The Murderbot series debuted on Apple TV+ and it’s a pretty straightforward adaptation of the first book, All Systems Red, with a bit of a plasticky comedic sheen that undercuts any sense of stakes, at least in the first two episodes I’ve seen. My main gripe is that Alexander Skarsgård feels wrong in the titular role (to me, obviously, versus how I read it), and has a strangely dorky, trembling quality to his voice that I didn’t think the SecUnit would. And that’s not just because someone said the robot reminded them of me.
Meanwhile I finished the fourth book in the series, Exit Strategy, and found it better but still pretty flawed. Ranked in order from best to worst: Book 2 > 1 > 4 > 3. I’m going to stop here for a few months, I think, and just watch the show as it comes out.
In need of a new Jack Reacher type of story, while not actually wanting to read a Reacher book because I’m almost running out, I started on Fearless by M.W. Craven. It features an ex-special forces type guy, the kind who’s had all the deadly training and whose records have been wiped clean, with the additional gimmick of a rare neurological condition that makes him literally incapable of fear. I’m about a third of the way through and so far they haven’t really made much use of this “power”, mainly saying that it makes him susceptible to making tactical errors, rather than imparting any advantage. Or perhaps it’s just that I’ve already read so much Jack Reacher — a man who doesn’t need a brain injury to be fearless. So far there are two books featuring this guy Ben Koenig, so maybe it’ll be a TV show someday.
Gamers may know Coffee Talk, a visual novel sorta game where you play a barista in a world where humans and mythical creatures co-exist, and the main game mechanic is making drinks to get the conversation going. I finished it a couple of years ago and thought it was okay, nothing mind-blowing. I’ve now started on the sequel, Coffee Talk Episode 2: Hibiscus & Butterfly. With the rainy mornings we’ve had this week, it turned out to be a great game to have on (even paused in the background while I did other things), because it often rains in the game world and the thunder mixed with its lo-fi beats soundtrack is pretty good. The game… more of the same. Cosy vibes, looks great, but the story doesn’t really grab me.
We often grade locally or regionally made things on a curve when they compete on a global stage, like if you see a game or song or movie made in Singapore and it isn’t a disaster, the relief you feel immediately gives it extra points. That’s sort of what’s happening with Coffee Talk, I think, because knowing it’s Indonesian earns it a little extra goodwill.
Since I chat with someone who’s actually in Indonesia, I asked Evan if he’d played these games yet and we ended up talking about the Nintendo Switch 2. Background: it launches globally on June 5, but no release date has been set for Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines beyond “July to September”. Of course, there will be imported units sold as soon as it’s out overseas. On Shopee, one large local retailer has already listed the bundle with Mario Kart World ($500 USD) for S$849 ($650 USD). And it’s the European edition, with a download code for Mario Kart that might not work without an EU eShop account. I thought this markup was obscene, but Evan informed me the gray market price in Indonesia was even worse, at around $800 USD! That’s more expensive than a PS5 Pro, by the way. Nintendo’s global distribution game is so unbelievably weak that customers out here are being bled dry.
A little later on, I got a pop-up from Amazon Singapore saying Switch 2 pre-orders had opened. I tapped through and immediately bought myself the Mario Kart World bundle at S$769, with delivery on June 6, which is only a S$60 markup after tax and conversion at the current rate of 1.3 SGD-USD. BUT, you know they’re not going to sell it here at that rate, it’ll probably be closer to 1.4, which would make the official local price about S$750–760. So it was an easy decision, and Evan asked me to grab him one too (even after pricing in a plane ticket to collect it from me, still cheaper than the Indonesian price).
But you know what else Indonesia has gotten great at apart from indie games and scalping? Pop idols! 88rising debuted their new girl group, “no na”, and I saw them via a YouTube recommendation. Their videos feature lush green Indonesian landscapes (think Balinese rice fields), and their sound invokes 90s R&B (like XG) and retro dance pop — I think I heard 808s on one of the new songs. I hope they go places!
Speaking of XG, they just wrapped a successful tour that involved going viral for actually singing live at Coachella, and capped it off with a pretty great new song, Million Places. It’s a reflection on their experiences traveling the world and getting to see their fans, and it’s weird that I can’t think of many other songs like this; they seem to be more common in K-Pop. I think it would be considered kinda corny in Western music these days if not cut through with something “hard” or self-deprecating. I think it comes off as sweet and sincere here because they’re experiencing this kind of success for the first time.
Usually after an artist gets past this breakthrough phase, they get accustomed to fame and become insufferable. At least, that’s what you see in countless musical biopics. A Complete Unknown (2024) is no different, and boy does Timothée Chalamet nail the annoying twerp of a genius that young Bob Dylan (likely) was. The movie is by-the-numbers, the musical numbers are by-god-this-boy-is-good. Between this role and his war rally scene as Muad’Dib in Dune: Part Two (2024), I’m beginning to think Timmy C can play anything. Can Christopher Nolan please direct him alongside Robert Pattinson and Tom Hardy — as three brothers with wildly different accents and mannerisms? I think that would be amazing.
Still thinking about John Woo’s Mission: Impossible 2 (2000), I watched his recent comeback film, The Killer (2024), a remake of his 1989 film of the same name. It has some really absurd but satisfyingly built action scenes, and I enjoyed the whole thing. Especially Nathalie Emmanuel’s extremely physical performance: all the typical John Woo stuff — throwing yourself sideways while shooting, sliding on your knees, getting smashed into walls… and she looked incredible doing it. Francis Ford Coppola clearly saw her talent, but sadly no one watched her in Megalopolis (2024) beyond that one “Entitles me?” clip that went around.
We went to see Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning this weekend because I couldn’t wait anymore. So that meant we didn’t rewatch movies 5–7, just recaps on YouTube. Tom Cruise and McQ keep saying this film was “designed and built” to be experienced in a theater, but at several points I found myself thinking I’d rather be seeing it on my Vision Pro. I wouldn’t have to hear other people’s noises, and I’d be able to move my seat further back in the room and higher off the floor. I’d probably make the screen even bigger too. I’m now looking forward to buying it off the iTunes Store and watching it again “properly” when it comes out.
No spoilers: About the film itself… I gave it a 4/5 on Letterboxd. I want to give it a 4.5, but there are just too many weird gaps in the storytelling and some of it felt contrived. It might be a case of the action concepts coming before the dramatic ones. Starting from the first film, the franchise has steadily morphed from behind-the-scenes, twisty espionage thrillers to high-stakes save-the-world blockbusters — not unlike the trajectory of the Fast and Furious franchise. My take is that this escalation of stakes is neither necessary nor sustainable (much like last week’s questioning of doing ever more work with new technology). I’d gladly keep paying to watch Ethan Hunt and team take down spies threatening an oil pipeline or the life of a valuable undercover agent. The threat doesn’t have to be nuclear annihilation, and the bad guys don’t need to form an entire Rogue Nation or Syndicate to be taken seriously! But that’s how Hollywood rolls, so here we are, having to market this as the end of the series (although the stars are saying it might not be) because we’ve run out of threat headroom.
I saw someone say that Mission: Impossible ended just fine with Fallout (2018), and I think that might be the way. Look at Dead Reckoning and The Final Reckoning as two bonus movies, made years after the originals at the behest of some streaming giant with millions to spend. Kinda like what Netflix did with Gilmore Girls. They don’t have to be canon; they’re fun fever dreams in an alternate universe. Ultimately this is a very good popcorn flick, and at several times I caught myself with my fingers curled in front of my mouth, holding my breath — I just wished it were under different circumstances.
Our long #youngstar programming nightmare is over. About two years ago, Michael and I noticed that the aforementioned Apple Music playlist had veered from its Japanese roots and presented differently to international users. The English picks were mediocre, and not edgy or innovative in line with the playlist’s stated purpose. And then it fell into a memory hole and wasn’t updated for months. Well, the localization experiment is over! I’m now seeing the Japanese version here in the Singapore ‘store’. Good on you, Apple Music editors.
I’ll try for a shorter bullet point update this week.
It’s hard to believe we’re already done with the first week of December. Every year, I say Christmas crept up on me and I don’t feel it coming at all. Now I accept that it’s just the nature of Christmas in the tropics (without winter), and if I don’t surround myself with visual signifiers of the season, the mind forgets what the body doesn’t feel.
Nintendo released Animal Crossing Pocket Camp Complete, the offline, self-contained, definitive version of their mobile AC game, and I decided to buy it after all. I played the live service version briefly when it came out, but soon decided I didn’t like the in-app purchase model. This is much better. So much better, in fact, that I have spent several hours this weekend fishing and harvesting fruit.
The game was actually mentioned in my first-ever weekly post back in July 2020. After 7 years of iteration, it now feels like a massive game with tons of content (clothing and furniture to buy and craft) and new functionality bolted on. Currently, it’s snowing in the world and the seasonal events have got my campsite decorated with sleighs and piles of gifts and I’m wearing a reindeer hat… and dare I say? It kind of feels like Christmas is coming.
If you’re playing too, add me to your world with the Camper Card below! I believe it’s just a one-way thing, and we won’t get to interact for real since there are no servers involved. And don’t forget, the game is half price now and will go up to $20 at the end of January 2025.
We collected our Zeiss Optical Inserts for Vision Pro (prescription lenses that click in magnetically), and the setup experience was pretty cool. The device detects that they’re in, and makes you redo the eye setup process. Then it registers the new lenses on your profile by having you look at a QR code printed inside the box. Given that my contact lenses are “weaker” than my regular glasses, I’m now seeing everything in the Vision Pro with even more clarity than I was before.
Leica fixed a deal-breaking bug in Leica LUX where your preference of ProRAW or HEIF file format wasn’t remembered between sessions. They also fixed some other small things that bothered me but aren’t worth mentioning. This makes it a viable camera app for everyday use because it gets you HEIF files with the gentler/less sharpened look of shooting in ProRAW. Plus you can choose a “Leica Look” color profile to start from, and non-destructively try others or revert to the underlying original photo afterwards. I like it enough to put a shortcut on my Lock Screen.
Our home broadband plan was up for renewal, and I got a call from the company to that effect. They wanted me to give the last 4 digits of my national ID number over the phone for verification before they would even tell me anything. “How do I verify you’re really from the company?”, I asked. “Can you tell me something you know about me?”, I offered, to which they said “We can’t share any customer information”, and agreed when I asked if I was just supposed to trust them. I said that didn’t work for me, and so they could just send me whatever special offers they wanted via email instead.
The offer was fine, and I decided to stick with them for another two years because it’s the best price I’ve seen anywhere. And as a bonus, we’ll be getting an upgrade to a 10gbps line. We’ll only be utilizing a maximum of 2.5gbps though, because that’s the maximum supported wired input on the WiFi 6E router I just got a few months ago.
Renovation noises at home continued, and someone lodged a complaint with the housing board against our new neighbor’s contractors. It wasn’t us, but I can see how this might not be the warm welcome anyone would hope for. There are also reports from other residents that they’ve been seeing ceiling leaks during the recent storms, and mysteriously, these are people lower down in the building! Fingers crossed this doesn’t grow to affect us, because I can’t take any more drama.
One noisy afternoon, I decided to finally pay a visit to my local library branch after talking about it for the last six months, and… it’s not much to write home about. Lots of retirees sitting around playing Pokémon Go and reading magazines. Afterwards I decided to eat at Yakiniku Like, a place that seems well designed for solo diners. I got my own little personal grill, and ate 200g of beef short plate with 300g of rice (and a huge mound of shredded cabbage) for a little over $20 and went home very happy.
We went out for a much nicer dinner on Thursday, checking out Hayop on Jose’s recommendation. It’s affiliated with the Manam restaurant in Manila, a fact that only landed as I was looking at the menu — I ate there a couple of times back in 2019 when I was there for work. The prices here have been proportionately raised, but the food is nearly as good as I remembered, so that’s fair. I like Filipino food because it respects the power of pork fat.
Testing the Leica Lux app with these
It turns out that writing bullet points ≠ shorter updates when you’re a typer-yapper like me.
I wanted to binge an entire anime series in a week and decided to go with Summertime Rendering. It’s a time loop story that feels like a visual novel game adaptation, but actually started as a manga series. I was hoping more for sci-fi but it’s really a supernatural thing. At 25 episodes, it became a bit of a slog near the end as the multiple timelines became too convoluted to follow. Don’t really recommend.
Netflix released a new 6-part spy series called Black Doves, starring Keira Knightley and Ben Whislaw (aka Q in recent James Bond films, and the voice of Paddington). I was optimistic, but while it’s not as bad as most Netflix shows, it still suffers from the Marvel-ization of popular culture where any seriousness or suspense is immediately undercut by comic relief before it can mean anything. That’s not the only problem with it, but the result is a show that feels like background fodder for phone fiddling.
Months after the Katseye moment, we watched the Pop Star Academy show that shows their formation and training over two years. It was interesting to see non-Asian idols like Lexie chafe against unethical manipulation in light of HYBE’s recent troubles with NewJeans. I don’t think the industry’s current models will hold up well as talent starts to realize they hold the keys to their fandoms and can stream online on their own. It’s like K-Pop’s In Rainbows moment.
I also think HYBE made a strategic error in greenlighting this behind-the-scenes show with Netflix, and it’s translated into Katseye’s failure to take off with an international (beyond K-Pop) audience. Fans of J-Pop and K-Pop aren’t surprised to see the rough training and emotional abuse their idols go through, but people seeing that shit for the first time probably feel terrible about supporting the whole business, especially when adult music execs gleefully admit on camera that they fucked with the teenaged girls’ trust in each other to create more drama.
Yiwen shared her Spotify Wrapped on IG and I learnt about the artist known as Night Tempo, a self-proclaimed “retro culture curator” who puts out city pop-inflected music that sounds exactly like how the perfect night drive must feel. Check out his latest album, Connection on Apple Music.
For something less weeby and more eclectic, Jean Dawson’s new album Glimmer of God is worth a playthrough. I’m going to be putting the opening song Darlin’ on playlists for quite awhile, I’m sure.
ROSÉ’s debut album rosie dropped, and what I’ve heard so far sounds like competent pop with a teenaged guitar girl’s poetry notebook slant. That’s not a knock; it’s as satisfying a sub-genre as a sad man’s whiskey-soaked heartbreak blues. I’m still feeling good about my prediction that she’ll turn out to be the most musically interesting Blackpink alum.
I used to drink 3–4 coffees a day, measured in espresso shots, usually from our home Nespresso machine or the office’s barista. At Starbucks prices, that would cost $10 a day or more, depending on the drink formulations. At home, about $3.20 in Nespresso pods.
While looking at where I could trim unnecessary expenses (which has resulted in pausing Netflix for the past month, I’ve barely missed it; and canceling YouTube Premium, much more painful because of how frequent the bad ads are, so perhaps a necessary expense after all), I thought perhaps I could drink more tea. After all, I like tea! It’s just a bit more bother, waiting for the water to boil and then standing there for 4–5 minutes while it brews, or at least having to remember to come back in time — I usually don’t, and then it stands there on the counter for 20 minutes becoming cold and uncommonly strong.
So I got some UK supermarket brand teabags in, because local supermarkets don’t do tea much cheaper and can’t do it much better, I assume. And boy are they ridiculously cheap. A box of 80 Sainsbury’s gold label teabags runs about S$5–6 (and less than S$2 in the UK), making each hit of caffeine about 10x cheaper than Nespresso. If you do the math, simply switching to tea will save me enough to buy a new iPhone Pro every two years.
Starbucks revenue is down, coincidence?
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I finally got the third and final dose of my hepatitis vaccine after recovering enough from Covid — that cough is still around though. For reasons too hard to explain here, I ran into YJ immediately after, and we managed to chat for about half an hour. It was my first time seeing him in years; I think the last time was a noisy fast-food lunch just before Covid happened.
He runs a bunch of coding classes for kids and I got to sit in for a little bit of one. What I want to mention here is how astounding it is to actually watch young teens use their computers in a classroom in 2024. They swipe between desktop spaces on macOS: they’ve got windows for Discord, Telegram, YouTube, Figma, oh and some multiplayer FPS they’re killing their classmates in, casually multitasking between all of it while still participating in the lesson.
I said to YJ either we’re really old and slow, or this generation’s brains are cooked. I assume the former. We were premature in calling millennials “digital natives” because the world they and Gen Zs grew up in were not sufficiently digital. I think these kids are there now.
Media activity
I know I said I was committed to finishing Astral Chain on the Switch, but I lied. The graphics are good for the aging platform, but the story is not engaging, the levels waste my time, and the combat is over complicated for no reason. Cutting my losses.
Likewise, after 24 hours invested, I’m ready to call Yakuza: Like A Dragon the worst installment I’ve played in an otherwise brilliant series. Perhaps it’s the decision to make it more of a JRPG, with all the tedious combat and level grinding that comes with it. The city of Yokohama where you spend most of your time is so much blander than it is in Lost Judgment — just compare the maps and you’ll see Yakuza’s version is a barren wasteland where Judgment’s pops with shops and activities on every block. I’m at a stage where the game is telling me to level up before the next chapter begins, and I’m saying no to hours more of pointless street fights.
I went back to Lost Judgment to finish the add-on DLC adventure, The Kaito Files, which took about four hours. And then I deleted it along with the two games above. Clean slate and it feels good.
I decided to see more films each week, and to cut down on the decision paralysis, they don’t have to be great.
Firestarter (2022) was terrible. I was actually excited for it because I saw the original 80s film several times as a kid; it had horror vibes and terrified me. It was based on a Stephen King story and starred a child Drew Barrymore as a girl with the power to set things on fire with her mind. This new one has Zac Efron playing her dad, and there are nearly no redeeming qualities. 1/5.
I rewatched David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo over two days and loved it more than I probably did when it came out. Although it wasn’t as successful, it made me want to rewatch The Girl in the Spider’s Web too, but had to confirm my vague recollection that it was a new standalone story written after Stieg Larsson’s death ended the trilogy. Turns out there are now SEVEN books in the Lisbeth Salander series, and Spider’s Web is book #4. I’ll probably read the new books first to see if they’re any good.
In the Heights was a fun musical with Lin Manuel-Miranda’s fingerprints all over it. The songs were satisfying, with the occasional clever bars that make you go ‘ooooh!’, and Jon Chu (of the Step Up films) is obviously the guy you call to direct big dance sequences. Perfect Sunday afternoon viewing. 4/5.
Completely without meaning to, I saw an Anya Taylor-Joy triple feature this week: The Northman: I was prepared for a mid-budget Viking tale, but had no idea it would be a star-studded, intensely violent, artistic triumph (4/5); The Menu: I was prepared for cannibalism and risked watching it before dinner anyway, but instead it was an absurd black comedy wrapped in layers of detestfulness — it attacks pretension with a blunt weapon forged from pretentiousness itself (3/5); and Furiosa: Jesus Christ, George Miller has action cinema running in his veins, you can’t take your eyes off the screen for a minute. Anya is incredible in all three, a victim with hidden strength. I’d like to see her do some lighter comedic material. Maybe I’ll watch Emma next week.
YouTube recommended me a music video by Kenshi Yonezu and I want to know why no one told me about this guy. I’ve seen three of his recent videos now and they’re brilliant! They make use of practical effects, clever editing, and great art direction to keep you engaged throughout the songs. Take a look:
sangsara.net 