sangsara.net

Tag: Japan

  • Week 4.23

    Week 4.23

    After a couple of Chinese New Year-related family activities in the first half of week, I took the remaining days off work. I’d hoped for it to feel long and restful, and to basically do nothing except play games and plug into new music and movies, but as you’ll know things rarely work out that way. I took way more time off work last year to do that and it still didn’t feel like enough.

    We did some research for our trip to Japan later this year, and got hotel bookings in at last — everything is selling out fast, and you may get stuck with small smoking rooms or extravagantly expensive suites if you don’t hurry. Currently, the plan is to spend about a week in Tokyo followed by Kobe and Hiroshima, two places we’ve never been. Next, we’ll have to think about restaurant reservations, although it’s likely too late for anything super fancy or exclusive, if we even wanted that. If you have any recommendations for things to do or eat in those cities, please drop me a note on Mastodon, email, comments, whatever!

    On food, I’ve eaten pretty well and badly this week. After chancing upon a new Chinese docuseries on Netflix (The Hot Life) about various regional hot pot cultures across China, I got the yearnings and we went and spent too much at the irritatingly named Beauty In The Pot, which I suppose is my second-favorite local Chinese hot pot chain. I’m no connoisseur but I’ve been to the Cou Cou at Jewel Changi Airport exactly once and it was the best I’ve had (small sample size, current definitive experience = Wu Lao in Taipei, where they infinitely refill the tofu in your steaming vessel for no charge). Oh yeah, there were also two big beef-centered meals of yakiniku and Texas-style barbecue. And a visit to Shake Shack which gave me my first taste of their local exclusive “Pandan Shake”, only like five years after they opened here and introduced it.

    We also spent a day with two of our nieces and a nephew, taking them out to McDonald’s and then back to ours for videogames. I did a fresh reset of an old iPad (the last generation of 9.7” iPad Pros, which feels pretty sluggish now just scrolling around in iPadOS 16), filling it up with kid-friendly games from Apple Arcade like Sneaky Sasquatch, Fruit Ninja, Sonic Racing, Cooking Mama. I think they could easily have played on it until the battery died.

    We also got on the Switch a bit, where I discovered Mario Battle Strikers is pretty hard at normal difficulty for a 9-year-old (and anyone on their team), and that Untitled Goose Game truly is a masterpiece of game design. The quirky concept just sucks everyone in, and it builds on the brilliant insight that mischief is a universal language.

    On my own, I played and completed Death Come True on the Switch, although it’s also available on iOS. It’s a Japanese FMV game (that’s Full Motion Video for you kids who didn’t live through the CD-ROM era) where you watch what is essentially a Japanese network TV drama production and make a few choices that influence what happens next. The plot involves murder, amnesia, and some SF elements. It came out two or three years ago and has been on my to-do list since. I can recommend it if any of the above sounds good to you, whenever it’s on sale.

    Another game crossed off my very long list is Kathy Rain: The Director’s Cut, which too is also on iOS. It’s a point-and-click adventure game in the style of Lucasarts and Sierra titles from the 90s. The artwork is on point, but I can’t say I enjoyed the whole experience. The story goes in a direction that didn’t work for me, and requires too much suspension of disbelief. Pity, I really wanted to like a detective mystery starring a motorcycle-riding woman in a leather jacket.

    At some point, I will get onto the latest installments of two other classic point-and-click adventure series that are now also on the Switch (with modern graphics): Leisure Suit Larry and Monkey Island.

    I also gave Borderlands 2 a go for the second time (I played it briefly on the Mac many years ago) but it didn’t take after a few hours. Between it and Doom Eternal, I was beginning to think I can’t play FPS games on the Switch; something just doesn’t feel right, even after tweaking the controller sensitivity. Is it the low framerate? Input lag? Maybe I hate the Switch’s Pro Controller? I can play these sorts of games fine on my PS4 and elsewhere, but moving and aiming feels so off here. But then I installed Crysis Remastered and it doesn’t seem so bad! Will give it a few more hours.

    ===

    Since I wasn’t in the middle of a book but didn’t have the energy to choose a “proper” one, I started on the next Jack Reacher installment, Personal (#19), and it was as easy as falling back into bed after brushing your teeth. Pulp fiction, it’s how you meet your Goodreads goals.

    We saw two films this week, Arbitrage (2012) and Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022). I’d say they were 3.5 and 4 stars respectively. The former feels a little like David Finch’s The Game in datedness, despite being much newer. Perhaps it’s because the hedge fund guys are old and not finance bros, and Richard Gere keeps conspicuously thumbing his at his BlackBerry? No one in his rich circle uses an iPhone in 2012! The latter is a sumptuous fantasy with the kind of precision and quirkiness that you’d expect from George Miller, but it doesn’t leave enough of an imprint to be a classic.

    Shrinking on Apple TV+ came out, and is very much worth watching. It’s apparently Harrison Ford’s first television role, and although he plays the same grumpy old man type he’s inhabited for the last few decades, he’s not phoning it in like his recent films work. You get the sense he cares here and there’s some nicely played emotional depth.

    ===

    Ivory came out of beta, and everyone says it’s probably the best Mastodon mobile app out there, so give it a try. It’s built on the solid bones of the now-retired Tweetbot for Twitter, and Tapbots have been making fluid and beautiful apps since the early days of the App Store.

    I’m also beta testing another classic app I won’t name that is experimenting with a new feature: they’re adding an Instagram-like social network feed to what was previously a standalone camera app. I believe it’s something they actually tried before but it didn’t take off then, and I’m not sure why it would now. Which is a pity because the core app is getting slicker and more usable, but this network is probably something they need to prove value to investors?

    There’s clearly a movement or at a least growing interest in decentralized, federated social networking models over the centralized ones of the past, as Mastodon’s rise is showing. And now some people are attempting to build the next Instagram using the same open ActivityPub protocol that powers Mastodon. Pixelfed is one I’ve seen, and is also in beta now. I joined its TestFlight through the site above, and you probably can too.

    I got stuck at the stage of picking the server I wanted to join for quite awhile. That, to me, is the big UX challenge federated networks face in gaining mainstream adoption. Choosing the right local server for your account is hard. Will it go down someday and lose all your posts? Will unacceptable behavior on the part of its operators someday cause you to be cut off from the wider network? I don’t know how we make this more approachable for more people.

    And then I start to wonder if these experiments will ever be successful in overthrowing Instagram. After all, cloning Instagram the app is doable, but building a user base as large as Instagram’s? Oof. Maybe we can fool Elon into buying it. Anyway metrics like engagement and MAU should probably be allowed to fall aside, as people seek more intimate networks (Path was too early, plus another one named Bondee was in the news this week) and products find other ways to pay for themselves. Would you use a photo-sharing network that had less to look at, and fewer (but more important) eyes seeing your posts? Hmm, maybe! I mean, I’m updating this site and you’re reading it.

    Processed with VSCO with kc25 preset

    I took one photo worth sharing this week as I was crossing a street in the Keong Saik area, after meeting some friends back in town for Chinese New Year. I saw the scene and fished my iPhone out of my pocket and fumbled with the camera left-swipe gesture that never seems to work when you need it, and just grabbed the wide shot (12mp HEIC) while moving.

    Later, I cropped it, increased the resolution using Pixelmator Photo’s AI-assisted upsampling feature, and edited it for color and emphasis with VSCO and Darkroom. It would have been less trouble and probably less processed looking if I’d shot a 48mp RAW file, but it turned out okay. Between the improved sensor, ISP, and the A16’s Neural Engine, this year’s model was able to get a shot that I don’t think was possible on an iPhone just a couple of years ago.

    Since you made it to the end, you deserve these Midjourney images of the The Golden Girls playing in a jazz band.

  • Week 2.23

    We kind of started planning our trip to Japan later this year, but there’s still a lot to figure out in terms of what to do, and where to spend our time. It seems a lot of the popular hotels and destinations are selling out fast, if not already sold out, because of the resumption of travel out of China. I’m going to use this as a test of two new collaboration features in iOS and macOS: shared Safari Tab Groups, and the new Freeform whiteboarding app. In theory this should allow us to gather links to interesting ideas and plot them out together across our devices over several days.

    On Friday afternoon, I was excited to see an article saying that one of the best bowls of ramen I’ve ever had was finally coming to Singapore. In fact, it was their opening day, and we decided to just go down right after work to try and get a seat. After about 20 minutes of queuing (which was nothing compared to the maybe three hours we spent in line for the main restaurant in Tokyo), we got into Nakiryu at Plaza Singapura, and were sorely disappointed. For starters, their signature Szechuan-style Tan Tan/Dan Dan noodles were sold out. We ordered shio and shoyu ramen instead, and they were roundly mediocre. The service was also spotty and uncoordinated.

    It’s a pattern that the local franchisee Japan Food Holdings (who’ve done the same thing with Afuri and others) seems to be repeating: bring in a brand people are excited for, then do nothing to capture the original taste and quality. I suspect if you did a side-by-side comparison of the ramen from several of their brands, you’d find they’re just selling the same product under different names. Sadly, they’ve probably got the connections to get these deals and as long as the money flows in, the original companies don’t care how badly it’s done outside of Japan.

    ===

    SEA Focus NFTs: Art by @ykhaamelz, music by @discokid909

    Singapore Art Week is back and we attended two events: SEA Focus and the creatively named Art SG. The former’s at Keppel Distripark where the Singapore Art Museum’s temporary spot is, and features a little NFT art corner sponsored by Tezos. In contrast to the other exhibits, I found the work in there refreshingly playful, modern, vibey.

    Art SG

    At Art SG (a large and mostly serious gallery fair over two floors at Marina Bay Sands), I also found myself reacting more to the digital or digitally inspired work. There was a large print of a CloneX pfp, attributed to Murakami, mounted on a wall that I saw from across the hall and made a beeline towards. The Pace gallery (which I only happen to know because of their collaborations with Art Blocks) space featured teamLab’s NFT project, and a James Turrell projection. The teamLab one is cool: anyone can download and run the artwork (an app) on their PC or Mac. These are regarded as authentic and valid copies of the work. However, one can also own an NFT of the work (there are only 7), and these collectors can change the text seen in the art for everyone else. Oh, and they’re $200,000 each.

    Unknown work at Art SG (forgot to take notes!)

    Elsewhere, I saw a work that was a white flag printed with a surrender message that I’d read before but didn’t know where. I googled the text but nothing came up. Later, I found a tweet from early 2022 referencing it: an on-chain exchange between two MEV… “searchers”? The tweets only have between a couple hundred and a couple thousand likes, so it’s probably not a widely known thing. But I definitely saw and remembered it from last year, which means I’ve spent too much time spectating in a very small fringe community. And my time spent appreciating generative art has definitely ruined traditional abstract art for me.

    The Field #290

    Speaking of which, I was excited to add an edition of The Field by Beer van Geer to my collection this week. It’s an interesting (animated) work in that all 369 pieces are different views of the same “territory”, starting at random points, zoom levels, and rendered with different palettes, but viewers of any section can move away from those starting points and explore. As I understand it, the field itself was created from noise data created by aggregating hundreds of images from the artist’s body of work, trying to derive a sort of pattern map or artistic fingerprint from their ouevre. Isn’t that so much more exciting than static paint on canvas??

    ===

    Ricoh announced a new special edition of the GR III compact camera, called the “Diary Edition”. Yeah it sounds like one of those translated-from-Japanese names that sounds slightly awkward in English, but I like it. As a name, you can’t get much clearer about the concept of a camera that you’re meant to carry around to intentionally document everyday life, and it even comes with a new “negative film” look that will also come to older GR III models via a firmware update. Whether or not this behavior is one that users will actually embrace when they already have smartphones, I don’t know. I suspect not, outside for a few glorious weirdos. But the atmosphere and quality of these photos could hardly be more different than your smartphone snaps, unless you go the film route.

    As a new colorway, I also love the look of the Diary Edition.

    Here are a couple of photos I took with my GR III on the way to the art fair:

    ===

    • We watched a couple of spy TV shows, of which Jack Ryan’s season 2 was the undisputed best. We’ll start on season 3 soon.
    • Miyachi’s second album, Crows, is out. I heard it through once and it’s a bop. I don’t know what he’s rapping about but I’m sure it’s slightly problematic.
    • I finished Arcade Spirits but can’t recommend it if you’ve got many great games in your Switch backlog. To recap, it’s a Western visual novel about running a video game arcade. Some of the background art is basic and not very polished. I was struck several times by the thought that a game creator today could create far better generic bar/beach/arcade interior background art in seconds using AI. And they probably will/are already. So as an artifact of our pre-AI phase, Arcade Spirits stands out as a bit lacking in the production quality department.

    Here’s a tweet showing a game prototype someone purportedly threw together using AI tools to create the graphics, icons, and voice acting!

    • Quite coincidentally, I started experimenting with Midjourney prompts on Monday trying to get the EGA/VGA PC game look of the Sierra games I played in the 80s and 90s. I found a good solution and started using it to visualize screenshots of #fictionalgames from the golden era of PC games, ones that never existed, or that might be made today with modern concepts.
    Police Quest 5: Capitol Invasion
    Quest For Glory 6: So You Want To Be A Private Military Contractor
    Where in the Bahamas is Carmen Sandiego?
    Leisure Suit Harvey: In the Land of the Casting Agents
    Command & Conquer 2022

  • Week 53.22 – Day 1.23

    • So maybe 2022 was not the best year for many things: my mental health, the markets, avoiding Covid, Goodreads reading challenges, making more time for people, etc. and it ended on a fittingly crappy note as I realized that I’m too neurotic to be a pet owner either. But we have to be thankful for the things we do have, and I am. Here’s hoping 2023 turns things around some 🤞
    • I saw someone toot that their only New Year’s resolution every year is “Use your stickers”, and I liked that enough to try and actually adopt it as a resolution (I normally think they are dumb). In essence, stickers do nothing for no one when saved on a backing sheet; you should put them to use somewhere, and eat all those mince pies you’ve been hoarding while you’re at it. Use and enjoy your things while you can, mindfully.
    • My Hotels.com rewards were expiring and I was kinda planning to let them go unused. But they are stickers! So I redeemed them for a night’s stay at a boutique hotel in the Ann Siang/Amoy Street area, which gave us an opportunity to eat at Maxwell hawker center, visit a few cocktail bars (Native is excellent), and get away from things for a little while.
    • I spent more time playing Citizen Sleeper on the Switch and still recommend it. Minor spoiler: early on there is a sort of timer mechanic hanging over your head, that you can’t help but work towards negating as a main quest. It’s always there in the background of what you do, making you uncomfortable. Once you manage to clear it, though, the game becomes almost too leisurely. The issue is still there but your character can skill up enough that it’s not a threat, only a minor annoyance. I’m not finished yet, so maybe there’s more urgency around the corner.
    • My last book of the year was Gabrielle Zevin’s brilliant Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, which I finished in the final hour of 2022 (for a total of 13 books read). It’s so good, an easy five stars. I would give it six, even. In my world it would be mandatory reading for anyone born between 1975 and 1985, and strongly encouraged for the rest of you. Heartbreaking, beautiful, real, nostalgic, and ripe for TV adaptation.
    • We binged both seasons of The White Lotus at some point between this week and last. It’s the sort of show you can’t stop thinking about afterwards, but it’s also a little pretentious and heavy handed with its imagery (oh lord here comes another moonlit interstitial shot of waves).
    • Going through people’s best shows of ‘22 lists, I saw Hacks and Reservation Dogs being mentioned a lot and gave them a try. The latter’s first episode didn’t take, although I can see what they’re going for; it’s just too depressing. Whereas Hacks follows a proven buddy formula with laughs, and teases character development. It’s a nice change of pace from most of our recent serious viewing.

    ===

    I tried making some city-specific illustrations in Midjourney and was surprised (again) by how good and coherent they can be. They’re not entirely accurate but the vibes aren’t off — Singapore is a time warp of golden era post-war colonial architecture and vehicle design, “exotic” southeast Asian street activity, and modern skyscrapers.

    Singapore street scenes
    Paris
    Tokyo
    Brooklyn + Manhattan
    Nairobi

  • Mountain Blossom

    In my post yesterday, I mentioned we’d put up some new art around the house. One of them is this Mountain Blossom Furoshiki from the Spoon & Tamago online shop which we thought would look really nice when framed. They say it’s meant for wrapping gifts or using as a scarf, but look at it!

  • Week 34.21: I keep looking at my mood ring (it says too much caffeine)

    • There’s a spot on the carpet where I like to sit most days while watching TV or using the iPad, and it’s gone flat from my lounging about. At the start of the week, I told myself I’d play the hell out of Neo: The World Ends With You, which I was once so excited for. I didn’t even start it up once. So I guess now’s not the time.
    • Tetris Beat on Apple Arcade (App Store) did come out, and my hopes were extremely high for a Tetris game set to music, dependent on players dropping tetrominos to the beat. Unfortunately it still needs some polish: there are sync and calibration issues for players transitioning between speakers and wireless headphones; UX gaps; and poor support for iPad and iPhone users with controllers. Even the basic touch and slide controls don’t feel just right. I’m hopeful that it’ll get better with updates.
    • I finished watching the new Evangelion movies with 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon A Time (Amazon Prime Video), which was easily the best of the series. I think it works and transcends its “flaws”, of which there still are plenty, because Anno finally found the will to contrast heaviness with a hint of joy and kindness. Afterwards, I sat through the credits in emotional shock, and immediately resumed my stillborn viewing of the original NGE series on Netflix. Still making my way through those.
    • Lorde’s new album, Solar Power (Apple Music), is finally out. I avoided hearing it for the first couple of days, afraid that it would let me down. Now on my fourth playthrough, and happy to report that I love it.
    • Also discovered this song from Asian American rapper Miyachi, which utilizes the Family Mart audioweapon jingle to great effect. Also check out his new single Chu-Hi (YouTube), about the joys of Japanese hard seltzers, and his street comedy (?) series, Konbini Confessions, which seems to be an elaborate promotion for the song.

    • For what feels like ages now, I’ve been reading Firebreak by Nicole Kornher-Stace. This week I made it past the halfway mark. It’s alright but goes on for a bit longer than it needs to for such a thin storyline. It’s world building, I suppose, but this sort of caricaturized capitalist future where supersoldiers fighting an eternal corp vs. corp war are turned into marketable BTS-type idols that everyone loves and buys merch for, even after they die, doesn’t really need or stand up to this much exploration imho.
    • I drink coffee daily, and at night I think about waking up the next day so I can drink coffee again. This Friday’s App Store refresh highlighted an app called HiCoffee, which tracks your caffeine intake, visualizes how much is in your system at any time, and whether it’s at risk of disturbing your sleep. For those who remember Jawbone’s wearable UP trackers, they used to have a complementary app called UP Coffee that did something similar (The Verge). Despite my miserly ways, I happily unlocked the premium functions for S$10 just because it’s very nice work. There’s a host of iOS widgets and Apple Watch complications for displaying your caffeine levels, and the built-in coffee database has info for all of Nespresso’s pods, Starbucks’ drinks, McCafe, Dunkin, and many more.
    • As if to confirm my beliefs, the universe or its algorithms then delivered me this excellent Guardian article on caffeine and its effects on the body and society. It’s got some interesting bits, like the history of coffeehouses in the UK, and the insight that maybe the rituals of consuming caffeine lend an unconscious order to how we tackle our work throughout the day, ebbing and flowing between focused and creative work as it wears off.
    • Prompted by a friend’s reports of how well their investments in the Luna token were doing, I looked into the Terra ecosystem out of Korea and was impressed by its vision — insomuch as someone with little background in economics can certify a financial flywheel logical and brilliant. I don’t know what I don’t know, but it sure looks good to me.
    • The universe struck again and I found myself out to Korean BBQ the next day with some colleagues, where we drank a beer called Terra. Afterwards realized it was my first time eating out in more than a month: dining out was forbidden back in July, and then full vaccination became a prerequisite for entering restaurants, and Kim only recently got her certification. The initial moments were a little disorienting. As many have already observed, you can indeed forget how to sit across from a group of people and eat together. Thankfully, I didn’t know I missed it till now.

  • Week 8.21

    • I was sold on an LED bulb future where they all last for years and don’t need regular replacement. That’s not been the case for quite a few of the fixtures in our apartment. This week, a new kind of bulb gave out, and I went on Lazada to get more. Thanks to the shittiness of their search engine, some bulbs with a different connector type got mixed in with the right ones I asked for, and I missed it because the Philips box designs for both are nearly identical. Their search is inexcusably bad. How can an item that doesn’t contain one of my two keywords appear on the first page of results? So now I have $25 of bulbs that useless to me, and their return policy doesn’t allow for “user error”.
    • The feeling of being depressed continues. I went on two walks after work this week because it supposedly helps to get some air and exercise. The second one helped tremendously because it ended at a new craft beer bar in our neighborhood. They’re not at the rock bottom prices of TAP, but few places can do that. Afterwards, a double cheeseburger and fries. Self-care is hard on the arteries.
    • Mogwai have a new album out. I’ve ignored them this whole time but gave it a try after seeing some praise on Twitter. Have also been listening to the very chill debut album from Pink Sweat$. I can recommend both and won’t be deleting them from my library.
    • An old episode of Begin Japanology (NHK) on YouTube taught me a couple of things I didn’t know about conveyor belt sushi. For instance, eating raw salmon was not historically a thing in Japan because locally caught salmon had parasites and had to be cooked before eating. When safer Norwegian salmon became available, it was conveyor belt sushi joints that started selling it first. The traditional joints followed later.
    • As the weekend drew down into nothingness, I became adamant that I should check the “Play videogames” box. I got Persona 5 Strikers on the Switch, paying an extra $10 for the Digital Deluxe edition which is available now unlike the regular edition which comes out Tuesday. Hell of a sales tactic, that. So far so good. It’s an interesting blend of turn-based RPG battle decisions with real-time musou battles, with the likeable characters and story-driven interludes of the original. Walking around the environments, I can see no technical reason why Persona 5 can’t run on the Switch. I’d bet on it being released by next year.
    • Found on Twitter, an epic NYC A-train sax battle from like six years ago. This version cuts together angles of the impromptu event from multiple cellphone videographers.

  • Week 5.21

    • It’s like the ants around here have gone crazy. I noticed them swarming in the kitchen one morning, carting off bits of a granola bar whose wrapper had a corner mysteriously torn off. Did they do it with their teeth? One colony cleansing later, I saw them reappear in another cupboard trying to get into a packet of dates. Wondering if there was something seasonal or lunar about this behavior, I asked some friends if they’d noticed anything similar lately and got “YES!” for an answer.
    • I joked that it was as if the ant leaders had announced that they weren’t going to make their food targets for the quarter, so everyone needed to get out there and collect goddammit!
    • Stonks. This week was noteworthy just because everyone now knows what a GameStop is, even though we don’t have any. I saw the headlines but didn’t poke into it until it was too late to get rich. Buut I bought a single overpriced share anyway, in solidarity with the people out to make predatory short-sellers suffer. I can’t even begin to guess if this is as big a deal as some make it out to be, or just a blip the system will painlessly absorb. I can’t intuit if it’s the beginning of a sea change in money, or just a January news story. My longstanding ignorance of market matters doesn’t help. But it is exciting to watch.
    • If it turns out to be a big deal though, many smart people seem to think it will accelerate adoption of decentralized finance platforms. A couple of weeks ago I wrote about getting my feet wet with PoolTogether, which was just buying lottery tickets with play money. This week I actually used Uniswap, and bought into an index fund governed by smart contracts. So… progress. Maybe next week I’ll quit my job and yield farm for a living.
    • It wouldn’t be an update without some Apple-related anecdote. My wife got one of the new iPad Airs for work purposes, and it’s nice enough that I actually questioned needing the next iPad Pro. Better screen technology and an A14X would be great, but if they raise the price for miniLED then I might just settle for an Air. My current iPad Pro, the one-off 10.5” model (2017), is such a weirdo. It’s like they had to cut a bunch of corners on it while waiting for the redesigned third-generation (2018). It doesn’t support spatial audio with AirPods, even though older devices like the iPhone 7 do. It’s got a white spot on the screen that I’ve seen others complain about. And graphically it’s so weak that most games seem to run in 480p.
    • Before bed each night, we started watching random YouTube videos of food being prepared, with no narration or music. Just street food kitchens and stalls in Korea and Taiwan frying up stuff at scale, with tons of oil. It’s beautiful, horrifying, and sleep inducing all at once.
    • As a result, I didn’t use my Netflix account until Sunday, when I started to watch Alice in Borderland, which is a truly not-bad Japanese live action series based on a manga. I recommend giving the first episode a go, just to see an impressive shot of Shibuya that will make you go “wait, what?!”. I’m up to Episode 3, which unfortunately goes into one of those time-wasting sequences where people scream/shout each other’s names for about three minutes. That’s still my number one pet peeve about Japanese shows. Nevertheless, I can recommend it on production values alone.
    • What a week for music, though. New albums from Rhye and Weezer, and the long-awaited debut albums from Arlo Parks and Celeste.
    • Through the serendipity of my personalized Apple Music radio station, I also discovered Instant Karma, an Amnesty International project from back in 2007 to “Save Dafur”. It’s 61(!) John Lennon covers by various artists, including R.E.M., Willie Nelson, The Cure, a-ha, Lenny Kravitz, and The Postal Service. Avril Lavigne even covers Imagine! I haven’t had the time for it all, but Regina Spektor’s version of Real Love might be my pick already.

  • Week 36.20

    August 31 – September 6, 2020

    • At the start of the week, Apple Music 1 (the radio station, née Beats 1) wasn’t working for me. I suspected it had something to do with the change in name and perhaps change of URL for the stream. It didn’t matter which device, Apple ID account, or internet connection I used, it was just down for a couple of days! I thought I’d be helpful and report it to Apple support, but that resulted in me spending an hour on live chat and the phone, being passed from the team to team, across several countries. Finally someone in Ireland was able to document the problem in their internal systems and let me go. It’s needlessly difficult. I said I didn’t need anyone calling me back or telling me when it was fixed, I just wanted them to log it. I should have just tweeted at them.
    • I had large double cheeseburgers with bacon and luncheon meat and fried onions for two meals this week. I can 100% tell that I’ve put on weight now. It’s on my face. A couple of friends have given up drinking and lost weight after a few months. It’s an effective method, but I don’t know what I’d do with all this misery if I tried it.
    • Necrobarista is a very different visual novel on Apple Arcade and Steam. It seems to try very hard to remind you that it’s set in Australia, with lots of “mate” usage, to the point where I thought it was made by Polish developers or something, and sounded inauthentic. Turns out it was made in Australia, so what do I know? Anyway what makes it different is that you don’t just click through dialogue quickly and see different character images pop up… each click through actually switches the whole scene and camera angle in a 3D space. A lot of work went into posing the characters and animating these short 1–3 second bursts. It’s much more cinematic than you’d be used to, and it makes you value each moment that much more. Unfortunately, the writing could be quite a bit better.
    • This week I watched quite a few videos by John Daub, who does this YouTube channel called Only In Japan (side note, but that linked channel is effectively a reboot after he sold his original channel). I’ve seen his stuff around for years, and he sometimes appears on those awkward, cheesy English language programs that NHK World puts out (don’t get me wrong, I actually like them for what they are, e.g. Peter Barakan’s long-running Japanology series, which just feels like a lovely artifact from the 90s even when the episodes are brand new). But I never really got into Daub’s style until he started doing livestreams. Back at the office, we used to tune into Twitch streams of people walking around various cities, eating things, checking out shops, and the virtual tourism was nice left in the background of a workday. Daub elevates that basic formula by being knowledgeable; a bit of a historian and tour guide, who also interacts with his community in the live chat. I’m now contemplating becoming a supporter on Patreon just because his walkabout videos feel slightly like being able to go on holiday during this pandemic. I shit you not, the other night I was walking in place in my living room as he went around Toyosu, like a sort of Brian Butterfield version of virtual reality.
    • For reasons I can’t remember, the Gregory Brothers’ viral auto-tune internet hit, Dead Giveaway, was stuck in my head for most of the week. As the words became more familiar, I was struck by how absolutely tragic they were. For those who don’t know the main line which was lifted from Charles Ramsey’s TV interview, it goes “I knew something was wrong when a little pretty white girl ran into a black man’s arms… dead giveaway!” The way he says it in the original video, and the kind of nodding unsurprised reaction of everyone, just speaks to the awful world of normalized racism people like him/us are living in. Further “research” on YouTube led down a rabbit hole of other videos surrounding the horrible Ariel Castro kidnapping case… which I’ll spare you from.