtle, with strong vignetting and center brightness, but a lovely blue/yellow bias that I suppose mimics cross-processed film (it’s been so long since I shot film I’ll take their word for it).
Clean Plate: A recipe designed to brighten up food photos and make them look a tad warmer and more appetizing. I use this often, sometimes it’s good enough on its own and sometimes it’s an appetizer.
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There was a new Taylor Swift album this week in Midnights, and boy does it sound great. I’ve enjoyed only a single play through so far, but it struck me as having a very Jack Antonoff-y sound (or is it just the sound of American pop music today?) — if you close your eyes, you can mentally swap Taylor out and it becomes a new Bleachers record.
We saw the first two episodes of The Peripheral on Amazon Prime Video and it’s just about everything I hoped it would be. If you haven’t read the book yet, you may as well just go straight in without knowing anything. One cool thing Amazon’s done here is have a QR code (at least on the TV app) that takes you to a microsite with more info on the show’s characters, key locations, and technologies. A DVD booklet for a streaming generation. I expect it’ll get updated as new episodes come out weekly as well. Don’t read it until you’ve seen it!
We got a cat! Well, pretty close to it, more accurate to say that we have reserved a kitten from the breeder we were previously speaking with. The next few weeks will be spent buying essential equipment, clearing up some of the mess around the house that she might destroy, and then she should be with us by the end of the month.
Appearance wise, she is what’s known as a seal bicolor ragdoll, white with brown markings on her face and tail. I’ve discovered that this combination combines the most popular and most common traits in these cats, so in gachapon terms we’ve pulled a three-star kitten. Although you wouldn’t know she was a kitten from looking at her; several people who’ve seen photos have remarked “oh, so you’re not getting a kitten?” They grow up to become large cats, with females possibly reaching 6 kg and beyond.
We’re still thinking of a name (her dead name is Dewey) but already have a strong contender. In branding terms, this phase is what’s known as “writing the rationale after having found a name that sounds great but isn’t especially meaningful”. Aside: is it a bad idea to name your cat after a Microsoft product?
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Darkroom (a photo editor I’ve used since it came out for iPhone — it now works as a universal app on iPad and Mac too) released their new update supporting the sharing of filters/presets. Early users of the app will remember that you could always share filters via a QR code, but this feature was removed a few years back when they switched to a new architecture. The way it works now is the preset’s details get uploaded to their server, generating a link that you can share. Anyone who clicks the link can see how your preset looks applied against four standard photos, and install the preset in their copy of Darkroom with a single click.
As someone who enjoys making presets in Darkroom, I’ve got a few that I would like to share with other users. I went through a phase of copying film looks from other apps like VSCO and RNI Films, as a sort of pastime, as I found it quite a soothing and mindless activity to switch back-and-forth between two photos and gradually nudge them closer together by adjusting sliders. Someone should make a game around that mechanic!
This week’s update was written via voice dictation on my Mac — with a few minor corrections. And that’s with a sore throat, stuffed nose, and raspy voice! As far as I can tell it’s not Covid, just this drawn-out flu that’s been getting quite a few people. On that note, Covid cases are once again rising here in Singapore due to the new XBB variant.
I can’t wait to upgrade to Ventura, assuming that it will have the same voice dictation enhancements as iOS 16. I wonder if this post reads differently, stylistically, given that I am saying this out loud rather than typing it. Related to that, I am now reading the book Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch (oh my God I can’t believe dictating that name out loud worked — I await the day this happens for Asian names). It’s about how language has been changed by the Internet and Internet culture (one of the things that involves is not capitalizing the word Internet, but macOS has seemingly not been informed).
What a good week it’s been for reading: I finished Adrian Tchaikovsky’s One Day All This Will Be Yours and went on to finish Blake Crouch’s Upgrade two days later. With this post-Seveneves sprint, I should be able to finish the year with a not-embarrassing 12 books or more.
I recommend both books by the way, the former being an unusual and fun time travel/time war story, and the latter another one of Crouch’s written-for-film-rights thrillers (his earlier novel, Dark Matter, is in production for Apple TV+). It is better than the film Limitless, but nowhere as great as Ted Chiang’s (dictation failed here) short story Understand. As you may already have guessed, the story is about a man whose genetic make up gets altered, giving him new abilities.
My new iPhone 14 Pro arrived. This year’s Space Black is definitely the darkest shade of gray they’ve done in years. Fitting, because while Apple’s been calling their camera systems “pro” quality since the iPhone 11 Pro, it’s only with the ability to capture 48mp RAW files now that the label may finally be justified, and everyone knows a “pro” camera should be black and draw little attention to itself. Just look at Leica’s stealthy “-P” models without their red logo. So the 14 Pro looks the part, at least it did until I slapped a bright Succulent green case on it.
I took it out to a concert the same day it arrived — after a few snafus during set up and migration; probably related to the bugs already addressed in iOS 16.01. Low light performance seems improved as promised, and if it’s dark enough to call for Night Mode, those shots are taken more quickly than they were before. However, I’ve noticed some gritty artifacts when using the 3x lens in low light, possibly due to moving objects across several frames being merged. Ideally these would look like motion blur, but they have gross sharp outlines and very digital-looking noise. This is new, and I hope it’s an issue that will be fixed in software.
Main camera3x lens, uneditedMain camera, unedited3x lens, lacking detail in low light, processed with VSCO KC252x “zoom”, unedited
48mp ProRAW files are not snappy to edit, and VSCO doesn’t seem to like them at all. Load any RAW file in the app and all the filters come out looking wrong. I’ve been bouncing between RAW Power, Darkroom, and Pixelmator Photo, unable to decide which makes processing files least painful. But should one shoot in 48mp at all? The post-shot cropping latitude you get is fantastic, but at up to 90MB a file, I’ll probably use it sparingly, on occasions where it’s better to just grab a quick shot and make decisions later. But for everyday use, I’ve set mine up to save 12mp ProRAW files, and will simply try to get the composition right from the start with the new 2x “zoom” mode if needed (essentially an in-camera 12mp crop into the 48mp image).
Tyler Stalman and SuperSaf have good reviews of the cameras’ performance on their YouTube channels. I’m slightly annoyed by Stalman’s discovery that RAW files have a much more natural look than Apple’s default processing for JPEG/HEIF files. The amount of sharpening and clarity and HDR effect has been turned up with each passing year, and where iPhones were once known for taking true to life photos, they’re more social media-ready and Samsung-y today. And consequently these photos are not the neutral starting points for post-processing that they once were. On hindsight, it was inevitable. A lot of casual editing today is hitting an Auto-Enhance button or loading up an AI filter in Prequel, Meitu, or some app I haven’t heard of yet. Sitting down to process photos is now a “pro” thing, and pros presumably want to shoot and edit in RAW while they’re at it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
All in all, a nice upgrade to still photos this year. You get more separation and background blur in regular shots on the main camera because of the larger sensor. The new image processing engine also takes advantage of said larger sensor and gives impressive sharpness and detail when shooting in some specific instances. And the return of a 48mm 2x mode is very welcome, but then you don’t get the benefits of pixel binning in that mode so it’s a little worse for low light environments.
A final word on cameras: the bump must not be allowed to grow any larger. As customers, we need to hold this line. It’s simply too much.
Really nice fur detail on this closeup (full size, sorry)
The Dynamic Island is very cool, but not something you really need to think about too often. Buyers expecting a fun new toy they can tap and fidget with a hundred times a day will be disappointed. For me, the notch was a non-issue; it just faded from notice in normal use. The Island is similarly invisible to me until it springs into use for some multitasking. At present, it’s only shown up when I was listening to music or doing some navigation in Apple Maps. The latter is especially nice (as a passenger), I can be texting with someone but still keep an eye on the next instruction, e.g. it shows an arrow saying to turn right in 2km. It’s an improvement that you get used to very quickly, and the animations are nowhere as distracting as critics wanted to believe. After a couple of days, it reveals itself to be the best kind of improvement: one you can simply take for granted while it quietly improves your life in the background.
The third and final major feature in this year’s iPhone is its always-on display. No, the new A16 chip doesn’t make the Top 3 for me. The A15 in last year’s iPhone 13 Pro was still zippy as hell, and the improvements here are somewhat minor. It’s testament to the A15’s power that Apple can reuse it for this year’s basic iPhone 14 and most people are just like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
The always-on display gave me battery anxiety. I’d turned on the new/old battery percentage indicator in iOS 16’s Settings and was convinced that my available power was dropping faster than usual for a new phone. But hiding the percentage was probably one of the best unpopular things that Apple did with the introduction of the iPhone X. Nobody needs to see that number drop. I turned it off and stopped worrying for the time being. If you want to give it a break, just turn your phone face down on your desk (this doesn’t work on glass tables, FYI).
It’s certainly nice, but nowhere as necessary as an always-on display on a watch, because seeing the time and other info without overtly turning your wrist towards you is a real use case. Being able to glance over and see a weather update or the price of bitcoin without tapping my phone’s screen is alright. But maybe not 10% less battery life alright? I need my phone’s battery for playing games and calling cabs and other things my watch doesn’t have to worry about. Time will tell if it’s a keeper or a feature we all turn off and forget about.
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I also replaced my Series 4 watch with a new Series 8, but apart from the always-on display and non-degraded battery life, there’s not a lot here to write home about for someone who isn’t into the athletic life. It’s just the most refined and capable version of a four-year-old design, and I expect it to last me for quite awhile. The Apple Watch Ultra is simply not for me, and it would take a radical redesign of the regular watch line to make the Series 8 feel obsolete (note: foreshadowing).
My last one was an Hermés model, and I’m really missing their classic analog watchface with the Cape Cod typeface (see below). There is simply nothing in the standard Apple Watch catalog of watchfaces that compares. If you want an elegant, full-screen analog face with attractive Arabic numerals and maybe just a date display, you’re shit out of luck.
My old Hermés Series 4, grabbed from a video I made in 2018Series 8 with the California watchface, close but no cigar
One interesting thing that’s new this year, but is actually available to all Apple Watches from Series 4 and up, is advanced sleep stage tracking in watchOS 9. I’ve been using the Autosleep app to do the same thing for the last couple of years, but it’s always been a bit of a faith/novelty thing: there was just no way of knowing how accurate it really was.
Well, it seems Apple invested proper resources into their machine learning approach, which uses your motion and heart rate to probabilistically determine what state of sleep you’re in at any point in the night, and it comes very close to what high-end, specialized equipment with lots of sensors on your body can do. So Autosleep has been Sherlocked and deleted from my phone, and you don’t need any other apps to analyze your sleep quality; just look in Health.app.
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One “local” artist I came away from Friday night’s showcase concert quite impressed with was Dru Chen, who played a couple of songs featuring some funky guitar work and a lovely musicality reminiscent of His Purpleness. I have nothing against people inspired by Prince. Everyone should be. Dru’s debut album is on Apple Music, so I’ll be listening to it some over the next week.
But for live music, it probably doesn’t get any better than this newly remastered 1985 show by Prince and The Revolution playing in Syracuse, now available in goddamn Dolby Atmos spatial audio. What an absolute treat to be transported right into the audience for this. I’ve only heard a few moments so far. It really calls for a fully charged pair of AirPods Max and a clear afternoon.
Big week for Splatoon enthusiasts: the new game finally dropped for the Nintendo Switch! But I’m… not actually a big Splatoon player. I just love the aesthetic and music and bonkers world it takes place in. I clocked about 10 hours in Splatoon 2, most of them losing to much better players, and it never became a habit.
But that game came out five long years ago, and I wanted to see how Nintendo would squeeze the last dregs of performance out of their aging hardware with Splatoon 3. Initial reactions: loading times have been greatly improved and it kinda looks like a current-gen game, which I mean in the best way possible! It’s colorful and sharp and the action is very fluid — almost too fluid. I basically suck at this; there’s so much visual chaos with paint being thrown everywhere, plus your enemies can swim in the paint virtually invisibly. But I’m having fun anyway.
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Big week also for iPhone enthusiasts: what was expected to be just a camera-focused upgrade to the Pro model (that a strong enough person [not me] could shrug off and then go hibernate for another year), turned out to be a little more substantial. First up, I decided not to go with “Deep Purple”. It’s not really my favorite color + the “gray” model is called “Space Black” this year (it was actually “Graphite” last year), so I went with that. Apple usually reserves “Space Black” for things that are pretty much black, so I’m hopeful it’ll approach the iPhone 5’s yet-to-be-surpassed black and slate color scheme.
The Dynamic Island is early adopter catnip; it changes the core everyday experience of interacting with an iPhone in the biggest way since the iPhone X introduced the Swipe Up Multitasking interaction model. How could you not want to play with that? Like everyone else who read the last-minute leaks that the new sensor cutouts would be visibly “joined with software” into one solid black area, I took that at face value: they don’t want a distracting dot and oval visible all the time, so they’d make it one solid black entity. I didn’t think about you could do something interesting by embracing that concept. The little announcement video that shows the island morphing to become a secondary Dock of sorts sold me instantly.
Some people on Twitter think the animations are superfluous and will get annoying after the first few times, and while I agree, they’re kinda delightful and novel now and will probably be turned down over the next few years of iOS releases. Like most of iOS 7’s jarring and annoying changes!
Oh, I also ordered a new watch from the Series 8 lineup. It’s one of the smallest hardware updates ever, with hardly anything new except a new temperature sensor and accelerometer, but I’ve been on my current model for four years and even having an always-on display is going to feel like a big upgrade.
AirPods? I’m err… content with my current ones. Or at least content enough to not pay full price for improved noise cancelling. I can wait for the eventual price drop on Shopee maybe six months from now. Fortunately, the new Personalized Spatial Audio feature doesn’t actually require new AirPods. After upgrading to iOS 16, you’ll be able to scan your ears and use the personalized profile with older AirPods. I installed the iOS RC on my phone this weekend to try it out a few days early, and it’s definitely made a difference to the feeling of immersion with head tracking on.
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Kim got back from her work trip, and we got started on Season 2 of For All Mankind, which is such a good series I don’t recall why we put it off for so long. We also saw Nope, and while most people I know loved it, and I get what it’s doing and some of that was very much appreciated, I just couldn’t give it more than three stars on Letterboxd. It’s essentially a two-hour build up to a Jaws joke. With that, Jordan Peele’s batting average with me is 1/3. I was talking to a film buff about it, and was drawing comparisons to Shyamalan’s work: how he showed almost his whole hand with his first film, and then spent the next few struggling to break free of expectations and his own language, which was really a well-practiced, keen sense of cinematic tradition more than the Twists. He films the way Bumblebee talks in the Michael Bay films: in pastiche, homage, and remixes. Which I happen to Really Like, by the way. Nope is Peele’s Signs. There’s even a scene where a slow, freaky motion by an object you can’t quite make out sends a chill down your spine, just like the first time you see the thing in Signs. Anyway, the other guy thought I was talking about Peele, not Shyamalan, and agreed. So I guess there really is something in that comparison.
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In between meetings one afternoon, I found myself near where I keep my always-growing Monocle backlog (I subscribe but ever hardly read) and flipped through an issue from last year. I’m confident I’ll clear the pile soon. Whilst reading about Veja sneakers and the 10th anniversary of their Monocle 24 radio station, I realized it’s been awhile since I tuned in.
And thus I discovered Enfance 80, an instant classic of a song from 2020 by the French electronic duo, Videoclub. I don’t exactly know what they’re saying, but it’s something nostalgic about childhood in the 80s, and by god does the sound nail that vibe (as remembered in the 2020s).
The other song that I’ve had on heavy rotation this week is Paul McCartney’s The Kiss of Venus, both his original and Dominic Fike’s reworking of it. The base melody is super pretty, which Fike dials up with Beatle-esque organ parts, but it’s his addition of a funky new bass line and electric energy in the chorus that are pure bliss. And like all great songs, it ends far too soon.
Singapore grappled with a potential poultry problem this week as Malaysia banned the export of chickens to protect its domestic market from rising prices. We get just about all our fresh chicken over the causeway, which leaves only frozen supplies (mainly from Brazil and Portugal, I think). Despite frozen chicken making up the vast majority of consumption today, people panicked and smash bought all the chilled chicken off supermarket shelves, some buying hundreds of dollars worth; I don’t know how they intend to eat it all either. The greatest threat is to our national dish of chicken rice, which seems hard if not impossible, to achieve with frozen fowl.
I did what had to be done and ate two large servings from my neighborhood chicken rice stall, all at once, as a farewell to our precious perfectly poached plucked poultry. I’d love to say that I’m now sick of it and won’t want any for a while, but honestly I could eat it Very Regularly if it wasn’t a terrible idea.
Went out for another drone flying session with my dad, no crashes this time. It was an extremely warm day, but I discovered that if you hover it above your head, the down thrust is just incredible, like a fresh breeze on a cliffside, and it cools you off in a minute. Are mini drones the best portable fans in existence? I think so!
The digital artist Tabor Robak launched his latest project, Colorspace, as an NFT series on Artblocks. I’ve been excited for this: they are tiny interactive, animated programs reminiscent of the 64K demo scene from the earlier days of PCs. Thematically they are matched to that era, simulating a desktop computer experience gone haywire, overtaken by swirling virus-like growths that break through the 2D plane and take over UI elements.
I got up in the middle of night to mint one, but all 600 went so quickly that my transaction failed. Thankfully they’re now on the secondary market for not much more. The NFT art scene still seems to favor static images closer to traditional art, which strikes me as missing the potential of this new format. I’ve mostly been collecting generative pieces that couldn’t exist traditionally: favoring those that are ephemeral, ever evolving, or at least in motion.
Drifting by Simon De Mai is one such project. By animating layers of simple geometric shapes over each other, and then adding cinematic lighting and shaders, it creates extremely cyberpunk scenes that can be read as anything from an endless descent down a megacorp’s elevator shaft, to a microscopic examination of advanced microchips.
The second season of Ghost In The Shell: Stand-alone Complex 2045 was released on Netflix, and I had to watch the recap movie they cut together from bits of Season 1 to remember what happened before. I think it came out before the pandemic! After that I binged the whole new thing over the weekend. In general agreement with the critics, it’s not quite classic GITS, but it’s still good to have something. S2 definitely of overall higher quality than S1.
I was getting a lot of Instagram ads for a game called Peridot and skipping over them without thinking… until… it dawned on me that this is Niantic’s new AR game which isn’t supposed to be out yet. Turns out Singapore is one of their guinea pig (ahem, soft launch) markets!
So I installed it and have been impressed by the leap forward that this is versus Pokémon Go’s AR mode. For one, it hasn’t made my phone too hot to hold. My creature also navigates the physical world very realistically with rock-steady positioning and impressive foreground occlusion (I have an iPhone 13 Pro so I assume LIDAR and ARKit are doing the work here). They’re also doing something neat with computer vision, so not only can the game tell the difference between grass, soil, sand, water, and other surfaces that your creature can dig into, but it also gives you tasks like “show your creature a dog or a cat” or “bring it to a tree trunk”, and will know when the camera is pointed at one.
It actually made me go out and take my new pet for a walk, and it ran ahead of me and beside me just like a dog would. When I brought it beside a body of water, it ran ahead and jumped in (complete with splashing animations). And this all ahead of what Apple’s going to show at WWDC. The AR glasses life is going to be something.
But this is all indicative of the current sad state of the web. Blogging is not popular, and there are few good options left for anyone wanting to start publishing in their own corner of the net, away from social networks. WP probably needs to start making more money from their hosting business, and I’d still much rather pay them for it than run/rent my own server and muck around with the open-source version.
I’m still hopeful for some catalyst in the near future that will bring decentralized self-publishing back into the mainstream.
This is the last post of my sabbatical era. It’s been great! Going back to work is bittersweet. My next update will probably be brief.
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!
Merry Christmas to any readers! I had a good one with lots of eating, lots to be thankful for, and everyone fortunately safe and healthy. The Instax mini Evo camera I got as a present to myself proved useful on Christmas Day at dinner with my family. Although the quality is poor in low light, I got to leave behind little prints for the fridge door, and gave souvenirs to my aunt and uncle too. There was a sleepover, day drinking, and a kid stood on my shoes because she wanted to be walked on top of them. In all, I count about five events over the weekend. Pooped.
For other photo-worthy moments, I got a lot out of FiLMiC Firstlight, a camera app that I hadn’t touched in a couple of years and recently rediscovered. It has a lovely, warm, film-inspired filter called Leopold (based on Kodachrome, I think), and behaves unlike the HDR-happy iPhone camera of today. Images come out with heaps of contrast and deep blacks, and generally don’t need any correcting in post. On reflection, I should just set my iPhone Camera.app to use a “Rich/Warm” photographic style.
Firstlight’s ‘Leopold’ film style
The Misery Men NFT collection is now up to #78, which was a Sad Santa. I held a giveaway and got 12 takers, so it was minted as a — I don’t know the right word for this — series of 12 editions? 12 prints? Anyway they were sent out on Christmas Day, and hopefully everyone who isn’t a bot is happy with them. I’m taking a break from the daily drops and will resume in the new year. There are already a few finished ones in the can, and some of them are pretty good by my standards.
Misery Man #78: Shackled to the wheels of capitalism for all eternity.
It was also the week of The Matrix Resurrections, which we saw in a regular Golden Village cinema after a gut-busting visit to Five Guys (my first one in this country). Dim screen, muffled audio, noisy patrons… it reminded me of why I no longer like going to theaters (Gold Class screenings are the exception, fixing all the above). Nevertheless, I enjoyed the film despite having many of my expectations subverted. I’ll need to see it again properly, but I expect to still agree with my initial assignment of 4.5 stars. Side note: Cien and Peishan saw it the same evening in the same cineplex and hated it.
Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch was also much enjoyed. It’s an insane directorial flex; every shot and sequence is beautiful and meticulously composed, existing just to indulge a particular sense of humor and beauty. Both films shine with the joy and energy of creators who have nothing left to prove, but where one is happy to keep iterating on a style even at the risk of self parody, the other reclaims its own fandom and fabric for self satisfaction. And I’m here for it, as the young ones say.
Once again, nearly no video games were played, but I picked up Steamworld Heist and Saints Row IV on sale for my Switch. The latter is probably a decade old now, but was irresistible at $2.79 USD, down 93% from its standard price.
Instead, I got more reading done and am closer to my Goodreads Reading Challenge target. Finished Iron Widow (3.5 stars at best) and The Power (a solid 4), both mentioned last week. It looks like I might make it, if I can finish The End of Men next week. Quick recap: all three books deal with the decline, displacement, and/or death (literally) of men due to overwhelming Qi force, mutant powers, and a gender-specific virus respectively. I’m also here for this as men probably have it coming.
One last thing. A year ago, I got a Backbone One controller for my iPhone and loved it. It made for a more console-like experience with many games, and it was more comfortable to use and more capable than a Nintendo Switch. So why did I buy another Switch this year? Let’s not answer that directly, but it may be no coincidence that I’ve been unable to use my Backbone since moving to the new iPhone: the larger camera bump isn’t compatible. The company then designed a simple adapter and provided the plans for 3D printing one on your own. Never having gotten around to convincing myself of a 3D printer’s utility in the home, I had to place an order for one of their officially manufactured ones, and have been waiting on it since September. It finally arrived this week and I’m happy. But if supply chain problems are gonna continue next year, perhaps getting a 3D printer isn’t such a bad idea!
sangsara.net 