Just 10 days to Christmas, and I finally got a sense of it happening through my first gift exchange and a couple of meetups. The first was with a few workplace alums, after one suggested to me that it would be nice if we all caught up (and so I ended up getting the job of organizing, which I bumbled through). It was nice after all, and I got to spend time with some people I hadn’t seen in years. The second was last night at a friend’s home that impressively decorated for the season, complete with a playlist of Christmas classics greeting us at the door. I think that was the moment it became real for me.
I brought my Leica D-Lux 7 out of hibernation this week for a few photos, mostly to put its aging battery to the test. It fits in my new Bellroy sling (the Ricoh GR III is still significantly smaller and lighter, albeit without a zoom lens), so I’m entertaining the thought of bringing it on our next holiday. Oh, that’s right. We’ve just booked a trip to Tokyo next year, wayyy behind the trend, but hopefully everyone’s had their fill of Japan by now and it’ll be less crowded when we get there. If I do need a spare battery, I’ll pick up the Panasonic equivalent model from Yodobashi Camera or something.
Another reason for the renewed interest was an update to the Leica FOTOS app (which connects to cameras) that came out this week. For the uninitiated, ‘Leica Looks’ are essentially a series of live filters that can be installed onto newer cameras. Owners of older models have been out of luck, but with this new update they can be retroactively applied in the app to any JPEG taken with a Leica camera. While trying it out, I discovered that photos I’ve been taking with the Leica LUX camera app also qualify as “taken with a Leica camera”, meaning you can apply these Looks to iPhone photos for free as well.
So far, I’ve been surprised by how well photos from its Micro Four-Thirds sensor have turned out, especially in daylight. Low light photos are quite smudgy/noisy if you elect to use an ISO value over 3200. I’m fortunate that Leica’s updated D-Lux 8 model this year was such a relative disappointment: a surface-level redesign of the camera’s body and UI without any improvements to the lens, sensor, or processor. It’s good news for me since an uncompelling update is money saved. Ignoring the PS5 I got in May, NOT upgrading stuff has been a bit of a theme this year. I don’t even covet Fuji’s X100VI camera one bit, maybe because it’s been so (artificially?) rare and overpriced.
===
Our new broadband line was finally activated, and it’s resulted in a doubling of accessible bandwidth. In one speed test, I got over 1.1 Gbps (symmetrical) on my iPhone. At this point, our fleet of un-upgraded hardware is holding us back more than the network. In a couple of years, when every device in the house actually supports WiFi 7, I’ll upgrade the router and unlock the full 10Gbps that we currently have.
How little use am I making of this plentiful bandwidth? Well, listening to a lot of Apple Music Radio.
You probably missed this because it hardly made the headlines, but Apple Music doubled the number of their live, hosted radio stations from three to six. Apple Music Club, Chill, and Música Uno now join Apple Music 1, Hits, and Country. In a world where personalized, algorithmic stations/playlists are plentiful and pedestrian, I think these human-led stations are a wonderful zig to Spotify DJ’s zag.
Some of the best artists I’ve discovered this year were serendipitous encounters while listening to Zane Lowe, Rebecca Judd, Matt Wilkinson, or Dotty taking listeners through their latest picks on Apple Music 1. I think receiving and interacting with other people’s passion and opinions is a key part of the cultural experience of music, so these DJs play an important role that is growing ever smaller. It’s so good to see Apple Music expanding their Radio offering rather than shutting it down.
I used to have a Shortcut on my phone to launch Apple Music 1, but with these new stations it seemed time to build a quick launcher. Now, I can start live stations and my personalized stations from the Control Center, Today Screen, or even with the Action Button.
===
iOS 18.2 came out of beta, with new Apple Intelligence features like Genmoji and Image Playground. They are okay for a bit of fun, but definitely won’t cause any artists or illustrators to become unemployed. It’s interesting to ask if they ever will, because Apple could certainly get the models there with time, even with fully on-device inference, so it’s just a question of intention. But I don’t think there are any brakes on this train and every company is onboard, they’ve just bought different tickets.
People sometimes say that I’d make a good teacher if I ever tried it. I think good teachers are probably more patient than I am and love speaking in front of people a lot more than I do. But on reflection, those are both things I’ve gotten a little better at over the last decade, so maybe.
I got a little taste of it this week when I was given the chance to hear a class of college students make their final presentations for a design thinking course, and provide assistance in the assessment of their assignments. They were asked to identify a group with needs, understand them, and then design games that could be of help. They had to prototype and test their ideas before finalizing a working version. They all did pretty well, creating solutions that were surprisingly polished.
The general idea about deploying Generative AI tools in the workplace is that they don’t do much to enhance the work of already talented employees. But for the vast majority of average or below-average workers, LLMs elevate their productivity and quality of work to a consistently higher level, which is still a net positive for teams.
Apple’s current ad campaign for Apple Intelligence seems to take that tack too, resulting in a message that’s so far from the Macintosh’s promise of a “bicycle for the mind” that these ads are rightfully catching some flak. But in the classroom, I saw AI tools give students (with limited time and a lack of traditional design skills) the ability to execute their ideas at high fidelity. Making card games that look and feel almost like professional products, fully illustrated without the help of artists, is not something we could have pulled off when I was their age. I’m partly envious, but also afraid that on a wider scale, execution will be confused with education.
Earlier in the year, when I sat in on another class being taught by a friend, I was struck by how hard it is to control the chaos of a large room of modern students, and the same thing was true here. When you get over 40 laptop and iPad-equipped young adults in a room, having their attention is not a given. Side conversations are happening all the time, and listening to whoever’s speaking seems like a choice.
Maybe it was just my experience as an English student, but our class sizes were smaller, and discussions almost always followed a single track, led by a professor pacing around the room rather than anchored to a screen at the front. There were hardly any screens, come to think of it, just books and notepads. Now everyone’s on Figma, Canva, Miro, and a host of other infinite sheets of AI-enabled SaaS paper. I’m not saying we had it better, but I worry that the option to take things slowly and still excel is disappearing. When kids today say they’re stressed, it’s hard not to believe them, having seen the performative polish that’s now standard. We’re getting awfully close to expecting students to pop out fully formed and ready for the mines.
===
Over the weekend, we decided to get our eyes tested at a Zeiss-approved optician’s, to order the official prescription inserts for Apple Vision Pro. This will let me use the device on days when I’m not wearing contact lenses. The need to have them on first has admittedly been only a very minor inconvenience, but now nothing will get in the way of hopping into the uh… spatialverse.
Of the three eye tests I’ve had this year, this was probably the most thorough one. The key seems to be patience (there’s that word again) on the part of the tester, in the sense that the testee should never feel hurried. They should be allowed to flip between options 1 and 2 as many times as they need to identify the sharpest and most comfortable images. As a result, I have a new prescription that shows my eyesight has slightly, but surely, deteriorated for the first time in over a decade.
My last test was in 2019, when I got my last pair of glasses from Zoff. Those were so comfortable that I stopped wearing contacts regularly and became a spectacles guy again. Now I wonder if wearing contacts actually helped arrest the decline of my eyes.
Anyway, armed with a new prescription and an appetite for vision correction, I went to the nearest Zoff outlet and ended up with a new pair of glasses. I learnt afterwards that the frames I chose were “trendy” and “perfectly suited for Gen Z styling”. Along with recent purchases of wide-leg pants and oversized tees, my fashion Bryan Johnsoning is complete.
Side note on Japanese express optical brands: I stopped considering Owndays because all their frames are small and narrow — they literally don’t have large options. Zoff at least stocks a few, and in general they overindex on “Boston” and “Wellington” shapes, so on both occasions I’ve been able to find something I like with almost no effort.
===
Media activity
After taking a break for several months, I returned to Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name on the PS5 and finished it. And this was a short game by Yakuza standards. I expected to feel pretty over the series by this point, but the emotional ending to Kaz’s story has got me quite excited to get started on the next game, Like a Dragon: Infinity Wealth, sooner rather than later.
I also returned to Luigi’s Mansion 3 on the Switch, which I started (and stopped) playing when I first got the console back in 2017. This game has just sat there for 6 years waiting for me to get back in, and all credit to Nintendo’s designers, it was stunningly easy to pick up where I left off.
There’s a ton of movies on MUBI due to leave in the next two weeks, so I started with Toni Erdmann (2016), which was nominated that year for the Palme d’Or. On the surface, it’s about a jokey dad whose daughter has become a miserable management consultant, and he decides she/they are not doing so well and could use a little cheering up. And yet as a film it was like nothing I’ve ever seen before: I laughed, I cried, I was bewildered. It’s simply art. 4.5 stars.
Another film that is leaving is a 2011 documentary by the late Austrian filmmaker Michael Glawogger, Whore’s Glory, which examined the lives of sex workers in Thailand, Bangladesh, and Mexico. The film’s biggest problem is its inappropriately “cool” millennial-era Western music soundtrack featuring Cocorosie, Tricky, and PJ Harvey. My 3.5-star Letterboxd review: “If anyone asks why I look sad, from now on my answer is ‘I saw Whore’s Glory back in 2024’.”
I haven’t held space to experience the new suddenly released Kendrick Lamar album, GNX, the way it deserves. Hopefully by next weekend.
Kim Deal of the Pixies has a new album out at the age of 63 and I quite like it. It’s called Nobody Loves You More.
I discovered a Japanese singer by the name of Kaneko Ayano while looking for artists with a similar sound to Happy End. She has an awesome ‘gimmick’ where every album is recorded and released in two different ways: acoustic and with a full band.
But for the song/video of the week, it’s Hanumankind’s Big Dawgs. I was listening to Apple Music 1 when it came on, and had to look it up immediately. He’s an Indian rapper from Kerala by way of Texas, and he’s just broken out now with this song after years of making music. His lyrical game is considerable, and as evidence I offer the existence of a YouTube comment calling him “Lendrick Kumar”.
I’m also embedding an older video I like, a freestyle performance, and a recent interview on Apple Music where it’s clear he’s an articulate and very driven young musician who’s going to be huge.
I just got back from a Sunday night dinner date in the East at a newish place called Carlitos. It was new enough that it didn’t have a Swarm entry, so I made one. That reminded me that the Foursquare app is about to be shut down, and I’m choosing to be optimistic about Swarm’s future. We’ve been promised some meaningful changes in the coming year and I hope the rethink will bring check-ins back in vogue.
Vision Pro updates
Kim got back from her work trip and the first thing we did was head out to the Apple Orchard store to pick up the new Belkin Head Strap that everyone’s talking about. And not a day too soon, because it’s now backordered into mid-December!
It is what it looks like: the top bit of Apple’s own Dual Loop Band, which you can attach to your existing Solo Knit Band — a rare best-of-both-worlds occurrence where the comfort, adjustability, and non-hair-mussing qualities of the Solo are met with the weight-relieving structure of a top strap. It works well, and I’m never taking mine off. I was using the Dual Loop before, but its thin strap that pulls upwards near the base of the skull cannot compare to the quality, fit, and comfort of the Solo band, which is such a wonderful design and product that it belongs in a museum.
I haven’t tried Spigen’s slightly cheaper version, but having read many reviews of how poor its adjustment range is, I can’t recommend you take the risk. You’ll want to get the tightness just right, so Velcro is the right solution, and Belkin has rightly made it.
Belkin was never an accessory maker I took too seriously in the last two decades, I mean, they made alright cases and cables, but I’d never choose them over first-party versions. That seems to be changing. This new Travel Bag for Vision Pro is further proof; it’s significantly smaller than Apple’s own Travel Case, and half the price.
1) Should have been in the box instead of the dual strap
2) $50 is overpriced but you’ve already paid $3500 so hard to complain.
3) When Apple knows an accessory is needed but doesn’t want to put its brand on it, it turns to Belkin (owned by a Foxconn subsidiary) https://t.co/oKM5HSIVi5
Career leak publisher Mark Gurman implied in the tweet above that Belkin is Apple’s secret partner; the one they go to when they want an accessory on the market but don’t want to make it themselves. The fact that they stock Belkin’s products in Apple Stores is supposedly proof. In this world, Apple knows the practical flaws of their own form-over-function accessories, and nudges Belkin (which is connected to Foxconn) into making uglier but more effective alternatives to keep customers satisfied. I don’t know if I believe it works exactly like this, but it’s not a bad arrangement? Let’s see if Belkin makes some kludge to access the power button on the underside of the new Mac mini, then.
A new Apple Immersive Video (AIV) feature was released this week, and a music video at that. It’s the song Open Hearts by The Weeknd, and Apple’s own press release says it’s a limited time exclusive for Vision Pro. Interestingly, they’re inviting people to visit their nearest Apple Stores to watch it, which means we’re entering a phase where the retail arm is positioned as providing free public access to the Vision Pro experience, not unlike the ‘Today At Apple’ sessions where people can learn to draw or take better photos with Apple products, even if they don’t own any yet. This is fine, but the barrier to getting people off their butts to see something cool (for free!) is somehow extremely high these days. Is this because the culture promotes ownership hand-in-hand with enjoyment, and people don’t want to try a device they already know they can’t/won’t pay for? I can’t afford a bottle of 55-year-old Yamazaki but I’d sure as hell have a free taste if offered one.
The new Apple Immersive Video from The Weeknd is worth experiencing. For one, it features a lot of movement but none of it is nauseating. I’m not sure if they’ve just figured out ‘one weird trick’ to make that possible.
Anyway, the music video is very impressive, as I said on Bluesky after seeing it. There are a couple of magical moments, some achieved with special effects and some that are just beautiful to experience in immersive video. For some reason, it never feels disorienting or nauseating even though the camera travels at speed for a fair bit. I wonder if they’ve cracked the motion sickness code and are inserting buffer frames or using some other imperceptible technique, but this bodes well for future productions. Perhaps it’s just very smooth dollying and sticking to just one axis at any time.
Apps
Perplexity: Google continues to struggle with integrating its Gemini generative AI models with search results in a way that doesn’t spit out lies, but Perplexity has been working great for me since I started using it earlier this year. It could be the types of questions I ask it, or the default stance of skepticism I adopt when it answers them (the sources are there for you to check, if something feels off), but it’s been a net positive for me and I keep the widget on my iPhone’s Home Screen and use it several times each day. In fact, I thought everyone was using it, and was very surprised to learn while talking to Viv that she had never even tried it.
This week, I got access to a year of Perplexity Pro for absolutely no money, thanks to a giveaway in Kevin Rose’s newsletter, and it feels great to have virtually no daily limit for Pro requests. Standard requests basically use a simpler model, think OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 series, which parses search results and writes an answer to your question. Pro requests use the latest models including Claude 3.5 and GPT-4o, and break your question down into its components before processing results, all to have a better chance of understanding what it is you’re trying to learn and answer accordingly.
I’m aware of the icky implications of Gen AI scraping and that this mode of bypassing publishers will probably destroy the web as it currently works. Perplexity claims to be paying publishers that it sources answers from, on a per-query basis that sounds similar to music streaming services, so it might be a best-alternative model worth watching. It’s an analogy that makes sense because of how Napster upended that entire industry through theft and wanton disregard for copyright laws… kind of like what AI companies are doing now.
===
Mattebox: Now here’s a name I never expected to hear again. I first mentioned Mattebox on this blog 13 years ago in December 2011, when I posted some photos I took on a holiday to Bintan. What I remember is that it was a camera app (as opposed to a photo editor), modeled on the ergonomics of the Konica Hexar camera (respect), and that its developer (Ben Syverson) cared enough to replicate a film-like response to clipped highlights. That torch is currently being carried by the upcoming Fig Camera app. It appears I even made/shared a filter for it called Velvius, which proves this has been a longer-standing hobby than I thought.
Anyway it disappeared off the App Store a decade ago for reasons I never knew, and then reappeared last week completely rebooted and redesigned. It’s now an editor, but still leans hard into the making and sharing of filters. It even lets you share a filter as an App Clip, which means people can apply your looks without even installing the app — probably a first in the photography app world.
I’ve played with it for a little while today and am quite impressed. It focuses on editing ProRAW files, even disabling tone mapping by default for a less HDR look (the trend these days), and a Pro subscription (S$40/yr) unlocks granular controls to dial in micro contrast, black levels, noise reduction, and so on. It even simulates physical diffusion filters, a feature that’s rare these days after the discontinuation of the Tiffen FX app around the same time Mattebox disappeared.
The UI is MUCH better than before, and although I already own the RAW Power app which includes all the same adjustments mentioned above, I would rather do them in Mattebox because of how neatly they are laid out. For a “first” release, Mattebox 3.0 gets so many essentials right, from having a double-tap gesture to reset values, to saving edits non-destructively over originals. You can even export your filters as LUT and Lightroom preset files. I’d like to try making filters for it but will 1) need to subscribe and 2) learn to use its HSL curve system, which is different from what I’m used to.
I’d love to see:
Undo/redo for adjustments
Indicators for RAW files in the photo picker
Using the system photo picker, actually, so you can view by media type, etc.
Grain tool
Media activity
I finished reading Variable Star after two weeks and gave it 4 stars on Goodreads.
I started on Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, just because it recently won the Nobel Prize in Literature. I’m 32% through it and I can’t say it’s anything terribly special yet. I saw that Sara reviewed it on Goodreads seven years ago and (I’m paraphrasing) said it was the kind of mediocre East Asian book that Western readers just lap up.
I watched Megalopolis (2024) in one straight sitting, in a giant virtual theater in Vision Pro, and it kinda rocked. What a Taj Mahal-grade vanity project, a pastiche of Shakespearean and Capital-C for Cinematic bombast. Watching this, you wouldn’t think that Coppola knows anything about urban design or architecture, they’re just metaphors for the story he wants to tell about great (and very pretentious) thinkers who change societies. They’re just MacGuffins for a crazy CGI movie that owes as much to Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004) as it does Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). I typed that and then searched to see if anyone else made the same connection, and indeed they have. 4 stars.
We watched Look Back (2024). It’s an anime adaptation of Tatsuki Fujimoto’s one-shot manga work of the same name. It recently had a successful theatrical run in Japan, and I’ve been dying to see it since seeing the reactions online. It also played here, but I missed it, and it seemed weird going to the cinema for a film that clocks in at just 58 minutes. Amazon Prime Video secured the worldwide streaming rights, thankfully, and the whole time watching it I wondered why it wasn’t acquired by Apple TV+. That would have been a great fit. I don’t want to say too much about it, but it’s brilliant, beautiful, and a showcase of how animation can express feelings that live action could never. 4.5 stars.
Can I just take a minute to show you this Labubu I saw hanging on someone’s bag on the train? It’s carrying a Chanel bag like the very one it’s attached to! That is just so super cute to me, I think I have a brain worm like the future American Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.
This felt like a very long week, and I’d say my mood has been pretty low on account of two cockroaches: Donald Trump winning his second presidency, and an actual one I found at home (the last time was a couple of months ago). The fact that Kim is out of town probably added to the anxiety.
I’ve been keeping windows closed and things locked down, so my working theories for how the real one got in are troubling: it either crawled up a drain/sink or through a tiny gap along a false wall that I’ve since sealed with silicone. It was nearly dead, presumably from the poison I’d put out. I bet the ongoing renovations next door are also a factor; maybe they were driven out of their usual hiding places by the vibrations?
The last time I wrote about this topic, Michael texted me to say that while he was used to the idea of encountering cockroaches in the home growing up in NSW, Australia, he simply hasn’t encountered any since living in Tokyo. Which I’m sure is an exception — shortly after, I opened TikTok and was shown a “day in the life of an unemployed woman in Tokyo” video, and she’d just found a dead cockroach in her kitchen — but I’ve put buying a holiday home in Tokyo back on my to-do list.
On the other thing, I’m just deeply disappointed that someone who so explicitly displays who is he could be voted in again by many of the people he despises, and who will likely suffer the most over the next four years. As much as I have any right to be, I’m disappointed in American society, free markets, confrontation instead of collaboration as a default response, our collective governance of the internet, and the networks that propagate misinformation.
I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about politics, and I didn’t even know how to describe my political mindset. I found this Political Compass quiz that maps your outlook, and scored more left and libertarian, but leaning towards authoritarianism. Maybe it’s a product of being Singaporean, but there are some things that I don’t want left up to a gullible and/or selfish public. But it’s just shocking that people would choose to install an authoritarian of Trump’s quality! Aren’t there any charismatic, intelligent, and attractive psychopaths we could have instead?
===
Perhaps I set myself up for a downer of a second half of the week by spending too many days mostly shut in and binging mostly mediocre anime to make use of my new Netflix sub.
There were some exceptions: I met Brian and Jussi for an evening beer along the river on the eve of the election. We thought it could go either way, but didn’t want to believe it. On the bus to town, I saw this older guy with cute plushies hanging from his backpack. Live your best life, dude. I still haven’t got a Labubu of my own yet. Over the weekend, I met Peishan and Cien for a rainy day brunch at Dough, where they have a really satisfying brunch plate (for about S$33 including tax). It included a “pancetta steak” — I guess a seared slab of pork belly — and awfully good scrambled eggs. I also stepped into a gym for the first time in my life that evening, not to work it off, but for a birthday party.
But, here’s the anime in question.
Oshi no Ko: The second season finished strong, and the third season is sadly at least a year away. I liked its deep dive into the production of stage shows, and its very specific endorsement of the “Stage Around” format where the audience is surrounded by a 360º stage, and their seats rotate to bring different sets into view. The “IHI Stage Around Tokyo” theater opened in 2017 and closed this April, so I guess I’ll never get to experience it.
Terminator Zero: I’d heard so many good things about this new addition to the franchise, and with Production IG involved, I was ready for something cerebral and beautifully animated. While the art was alright and recalled classic 2000s anime to my untrained eyes, the story is unnecessarily drawn out and the conflict isn’t very interesting. I ended up watching it at 1.5x speed, which made it feel normal, that’s how sluggish it is.
Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft: I’ve had this series bookmarked on Netflix for a couple of years, I kid you not. There was an empty placeholder detail page for it, and I added it to my list before there was even a cover image for it. I’m pretty sure I read somewhere that it was going to be anime, but as it turns out, it’s an awful American animation. I quit in the middle of the first episode.
Solo Leveling: I watched the entire season and am already having trouble remembering it clearly. It’s based on a Korean fantasy manhwa that feels like an isekai, where a weak fighter gains access to a floating UI that no one else can see, suggesting that he’s living in a simulation, and then levels up (which no one else can do) to become a formidable fighter.
Wind Breaker: Pretty generic brawler story where a gang of high school delinquents ‘defend their town’. Might not finish this.
Ron Kamonohashi’s Forbidden Deductions: A comedic detective show I watched an episode of over a year ago and forgot about. That I’ve now picked up again instead of better shows because I hate myself?
Oh, I also decided to watch The Substance (2024) while feeling lousy, which was not a smart decision because it’s so thoroughly depressing, but I loved it. It reuses some ideas and even shots from the director’s earlier short, Reality+ (2014), but is even more deranged and ham-fisted in its commentary on beauty than I could have ever imagined. French cinema must be protected at all costs. 4 stars.
XG’s second mini-album/EP came out, along with a new single, Howling. I love that they’ve put a song out into the world with a very prominent “awoooooooo” in it, and better yet, it echoes the yell in Led Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song.
Monday got off to a good start when I finally landed one of the coveted booth seats at the co-working space. Up to then, they were always occupied by the time I got in, and it was a feat not repeated at any other point in the week. Because I’d only signed up for the month of October, and with Thursday the 31st being a public holiday (Deepavali, not Halloween), this chapter of drinking too much coffee and watching movies while surrounded by busy people has come to an end — let’s be honest, though, most of their screen time looks like chatting on Slack/WhatsApp and browsing the web.
I’m feeling a sense of loss about it, actually. For starters, the renovation noise is set to continue next week and might drive me out of the house still, now without a place to go. But more than that, I was just getting used to the routine and would jokingly say to Kim, “I’m going to the office”. It’s akin to the loss of a ‘third place’, a social setting distinct from home and work. However, I don’t even have a second place these days!
One thing that sitting still in front of an iPad for hours on end has highlighted is how important yet increasingly difficult it is to single-task. While thinking about my/our deteriorating attention span — that constant feeling of being pulled towards other tasks while in the middle of doing things I chose to do — I identified a root cause in myself: I have less trust in my memory these days. So when something occurs to me, say looking up a fact or sending someone a message, it’s harder to file it away for later follow-up, because I think I might forget. Past experience has probably taught me that I’ll forget.
On one hand, I could make peace with that. So I’ll forget a thing or two; big deal! I don’t have to optimize every detail. Things can be allowed to slip and it’ll probably be fine. Or I could use the time-honored second brain productivity hack of… jotting thoughts down and then getting back to what I was doing? I may give that a go with the Quick Note button in my phone’s Control Center and see if it makes the distracted feeling go away.
The filmmaker Lav Diaz is known for making extremely long movies. At 10 hours, his Evolution of a Filipino Family (2004) is probably only consumable in several sittings and is the ultimate test of patience and focus. Like Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (2014), it was shot over more than a decade, and you see the actors age for real.
One could criticize its poor production values, shot in grainy and low-res black-and-white film and video, often with inadequate microphone coverage, or its loose editing and lack of action (its 10-hour runtime probably says something about Diaz’s attitude towards concision). But the message is in his medium, and I’ve found watching it to be a great meditative exercise; letting the mind alternately empty and gather and empty again as you watch the family slowly lead cattle from one end of the screen to the other or hold sparse conversations over meals, spread over minutes of near inaction. The first 2.5 hours passed effortlessly in a state of detached attention.
I also managed to watch Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) on MUBI without much distraction. It’s a hell of a film, visually inventive and beautiful, with an opening sequence that you have to see to believe, going from sensual shots of skin to burned and scarred consequences of the atomic bomb. Which is the backdrop for this film about war, love, and memory.
Having just visited Hiroshima for the first time last year, I was surprised to find so much of it familiar in this old work: the bombed-out dome, the peace museum, and its garden sculptures. It was also incredible to see its depiction of an interracial relationship between an Asian man and a white woman as equals. As far as I can tell, it was probably one of the first films to center such a couple.
The first few Apple Intelligence features launched this week in iOS 18.1, and while many in the tech press seem unimpressed by these ‘basic’ capabilities, especially when compared to products from OpenAI, Google, and Meta, I’ve found them so impactful to the way I use my computing devices that I can’t imagine going back.
Apple also announced impressive M4 updates to the iMac, Mac mini, and MacBook Pro this week, but I don’t need to upgrade!
For one, I can summarize long emails and webpages directly in Mail.app and Safari. My bank likes to send me long, jargon-filled market updates in its email newsletters, and now I can summon a quick paragraph that gets to the point.
When I get back to my phone after some time away, I can see what would normally be stacks of messages and notifications summarized into a few lines. I’ll still read them anyway, but it’s great to get a preview so I can triage for urgency. This is also useful when getting Siri Announcements over AirPods. Say someone sends me a long string of messages, instead of having them all read out over my music, I can hear a summary and know whether it’s important enough to pull my phone out for.
And coming back to the point about avoiding distractions, there’s a new focus mode called “Reduce Interruptions”, alongside others like “Work” and “Do Not Disturb”. This reads and assesses all your notifications with AI, and will only show you things that seem time-sensitive or important.
There are also Writing Tools that I’ll be using to proofread this post before sending it out, and a Clean Up tool that can remove objects in photos using a generative model. It’s quite good, certainly enough for casual use, and I’ve seen online examples of it pitted against Adobe’s equivalent AI tools and actually coming out ahead in some situations. Plus, everything happens on device, which is great for data privacy reasons.
A quick demo of the Clean Up feature in Photos.app
One grumble I have, though, is that Apple appears to be reserving its upcoming Visual Intelligence feature (where you can point your camera at something and have the phone offer contextual information) for iPhone 16 models with the new Camera Control “button”. I hope they’ll make it work with the Action Button on iPhone 15 Pro models, but am preparing that I won’t have it until I upgrade to next year’s 17.
In the meantime, I have found a new use for my Action Button: starting the Apple Music 1 radio station. This has proved super useful and convenient. If I’m anywhere with my AirPods in, getting some music going is now just a button press away, even without getting my iPhone out of my pocket.
Take a minute to appreciate this ad that Apple made to celebrate the debut of this radio station back in 2015, back when it was called Beats 1 — a far better brand in my opinion. It was a simpler, more optimistic time. Watching this, I believed that a global internet radio station dedicated to great music, across all genres, could map differences in culture and unite us all.
I must mention that Nintendo joined the music streaming app business this week. Nintendo Music is free for subscribers to the Nintendo Switch Online service (USD$19.99/yr), which I already am for purposes of playing games online and backing up saves from my Switch. However, the app is not available in Singapore as Nintendo’s online services are not officially available here — one has to create a US account instead. But complaining about Nintendo’s digital and worldwide strategy is a whole other post.
So far, this music service is pure win. Classic first-party soundtracks from the best in the business, with curated playlists for different moods and activities, and the ability to “extend” some tracks to an hour’s length (it appears there’s more to this than just looping the songs) for use as background music? With more music continuously being added? It was enough to make me jump through the hoops of switching App Store accounts to get the app on my phone. And so I’ve been listening to the sounds of Animal Crossing: New Horizons again, feeling nostalgic for the early days of the pandemic when great music in a cozy game did unite the world during a very stressful time.
They should add Shortcuts support to the Nintendo Music app so I can start playing music via the Action Button.
I may buy Nintendo’s upcoming Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp Complete smartphone app, which is their clever solution to keeping the live service mobile around after its servers shut down. You can buy a fully offline version for $10 (going up to $20 in January 2025), with all 7 years (!) of old in-app purchase content included. Current players with saves can resume their progress, but I will probably start over again. The new app launches on Dec 3, 2024.
Remaining media activity
I’m halfway through reading Variable Star, a book by Spider Robinson based on an idea and notes left behind by Robert Heinlein. So, it’s a posthumous collaboration, and a very entertaining one at that.
We waited till all episodes were out and then binged Season 4 of Only Murders in the Building. This is not my preferred way of watching the show; I believe spacing them out lets the story breathe and be remembered better. But Kim is going away again for a couple of weeks, and neither of us wanted to wait that long to pick it back up.
I finished Season 2 of The Old Man and remain impressed. It’s one of the best ‘classic’ espionage shows in recent years, and if you have a better one to recommend I’d love to see it. I’m talking old-school, Tinker Tailor-type spy intrigue, which reminds me I should pick up a John le Carré book next, because I don’t think I’ve ever read one. Btw did you know Nick Harkaway is his son??
After six months, we caved and reactivated the Netflix subscription. Kim wanted to watch Culinary Class Wars on her flight, and I’m keen to check out some of the new anime series they’ve put out, like Ranma 1/2, Dan Da Dan, and Season 2 of Oshi no Ko. I watched 9 episodes of the latter on Sunday; it’s that addictive. It was always a great looking show but the artistry and animated flexing is on another level now: some of the kinetic montages and dramatic sequences jump through a dozen art styles in as many seconds, and feel inspired by the Spiderverse films and maybe even Satoshi Kon’s Millennium Actress (2001), which might be my favorite animated film of all time.
Two visits to Maji Curry in 9 days. Think I’d better cut back for awhile…
I blame a medical appointment for our being in the area. Remember how Kim took a fall a couple of months ago and hurt her leg? She’s been feeling mostly back to normal but was advised to get an MRI just to be sure. Late last week we met the doctor for his interpretation, and it was worse than expected. The tendon that normally runs down her entire leg has become completely detached from its anchor point at the top of the thigh. In other words, she’s currently missing a crucial muscle involved in leg movement. In practice she can still move it, but with less strength than normal.
So the weekend was spent worrying about what this meant, until our follow up appointment this Monday with another doctor who was called to advise on surgical options. Yes, it can be fixed: they’d slice the thigh open, dig around for the loose tendon, stretch it back up, then attach it to the pelvis or wherever it’s meant to be. This would then be followed by six weeks of recovery and then indefinite physiotherapy. It also carries the risk of nicking a large nerve that happens to reside in that area.
Fortunately, this doctor’s disposition was entirely the opposite of worried. He reckoned that as long as she wasn’t an athlete concerned with peak performance, one could get by without addressing this; other muscles compensate and exercise with physiotherapy will see her through it. He said many patients just leave it, and continue to have normal lives. It was exceedingly refreshing to finally get some good news.
But in not so good news, my neighbor’s long-dreaded renovations are finally beginning next week. That means a handful of days where I absolutely can’t be home during the day (or I’d probably go deaf from the hacking of walls and tearing up of floors); a few weeks where I probably wouldn’t want to be home (noisy enough that one wouldn’t be able to read, think in peace, or get on a call); and a couple more months after that where the noise should only be a mild annoyance.
I’ve already made plans for that first phase next week, which happily coincides with Singapore Design Week. That will give me a few things to see and attend around town from mornings to evenings. And then for the rest of the month, I’ve decided to sign up for a membership with a co-working space company (a la WeWork), and spend my days hot-desking like a digital nomad or startup serf. It sounds ideal: air conditioning, power, WiFi, free coffee, and a change of scenery. I might even meet interesting people?! Although I’m more likely to be watching movies or gaming on my Switch rather than doing any real work (unless some new side project idea hits me).
This is way better than my original plan, which was to hang out at public libraries the whole time. Fewer amenities there, and a lot more competition for desks because our libraries are very popular hangouts for senior citizens these days.
Anticipating being in libraries where plugging into wall sockets might be frowned upon, I made a premature purchase that arrived this week: the most powerful power bank I’ve ever had. My requirement was that it had to comfortably get me through a whole day or more of using everything from my phone to a MacBook to a Vision Pro.
And so I did some research on what a modern power bank looks like, and decided Ugreen’s Nexode lineup offers the best value. Anker has some competitive ones in their Prime series, but they’re twice the price and (as I discussed with Michael) they’re not even that reliable or safe these days.
If you haven’t bought a power bank in recent times, you might be surprised by what they can do now. For starters, the one I got has a 20,000mah capacity with a maximum total output of 130W over 2 USB-C PD ports and a USB-A one for legacy devices. That’s enough bandwidth to fast charge two MacBook Pros at the same time. There’s also a digital display that shows you real-time power draw stats, and estimates of how long you’ve got before the battery is depleted (or fully recharged). Ugreen claims that it uses EV-grade batteries that can stay above 80% capacity for 1,000 charge cycles (Apple’s guidance on their batteries is only 500 cycles, for comparison). Given that coworking spaces provide lots of power points, I don’t really need one now but it’s good to have around?
For the record, I’m still undecided if I actually would whip out the Vision Pro in a coworking space. But I can’t imagine not using it for an entire month. This week, I wandered into a conversation in inSpaze (an immersive social network I wrote about here) and found myself invited to a ‘live’ test of a new feature. It essentially lets you upload a large video file (say, a home movie or film that you absolutely have the distribution rights for), and invite others to watch it with you in real time.
The final release will include a special 3D environment suited for watching videos, but for this test we were just in the usual “living room” environment. Spontaneously watching a film with strangers was more fun than it sounds. Everyone was well behaved and went on mute, chatting over text instead. In that way it was better than watching a film in a real theater with inconsiderate whisperers. We gave our feedback and suggestions afterwards, and I said that a visual/spatial way to express emotions like surprise or amusement would be nice to have, better to subtly feel a sense of community with everyone else in the theater.
===
I also tried a bunch of new camera apps. Halide really started a trend with their Process Zero mode, and now I’m seeing new and existing apps tout a “no AI” approach. I won’t link the more blatant copycats, but will quickly mention a few that go beyond just adding a RAW capture feature.
Fig Camera is currently in beta and offers a novel minimal camera UI, along with the ability to create your own camera-capture-to-file processing pipeline with LUT files. It also has a couple of options for taking more natural photos with less “AI” and Smart HDR, etc.
Mood.Camera is more of a traditional retro camera app with a selection of film-inspired filters, but it also lets you select from different levels of dynamic range enhancements: from zero (expect harsh, blown highlights) to an ‘Extended’ setting that’s even more artificial than Apple’s defaults. I really liked how the dev has modeled certain aspects of lo-fi film photography that are very hard to achieve with pure HSL sliders and presets (like the ones I’m fond of making in Darkroom). Stuff like different grain sizes, halation, and textures. I impulse bought the lifetime unlock for S$20 and now slightly regret it because the color shifts are quite strong and there’s no way to turn them down at this time.
Lampa also captures pure sensor data before Apple’s process gets a chance to stack and merge and overdo the brightness. It then puts your photos through their own RAW development profiles (the app description says they’re not “just filters”). There’s no option to shoot with Apple’s processing, unlike Fig and Mood. Surprisingly, Lampa only offers four distinct and pleasantly subtle looks, unlike the plethora of filters standard in Mood.Camera and most others. I’m a fan of this minimal approach but unfortunately the pricing model is maximalist and they want S$40/yr.
Bonus: if you’ve been shooting RAW files with Halide’s Process Zero (or any other app’s single-capture RAW — not to be confused with ProRAW), you might appreciate this Darkroom preset I made that emulates the high contrast monochrome look that the Ricoh GR cameras are famous for. I repeat, they are tuned for the brightness profile of iPhone RAW files.
I’ve been watching this streamer on YouTube named Pim who runs a channel called 4AM Laundry. Every weekend, he sets off with a backpack full of batteries and modems, and livestreams his adventures going around Japan to find retro gaming gems in secondhand stores like Book-Off and Hard-Off. They are soothing and educational, and great to have on in the background as he literally does this for 9 hours at a stretch.
This week he was invited to visit the Tokyo Game Show with a press pass, so I tuned in for that. It’s an event I’ve always wanted to experience in person, even though I know it’s probably hellish and more fun in theory than practice. This was a nice way to get a glimpse of its atmosphere.
Monday was Hari Raya Haji, a public holiday, and we took an early walk along the nearby ‘park connector’, which I guess is the local government term for “paths beside rivers and canals linking the city’s green spaces”. I must admit, I prefer evening walks over morning ones.
Mornings are best spent slowly booting up with a hot cup of tea and maybe exploring some new music. Although I started drinking black tea as a way to save money and smooth out the coffee jitters, it’s become my preferred drink throughout the day. Seinfeld’s new set includes a bit where he dismisses tea as weak and tasteless (“I hate it!”), claiming coffee is the only drink that understands “they’re trying to kill me out there!” Inspired by the insight, I tried reintroducing coffee into my routine: one cup in the morning, followed by tea for the rest of the day. It didn’t take. I didn’t need it! Maybe my tastes have changed, or maybe life doesn’t feel so painful right now. #blessed.
One more thing about saving money to establish that I am trying, before we get to the next part where I might appear to not be: Kim found out that the restaurants under the Little Farms grocery brand offer wine at prices that seem like misprints in the menu. They’re essentially sold at the same retail prices you’ll find in the store. So we had a nice Malbec from Australia’s Gill Estate along with our dinner for S$35. That’s S$35 for the BOTTLE, not a glass. I think we’re going to be eating there a lot. (For comparison, I think the cheapest ones here typically start around S$60).
I actually made this
I pre-ordered an Apple Vision Pro for launch day. I wish I could call it a casual treat but it’s a fairly large purchase; certainly the most I’ve spent on a single computer in my adult life, and probably equivalent in inflation-adjusted terms to the 33mhz 386-DX my parents bought us in the late 80s. This thing probably has a trillion times the processing power of that PC, not to mention 30x the display resolution, in each eye. It’s amazing the difference three decades makes!
I’ll save further thoughts for when I get it, but right now I’m planning to use it primarily as a personal theater, perhaps as a larger display for my Mac, and am very excited to try new spatial applications and games as they come out. So many of the things coming to visionOS 2 feel like essential launch features that I may even install the beta.
If you’re looking to justify one to yourself, feel free to copy my notes.
It’s the first VR/XR headset I’ll be owning, and Apple’s entry into the category is a sign that it’s nearly ready for mainstream adoption. This is probably the moment to start paying attention to new experience possibilities, new interaction conventions, and new consequences for behavior and preferences. Any later might be too late.
These early days of a new platform are the most exciting. Hopefully, we’ll see creators trying out new ideas and innovating in the app space. If Apple made cheaper development units available to select indie studios, this might be helped along. Maybe they are?
The unconfirmed cheaper and lighter model is rumored to be targeting a late-2025 release, and a second-generation Pro model perhaps a year after. That’s at least 18 months where this will have no competition. And if waiting means missing out on two years of watching this potential revolution unfold, then it’s clear to me I don’t want to.
I’ve got the time on my hands now to make plentiful use of it.
As a paying subscriber to all Apple services currently available in my country, I’d be leaving value on the table if I DIDN’T have access to all the exclusive Apple Vision content that’s coming. There are spatially enabled games in Apple Arcade, and Immersive Video features on Apple TV+. It’s not a stretch that Apple Music might add 3D video content in the future. I know it was Amazon Music that hosted Kendrick’s ‘Pop Out’ live event this week, but imagine being in the front row for something like that on a pay-per-view livestream!
I had the opportunity to see a little of Alicia Keys’ Rehearsal Room feature for Apple Vision and it sold me. Maybe people who’ve dabbled in VR for awhile won’t find it as impressive as I did, but the feeling of her presence five feet away was magical. Just like with the Nintendo 3DS, it’s one of those things you have to see to believe.
Speaking of Alicia Keys, I came across the cast recording for Hell’s Kitchen, a new Broadway musical she’s created, loosely based on her life. It features many of her hits and has been nominated for 13 Tony Awards this year. All that, and yet the album on Apple Music was how I found out about it. Now I wish I could painlessly fly to New York to see it. And while actually being there would be best, I’d love a world where I could buy or rent a front-row seat recording with a double-tap of my fingers in Vision Pro.
Check out these videos of the cast performing the reimagined versions of No One and If I Ain’t Got You.
===
Media Activity:
I signed up for MUBI at last, so the quality and/or pretentiousness of my film viewing is about to go up. If you’d like a free 30-day membership, please use my referral link.
I started posting post-film impressions on Threads throughout the week as I go, but don’t worry, I’m pasting and expanding on them here on my own platform.
Saw Baby Assassins (2021) because Hideo Kojima raved about the movie series in a tweet, and I found it a fun take on the ol’ high school assassin girls trope; more about their friendship and trying to cope with adult life than the (well-executed) fighting. 4/5 stars.
I then saw Baby Assassins 2 Babies (2023) the next day and it was a perfect sequel. The best thing it does is develop the girls’ relationship with more unserious conversational set pieces that feel like Quentin Tarantino took a course in Japanese comedy. Can’t wait for the third one out this year. 4/5 stars.
Saw The First Slam Dunk (2022), which is an animated film based on the long-running series. I’ve only seen the first episode of the original anime on Netflix, and it looked like it was made in the early 90s. This film takes the quality bar up a million times with some of the best 3D CG anime I’ve seen. 3.5/5 stars.
Saw Tom Cruise’s The Mummy (2017), thinking that his star power would make it okay despite the negative things I’ve heard. It started quite strong but was so so bad. 1.5/5 stars.
Saw The Breakfast Club (1985) all the way through for the first time and enjoyed it! It clearly influenced many other films, memes, and popular culture’s depictions of that entire retro/80s-era of American high school life. 4/5 stars.
Caught The Scent of Green Papaya (1993) on its last day on MUBI, which is a real shame because more people should see it. Hardly wasting a single frame of its gorgeous, luminous 100-min runtime, this immersive drama set in 1950s Vietnam is simply a masterpiece. Yes, there’s workplace harassment and ant cruelty, but that attitude is why they don’t make them like this anymore! 4.5/5 stars.
We are enjoying Presumed Innocent on Apple TV+, where Jake Gyllenhaal plays the kind of creepy protagonist you don’t know whether to trust that he does so well.
My song of the week has to be the Lorde remix of Charli XCX’s girl, so confusing. It’s amazing to hear them communicating through a song, and Ella’s verse is probably the most vulnerable from a superstar in recent memory; in a league of its own compared to ahem generic confessional love songs by some people.
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?
===
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 