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Tag: MUBI

  • Week 48.25

    Week 48.25

    My personal MUBI Shaolin film fest went on as planned, and I managed to watch a few more before they left the service. Gordon Liu had a role in just about all of them, which shows what a popular and influential figure he was in the industry. Who even comes close in Hollywood? Pedro Pascal??

    If I had to recommend one Shaw Brothers film, it would still be Dirty Ho (1979) which I’ve mentioned here before. It’s essentially the same winning template that Jackie Chan’s career was built on — lots of brilliant, intentional fighting moves masked as accidents and incompetence.

    The most uneven one I saw was Legendary Weapons of China (1982), which has about five different plot lines running through it, all to provide flimsy justification for the spectacular finale in which 18 (!) different Chinese weapons are brandished, and as many fighting styles showcased. It’s like Don Draper pitched that idea on a whiteboard and then they had to come up with another 70 minutes. There is an extended action sequence in a straw toilet hut floating over a river, where people literally end up in the muck. This absurd scene involves both kungfu and possession with voodoo dolls.

    In another realm of absurdism lives Dogtooth (2009), the debut film of Yorgos Lanthimos which made a splash at Cannes that year. I saw it on MUBI this week because I liked Bugonia (2025) and wanted to start at the source. Jesus, this film is an exercise in creating the wrongest setup and then having its characters do things that follow on logically but are still nevertheless very wrong. You get the sense of perversity for the sake of it, or to give life to the director’s own kinks, sort of like Tarantino putting his foot fetish in everything — but still actually much worse.

    However, do something terrible with craft and conviction, and it will gain lasting historical value. That’s how this world works; I don’t make the rules! But what if you don’t actually make the thing and just have the idea. In the form of a prompt, let’s say?

    Images that never happened

    Google released their Nano Banana Pro image generation model recently, and I’m sure we’ve all seen examples online by now. Things have progressed to the point where I’m constantly questioning the veracity of things I see online, and I think at some point the mental filtering will become so tedious that we’ll simply stop wondering and accept things that are true and untrue equally. If the short-form video that ruins your brain’s ability to focus and feel joy on normal terms makes you laugh, who cares if those things really happened? And then it will extend into other parts of life, and then… who knows?

    I decided to see if Nano Banana could place me in ROSALÍA’s LUX album cover and, of course, the answer was yes. Too easily, in fact. I only supplied it with a single forward-facing photo of me at a dinner table, and it was able to extrapolate what I’d look like from a different angle. We are, ladies and gentlemen, so cooked.

    It was also Black Friday sales week, and I decided to give VSCO Pro’s annual subscription a try at 50% off (hard to justify at full price). In addition to their Pro set of filters, which are actually really good, it also comes with access to AI tools, of course. Their object removal is state-of-the-art, to the point that it can invent very believable portions of an image that you wouldn’t notice unless really scrutinizing the scene. After a few experiments, sculpting messy scenes in old photos into what I wished they actually looked like, I had to step back and ask myself what the hell I was doing. Apple’s refusal to let the iPhone create “images that never happened” is absolutely the right stance.

    VSCO AI Remove tool, before and after

    What becomes of designers?

    AI’s obviously going to change the way we work, and I’ve been worrying for a while now about the future of the design profession. About the people who do this work, whether they will continue to be attracted to it, who will pay for their services, and what those services will actually look like. It’s been hard to imagine timelines that are positive by the standards I care about.

    As with many sectors that have experimented with AI tooling, I often hear that senior practitioners using generative AI models can get more done “on their own” — the highlighted phrase implying 1) without the assistance of those pesky junior people, and 2) more cheaply for the business. But just because the tasks once performed by junior people can now be done by AI doesn’t mean juniors can’t find something else to do, or don’t need to be trained anymore. Nevertheless, some business leaders are acting as if that were true.

    A friend told me how it’s now possible to run a small agency powered by seniors + AI only, without any junior hires. They were surprised that I pushed back — but the idea sounded irresponsible to me. It’s one thing if you can’t find employment and have to embrace AI to put food on the table. It’s another to be in a position of strength late in your career and choose this. If you can’t afford to leave the ladder down behind you, I said, it would be better not to do it at all.

    But because bean counters can always be counted on for short-term thinking and a reluctance to spend on design, some companies will go further and not hire AI-augmented senior people at all. They’ll either use inexperienced juniors or ask someone like a product manager to handle “design stuff” on the side using AI. Depending on how much the tools improve, the visible outcomes of this may seem acceptable for quite a while! Design won’t go away as a function, it’ll merely be handled by a different group of people.

    My main concern has been that doing a good-enough job in this way will scale so well, and become the dominant approach so quickly, that we’ll lose the diversity and depth of craft that comes from having human practitioners out in the real world, doing things like interviewing users to understand outlier behaviors, reading contextual cues and hearing what they don’t say as much as what they do. Then using these unique stories to make the larger design solution more resilient. It’s a job that humans are well equipped to do. A business that relies on AI to create an average of best practices may happily miss all of it.

    Why do I think this matters? Because while a bunch of LLMs trained on world knowledge (including artifacts from past design exercises) will generate pretty good insights and workable interfaces from a wide field of generic possibilities, it’s still a path to a monoculture of experience. And if we break the chain of passing down the skills to do the work, then some future post-AI generation will have to learn them all over again.

    I wondered if there might be a market for artisanal human-led design work. After all, centering the role of human craft has kept the luxury goods market alive in the face of mass manufacturing. But that would mean it becomes something performative, and necessarily restricted to higher paying customers. I actually believe that AI augmentation can produce better work; I just don’t trust our economic systems to nurture it over cheaper work.

    Teach an LLM to fish…

    Then this week, I saw something on TV that seemed like an apt analogy and put me into a more zen state of acceptance. It was an episode of Japanology Plus on NHK, with long-suffering host Peter Barakan forced to go out on a small fishing boat in challenging waters. I was honestly surprised the producers/insurers allowed a man of his age to do it.

    Anyhow, as they were heading back from being thrown around by the waves, he asked the captain how fishermen in the old days would have survived that ordeal without GPS, walkie-talkies, and engines. The captain’s reply was that it was more dangerous back then, and they had to use their experience and intuition, navigating by looking at the mountains and stars, reading the winds and currents. You can imagine many lives were lost on the job.

    Would any of those old fishermen trade places with their descendants today, giving up those seafaring skills for the ability to catch many times more fish and live twice as long, comfortably? Very likely! Modern fishermen are still out there on the ocean but their technology distances them from intuiting the waters in the same way. We also know now that the scale at which they fish those waters is unsustainable.

    Likewise, there will be more designers in the future, less skilled by today’s standards but able to oversee projects too complex for us to fathom. Maybe with worse overall outcomes for the world than if we’d never opened the mystery box of AI. But I realize now that this pattern of losing one thing to gain “something more, but worse” is simply an inevitable law of the universe. Two steps forward, one step back.

  • Week 38.25

    Week 38.25

    I type this while listening to Sam Fender’s last album, People Watching. I’ve been meaning to hear this through for awhile, but it got buried in my ever-growing library of new music. Thankfully, with the latest update to Apple Music in the OS26 series, you can now pin up to six albums or playlists to the top of your screen. I’ve wanted this sort of ‘Now Playing’ or ‘Heavy Rotation’ virtual shelf for the longest time — it’s the first feature I’d add if designing a music player app. So this album and five other neglected ones are now sitting up there, and I can give them the attention I want.

    I’ve been listening on both my new AirPods Pro 3 and an original pair of AirPods Pro, and dare I say the difference is quite obvious. Louanne asked me what I do with old pairs of headphones when I get new ones, and the answer was “put them in different rooms!”, of course. I’m fast running out of rooms. The new model sounds much more Beats-like than ever (modern Beats, not OG Monster Beats). That is to say, a bass-forward sound with a very clear, almost sparkling high end. It’s a fun sound, and I think they’ll be very popular for all kinds of music, if not audiophile-grade neutral. They appear to fit better than before too, and the difference in body shape will strike longtime AirPods users as soon as they pick them up.

    Then my new iPhone arrived, and before you judge, the old one is being returned to Apple’s Trade In partner in a few days, where it will hopefully be responsibly refurbished or at worst recycled. They’ve suggested that I’m likely to get nearly half the original cost back, which is an astounding deal for a two-year-old model! I’ll believe it when the deposit lands in my bank account.

    I’m very happy I decided to stick with the Pro Max size instead of switching to a Pro. The slight increases in height and width are visible if you put them together, but isn’t really noticeable in the hand. The increase in thickness IS, but combined with the new gentler corners on the seamless aluminum body, I think thicker is actually better? This might be the best feeling iPhone ever.

    I’ve yet to put the new camera system through its paces, but I’m excited and very pleased after a couple of days with it. Images look cleaner, and the redesigned front-facing camera is a revelation. I took a test selfie and could scarcely believe how presentable I looked. Coming from the iPhone 15 series, I’m also new to the new Photographic Styles that were introduced last year, and am getting a lot out of them. I compared photos shot in RAW with Halide and in HEIC with the default camera using a tweaked “Natural” style, and they’re extremely close in both SDR and HDR. This is a big deal! Along with the revised Photonic Engine this year, the dark days of overprocessed iPhone photos may be behind us.

    When reviews get creative

    One thing I’ve noticed this year is how bland and predictable the video reviews from the usual tech YouTubers and influencers have been. They go through the spec sheets while speaking to the camera, do a few test shots, and end without any thoughts you couldn’t have pulled out of ChatGPT. But then I saw a couple of videos from the Chinese-speaking side of the internet, and that’s when I realized Western civilization is well and truly finished.

    Take a look at these and tell me you’re not duly impressed by the storytelling creativity, production skill, points of view, and passion on display — even if you can’t understand a word (but most of them have English subtitles you can enable). They could just shoot the phones on a stand while swinging a light overhead, but they instead they go hard with CGI, costumes, sets, comedic sketches, and cinematic editing. And they do these in the WEEK they’ve given between the phones being revealed and launching.

    We visited a local art sales event for works based on the Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex franchise, just to have a look. The metal-printed pieces were going for upwards of S$4,000, so there was never any chance we’d buy one — but I got a little acrylic plate standee for my desk (S$25). Above are some snaps straight from the iPhone 17 Pro Max, using only Photographic Styles.

    Afterwards, we visited the SG60 Heart&Soul Experience which is being housed at the site of the old library@orchard. Supposedly it will be renovated and return as a downtown library next year, which is great news. From what I can gather, it’s meant to inspire people about what Singapore’s future might look like, and what place they’d have in it (employing lots of tech to personalize the journey). Criticisms I’ve heard are that it doesn’t go far enough, and the future shown looks kinda like the present: delivery drones, working in VR headsets, greenery everywhere. Visit and see for yourself. Bookings are required, but the tickets are free. It’s quite an involved production with each visitor being given a guide device (an encased Xiaomi smartphone) to wear around their necks, and human facilitators bringing them through the stations.

    Oh, speaking of cases, we went by Apple Orchard Road after the show to have a look at the iPhone Air, and I haven’t seen that store so packed in years. I picked up a rather loud Beats case in “Pebble Pink”, mostly because I really wanted a Beats case last year but they only made them for the iPhone 16 series. It’s hard plastic with a matte finish that’s slippery when your hands are dry but tacky enough if there’s a bit of moisture.

    Check out my reel with the Pink Panther theme:

    And while we’re on the subject of great directors, I finally sat down with Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers (2003) on MUBI. More explicit than I expected, it’s easy to see why people call it pretentious with its heavy callbacks to classic cinema, but it’s never boring and it sure knows how to use mirrors. I gave it 3.5 stars on Letterboxd, mostly because there’s “altogether too much time spent lying on floors for my liking”. There’s also one truly revolting moment where, out of money, they raid the apartment building’s trash for scraps of food and assemble the world’s grossest bento.

    Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest (2025), now on Apple TV+, is a remake of Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963), which I’ll embarrassingly only get around to watching after this homage. But this is a fine film that stands on its own: a sharp, sometimes experimental exploration of class and morality, constantly playing on the gulf between generations — Motown vs. modern rap, film vs. digital, Kurosawa vs. Lee.

  • Week 12.25

    Week 12.25

    • I found solutions to a couple of longstanding bugs and problems relating to date metadata saving on iPhone photos and battery drain on my Kobo, but published them as two separate posts so as not to clutter this update with nerdy troubleshooting.
    • Had a good couple of days in Bangkok. As others prepared me to expect, the shopping centers are a cut above anything in Singapore in terms of scale, brand availability, and features. And there are so many of them, from giant complexes full of small kiosks that feel like the old days of Sim Lim Square, where you have to stay alert or be taken for a ride (MBK Center), to luxe architectural marvels I can’t figure out the sustainable economics for.
    • Like in Tokyo, it was again nice to see so many bookstores thriving, sometimes two in a single mall, which is so not the case in Singapore.
    • I had some time to kill on my first afternoon so I went to the cineplex at Siam Paragon and saw Mickey 17 in a widescreen format called ScreenX that I’d never heard of before. It was also showing in 4DX (with chair motion and blasts of wind, etc.), and the other theaters supported IMAX and different 3D options. They sold popcorn in 8 flavors.
    • The fact that Singaporean cinemas are struggling to survive and haven’t invested in these new technologies/gimmicks was making me slightly jealous, until I read this MUBI Notebook article about how 4DX just distracts you from the film and is an uncomfortable seat to boot.
    • In this new issue of Notebook, they also look at the immersive content available on Apple Vision Pro and comment on these early explorations as being typical of a new form of cinema trying to find its place in the world. As novel as it was to watch Mickey 17 with ScreenX’s additional peripheral content, it obviously doesn’t compare at all to Vision Pro’s immersion, and probably isn’t necessary compared to watching the regular version of a 2D film. So I can’t blame our cinemas for not investing in these new formats to win people back.
    • Also at Siam Paragon, there was a large Nintendo store run by an authorized retailer that kinda gives real Nintendo stores a run for their money. Because they’re not bound by arbitrary brand rules, they can sell third-party products alongside the games and official merchandise, which has the effect of giving a fuller picture of the ecosystem and better celebrating Nintendo’s cultural impact.
    • Japanese culture has a large presence in Bangkok. I saw many brands and retailers that we don’t have here, like Loft, Matsumoto Kiyoshi, Hinoya Curry, and their Books Kinokuniya stores are massive and stocked with tons of manga and anime-related products. There were dedicated Gundam plastic model (Gunpla) stores, a Bandai Namco gachapon store, and even a major Jujutsu Kaisen exhibition in one mall with tickets costing about S$22 (I decided against it).
    • I ended up eating curry rice from Coco Ichibanya and Maji Curry instead of Thai food on a couple of occasions. Cocoichi is better there than it is here (not saying much), but isn’t quite the same as in Japan. Maji Curry, however, should be commended for their consistency. It’s just as good everywhere I’ve had it. That said, they offered me a choice between chicken and beef-based curry sauces, and that was definitely new.
    • The ICONSIAM mall was recommended by many people, but perhaps I was just all malled out by that point because I wasn’t feeling it. The Apple Store there is pretty cool, with very high ceilings and lots of natural light, but it had the effect of making the minimal product displays feel lacking. The Apple Store at CentralwOrld is much more interesting, with its circular design, spiral staircase, and two-story layout.
    • It might also be that minimalism is a rare creature in the Bangkok mall landscape. It can be seriously overstimulating, with hundreds of colorful decorative elements dangling from every surface, or crowded aisles like in the basement of ICONSIAM, which is a bewildering recreation of a chaotic street market, complete with roast crocodile meat on sale, and then you walk 50 meters and pop out next to a sleek Rimowa flagship store.
    • The traffic in Bangkok is a major drawback, pushing visitors to choose calling for a Grab motorbike instead of a car. That’s not a dice roll I’m ready for, so I spent several hours editing photos in the backseats of cars. For example, a 14km trip to the Museum of Contemporary Art took over an hour in the middle of the afternoon, instead of the 15–20 minutes you’d expect from looking at the map.
    MOCA Bangkok
    • MOCA, by the way, has the most breast-obsessed permanent collection I’ve ever seen anywhere in the world. Well over 50% of the work on display features topless women, and I regret not taking more photographic evidence to prove it to you. But here are some paintings I saw plus the current special exhibition, Mammals, which was said to feature 1:4 scale models of animals, except the artist couldn’t resist adding human mammaries to each one for comparison.

    • The National Museum was thankfully a lot tamer, featuring Buddhist statues and unearthed ceramics that tell the story of Thailand’s history over the past few thousand years. These insane carved ivory tusks, though, I thought were worth sharing. They’re fairly recent, made in the 20th century by artisans from Myanmar.
    • Man, that Severance finale, eh? Woof.
    • Wait, I mentioned the shopping scene in Bangkok, but what did I actually come back with? A pair of jeans (that I could have bought back home, really), a Snoopy “Scenery Box” blind box that I first saw in Japan and have regretted not buying, and a MagSafe PopSocket from the current Peanuts Cherry Blossom series that is being featured in select countries’ Apple Stores right now.
  • Week 47.24

    Week 47.24

    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.
  • Week 44.24

    Week 44.24

    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.
  • Week 43.24

    Week 43.24

    I’m on my last week camping out here in a co-working space while renovations continue in the apartment next door. From what I’ve observed, they’re probably behind schedule and will continue into November. As of this moment, however, I’m not planning to extend my membership another month.

    On the few days I’ve stayed home, I found that AirPods Pro do an okay job of reducing the noise, as long as you’ve got some audio playing. That should allow me to do most of the same things well enough (watching films, reading books, scrolling trash), but the part of being out here that I’ll miss is observing other people at work and guessing what they do. The most entertaining one so far has been a life coach who saw his clients for one-on-one sessions out in the open space, right next to other people typing away on laptops. Weird!

    I am incidentally looking forward to the AirPods Pro update next week that will turn them into hearing aids and concert hearing protectors. We got my dad a new pair in anticipation of the former, and he’s open/excited to try it out. If you know someone who may have impaired hearing but doesn’t want to get fitted for traditional hearing aids, check this new feature out because it may be a helpful alternative. Hearing loss apparently contributes to dementia.

    Come with me to Bluesky

    On le scrolling de la trash: I decided to reduce my participation in totally toxic platforms like Twitter, toxically owned platforms like Threads and Instagram, and make another go at a decentralized alternative. It’s complicated, but I don’t want to fully leave these places because I want to know how people I disagree with think. I’ll spend less time there, though, and I won’t post new content.

    I’ve tried Mastodon but its lack of algorithmic discovery was a bug for me, not a feature. Like Michael who reached the same conclusion, I will not be renewing my omg.lol subscription and that will mean the loss of my social.lol Mastodon account in about a year.

    So that means returning to Bluesky, 14 months after I first got in. In the beginning there was a waitlist, and it was hard to find people I already knew elsewhere, and I couldn’t get anyone to follow me. A year on, it’s beginning to look like a viable place to hang out. There’s a tool called Sky Follower Bridge that helps you find your Twitter people on Bluesky.

    You should look me up at @sangsara.bsky.social if you decide to join! I have just 44 followers now, but with your help I might get to 45.

    I like two things about it right now: that the community I see is welcoming and nerdy in that OG internet way, and that one can customize their experience via ‘feeds’. Technically, if the niche and/or conspiracy theorizing content I see on Twitter ever comes over, I can wall them into a clearly marked section that I’ll only see when I want to, but on the same open platform built to last longer than the ones we’ve had. I’m tired of moving from shipwreck to new-but-already-cursed ship every few years, an odyssey described in this great thread by @pookleblinky.bsky.social that I reposted. It’s disgusting but us millennials probably coined the term ‘digital nomads’ because that’s what we are.

    Later: After writing the above, I came across this post by Adam Singer about why quitting TikTok and Instagram gives you an edge over most other people, who are hopelessly addicted and mentally fractured, a topic I mentioned recently after reading the controversial book Stolen Focus. He makes a distinction (that I agree with) between image/video-based networks, and text-based ones like Bluesky, Reddit, and old-school forums, because the latter type fosters connections and discussions in a way that pure content delivery systems largely do not.

    In the same way it doesn’t matter if Johann Hari got the facts exactly right in his book, it doesn’t matter if you cut down on social media because you hate a tech baron’s irresponsible personal/business/product design choices or if it’s because you just want to reclaim some agency over your own mind. The important thing is that you try it and see what happens.

    ===

    Test photos

    Here are some photos I took this week (ProRAW in the default camera and some with Fig Camera’s beta) while further improving my upcoming positive film LUT. I’ll probably sell it on Gumroad for a few bucks. I have no marketing channels and no hope that anyone will ever find it. Other than that, the main thing holding it back is that I have no name for it.

    ===

    Other activities

    • On Wednesday I saw Ben and Nate for a few drinks and dinner, which became cocktails till midnight and a S$230 expense I consider irresponsible in this economy.
    • On Friday we met my parents for a rare weekday lunch. It was at a restaurant attached to a gourmet grocer, and afterwards I found an entire suckling pig gutted and shrinkwrapped, on the bottom shelf of a freezer, ready to be taken home for S$285 (pic below, you’ve been warned). How many people would know what to do with that?!
    • On Sunday we went out to watch our niece play netball in a youth tournament. It was my first time watching the sport at all, and it struck me as a strange cross between basketball and golf. It’s all running and passing until someone gets close to the basket, then everything stops and they take their sweet time to shoot.
    • Over the weekend I convinced Kim to play some co-op games on the Switch. We started with the indie game Blanc, which mostly has a unique art style going for it: hand-drawn and scanned sketches turned into a 3D world. The gameplay — a baby fox and deer journeying together through a snowy world — was unfortunately boring.
    • Then we tried It Takes Two, a bigger budget affair from EA, which Munz recommended to me awhile back as a non-gamer who enjoyed it with her boyfriend. This was surprisingly a lot more fun despite the higher difficulty level (from several platforming sections while wrangling a 3D camera). It helps that you have unlimited lives, and can learn by dying.
    • IYKYK, but we have been bingeing The Devil’s Hour on Amazon Prime Video, a UK drama series that came out in 2022 and whose second season just premiered. We watched the first episode when it came out then never went back for more. That was a mistake. It looks like a cop show, but with something supernatural going on, and it’s kinda creepy/scary to watch alone in the dark, but towards the second season it starts to show its hand and I was hooked.
    • MUBI has a few films by François Truffaut in my region, and they’re all due to leave today, so I’ve been trying to watch as many as I can. In order, I saw The 400 Blows (1959), Stolen Kisses (1968), Antoine and Colette (1962), The Last Metro (1980), and Jules and Jim (1962). I probably watched The 400 Blows in my late teens but it reads so differently when you’re closer to the parents in age than the child.
    • I’m planning to see his last film, Confidentially Yours (1983), later today after posting this. What can I say? The dude had range. These films reinforce the notion I have of French cinema effortlessly, almost pathologically, blending genres. They go from tragedy and defeat to absurdist comedy in an instant — it all exists together, I guess.
    • I read and enjoyed Psalm for the Wild-Built, a cozy little novella by Becky Chambers that won the Hugo Award. It’s set in a neo-Luddite world where people lead more sustainable, less technology-driven lives after all their robots became sentient one day and decided they would live separately from humans.
  • Week 35.24

    Week 35.24

    First, an update on last week’s air conditioning saga. During another service visit, the professionals confirmed what my online research had suggested: a malfunctioning thermistor was the reason for inconsistent cooling. To test it out, they swapped sensors between two indoor units, and now that the cause has been confirmed after a couple of days, they have to come back yet again to replace the broken one (S$161).

    Shortly after, I was coincidentally served this cocky tweet about how “reasonably smart” people with internet access can now challenge an expert about their specific problems, because 1) the information is out there, and 2) the customer has more invested in the outcome than the vendor. For the record I tried hard not to preemptively suggest it to the experts, but when they diagnosed a ‘thermistor problem,’ I wasn’t the least bit surprised.

    New house problem: We found a dead cockroach and it’s been bugging me. I made a poll on Instagram Stories and asked how many people have seen a roach in their homes in the past year, and was surprised the results were pretty much 50-50 (n=29). It might be down to how many people have apartments with integrated rubbish chutes or face open-air corridors. In any case, there’s always something wrong and I need the universe to give me a break or better mental health.

    ===

    I joined my first-ever book club after hearing about it from some folks I met in inSpaze. They meet in the app for an hour every week, and have what I assume is a typical book club discussion if not for the fact that (nearly) everyone is in a Vision Pro.

    They’ve just started on a new book, Guy Immega’s Super-Earth Mother, which I couldn’t find in the library’s catalog and had to buy off the Kobo store. The title is my least favorite part, as it could turn some readers off. I didn’t expect to enjoy it as much as I did, but I ended up finishing it in just a couple of days. I was later chastised for this, as we’re supposed to be reading it together over three weeks.

    It’s about a billionaire’s mission to send an ark of human DNA across the universe in the care of an AI (Mother-9), and how its efforts to colonize other planets goes. That premise immediately reminded me of the back-half of Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves, but this is a very different effort. I think I described it in my Goodreads review as “a compact and accessible space epic”.

    What’s making this extra special is that one participant is a friend of the author’s, and they’ve been filling us in on little Easter eggs and references to real-life experiences. There’s also a chance that Mr. Immega might join us for a short Q&A in a later session.

    This external push to read broke my summer reading block. I had stalled on Neal Stephenson’s Interface for months, but after finishing Super-Earth Mother, I breezed through another hundred pages and am enjoying it immensely.

    Kim’s pretty old Kindle Paperwhite finally died, and I got her a new Kobo Clara BW (she declined the Color model, which I still think was an extra $30 worth spending), which is a very nice and slender reader in person. I am now envious of its USB-C charging and Dark Mode support, and am trying to stop myself from buying a Libra Color to replace my first-gen Libra. At over S$300 dollars, even if I’ve read 100 free books on mine so far (I haven’t), I’d still have paid $3/book for the sheer utility of an e-ink screen, which seems silly to me because one can read perfectly well on an iPhone. Or a Vision Pro, even.

    I tried that, btw. Having giant floating pages in front of you is actually not terrible. And in doing so I hit upon another realization about the Vision Pro. Photographers are always saying that you should print your photos to appreciate them, at as large a size as you can, but how many of us really do? Most photos end up being seen on phones, and maybe laptop-sized screens. But now there’s a way to view our favorite shots at wall size and have a gallery-scale experience at home. And, I suspect, discover more flaws and limitations that will push us towards buying better gear. It’s tragic how much of the last decade we documented in piddly 12mp photos because iPhones were more convenient than dedicated cameras. Ugh!

    ===

    Media activity

    • We caught up on Sunny. This is a show that, on paper, seemed designed to light up my neurons. Robotics, AI, a Japanese setting, a “darkly comedic” mystery, a story about clashing cultures, an A24 production. But it’s not for me at all. I came across the above clip on how causality, consequence, and coherence (my terms) are essential in telling a story people can care about, and sadly Sunny fails to adhere to those rules.
    • But also on Apple TV+ is Pachinko, which has just returned for its second season, and I thoroughly enjoyed the first two episodes out now. I understand that it’s one of the most popular shows on the service, and I hope it finds an even wider audience.
    • The consensus online seems to be that Apple TV+ is full of great shows that people just aren’t discovering, and Bad Monkey is one of them. Again, I think the show’s title is the weakest link here, and you should be giving it a chance. Vince Vaughn does his thing, the dialogue crackles, and things move with causality, consequence, and coherence. It also kicks off with the discovery of a severed body part.
    • We rewatched Twister (1996) and then saw Twisters (2024). The original is an actual classic, directed by Jan de Bont (who also did Speed), and features a team of tornado chasers with actual, palpable camaraderie. You feel like you’re going along on an adventure with them, and part of that happens because the script bakes in ample downtime where they strategize, tell war stories while eating steak and eggs, and hang out in motels overnight. The sequel is almost embarrassing in how it tries to check a series of “mirror the original” boxes — there’s the in-over-their-head outsider whose terror is played for comedy, the traumatic past weighing on the female lead’s motivations, her magical gut feel that can predict weather better than the science-dependent nerds. But despite all that, it can’t reproduce the magic. Still, as a standalone movie, Twisters is not all bad, and Glen Powell is definitely becoming one of the most likable and bankable men in Hollywood. 4 and 3.5 stars respectively.
    • We also watched Office Space (1999), which I realize I’ve never really seen properly at all. It’s an anti-work masterpiece, with many themes and grievances that seem to be reemerging today. Sure, it came out around the time of The Matrix, when rebellion against cubicle offices was at its peak, but I can’t recall many films in the past ten years that have so strongly espoused quitting your dumb job, burning your workplace to the ground, and finding purpose somewhere else. 4 stars.
    • Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin (2004) was leaving MUBI, so I decided I’d better see it. Boy, what a downer. I looked at reviews on Letterboxd and here are some excerpts from the positive ones: “This is a flawless film, but don’t watch it.” “This is not a movie I should’ve watched.” “I will never recover from this.” “What if I just walked into oncoming traffic”. 4 stars from me, but I tried not to think about it too hard. It might be a 4.5.
    • Also leaving MUBI was the French film Summer Hours by Olivier Assayas. It’s a quiet and beautiful story about the familial unraveling that happens when a parent dies and there is ‘bric-a-brac’ to be split up and hard discussions to be had. Sad subject matter, but nowhere approaching the rock buttom of Mysterious Skin’s tragedy. Also 4 stars.
    • I tried again to start watching Assayas’s Irma Vep TV series, but various interruptions have stopped me from finishing the first episode. I know it’s not a straightforward remake of the original film, but Alicia Vikander’s character is so different from Maggie Cheung’s that I’m intrigued to see what he’s trying to say about her/them/filmmaking with this new take.

    Featured photo (top): A superb dinner we had at Beyond The Dough on Arab Street. It’s one of those places that brings obsessive Japanese craft to traditional pizza. They are amusingly two doors down from a Domino’s outlet.

  • Week 31.24

    Week 31.24

    It’s been about three months since I embarked on a break from full-time employment, but my subconscious seems determined to remind me of what I left behind. I’ve had about a half-dozen dreams about work: either I’m being called back to help fix something “for just a few days” and finding I can’t leave, or I’m being given some “urgent” problem that is really a big overreaction — I must stress none of them were actually based on real situations or people, which is the weirdest part. Each time, I wake up and realize it’s not just that the problems aren’t real, but I haven’t got ANY problems like them at all, and it makes the whole thing worth it despite opportunity costs.

    With Kim’s leg injury improving, my focus shifted from caregiver to caretaker of my own neglected digital life. The first task was reviewing my digital security practices: passwords were reset, new tools deployed, and unlikely edge cases considered and guarded against. Take this as your reminder to please sort this stuff out for yourself! You must get a password manager. Use 2FA and unique passwords for every website, no exceptions. Protect yourself with a Recovery Key for your iCloud account, and add some trusted people as Account Recovery contacts and Legacy Contacts so you/they can access your data in the event of a hack or your demise.

    Next: email migration! Whoo!

    Four years ago, I switched from Gmail to Hey.com, a $99/yr email service that offered an opinionated user experience which meant leaving behind nearly two decades of history for a fresh start. They don’t support you bringing your email archives along. They don’t even let you use your own choice of email app; their web app and hybrid apps are all you get. I wrote two posts about it back then, saying I would probably not continue with my free trial. But I ended up doing it anyway, and for the most part I’ve really enjoyed trying a new approach to such an ancient, core component of online life.

    For one thing, I never got spam in my inbox. Hey unfortunately lets a lot of spam through, but they land in a separate zone called “The Screener”, along with any mail from an unknown address mailing you for the first time. From here, you can either let them in or block them. It’s a small difference, reviewing a bunch of possible spam on a separate page versus seeing them mixed in with all your legit mail, but feels huge because your inbox becomes a serene, protected space. Admittedly, taking care of “The Screener” has become daily work because spam always gets in.

    From what I’ve seen of Gmail in the past four years whenever I log in for a peek, it’s a post-spam apocalyptic wasteland. It looks like Google has just given up on detecting and filtering spam because some data-driven PM decided it won’t hurt their bottom line.

    Since my current Hey subscription ends in September, I looked into whether it might be time to switch again. Three key reasons: Apple Intelligence, performance, and $99/yr is money I don’t need to spend on email right now.

    Apple Intelligence: I’ve never liked the Apple Mail app on iOS. It felt a little underdeveloped for handling the different needs of modern email — without the tagging and search filters of Gmail, or the segregation of personal mail, newsletters, and receipts that Hey.com built their UX around.

    But the new AI-powered Mail app in iOS 18 looks exactly like what I want, and I’ve decided to embrace the power of defaults. I’m bearish on some aspects of generative AI, but this stuff is where it shines. Because Apple Intelligence will be able to understand what emails are about, it can summarize and prioritize messages while sorting them into categories like “Updates” and “Invoices”, so you can tackle them with different mental modes. I’m hoping that AI will also bring spam filtering that really works. Sadly, because Hey.com intentionally won’t support IMAP and SMTP, I can’t use them with Apple’s new app and have no choice but to leave. The Hey manifesto also contains strong wording that suggests they won’t be adding any AI features soon.

    Hey.com’s performance: It was never blazing fast to use their apps because they’re hybrids with seemingly little caching, and it annoyed me to death every time I ‘backed out’ of a link to find that the whole thread of newsletters I was reading had refreshed and I was back at the top again, but lately things have gotten even worse. About a year ago, the Basecamp/Hey founders went on a crusade against cloud hosting services and decided that they could self-host their services and save millions. I have to assume their infrastructure is extremely Western world or US-centric, because speeds have become terrible for me here in Singapore. I’m talking about noticeably slow performance waiting for EMAILS TO LOAD. I got even more confirmation of this when I tried downloading my 1.6GB .mbox archive to move elsewhere: it was capped at 100kb/s and took me over five hours. I can normally download a file of that size in maybe a minute?

    Ninety Nine United States Dollars A Year: Yeah, I can’t justify paying this much to have my email load slowly AND miss out on exciting AI features. I’m already paying for iCloud+ with tons of storage, so it seems logical to just use iCloud Mail as well. Bless Hey though, they let you keep your @hey.com email address for life even if you leave, so I’ll continue using mine and forward everything to my Apple address.

    A note about concentration risk: I’m aware there are risks in letting one company handle your entire digital life. All it takes is one successful hack locking you out of your iCloud account and it’s game over. For that reason, I would recommend NOT using the new Apple Passwords app coming in iOS 18 if you know how to select and use a third-party one. It’s a great default for people who wouldn’t use a password manager otherwise, but if you can have another basket for that egg, do it. Email is particularly important to keep separate, as most of your account passwords can be reset in the event of a hack if you still control your email address.

    But like I said about the Vision Pro and its integration with Apple Services like Arcade and TV+, I’m finding myself getting even deeper into their ecosystem and liking it fine. Where I once subscribed to differentiated, prosumer-serving alternatives to Apple’s ‘good enough’ apps, these days I prefer their simplicity and constraints.

    I switched from Evernote to Apple Notes several years ago and haven’t looked back. Side note: I’ve been on an anti-Notion campaign ever since I saw an unsuccessful rollout in my last team; it’s another overpowered tool for fiddly people who like to overcomplicate their tasks. I’ve used iCloud Calendar since leaving Gmail. I’ve even ported a lot of ancient files from Google Drive and Dropbox to iCloud Drive. And now email, arguably the most crucial service of all.

    “Hang on, Apple Intelligence in the Mail app isn’t out yet and might not be until the end of the year! How will you live until then?”

    Thanks, little imaginary reader, I’m glad you asked! I’m using Spark Mail in the meantime, which I’ve dabbled with in the past using my Gmail account. It’s a mail client with a bunch of smart, AI features (for a price) that are pretty close to what Apple promises. For one, a smart inbox that works quite well at sorting your different mail types, and a feature called “Gatekeeper” that works just like Hey’s “The Screener”. Their asking price is less than Hey’s, but more than Apple’s (free, if you already pay for iCloud+).

    Just a couple of days into using Spark with iCloud Mail, and two things stand out: One, it’s so nice to use a native email app, and two, I’m actually reading my newsletters again. In Hey, newsletters are collected on a a separate, infinite-scroll page called “The Feed” which suffers from an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ problem. In Spark, received newsletters sit inside the main inbox, just collapsed into a single line. This seems to make a difference. It’s a visible nudge to check them out, and because they load and react instantly, you can actively triage them and unsubscribe/block/delete if you find yourself asking why you ever signed up for one. Where Hey’s endless stream of newsletters can get overwhelming, Spark’s (and I assume Apple’s) approach is more like a physical magazine or newspaper with a finite amount of content, which most people prefer.

    I should have taken my own advice in 2020 — it turns out Spark’s approach was always the better fit for me. I even made visual aids to explain it!

    This diagram above is how HEY is laid out, if you think of each column as a screen. In the Imbox and Paper Trail, each email is a single line item, while they are larger previews in The Feed, which is designed to give a peek into newsletters so you can decide if you want to expand and read them. This doesn’t work for me because I don’t want to keep all of Graniph’s new product announcements, but I do want to see them.

    And this is an illustration of how I’d prefer to handle my email. A single inbox view encompassing important emails and personal letters, newsletters, and updates/receipts/notifications from other services. Spark … is the closest thing I’ve found to this.

    All in, it’s been a week of fiddling with things that seemed to work just fine, but hopefully I’ve simplified and improved them for the future and not introduced more things to maintain.

    ===

    Media Activity

    • Before I could move off Hey Email, I had to finish my backlog of favorite newsletters. One of them was Craig Mod’s “Return to Pachinko Road” series from earlier this year. Over 18 days, he walked 694,942 steps and wrote close to 50,000 words in daily email updates. I read them while waiting those five hours for my mail archives to download. He’s such a good writer, and I can’t recommend enough that you sign up for his newsletters and/or membership if you can spare the money (regretfully, I can’t right now as a member of the unemployed class).
    • MUBI’s collection of films by Abbas Kiarostami is leaving the service over the next couple of weeks, so I prioritized watching them, starting with the Palme d’Or-winning Taste of Cherry (1997). God, I was not prepared for it on a Monday afternoon and fell to pieces during the old man’s monologue in the final third. Fortunately, I watched it on the TV because I don’t think Vision Pros have an IP rating. 5 stars.
    • Next was Through the Olive Trees (1994) which was very charming — the Iranian actors’ performances are fantastic, and perfectly naturalistic in keeping with the cinematography. I initially score this a 4, but it’s now a 4.5-star film for me.
    • The Wind Will Carry Us (1999) shares some landscapes and in-car camera angles with Taste of Cherry, but where the latter is heavy with life’s troubles, this one centers hope and rebellion against the narratives we find ourselves in. One could even read it as an anti-work parable: forced on a business trip of indefinite length, neglecting his family’s pleas to return home for a funeral, summoned to give gravely inconvenient (hur hur) updates to his boss at all hours, a workaholic asshole learns to relax, enjoy the local milk, and finally give his assignment the finger. 4.5 stars.
    • Fresh off Presumed Innocent, we were looking for another legal thriller to watch and discovered neither of us had seen The Firm (1993) starring Tom Cruise. Welp, it turns out there are no courtroom scenes in the film at all, and he’s a tax lawyer. Still, a very enjoyable 3.5 stars.
    • The Paris Olympics are on, and despite not caring much for sports I’ve found myself unable to resist watching competition on a global scale. Mostly tennis, but also archery, shooting, diving, gymnastics, and some athletics.