The new fridge arrived without a hitch. It makes the tiniest ice cubes, they’re like chiclets. We also got baited and switched: the model in the showroom said “20 year compressor guarantee” but the one that arrived has a sticker that says 10 years. In any case, we’ve been assured that these compressor warranties are meaningless because they’re never the first thing to break down. Kinda like LED bulbs that claim to last centuries, then.
The Onchain Summer campaign/festival on Coinbase’s Base network (Ethereum L2) continued, and I really got into the release of a few generative art projects on Highlight.xyz, in particular RUNAWAY by James Merrill. It’s designed to be a long-form open edition project, and so the algorithm is wackier than most, with quite a bit of variety in the outputs. Of the four projects launched together, RUNAWAY understood the assignment best.
RUNAWAY by James Merrill
This inspired me to get back to playing with Midjourney, and totally unrelated to the above, I made a couple of images I call “Swamp Aesthetic” and “Pond Aesthetic”.
Pond Aesthetic and Swamp Aesthetic
XG’s buildup to their first mini album continued with the release of New Dance, yet another solid pop song accompanied by a fun video (this one goes for an early 2000s vibe). So far they’ve only released one early dud — Mascara is not a great song imo — and everything else has been a straight banger. It’s an incredible track record, so to speak, and they’ve created a formation where every member is differentiated and recognizable. Back when I found them in February, they had 1.1M YouTube subscribers. That number is now 2.18M. I said back then that they’re gonna be huge and I’m more certain than ever everyone’s going to know them in about half a year.
Apple Music agrees, and they’re featured in this month’s Up Next spotlight, which means a short video, radio interviews, and pre-order promotion for New DNA which drops at the end of September. Just for reference, past honorees of the Up Next program include Billie Eilish, Megan Thee Stallion, Sigrid, and Burna Boy.
I finished reading Ann Liang’s If You Could See The Sun, which turned out to be a YA novel set in a prestigious Chinese high school, with a protagonist from a poor background who’s struggling not to drown amongst her fuerdai classmates, and then… she develops a superpower? It’s pretty fun, and you can see it being Netflix adaptation fodder. 3/5.
We’re currently watching Deadloch on Amazon Prime Video. Throughout most of the first episode, it felt like we would quit, but it somehow picked up and now it’s a fun and ridiculously vulgar ride. It reads as a send up of the small town murder mystery genre (albeit set in Tasmania), but the murder bit is just as interesting as the comedy.
I’m still rationing episodes of Poker Face, watching them like little films. Episode 5, The Time of the Monkey, had such a fantastic payoff I’m still thinking about it days later. I don’t want to spoil anything, but that ridiculous episode title will actually make sense by the end.
Oh oh, I found a silver bracelet I bought off SSENSE years ago and decided to put it on one morning as I was going to work. Some colleagues immediately noticed it and said ‘hmm what’s going on with Brandon lately? He’s accessorizing and wearing new clothes and painting his nails?’, which led me to wonder if I’m going through some kind of weird mid-life crisis? Technically the crisis probably began when I turned 40, which was the year the bracelet in question was purchased. LOL why are people such cliches?
I survived the island. Their warnings of limited internet access were exaggerated, and it turned out that we did have wi-fi in our villa, albeit quite slow; I did not feel completely disconnected, but I managed to avoid being “online”. I did not, however, get a chance to play Hello Kitty Adventure Island, nor finish the book I was reading until I got back to Singapore. That will have to be remedied in the coming week.
We mostly spent our time sitting by the pool, or the beach, or eating, or walking around and exploring the “private island”, which is incidentally a marvel of self-sufficient sustainability. All water used in showers and bathrooms is collected rainwater and natural well water. Wastewater is processed and filtered on-site and used on plants. Food waste is composted and broken down by black soldier flies bred for this purpose, not shipped back to the mainland and incinerated.
I managed to get a tan, and now I’m sporting a ‘just healthy enough to look like a living human’ shade. I also need to shed my lizard skin this weekend and head out to a wedding, so there was a shopping trip as soon as we got back to pick up a decent shirt. Putting on a suit stresses me out more than wearing shorts and sandals on the beach, tbh. There’s a Goldilocks zone of comfort somewhere in between and it looks exactly like a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, which is where I plan to stay for life, thanks very much.
Island photography and phones
Speaking of being indoors and online, I took a bunch of panoramas on this trip with the express intent of viewing them on the Apple Vision Pro when it comes out next year. Enjoy this one, and a vertical video of some gentle waves if you need to take a little mental break.
The majority of other photos were taken with the Halide app as is now my usual practice, and in comparison to photos of, say, the sunsets taken with the camera app on my iPhone, they came out much more natural and aesthetically pleasing. It still boggles my mind that Apple shipped the Photonic Engine on the iPhone 14 Pro the way they did because it looks so overprocessed by default.
I can’t wait to see if the 15 Pro will resolve this, and if I’m honest I’m also keen to replace the ailing battery on my 14 Pro — online anecdotes suggest many of us are suffering from accelerated battery aging this year. I’ve watched mine fall from 88% to 86% maximum capacity over the last two weeks. Some people believe the combination of using a case + MagSafe charging is the cause, because of the heat generated. I don’t know what’s going on, but I don’t want to avoid useful features or stop doing normal phone things just because of this.
Blue skies
I finally got into Bluesky this week, and I don’t dislike it! Threads is unfortunately a place where I’m visible to everyone who knows me on Facebook/Instagram, which is to a large degree my real-life social graph. And what I liked about Twitter was that it was an online place for my online identity and my online people. I’m hopeful that Bluesky can be more of a Twitter replacement, and its relatively smaller size could be a strength, as long as the people I want to follow are on there. At this point, I’m rarely even checking Mastodon.
Coinbase launched their new Ethereum L2 chain, called Base, and its stated purpose is to be a more user-friendly blockchain that could go mainstream and be used by the next billion people (ambitious). They say (and I like this positioning) that “online” was the first revolution, and “onchain” will be the next.
I’ve been playing with it within their Coinbase Wallet app, and enjoying their “Onchain Summer” campaign which focuses on minting a bunch of free/very cheap NFTs. It’s a good demo of how low gas fees are on Base compared to regular ol’ Ethereum; most transactions cost just pennies. There’s still a lot of work to be done to make this more understandable, and arguably the entire user experience of creating and funding a new wallet needs to be rethought.
The main launch event was Cozomo de’ Medici (who I thought everyone agreed was Snoop Dogg but now may not be?) partnering with the Friends with Benefits (FWB) DAO and the Korean animator DeeKay to launch a pair of Open Edition artworks depicting a cryptocurrency future. Importantly, people could buy them with a credit card, instead of fumbling with wiring money to Coinbase and then buying ethereum and then sending it to their self-custodied wallets on the Base chain.
Did I lose you in crypto-jargon land? Don’t worry, I can’t keep up either. Think of Open Editions like an all-you-can-eat buffet, but with a closing time. The intent is to encourage access over the usual scarcity and price speculation. In this case, the NFTs were only available to be minted for 24 hours, and apparently some 70,000 were snapped up at a cost of 0.01 eth each (around $20 USD, I think). That’s still a cool $1.4M made!
Sounds of summer
We enjoyed this summer vibes playlist compiled by XG (Apple Music) while lazing in the pool this week. I still can’t get their housey new song, TGIF, out of my head.
Speaking of Apple Music, I noticed a new personalized radio option appeared on my “For You” tab this week, called Discovery Station. 9to5Mac.com reports that this feature has been in testing for awhile, with people spotting it on and off over the past year (how do I get into these betas?!) — in any case I’m glad to see new features and am hoping for more improvements around the launch of iOS 17.
I fell ill with a fever that spiked Monday night, and then strangely subsided the next day, replaced by wrenching back pain and body aches after a night of hallucinatory dreams that felt perfectly sensible at the time. Then on Wednesday just as I thought I was getting better, I was struck by the worst bout of diarrhea I’ve had in recent memory. It lasted practically all day, even after I’d eaten nothing but white bread and water, even after there was nothing left to expel.
What made things worse is one of our neighbors recently sold their flat and the new owners are doing renovations right now, with the few days of heavy demolition coinciding perfectly with my time in bed.
The doctor I spoke to prescribed me some dubious medication: one of them, meant to be taken an hour before food, is normally prescribed to people with stomach ulcers or gastric reflux problems. I mean, it reduces the production of stomach acid, which surely helps, but I went online and one of the things it’s clearly not prescribed for is diarrhea. It even says that if you are experiencing diarrhea, you need to inform your doctor before they prescribe this. I stopped taking it after the first dose. Maybe I’m too much of a WebMD believer and should just trust real doctors but it was prescribed so casually along with four other things that I can’t trust it’s necessary.
So I got on the so-called BRAT diet, which stands for Bananas, Rice, Applesauce, and Toast — basically all you can eat is bland stuff. I’m surviving on bread and bananas and a little peanut butter at the moment.
Oh, I learnt the above neat trick on Twitter in the process. If you wrap the stems on a bunch of bananas with plastic, it prevents them from going black and rotting. They release some sort of gas while ripening (?!) and by blocking the rest of the bananas from it, they last much longer.
Photo from @BrianLeeWow on Twitter
Another thing I learnt from on the internet this week was the existence of an obscure Sanrio character turned internet darling, confusingly named “Big Challenges”. He’s an optimistic crocodile that was created in 1978 and then dropped off the map until fans petitioned in 2020 for his return. And now he’s made an appearance as an NPC in the new Apple Arcade game, Hello Kitty Island Adventure, which may have been named in reference to a 2006 South Park meme? (Disclaimer: the featured image on this post is not from the game; I made it with AI.)
As for the game itself, it’s getting great reviews, and seems to be very much Animal Crossing but with Sanrio characters. So perhaps I’ll be spending some time with it next week while on my own island getaway.
What island getaway? Well, by the time you read this scheduled post, I will (hopefully) be on a small secluded holiday island with nearly no internet connectivity, no television, and no air conditioning. To be honest, I’m a little worried we’ll get there after two boat rides and an hour’s drive only to be put into cages and executed on camera for the dark web. Barring that nightmare outcome (inspired by a book I read recently), it promises to be three days of unplugged relaxation: reading, floating in a private pool, looking out at the ocean, maybe gaming a little, and sweating my ass off.
But first I’ll have to get over the anxiety I feel when I think of not being online and connected to everything. I mean, things are moving so fast these days, I could back next week to find the stock market’s crashed, or every country’s locked in a room-temperature superconductor arms race, or some new AI has decided I should do twice as much work for less money.
On one of those topics, it’s now 6pm on Saturday and I’ve spent the last hour watching a YouTube livestream by the National Taiwan University’s science department, as they test their LK-99 sample for superconductive properties. That’s another thing that started this week (or last?), some Korean scientists released a paper on their attempts to fabricate a superconductor over the last 20 years, in the most confusing way possible with multiple releases, internal fighting, and not much clarity on whether this thing is real. But it’s gotten every backyard chemist online into trying to replicate their process, which is apparently not hard. It’s something the human race could have accidentally discovered a hundred years ago, which makes my skin tingle! Imagine an alternate universe where we’ve had this technology all that time.
man: thank you God for giving us computers to do the hard thinking for us
god: of course my child, this is what I always intended. that’s why I made them so easy to make with just lead and copper
The stream started strong, but then I was appalled at their inability to present this in a camera-ready way. The lab is a mess, and they didn’t have their workspace prepped to work with the sample; it was being moved around with pieces of paper on a crowded desk, and at one point it looked like they were going to drop it on the floor. Watching it, I finally understand why all the videos and photos posted online so far by other enthusiasts have been so blurry and lo-fi. Scientists are not YouTubers!
So far, it’s been a washout. The tiny sample they derived, in part because of a failure to neatly separate it from the quartz tube without resorting to the use of a hammer, has not responded to a magnet. They’re doing something called a SQUID test now, but I don’t think it’s looking good. Might have something to do with their decision to use different temperatures and baking times than cited in the original paper. In any case, other labs around the world seem to have been able to replicate LK-99 to some extent, so I’m hoping we’ll “be so back” by this time next week.
look, it's really easy. you log on and tweet "it's so over" or "we're so back" depending on any minor development in the current thing or if things are really crazy you tweet "it was so over but now we're so back". you can also post this meme with two astronauts… pic.twitter.com/zJNqocjzkh
Okay that’s enough from me. Here’s some music I liked this week.
XG released the next song from their upcoming mini-album (I can’t wait), and it’s called TGIF, and it stands for “Thank God I’m Fly”. I love it.
I discovered the Japanese ambient artist Haruka Nakamura, who came out of a hiatus to work with The North Face to create four albums of background music for their Harajuku “Sphere” store. One for each season. What a gig.
Utada Hikaru put out a new single called Gold — Mata Au Hi Made which I’ve only heard once but found sadly unengaging. I’ll have to get back to it later.
In the early years of mobile connectivity, we counted ourselves lucky to get 1GB of data per month. Fifty bucks bought you a plan, a phone, and a two-year leash. These days? I’m sitting on an 88GB, 5G mountain for half the price. Thank you, technological progress. But since COVID and working from home, I’m only using a fraction of my allowance.
Yet, like any good consumer, I want more. So I switched providers from Circles to M1, lured by a plan that comes with 150GB at the same price. But there’s a catch, M1’s a little disorganized and provided me no updates on when my number would be ported. Right now I have two eSIMs jostling for control in my phone.
Their checkout process also insisted on a “delivery” date. Delivery of what exactly? I’d already gotten the QR code for my eSIM over email. Assumed it was just a holdover from the old physical SIM days, too much bother to scrub from the website. But no, someone actually turned up to my doorstep at the appointed time, just to verify I’d activated my eSIM, then had me sign off on it.
Let me repeat: M1 sends a flesh-and-blood human to confirm I got an email, but can’t drop me a line to say when my number would switch over. I had to spend 10 minutes on a support call to find out that it’s scheduled for next week. Will the data bonanza make up for this frustration? We’ll see.
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On a mellower note, I started to make use of my dormant brain.fm account again, to provide background music while I read and work. Is it pseudo-science? Beats me. But I like most of the tunes and it seems to work. The app has been significantly upgraded since I last saw it, with many more genres of music to choose from, and the option to vary the intensity of their brainwave-enhancing signals (which sound like wobbles).
With a little help from brain.fm and last week’s recommended music from Alice Sara Ott, I finished Sayaka Murata’s Life Ceremony, and also Hervé Le Tellier’s The Anomaly, and Lee Child’s 20th Jack Reacher novel, Make Me. Of all those, I can recommend The Anomaly most wholeheartedly. It’s a book you probably shouldn’t know anything about going in. If you really must know, it has science and mystery elements, but that’s all I’ll say. I’m now reading real-life astronaut Chris Hadfield’s The Apollo Murders.
Not bad for a guy who’d only finished one book two months ago, now 8 out of 12 down on his Goodreads Challenge.
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I’ve been listening to Tessa Violet’s new album, MY GOD!, and it’s a playful catchy affair. Incredibly, Blur have reunited with a new album, The Ballad of Darren, and I couldn’t find much wrong with it after one playthrough. Maybe it’s the halo of how good the last Gorillaz album was after a decade of underwhelming me, but I think Damon Albarn is back.
I made a commitment to use my AirPods Max more — they’ve been neglected because they’re somewhat of a pain, both literally and figuratively: the headband’s a little tight for me and the Smart Case remains a questionable design, adding friction to the simple act of turning a pair of headphones on and off.
Two things have improved the experience for me. First, a dubious Reddit post from another big-headed owner who suggested bending the metal frame open, briefly straightening them open to form a 180º line, to ease the squeeze. This could obviously damage them, so do it at your own risk. But I think it’s made a difference. This is something you can’t do with the plastic Beats Studio Pros, sadly.
Secondly, an updated audiogram from the free Mimi hearing test app. The last time I did the test was 2021, and I got slightly different results this time. I highly recommend everyone does this if they’re old enough to worry about losing some hearing. Thankfully my ears are still pretty good.
Saving your test results as an audiogram effectively personalizes your listening experience on AirPods and supported headphones, applying an EQ profile that compensates for the frequencies you’ve become less sensitive to. You’ll hear music the way you used to, once you dive deep into the iOS Settings menu and find the section on Audio Accessibility, and turn on “Headphone Accommodations”.
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Another app that played a part in this week is Darkroom, the photo editor for iOS and Mac that I’ve mentioned a few times. They launched a portal to showcase presets made by community members, and kindly put a spotlight on some of the ones I’ve made and shared. You can access this catalog through a new button in the app, too.
As Twitter is living on borrowed time (this was the week their petulant man-child owner pushed out a hasty, clumsy rebrand to “X”), I decided to republish my thread of Darkroom presets to… Threads. Annoyingly, it’s still buggy and messed up the chronological order of my posts. Nevertheless, I think they’re all still there, and I’ll post future presets to the same link.
New ones I shared to celebrate being on the presets portal:
E1: This is my reproduction of the popular E1 filter in VSCO. I wrote that it adds warmth, color, and film vibes in a single tap, and it truly is quite a versatile everyday effect.
MEM3: This is another strong effect from my nostalgia-forward MEM series. It lightens and fades images with a blue-magenta cross-processed wash. You pretty much lose all highlight detail, but it’s a good look for certain scenes.
MEM4: I said that this creates a warm and dusty sunset feel, but it’s really also great for low-light scenes. Check out the last photo sample through the link. Again, you do stand to lose detail in contrast areas, so vary the strength to taste.
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Growing up in the 80s, I caught reruns of Takeshi’s Castle on Chinese TV channels with no context, and no ability to understand what was said. On reflection, I grew up watching a lot of shows visually rather than verbally, which continues to this day whenever I choose to watch movies on planes without headphones.
Anyway, Takeshi’s Castle, for the uninitiated, was a long-running Japanese game show (?) featuring normal people tackling an obstacle course of heinous physical challenges that would make insurance men squeamish. It was a precursor of Ninja Warrior, American Gladiators, and yet a different beast: whimsical, insane, hilarious. Why the name? It was hosted by the infamous Takeshi “Beat” Kitano, who played the err… lord of the castle that 100 contestants each week tried to storm. Here’s the Wikipedia article.
I’m pretty sure you all know this, anyway. It’s a cornerstone of modern media culture! Turn in your TV licenses if you don’t.
So imagine my elation while browsing Amazon Prime Video in bed and suddenly seeing a new Takeshi’s Castle, a 2023 reboot! We’ve seen two of the eight available episodes, and it’s still gloriously fun. It’s still not rolled out globally, as some markets will get English voiceovers (the UK one will have comedian Romesh Ranganathan as one commentator), but I wouldn’t watch it any other way than in the original Japanese, and maybe even with the subtitles off for old times’ sake.
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On Sunday we visited the Illustration Arts Fest where some talented friends were showing their work. It was packed, and probably the most crowded place I’ve been in since Tokyo. Let’s hope I don’t get COVID again.
The most common theme was cute cartoon cats. On stickers, posters, keyrings, enamel pins, you name it. Some other artists were out there, scratching their own freaky itches and looking for kindred spirits in the crowd. We bought a couple of things for the apartment, including these little guys below from our friend Reg at Ocio Ceramics. A dumpling and a frog. Cuteness sells.
I’ve implemented a new blog theme, which you’ll notice if reading this on the web (as opposed to an RSS feed reader or the email newsletter — I’m surprised at how few people still use the former, and that people are using the latter). For the first time in many years, I’m experimenting with having a listing page instead of just having every post on a long page. Let me know if you think this is better.
A new cafe opened nearby and we’ve made something of a new routine to go there on Saturday mornings and spend quality time together. The coffee’s good, I get to see and hear people in this community that I’m normally ignorant of, and most importantly, it’s a chance to see cute neighborhood dogs.
After last weekend’s work commitments, I took Monday off to chill and fly my underused Mavic Mini 1 drone with my dad (who has a newer FPV model that he flies with a video headset). Hmm, I wonder if you’ll be able to use your Apple Vision Pro for such applications — I can’t see why not.
Bookworm mode has been engaged: I finished Anthony McCarten’s Going Zero, and both started and finished A.G. Riddle’s Quantum Radio this week. Along with Daniel Suarez’s Critical Mass a month ago, that’s a big dose of SF — so I’m now halfway through Sayaka Murata’s Life Ceremony, a slim collection of weird short stories. Whenever life feels like a directionless mess, I always find reading to be the cure.
Shitty films, such as the latest Fast and Furious installment (Fast X), where I couldn’t even make it past the halfway mark, don’t offer the same solace. It’s not only dumb and unengaging, it’s not even engaged with itself; the writing is awful and nothing makes you care at all. So instead, I watched Dwayne Johnson in Skyscaper on Netflix, and although it was a dumb and kinda bad action movie, it at least had a pulse.
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Now let’s talk Beats, baby.
The long-awaited update to the Beats Studio over-ear headphone line finally dropped with the new Beats Studio Pro. My first pair was the Beats Studio 2 circa 2013, with that iconic Ammunition-designed silhouette (the original Studios were fugly, like everything from the early Monster-made Beats by Dre era) — all smooth swooping lines and a low profile on the ears. It’s a design so good they didn’t really change it in 2017 with the Beats Studio 3, and it remains untouched in 2023’s version.
Throughout all incarnations, the sound quality was, to be blunt, crappy. I love a good design as much as the next guy, but when it comes at the expense of audio quality, it’s a hard sell. But somehow, I ended up buying three pairs. Go figure.
After being acquired by Apple, there was hope that sound quality would improve, and indeed the entire Beats line has received significant upgrades, with two exceptions: the on-ear Solo series, which got a short-lived premium noise-canceling reboot with the Beats Solo Pro, and the Studio series. After the Beats Solo Pro was discontinued (my guess is Solo buyers are price sensitive and so the Pro model flopped), they went back to selling the pre-Apple Beats Solo 3 Wireless model and never bothered to update the Beats Studio 3 Wireless. Until now!
The new Beats Studio Pro looks like a proper contender for anyone on Android and those okay with skipping the latest Apple features (e.g. adaptive audio is only coming to second-generation AirPods Pro later this year). It does however have the key ones: spatial audio with dynamic head tracking, improved ANC, and USB-C support including lossless audio over a cable. Given the improved sound quality of recent releases like the Beats Fit Pro and Beats Studio Buds+, I have high hopes for these.
The Beats video aesthetic is still fresh, like an Apple design language from a parallel universe.
Beats recently brought Samuel Ross onboard as “principal design consultant”. His job? Picking out colors. Sandstone is a good-looking warm shade of white; Navy seems like an improvement on previous versions, darker and less saturated; Black is, well, black; and Deep Brown is the interesting new addition here. It reminds me of the original Zune. Ross says in the product video that he was going for “elevated” looks, but man, these are plastic. Luxe colors on plastic? Personally, I would’ve preferred a bit more energy and attitude.
However, a long-standing concern remains: the clamping force. These headphones have always been a bit tight, making them uncomfortable to wear with glasses. Early reviews indicate no change in this aspect, so that’s a good excuse to stop myself from getting them.
If I do, Sandstone has my name on it.
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Someone mentioned how you could use ChatGPT as a therapist, which prompted me to try writing a prompt that anyone could use for this purpose. Keep in mind that you’ll get better results with GPT-4, and of course this is no substitute for real professional care and advice.
That said! I tried it out on a couple of scenarios and it was pretty good at guiding a conversation, suggesting strategies like reframing your thoughts, and helping you to reflect on your situation. I’d suggest talking to it like you would a real person, and saying things like “see you next week, what do you think we should talk about then?”
The last one came into view after watching her breathtaking performance of some Chopin on NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts of all places (embedded below). I only just learned that she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (like Jacqueline Du Pré, who I mentioned a few weeks ago) in 2018, but has apparently managed to overcome it for the moment. It’s a cosmic joke that bad things happen to the most incredible talents.
It seems my general mood and well-being hasn’t improved. In fact, I fear it may have gotten worse. There were some fires to put out but at some point you’re just on fire yourself and can’t tell if you’re helping or hurting. This is fine, the dog says. But after working over the weekend, I am pretty crispy and ready for a swim.
Billie Eilish’s new song for the Barbie soundtrack is the vibe I was looking for: all sad, searching, and scared. I watched the Zane Lowe interview of how it came together and that just solidified it for me. I admit that I was beginning to worry her winning streak would soon end, but this is a really lovely song and I think she’s gonna be a great songwriter for a very long time. I also finally got around to Olivia Rodrigo’s Vampire, which I’d heard many good things about, and Jesus this girl sings like she has something to prove. The kids are still alright.
Oh, at one point this week I had a senior moment, as in I found myself doing something I used to see senior leaders do in my early days in the creative industry: I sketched my ideas out on paper to explain what I wanted to younger people, because I can’t use the newfangled tools as well as they can. I did this twice! Wow, I said aloud, I should just retire soon and move to Thailand and wear beer brand singlets all day like they did.
I had so little leisure time that I only managed to squeeze in a couple episodes of Love Village, and one more episode of The Bear. I’m getting close to finishing the book Going Zero by Anthony McCarten, which I’m ready to recommend as a fun adventure involving surveillance technology.
For those who haven’t seen Love Village, it’s a Japanese “dating” reality show for old people. It’s Terrace House where everyone is over 40 and hasn’t been lucky in their relationships — it’s where they go to find their “final partners for life”, as we’re constantly reminded. The show is hosted by Japanese TV personality Becky (no stranger to love problems, it would seem) and comedian Atsushi Tamura (who is described by Netflix in another show he hosts as a “reformed playboy”). I like that they both skewer the participants when they do silly things and shed tears (!) when moved by their stories. It’s exceptionally plain and chill TV, which I like for nighttime viewing.
I drew my first Misery Man in over a year; inspired, I guess. The caption on this one is “Keep the PMA! (Positive Mental Appearance)”.
Longtime readers may know that I’m a fan of Malin’s music — when he announced a concert to celebrate the 20th anniversary of his debut album, I looked up plane tickets to New York. Not long after that, he was struck down by this rare condition and is now raising money to help pay for treatment. Please consider a donation or buying a “Keep the PMA” t-shirt to help.
I’ve thus far neglected to mention that I’ve become slightly obsessed with Korean instant noodles, which they specifically call ramyeon/ramyun, and have been buying and eating too many of them in recent weeks. I never went to ramyeon town before because I have a low tolerance for spicy food, but watching Jinny’s Kitchen might have set me off, and I’ve found that there are mild versions and that even the hot ones are sometimes worth suffering through.
A few notes:
Nongshim’s Shin Ramyun is the original, the classic, the Nissin chikin ramen of Korea. The company’s English website says it’s always been a pork-based broth, but the export versions I’ve seen here in Singapore and Australia seem to be based on soy and mushrooms. There’s a new shrimp flavored version that was previously only available in China, but I have no interest in trying that.
I was able to find a pack of Shin Black imported from Korea, a premium version that adds beef to the pork base, and it’s certainly tastier and unexpectedly less spicy.
The Samyang company’s Buldak range of noodles are of course the notorious super spicy “fire chicken” ones you see in those YouTube challenge videos. I can’t eat more than a bite or two of the original (there’s also a 2x spicier one in red), but there are milder versions like jjajangmyeon and “carbonara”. Still, not for me.
I learnt in a video that people don’t think you should add eggs to Nongshim’s Neoguri spicy seafood noodles, which I have been doing, along with sliced cheese, kimchi, and sometimes a sausage. Oops.
Yeah I was not keen on this adding of sliced cheese to soup noodles, but now I don’t even think about it.
Of all the “Korean style” (basically red chilli and soy sauce?) noodles so far, I think my favorite might actually be Ottogi’s Jin series, which comes in Mild and Spicy versions. The Spicy one is about as spicy as regular Shin Ramyun (export), nowhere as crazy as Buldak.
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It’s not all sunshine and noodles; my increased consumption is partly due to a demanding work schedule filled with late nights and skipped meals. In general, I don’t believe these circumstances get the best out of anyone, but I’m told it’s the norm in China these days. I’d heard of 9-9-6 (working from 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week), but apparently people joke 0-0-7 is more accurate. If nothing else, you’ve now learnt a lame new way to say 24/7 today.
I keep thinking it’ll get better soon, but it hasn’t yet. Around the same time, I tried asking ChatGPT to write some funny posts that could go viral on a new social network called Threads, but it only returned some reheated tweets. One of them hit the mark though: “Is being an adult just perpetually saying ‘after this week things will slow down’ until you die?”
So, Threads!
Facebook/Meta/Instagram’s Twitter clone was rumored for awhile but I guess I wasn’t expecting a global launch of this scale — normally they roll stuff out haphazardly? But I think we’re now at over 70 million sign ups in two days, for a separate app that you need to download! It seems they rushed this out to take advantage of Twitter’s shambolic state, and even then, everything has been running smoothly.
They made the choice to go algorithmic feed only, and to populate yours at the start with suggested content. Maybe it’s because I’ve been using adblocking tools for the past few years (who am I kidding), but my recommendations have been terrible.
It’s been giving me Singaporeans influencers, sports, beauty and fashion, and positive lifecoachy shit. I’ve since found and followed many of my sort of people, and muted over a hundred accounts I do not want. That should be enough data for it to start improving, so I’ll just have to wait until they do something with it.
But of course, we don’t have to be on Threads. And maybe we shouldn’t, given Facebook’s reputation and past actions. Much has been made of how Elon has managed to make Mark look like the good guy here; a sizeble feat. I’m still getting a lot of specific tech and financial content on Twitter, and I enjoy the quality on Mastodon, which comes from strictly following only accounts that don’t annoy me given the lack of an algorithmic feed.
I suspect the majority of people on Threads so far aren’t posting, just lurking and figuring out what it’s for. I’ve been followed by a few people but I don’t follow back if they have zero posts or want to have private accounts. Meanwhile, successful IG content creators are either using it exactly like they do on IG (posting memes, photos, and videos) or writing inane things to try and get engagement.
I don’t want any of these things on a text-centric platform. It’ll take awhile to settle, and maybe it’ll just become a lame sort of normie place like Facebook.
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I’ve also been utterly captivated by George Harrison’s My Sweet Lord out of nowhere, and have probably listened to it a hundred times and sung it to myself a hundred times more this week.
It must have come up on my Apple Music at some point and resonated in the midst of my terrible week — the intentional, sutra chanting-like repetition is brilliant, hypnotic, soothing. How can you not be crazy for a song that goes from Hallelujah to Hare Krishna and back again? That declares such pure desire to know an unknowable god, that acknowledges how life is simultaneously too long and too short, that love is all you need?
So I made a playlist collecting all the different versions and covers I’ve been listening to: My Sweet Lords. It has 23 tracks so far, and I hope you like it and join me in this obsession.
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We started watching season 2 of The Bear and it’s truly excellent so far, as was season 1. Episode 6 is something else. It’s the television equivalent of Uncut Gems and Kendrick Lamar’s We Cry Together on the Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers album: extremely chaotic and uncomfortable, and not something you’ll rush to re-experience soon.
We also saw Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part 1 and it feels a little off. Still a good time, but some of the writing feels stilted and theatrical, and overall it doesn’t feel consistent with the others (okay, one can argue MI:2 felt nothing like the rest too, but that was when we were cycling through different directors; Christopher McQuarrie has no excuse). The challenge the team faces here is like nothing they’ve been up against before, but that veil of otherworldliness is distracting, and I didn’t get to appreciate it as much during the film. 4/5, I think.
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But we can’t end the week without some AI experiments, so I went back to my GPT-4 poetrybot and gave it my thoughts on the themes in My Sweet Lord, and it returned a pretty good poem, albeit several stanzas too long and not quite right in places. A bit of snipping and human co-creation later, we have this:
Life is long, Life is brief, In joy, a song, In pain, grief.
Love is low, Love is high, In knowing, grows, In doubting, dies.
God in the small, In the leaf, the bird’s call, In the rise, the fall, In all the all.
Seek the divine, In the day, the night, In the yours, the mine, In the dark, the light.
There was a massive thunderstorm Wednesday morning, and we woke up to water leaking across our living room floor, dangerously close to some power sockets, which would have totally ruined the not-on-fire vibe I’m going for in this apartment. It seemed that some fault on the rooftop was letting water into an unused cable housing that runs through the entire building. Once upon a time, this “pipe” used to carry terrestrial TV signals from the antenna above, and it’s definitely not supposed to have water in it.
The storm continued all morning, and I was mopping up water and wringing towels every 10 minutes while trying to be on work calls and contacting the authorities and arranging for our own contractor to do something about it. Although the town council sent someone down within a few hours, he turned out to be not so useful, firstly by not understanding the size of the problem (it was already sunny and dry by then), and then by trying to tell me there wasn’t really a problem on the roof. There was no other possible ingress point for the water.
Because the next day was a public holiday, I was pretty anxious to get it resolved ASAP as staying up 24/7 to be a squeegee operator was not acceptable. By the end of the day, thanks to some prompt private sector assistance — albeit at my own cost — I had the issue resolved (and I was right about the source).
The leak added unnecessary stress to an already difficult week, exacerbated by the tough transition back to work after my holiday. As if on cue, I came across this piece in the New Yorker on “The Case Against Travel” which I won’t try to summarize. It ends with a sobering observation that holidays are a salve for the grind of working life, and that first-world people just live looking forward to the next trip and the next, each time believing in some life-changing outcome of travel that never actually materializes. This reliance is something I never believed applied to me before, because I’m quite alright not traveling for long stretches — dear god, I just want more time left to my own devices — yet, startlingly, the absence of any further planned trips and the abyss now facing me feels… depressing?
It’s definitely about being tired. I also read this article (a book plug) about the “cost of traditional masculinity”, mainly centered on the role of providing, which powers economic growth but maybe not happiness. What would the world look like if every socially enforced achievement target was replaced with an appreciation for “enough”? Human progress would be hindered, I can hear you say, but the human-driven damage would be too, and that seems worth it.
I took a couch break one afternoon and read this other article in the New Yorker about quack surgery for a certain masculine insecurity, which was very, very disturbing. It’s about as graphic a piece of writing as I can ever recall reading. I am still trying to forget some details! Ah, modern life is closing one’s eyes to tragedy.
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Other bits:
We went out for dinner Friday at a Sri Lankan restaurant called Kotuwa in Little India. I don’t remember half of what I ate, but it was very enjoyable. Since Peishan and James were there to enforce vegetable eating, I was able to try the cashew curry — literally a little bowl of boiled cashews in a sweet gravy, which worked.
We finished Silo on Apple TV+ and enjoyed the season overall. I’m told the books are light and not very good, so it seems this was an adaptation that took a good central idea and nailed the execution. I’m pretty sure a second season will be coming.
I chanced upon an Apple Music page of DJ mixes made to celebrate two Tokyo clubs that closed last year, and I’ve been enjoying a few of them. I don’t think I’ve been inside a club in years, but I remember the feeling of often being disappointed in the music and thinking, “I’m gonna get home and listen to XYZ instead”. But I think I would have loved hearing some of these mixes irl.
I started using Vibes, the latest app in the (Not Boring) series by Andy Works. These functional apps (calculator, weather, etc.) borrow video game aesthetics and interactions to offer an appealing alternative to Apple’s flat design, and they’re winning — they won an Apple Design Award last year, and the standard Weather.app has grown increasingly rich and playful of late. Anyway, Vibes generates a real-time videogamey soundtrack for your life, based on your sleep and movement patterns, helping you to rest and focus throughout the day. I usually use Brain.fm or lo-fi music for this, but Vibes is simple: just hit Play and it’ll do what it thinks you need.
After watching some Bob Ross on Twitch one night, I fooled around on the iPad and drew a landscape in ProCreate. It’s nothing great, but then I tossed it into Midjourney and said ‘do this like Bob Ross’ and oh my lord. It makes me both want to improve and to never draw again — like, what’s the point?
sangsara.net 