sangsara.net

Tag: Mobile gaming

  • Week 13.23

    • We traveled from Kobe to Hiroshima via Shinkansen, then went back to Tokyo for a few days until a red eye flight back to Singapore on Saturday. As with most holidays, it didn’t feel long enough; I could have used another week. But I’m thoroughly pooped from all the walking and general lack of sleep. It was wonderful to see Japan again after five years, and our chat with the old taxi driver who spoke English with us on the way to Haneda Airport indicated that Japan might almost be as happy to have us tourists back. I fantasize about dropping in for another week within the next year, but who knows how long it’ll be again.
    • Hiroshima felt very different from Kobe, partly because of its terrible history, and the gravity of it which pulls every experience towards a discussion about peace, awareness, and suffering. It has quite a few museums, and they all inevitably address the atomic bomb in some way. I had bad dreams each night. I’m not normally one to believe in this sort of thing, but there is so much death there and so recently, that my first thought was “bad vibes”.
    • While we were there, though, the sakura bloomed fully across the city and it was beautiful to see.
    • We visited a Picasso exhibition at the Hiroshima Museum of Art (beautiful building, galleries were a bit dingy though in the basement), and also lots of art and exhibitions dedicated to remembering the atomic bomb at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). We didn’t have energy or syllables left for the Hiroshima Prefectural Art Museum. MOCA was wonderful though, newly renovated after two and a half years and opened for less than two weeks when we visited.
    • Did you know Picasso created a series dedicated to the horrors of the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima? No? What are these then, AI-generated photos from Midjourney v5?
    • After many years of being a Go Go Curry fan curious about Champion’s Curry, the Kanazawa-style curry franchise that Go Go supposedly ripped off down to the signature yellow, I finally got a taste of it. And… it was sadly disappointing. It’s soundly beaten by Go Go’s richer flavor and dedication to excess — there’s no preset that comes with the works. On this trip, if I had to rank curries, Hinoya might come first, followed by Coco Ichibanya, closely followed by Go Go in third and Champion’s in last place.
    • I saw a Japanese toothpaste ad of some sort that demonstrated people brushing their teeth in a curious way: holding their brushes like pens or chopsticks. Is that how everyone does it? I’ve never seen it. Perhaps it’s time for a new Japanese Wisdom Fad to go global: the secret art of teeth cleaning. Anyway I tried it out for a laugh and was surprised by the ergonomic improvement! Holding the toothbrush in pen grip means your elbow stays close to the body rather than sticking out, and your forearm is perpendicular to the ground. This gives you more power in the up-down motion by moving your entire arm rather than your wrist. Combine that with the added directional precision from being able to move your fingers, and it feels easier to do those small away-from-the-gumline strokes you’re meant to do, versus holding in an overhand grip.
    Please excuse the iPhone finger sketch
    • You may remember that I became quite fond of watching a live street webcam in Shinjuku about a year ago, leaving it up on the bedroom projector as a sort of video wallpaper or magic window into another world while I read or did other things. Well, we finally got to stand on that very street and see ourselves on the screen! With tourism back, the street is much busier than it was a year ago, uncomfortably so, but now I finally know what the inside of the ramen restaurant looks like, and confirmed my suspicions that there’s a gap under the steps of the KBBQ place where the rats probably hang out. We waved at the camera and tooks a couple of photos from a street-level POV. What’s great was that there were many other people obviously there to see the cameras too… my weird little Kabukicho webcam community!
    • I ended up not finding very much to buy in terms of electronic souvenirs. I don’t need another camera or headphones, as mentioned a couple of weeks back, and I couldn’t even bring myself to buy a phone case that I don’t need and that will be obsolete in half a year when the iPhone 15 comes out. I did however get a little $12 plastic robot at Don Quijote that plays their unforgettable jingle with the push of a button. It’s going to get a lot of use in my home, I think.
    • Wait that’s not correct, we got a portable massage gun called an Exagun Hyper from the Doctor Air brand. Not an insignificant factor in this decision was the advertising campaign featuring Ryoko Yonekura, also known as Doctor-X in the TV series of the same name. She was clearly hired for that reference alone and seems to relish it. I’m kinda sure they even pronounce Doctor Air with the same flourish that “Doctor-X” is usually delivered with.
    • If anyone in Singapore is wondering why Netflix removed the first six seasons of Doctor-X and now only has Season 7, it may be a licensing issue with Amazon. Seasons 1–5 are now on Prime Video locally, so you have a chance to catch up and hopefully Season 6 will turn up someday. Be warned though, this is not strictly speaking good TV. It’s a cheesy, overly dramatic manga-style live action show about a doctor with miraculous surgery skills and no social ones. Like House but turned up even further.
    • I also got some tees and socks from FamilyMart, because I’m always on the lookout for good black t-shirts and their white/green/blue brand socks were an internet sensation a year or so ago. Oh, and some sake straight from their Kobe breweries. That’s about it for physical souvenirs.
    • What I have brought back intangibly, though, is a renewed enthusiasm for gaming on mobile and the Nintendo Switch — I didn’t bring my Switch along and now I’m dying to play through my backlog. It’s hard to explain but the media and cultural environment there for gamers is immersive. You see giant ads for Splatoon 3 in the subway. Billboards and TV spots for mobile games like Dislyte and Genshin Impact. Late night shows on TV where people play trading card games. Most of these games aren’t even Japanese in origin, but they’re part of the landscape and it’s encouraging? Inspiring? To feel your hobby validated as a visible part of society. Nearly none of that is the case in Singapore, the irl city.

    A selection of (sakura-centric) photos from this week follows. Please rotate your iPhone to landscape because WordPress’s masonry layout somehow doesn’t work on narrow screens!

  • Week 39.22

    I revisited some drawings I made awhile ago and deleted some, finished one, started doodling another. They’re pretty terrible but it keeps me feeling like I’m doing something on days where I’m objectively doing nothing else of value.

    ===

    Splatoon 3 has been my only game on the Switch this week. I’m getting better at it, but the short multiplayer matches are kinda unsatisfying. Over too soon, and with a team of four randoms playing together without the benefit of voice chat, you never get that feeling of great teamwork. I guess I’ll need to go out and make some new friends in real life and convince them to buy Switches and play with me. None of my current ones seem interested.

    Just on a whim, I installed Apex Legends Mobile and started playing it with my Backbone controller. It’s… not bad? But Battle Royale games simply take too long and there’s no simple deathmatch option, so I may be back to Call of Duty before too long now that I’ve got the shooter bug again.

    Netflix Games has a new title called Lucky Luna from Snowman, the makers of Alto’s Adventure and Alto’s Odyssey. It’s kinda like Downwell + Celeste but casual and atmospheric rather than punishing and frustrating. I mention this because I played it a little while, but also we’ve been thinking about adopting a cat, and one named Luna popped up through a family contact around the same time, and I thought it was a nice coincidence (but not a sign).

    There’s a new Death Cab album called Asphalt Meadows which I bet no one saw coming? I heard it through on my commute and it did nothing for me. Formless songs that don’t seem to be about anything interesting. The new Blackpink album has also been played a few times, and it has a couple of strong songs but mostly feels way overproduced while also lazy in places (the annoying “whipitwhipitwhipit” lyric + nursery rhyme melody line in Shut Down).

    If you want more catchy songs that don’t try to say very much, the new Mura Masa album demon time is very good. Collaborator Channel Tres (who guests on the delightful track, hollaback bitch) also released a collection of musical NFTs with the lo-fi musician omgkirby this week on Opensea. I actually minted one, because what NFT slump??

    The new AirPods Pro have obviously been on my mind as a serial Apple product collector, and as more reviews keep coming out saying how much better they sound, the fight just keeps getting harder, my friends. But with any luck, I’ll be able to make it to Christmas without them. I mean, I’m typing this while listening to music out of my bloody iPad Pro’s speakers and still having a good time, so I should be able to do it.

    One of the things I aspire to, and that new AirPods Pro would help me achieve (of course), is to be a listener of podcasts. I just haven’t ever been able to turn this into a sustainable habit because when I have headphone time on the train or around the home, it’s music I want. But the news that Adnan Syed, the murder suspect subject of season 1 of the Serial podcast, was freed after his conviction was overturned brought my mind back to this goal. Someone told me the Serial team is going to cover the new developments.

    I tried to listen to their second season back in the day, about some army guy or whatever, and just couldn’t get into it. Maybe because the life and times of some army guy or whatever doesn’t appeal at all. After Jose told me Season 3 was about observations on the criminal justice system after spending time in one courthouse for a year, I decided to give that a go. Episode 1 was good listening: a case where the victim of a bar fight ended up the only person arrested and put on trial.

    ===

    On Sunday evening we went to see the Lee Kuan Yew musical now on at the Marina Bay Sands theater. It’s a simplistic reduction of an important man’s life, and there’s a lot to unpack. Why does this even exist, and in musical form? Alexander Hamilton had a couple hundred years to grow cold first; this first debuted in 2015, the same year LKY died. The poster bills it as “history, his story, our story”, but to what degree is it accurate? Is this really a historically sound account? Why does every actor sing in an affected British accent, even the ones who have exaggerated Singaporean accents when they’re speaking? Why are the songs so rough? Why is there literally only one woman in the cast of 21?

    But hey on the positive side, it’s a super impressive production in technical terms, all hybrid video projections and moving stage pieces! Most of the dramatic parts are entertaining and the music is performed by a live band. It’s surprisingly affordable (from $50) and made for a good night out. I also ran into my friend Xin who I haven’t seen in years!

  • Week 31.22

    I opened last week’s update wishing for an Apple Music playlist that recreates detective Harry Bosch’s jazz music collection for those of us who’re okay with digital in place of vinyl. Well I’ve found one: BOSCH JAZZ by Bobby T. It’s 111 songs (nearly 12 hours), lovingly put together by an obvious fan — you know an amateur playlist is going to be good when they’ve bothered to make their own cover art.

    There’s so much new music out, I’m going to need a commute again to get through it all. I’M KIDDING! I think I’d rather be unemployed. But Ryan Adams seems back to his old ways, just musically, one would hope, releasing a third album called FM available on his site now and on streaming soon. If you count Romeo & Juliet as a double album, then he’s put out four already this year. Also, King Princess with Hold On Baby, which I’ve heard through once and wasn’t entirely satisfied by. The first half of DOMi and JD BECK’s NOT TiGHT on Anderson .Paak’s new label, though, sounds amazing and entirely tight. Plus there’s new Perfume, Maggie Rogers, and Billie Eilish…

    I saw somewhere recently that the use of ellipses, as in the punctuation mark above, is a boomer (not really, but just everyone who isn’t young) thing. It’s made me very self conscious lately.

    ===

    Wednesday was my day off which I spent playing games and drone flying with my dad in a very pleasant return to the sabbatical era.

    https://twitter.com/bookaholic134/status/1552706287003209728

    It never occurred to me 1) to call them reading slumps, but it’s a perfect name for this state of being all read out after going through too many books too fast; which happens to me annually, or 2) that it also happens to other people. I read the first third of Seveneves (enjoyed it fine) and then suddenly left it alone for weeks. No progress this week either.

    Instead, I picked up Life Is Strange: True Colors for the Nintendo Switch on sale, having enjoyed the first series many years ago. True Colors is still episodically arranged, but released as a single installment. I’m about halfway through, and would recommend it as a light gaming experience (no skill required) with good writing and some actual emotional weight. It features an inclusion and diversity situation that seems unrealistic for the small town it’s set in (you play a Chinese American girl and get to determine her sexual orientation, you’re surrounded by people of color, mental health issues are discussed), but I love that they’re simply showing and not telling. Bear in mind the game looks a decade old on the Switch, so just get it on your platform of choice. I prioritized portability and a lower price.

    End of Sunday update: I’ve just about finished the main game now. It felt shorter than I expected, but was still about 10 hours? I would have enjoyed a more epic and twisty mystery, but the point seems to be soaking in the quiet small town moments, music, and interactions with new friends. And feeling depressed. There are a few sucker punches in here.

    Have also started on a new mobile gacha game, ALICE Fiction by Wonderplanet. Years ago, this company released another title that borrowed the aesthetic and some of the narrative set up of Mamoru Hosoda’s Summer Wars, recently mentioned here as one of my favorite anime films. Sadly, while they had the idea then, the execution in Crash Fever did not pay off. This time, they seem to have brought a much bigger budget and many more influences. The result is a more generic but probably quite crowd-pleasing anime-ish puzzle game. While there’s the old tiresome squad battle thing going on, it’s underpinned by a color-matching game mechanic that I don’t mind at all. In fact, this linear gem conveyor belt thing is definitely familiar. I may have encountered it before in some game on the Xbox360. Anyway, it looks great and is worth a look if you’re into any of this.

    It’s worth mentioning that ALICE Fiction’s conceit, seen in the second App Store screenshot, is that it’s set in the metaverse. Not new, we’ve had this for ages, e.g. Sword Art Online and its many game adaptations. But I’ve been seeing an increase in mediocre open-world games that bill themselves as a/the metaverse, for obvious marketing and investor-attracting reasons. I expect this trend to accelerate, with hundreds of companies willing some faux-metaverse into existence, creating extreme confusion as to what it really means, so that by the time we actually have one it will (thankfully) be referred to as something else entirely.

    ===

    Looking for a new show on Amazon Prime Video, we found Chloe, a co-production with the BBC with a premise that sounds like you’d struggle to get with it, but by god does it work somehow. In part thanks to Erin Doherty’s shapeshifting performance of a pathological shapeshifter, and in part due to deft direction that creates effective suspense. It’s not something to watch directly before trying to sleep.

    ===

    Midjourney upgraded their algorithms and the new V3 system creates even more impressive images than before. I’ve been playing with creating food photos lately, trying to make unlikely pairings such as Spam slices sprinkled with 24K gold flakes. Also a series on Conscientious Consumption, where you are bludgeoned over the head with symbols of the environmental and moral costs of what you’re eating.

    Midjourney v2: color drawing of Asian female superhero
    Midjourney v3’s interpretation of the same prompt
    V3 does a great job with details and coherence in this magical steampunk library
    The same prompt with a Studio Ghibli style modifier
    Default quality, prompt involves a futuristic city in the desert with greenery
    Using the new Quality setting to increase GPU time by 5x
    Future travel agency booth, using teleportation
    Teleportals on a larger scale
    Ramen burger, professional food photography prompt
    Steak and cotton candy
    A sorbet shaped like a massive diamond
    An amuse bouche resembling AirPods
    Conscientious Consumption 1: Fried chicken and feather
    CC2: Dairy ice cream on terroir signifying the acres of grass utilized to produce it

    Oh, I’ve also been using the VSCO app’s fairly new Dodge & Burn brush feature and loving it. Fairly mad that in this day and age of touchscreens, all the other popular photo editing apps don’t let you just reach out and light pixels. Instead, we have radial/linear masks in Darkroom, and other clunky controls. VSCO has been flirting with the bottom of the barrel lately (Hipstamatic firmly owning said bottom), but the addition of this one classic tool has helped its chances of survival significantly.

    Just putting this here to say I love the Ricoh GR III

  • Week 30.22

    • After three weeks of watching little else (thanks, Covid) we finished all the Bosch in the world. That’s 7 seasons of the original series and one season of Bosch Legacy — wherein he’s retired from the LAPD and working as a PI. The vibes are off; it struggles to maintain the structure and entertainment value that came with Bosch having a partner and a team. They try to do something interesting with the idea that he no longer has the authority of the law behind him, but far from enough to sell the new concept within 10 episodes.
    • My speakers and headphones have played even more jazz than usual thanks to Bosch’s record collection featuring prominently on the show. Lots of Art Pepper and Wes Montgomery. Pity it’s an Amazon Prime Video series (and they still don’t have all the episodes available here for god knows what reason). If it were on Apple TV+, I’d bet there would be a great companion playlist on Apple Music.
    • Spiritfarer continues to be a cosy little time sink on the Switch. That’s about all I’ve played.
    • I bought Into The Breach for the Nintendo Switch about two years ago and haven’t started it up once. Always meant to get around to it, you know how it goes. It’s a turn-based strategy game featuring giant mechs fighting off an alien invasion in pixel art style. This week, it released on iPhone/iPad as a Netflix game — totally free to play for subscribers. I’m unable to decide which platform I would rather play it on.
    • Speaking of Netflix, we (okay, we started together but I was left to watch the remaining 75% myself) saw their latest big-budget mess: The Gray Man. It’s supposedly based on a book, but it must have been a comic book because the tone is completely off for a globetrotting spy/assassin caper. It suffers from the Marvelization (actually, is this also Joss Whedon’s fault) of entertainment, where everything is jokey and wacky and the stakes always feel low and the one-liners are channeling Ryan Reynolds freestyling at an open mic night (you’d be forgiven for being confused that it’s Ryan Gosling here). Depending on how much you’re forgiving of Marvel Tone, it’s either a 2 or 3-star film, but add another star because Ana de Armas is in it.
    • We went to see the National Museum’s exhibition OFF/ON: Everyday Technology That Changed Our Lives, 1970s – 2000s. It starts very strong, with a recreation of an office out of the 70s and 80s — the Olivettis and stationery and furniture brought me back to messing around at my mom’s workplace as a child. Overhearing conversations are absolutely part of the experience: someone encountering a typewriter and asking “how do you backspace on this thing?”; kids expressing surprise that we had ‘emojis’ for texting back then (they were emoticons :D); a zoomer pointing at a roll of developed film negatives and saying to his friends that “they’re like SD cards, in a way”.
    • Disappointments: Only one old camera on display, an Olympus Pen. I was really hoping to see a nice collection, and some more detail on film photography, because honestly the kids have no idea. And the section on Gaming was woefully underdeveloped, like it got none of the budget at all — featuring just ONE retro-inspired pachinko-style game developed for the exhibition. They could have had a few screens showing videos of old games, or put in a couple of MAME cabinets for people to play on. Maybe down to copyright issues, oh well.
    • I came across a generative art project that immediately got my attention: Bidonville, by Julien Labat. The title translates to “slum”, and each of the 512 pieces features a randomized, chaotic, yet organic layout for its little dwellings. As the artist’s notes say, it’s a thoroughly serious subject rendered with childlike naïveté. It’s moving. And by pressing E and W on their keyboard, the viewer can supply or cut off electricity and water to the community, and see their effects in the lights at night, and laundry being hung out to dry.
    • Speaking of moving, I forgot to mention last week that I came across this poem so moving it stopped me from speaking.
    Scenes from OFF/ON: Everyday Technology That Changed Our Lives, 1970s – 2000s

  • Week 28.22

    • For two and a half years, I stayed out of Covid’s way by being an introverted indoorsy germophobe. It also helped that I wasn’t going in to any offices or meeting with strangers for the majority of that time. With the general sense of complacency everywhere now — borders open, masks optional in workplaces, in-person meetings a thing again, restaurants packed — it was only a matter of time.
    • It seems likely that I’ve been infected with one of the new BA variants; statistically they are most cases now, and reportedly more infectious and maybe even more severe. It’s Day 6 today since I tested positive on Tuesday (though was feeling it in my cells since last Sunday), and I’m still not over it. I started losing my sense of smell two days ago, and it felt like 95% of it was gone when I woke yesterday. After my nose and sinuses cleared, some of it returned. I could taste certain things more accurately, but some frequencies on the spectrum were just missing or muted. Coffee tasted nothing like it used to, only weak notes of chocolate and a thin woodiness like hot water that had been stirred with twigs. It seemed to be only getting worse, so I started preparing for a life without taste. It was a bit depressing.
    • Things seem a bit better today, although I’ve yet to try the coffee test. I suspect it may take a very long time after I’ve recovered for things to get back to normal. Meanwhile, lungs full of phlegm and wheeze, sudden hot flashes, fatigue, and bad sleep.
    • Keeping us company has been detective Harry Bosch, of the TV show Bosch, which no one I know has ever talked about despite it having seven seasons. I don’t know why! It’s really good, a sort of modern L.A. noir thing, with a main character who would sound cliche if described aloud (he’s haunted, makes mistakes, an extremely good cop, has no personal life because of his work, takes a pessimistic view of the world), but none of that actually comes across and strikes you at any time, so naturalistically is he played by Titus Welliver. Also: jazz music, cigarettes, great editing and direction. It doesn’t have a large budget but never feels like cheap television. Each season is a seamless story arc with no episodic filler.
    • Frustratingly, Amazon Prime Video in Singapore claims to have Bosch, but each season has multiple episodes missing/unavailable. I don’t understand the point of putting up incomplete seasons if there are licensing issues holding back some parts.
    • I managed to find a few hours to spend with Spiritfarer on the Switch which I’d started awhile back but then left alone. It takes awhile to open up and get all the loopy mechanics going, which has now happened. With all the things that need tending to, it’s very easy to get sucked in. Unlike most games in the time management/busywork genre, however, this one is cozy and doesn’t penalize you for taking it slow and chilling out, just enjoying being on the open sea, on your metaphysical boat taking the lost souls of your friends and family to the afterlife.
    • After some delays, rumored to be China related, Diablo Immortal finally launched here in Southeast Asia about a month after the global release. It takes a criminal amount of time to start up, sometimes close to a minute, because the server it checks for updates is slow to respond. But the game itself is polished, fast, good looking. I played it to Level 21 with my Backbone One controller and it feels like a proper Diablo game. Edit: Polygon has a look at the much-criticized monetization system, and I should clarify I have no intention of becoming invested in this. It’s just a fun game until it ceases to be.
    • I’m concerned that the ever-growing camera bumps on iPhones are going to make the Backbone One stop working again later this year when the 14 series comes out. Already, Razer’s Kishi controller doesn’t work with the iPhone 13 Pro. If you go on Apple’s official store, the only game grip they sell for it is an odd controller that holds your phone above it in a mount, connected via a lightning cable. Very uncool. It’d be great if Apple made their own. I’m sure they won’t.
    • I made more Midjourney art.
    Cosy evening
    Cozy evening
    Photon’s Dream
    A watercolor piece generated off a drawing I fed in
    Robot Samoyed
    Magical massive libraries in anime worlds
    Jay-Z album cover by Saul Bass
    Jay-Z album cover by Saul Bass
    Jay-Z album cover by Makoto Shinkai
    Cozy evening, Studio Ghibli style
    Summer nights
    Carefree days
    Carefree days
    The best time of our lives

  • Week 26.22

    • If last week was long and exhausting then the trend is only accelerating. This week involved a lot of extroversion, conversations, and digging deep for social energy. But there’s change here: talking too much used to wipe me out. Now it can feel worthwhile. Sometimes I even wander into the “need to shut up and listen” zone. Part of this is getting old — people might let you, but it doesn’t mean you should.
    • I spent some time with a visiting colleague of sorts, and got to talking about how I spent the last year (rest, goofing off, learning random things), and takeaways from this entire period of work and personal growth since joining the company. It’s no wonder I’m tired; I barely recognize who I used to be five years ago. Things that were hard then are easier now, which reminds me of this “NLP” phrase that used to be in the Pzizz sleep app: let things that are easy… be easy. Is it cringe motivational shit? I think a lot of people could learn from it.
    • Last week I tried to buy a Ricoh GR IIIx and my order got canceled because of supply issues. This week I took my Ricoh first-gen GR out for a bit and decided I’d rather stick to a 28mm field of view and crop if needed, so I’ve ordered a regular ol’ GR III instead. Thanks to Shopee’s June 25th sale, I managed to get a better price than what I found in Funan’s camera stores. Let’s see if it manages to be delivered.
    • Painfully aware I haven’t played any games recently. The creator of Downwell made a new mobile action game for Netflix, called Poinpy. I’ve only spent 10 minutes on it. It’s much friendlier and cartoony looking, but you can still definitely draw parallels with Downwell.
    • If you’re a child of the 80s and 90s, you may remember playing Westwood Studios’ point-and-click game adaptation of Blade Runner, which was hailed as a groundbreaking experience. I hadn’t even watched the film at that age, so the game was just weird to me, but it still looked like nothing else owing to its voxel rendering and motion captured actors. It’s now been remastered and released on the Nintendo Switch for just $10 USD, so I’m planning to give it another go.
    • After seeing some Twitter chatter about Philip Seymour Hoffman’s brief but remarkable impersonation of Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible 3, we watched it again from my iTunes library and… it’s not the movie I recall. Something about its oversaturated colors and tight framing makes the film feel much older than it is, and nowhere as thrilling as I think it was in the theaters. Ah well. At least now I have this line stuck in my head ready to be repeated all day.
    • Netflix has a new (bad) reality TV show called Snowflake Mountain where a bunch of spoiled young people living off their parents get told they’re going to be on a show set on a luxurious resort, but then they get dropped into a wilderness survival experience. It’s so bad we watched all 8 episodes in one go on Saturday. It’s enjoyable mainly because some of them do grow up and become more mature, but I wonder what the producers would have done if all of them remained insufferable and selfish. That said, the brainwashing playbook is well established! Throw them into adversity to break their spirits, add a little kindness and positive reinforcement to bring them back in, then keep them on their toes throughout.
    • There’s a fair bit of hip-hop in my library, but Logic’s work is a blind spot. His new album Vinyl Days came up in Apple Music’s New Releases list and I’ve been enjoying its classic production throughout the week.

  • Week 22.22

    Singapore grappled with a potential poultry problem this week as Malaysia banned the export of chickens to protect its domestic market from rising prices. We get just about all our fresh chicken over the causeway, which leaves only frozen supplies (mainly from Brazil and Portugal, I think). Despite frozen chicken making up the vast majority of consumption today, people panicked and smash bought all the chilled chicken off supermarket shelves, some buying hundreds of dollars worth; I don’t know how they intend to eat it all either. The greatest threat is to our national dish of chicken rice, which seems hard if not impossible, to achieve with frozen fowl.

    I did what had to be done and ate two large servings from my neighborhood chicken rice stall, all at once, as a farewell to our precious perfectly poached plucked poultry. I’d love to say that I’m now sick of it and won’t want any for a while, but honestly I could eat it Very Regularly if it wasn’t a terrible idea.

    Went out for another drone flying session with my dad, no crashes this time. It was an extremely warm day, but I discovered that if you hover it above your head, the down thrust is just incredible, like a fresh breeze on a cliffside, and it cools you off in a minute. Are mini drones the best portable fans in existence? I think so!

    The digital artist Tabor Robak launched his latest project, Colorspace, as an NFT series on Artblocks. I’ve been excited for this: they are tiny interactive, animated programs reminiscent of the 64K demo scene from the earlier days of PCs. Thematically they are matched to that era, simulating a desktop computer experience gone haywire, overtaken by swirling virus-like growths that break through the 2D plane and take over UI elements.

    I got up in the middle of night to mint one, but all 600 went so quickly that my transaction failed. Thankfully they’re now on the secondary market for not much more. The NFT art scene still seems to favor static images closer to traditional art, which strikes me as missing the potential of this new format. I’ve mostly been collecting generative pieces that couldn’t exist traditionally: favoring those that are ephemeral, ever evolving, or at least in motion.

    Drifting by Simon De Mai is one such project. By animating layers of simple geometric shapes over each other, and then adding cinematic lighting and shaders, it creates extremely cyberpunk scenes that can be read as anything from an endless descent down a megacorp’s elevator shaft, to a microscopic examination of advanced microchips.

    The second season of Ghost In The Shell: Stand-alone Complex 2045 was released on Netflix, and I had to watch the recap movie they cut together from bits of Season 1 to remember what happened before. I think it came out before the pandemic! After that I binged the whole new thing over the weekend. In general agreement with the critics, it’s not quite classic GITS, but it’s still good to have something. S2 definitely of overall higher quality than S1.

    I was getting a lot of Instagram ads for a game called Peridot and skipping over them without thinking… until… it dawned on me that this is Niantic’s new AR game which isn’t supposed to be out yet. Turns out Singapore is one of their guinea pig (ahem, soft launch) markets!

    So I installed it and have been impressed by the leap forward that this is versus Pokémon Go’s AR mode. For one, it hasn’t made my phone too hot to hold. My creature also navigates the physical world very realistically with rock-steady positioning and impressive foreground occlusion (I have an iPhone 13 Pro so I assume LIDAR and ARKit are doing the work here). They’re also doing something neat with computer vision, so not only can the game tell the difference between grass, soil, sand, water, and other surfaces that your creature can dig into, but it also gives you tasks like “show your creature a dog or a cat” or “bring it to a tree trunk”, and will know when the camera is pointed at one.

    It actually made me go out and take my new pet for a walk, and it ran ahead of me and beside me just like a dog would. When I brought it beside a body of water, it ran ahead and jumped in (complete with splashing animations). And this all ahead of what Apple’s going to show at WWDC. The AR glasses life is going to be something.

    My WordPress.com plan for this site came up for renewal and I learnt that they recently changed up their pricing structure to be more expensive while giving fewer benefits, which has gotten the community a little upset. Thankfully, I’m able to keep my legacy premium plan and so I have.

    But this is all indicative of the current sad state of the web. Blogging is not popular, and there are few good options left for anyone wanting to start publishing in their own corner of the net, away from social networks. WP probably needs to start making more money from their hosting business, and I’d still much rather pay them for it than run/rent my own server and muck around with the open-source version.

    I’m still hopeful for some catalyst in the near future that will bring decentralized self-publishing back into the mainstream.

    This is the last post of my sabbatical era. It’s been great! Going back to work is bittersweet. My next update will probably be brief.

  • Week 10.22: Stayin’ home, playin’ games

    Probably nothing significant happened this week, apart from losing some money doing dumb trades. People seem to think all I do during my time off is play video games and watch TV, and for once this week that was actually kinda true.

    Mood!

    Media activity:

    • Picked up Doom Classic on sale for the Switch, only $2.49 USD to relive one of the most impactful moments of my youth. I remember walking into the game store the week it came out and seeing people play through the first episode. It was like a glimpse into the future: dark atmospheric “3D” graphics far better than anything I’d seen, with incredible music synthesized through a Roland sound card (real sampled electric guitars!) — I couldn’t believe it. It was thrilling just to watch. When I asked how many floppies it came on, and I think the answer was two, my head exploded. Shareware? Two disks, not a CD-ROM? And it would run on my lowly 386-SX?! iD Software pulled off a moonshot that raised the bar for all games.
    • I made it through 4 of 10 episodes in Ace Attorney Chronicles. It’s probably the best (least annoying) game in the series I can recall. Mild spoilers follow. A large portion of the game covers the protagonist going to Victorian London, and there’s a fair amount of racism and xenophobia depicted. People calling you an untrustworthy Nipponese from a backwater Eastern land, and so on. What’s cool is that your party’s initial impressions upon arriving are so positive, so rose tinted about everything being wonderful and better there, that I thought I was in for an entire game of Japanese people romanticizing England to death (another trope), but then came the swift and surprising subversion. An hour later and your lawyer character starts questioning how superior the “world’s greatest legal system” really is.
    • Puzzle Quest 3 came out on mobile as a free-to-play game. I loved and played the hell out of the original on several platforms including the Nintendo DS, bugs and all. So I was ready to get sucked in again, but it’s hard to recapture that kind of charm, and the addition of in-app purchases and timers don’t help at all. I’ve leveled up my character to a point where I’m now caught between being too strong for easy missions and too weak for normal ones, and I’m not sure how to even grind upwards because the UI is inscrutable and I can’t see a way to replay previous story missions, which would help. Sad.
    • Bad television: the reunion episode of Love Is Blind USA, all but two remaining episodes of Love Island Australia, and a trash new Netflix movie starring Leighton Meester, The Weekend Away. I have to admit I really enjoyed the latter, which appears to be based on a book which is probably found on shelves next to The Girl On The Train and other improbable, twist-filled paperback murder mysteries.
    • We finished The Afterparty on Apple TV+, a comedy murder mystery not unlike Only Murders In The Building, but without the thing I liked most about that one: nosy amateur sleuths. In The Afterparty, the police are doing the detecting, and everyone’s a suspect. Worth a watch because each episode emulates a different film genre and most of it works well.
    • I also finished season 1 of Foundation on Apple TV+ and daaammnn. I started watching it way back when the new Dune came out, and it looked distinctively “TV” against the scale and aesthetic of that film. It took a few episodes before I found the core of the show for me, and that core is actor Lee Pace in the nuanced role of the tyrannical galactic emperor. You cycle through all possible feelings for him over the story arc, and making that work sure isn’t easy. There are a bunch of other things that could be improved/decheesed, but I’m down for season 2 ASAP.
    • Saw Part 2 of jeen-yus, the Kanye documentary, which made me go back to playing The College Dropout again. Undeniably great and timeless. The documentary is also a priceless artifact, because how often do you get a camera following an artist over 20 years, from before they even make it big? Can’t wait to see the third and final part covering his journey into madness and arguably even further greatness at the same time.
    • The Beatles 1 compilation album of all their #1 hits received a full Dolby Atmos remixing at the hands of Giles Martin, son of George, and you can hear what that means using spatial audio on an Apple device with Apple Music. They went back to the original four-track tapes and separated the instruments, previously flattened together into a single mono channel, so you can now hear them with a fullness that can only be described as “live”, especially with dynamic head tracking enabled on AirPods/Beats Fit Pro. So I’ve been listening to some of that, slowly.