After listening to ROSALÍA so much last week, I decided I wanted to experience LUX closer to the reality it was conceived in. So I reinstalled Duolingo, which I haven’t touched since maybe 2017? After several days, I’m now at Level 9 in Spanish, whatever that means. The biggest obstacle to Español perfecto is my inability to roll my ‘R’s, which I will simply need to practice out loud until it clicks. I can only do this while alone because Kim tells me to please stop por el amor de dios.
I met up with some old friends and acquaintances this week: one about to have their second child in the midst of questioning their career trajectory (aren’t we all?) and another who’s just come off living on a boat with their family for the past seven years, sailing from port to port in an unusual nautical retirement. Their youngest child practically grew up on water but will now have to stay in one place, join a normal school, and get accustomed to land life. In thinking about both situations, I reflected that personal freedom might be the most valuable asset to have when dealing with difficult times.
Later, I mentioned the old D&D character alignment framework to Cien and Peishan, and how it related to our personalities which I thought were evenly spread across Lawful to Chaotic. It hadn’t crossed my mind that Chaotic was actually about valuing freedom, but it kinda is — freedom to follow your whims instead of rules and expectations?
Then I visited the Artscience Museum on a weekday afternoon for a futurism exhibition called Another World Is Possible – a hopeful title promising alternative models for living, maybe even freedom from our current constraints. My expectations were high because it was yet another collaboration with ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image) out of Melbourne. Alas, I left feeling rather annoyed and unfulfilled.
The space itself is inadequate for multimedia shows. There’s not enough surface area, and the adjacent rooms without doors bleed sound into each other at an atrocious level. Near the end, there were some screens with a peaceful computer-generated nature scene meant for reflection, but all you can hear is music blaring from another video installation.
But regarding the actual show, several of the items presented were clearly AI-generated slop, unlabeled. The wall text just says things like “12-minute audio/video presentation” or “14-inch giclée print.” I don’t want our institutions of culture to charge $20 for mediocre renderings one could Midjourney at home. Hard to feel like ‘another world is possible’ when the medium represents what’s wrong with the present one.
Racism came up during my book club meeting this week, which gave me a chance to traumatize the Americans with “Darkie” toothpaste. It’s a brand that’s been ubiquitous in these parts since I was a kid. The name is bad enough, but they also put a minstrel on the box, highlighting the contrast between black skin and white teeth. It rebranded to “Darlie” at some point and made it somewhat arguable that the man wasn’t black, but we all know. It was only in late-2021 that its Chinese name changed from 黑人牙膏 “Black Person Toothpaste” to 好來 “Bright Future” (my translation). Reading the Wikipedia page, I was surprised to learn that it had a market share as high as 50% in Singapore in the 80s!
But hey, cultural theft isn’t just about race. Kill Bill is getting a theatrical re-release next month — both volumes cut together with unseen footage into the 4hr 40min epic Tarantino originally intended. Maybe no cinema in Singapore will take it up, but this means there’s hope for an updated digital release at some point.
That iconic siren when the camera zooms into Uma Thurman’s rage-filled eyes? Sampled from the Shaw Brothers film Five Fingers of Death aka King Boxer (1972), which I saw for the first time this week on MUBI. The Chinese title 天下第一拳 translates to “The Greatest Fist Under Heaven” — not “in the world” but “under heaven,” which is somehow more evocative and poetic.
A bunch of these old Shaw Brothers wuxia flicks are leaving MUBI in the next few days so I’ll be on a little martial arts marathon in the coming week.
And since we were talking about cultural appropriation last week (I’m cool with it), you know who else loves sampling kung-fu movies and helped Tarantino put the sound of Kill Bill together? That’s right, the RZA aka the Abbott, who resurfaced this week with the release of Japanese rapper Awich’s new album Okinawan Wuman, which he produced.
Apart from a little cringey self-caricaturing from Awich — the usual “we say arigato” shit, not unlike Utada Hikaru singing “You’re easy breezy and I’m Japanesey” back in 2005 — it’s a solid album on first listen. Maybe I’m being too critical about someone trying to break into another market by dumbing down their own culture, but she’s already got the RZA in her corner. She doesn’t need to prove anything. Feel free to switch up languages and drop the most obscure Okinawan slang! ROSALÍA’s success has proven that you can trust listeners to find their way to you.
Awich’s promotional video has a Japanese hip-hop expert explain, by way of establishing how monumental it is that RZA has produced this Japanese lady’s album, that the two most important acts in history were the Wu-Tang Clan and De La Soul. What good fortune for us, then, that this week saw the latter’s first new album in 9 years, Cabin In The Sky! We eating good, mi familia.
The knives are falling at my feet and I’m supposed to catch them by the handles. I don’t succeed. This is a free “immersive Predator experience” at a Bangkok cinema complete with atmospheric sets, film props, and physical challenges to prove you’re predator not prey. I fail the blade catch but nail the laser rifle and poison plant maze. The whole setup probably cost more than most Singaporean theaters make in a week, which is why we’ll never see anything like it back home. Small markets can’t justify this kind of spectacle when nobody goes to movies anymore.
The market size thing keeps coming up. Sushiro here is cheaper with bigger portions — the mackerel and tuna noticeably better than Singapore’s. But a local friend sent me to Katsu Midori instead, which claims to be Japan’s “number-one” conveyor belt sushi brand. The quality and generosity made me understand why Singaporeans fantasize about moving to Thailand. It’s not only the cost arbitrage; it’s having enough customers to support real competition and excellence at every tier.
I saw Predator: Badlands before the knife-catching humiliation. It’s not like any other Predator film — a young Yautja (Predator) is the protagonist, Elle Fanning tags along being delightful, and if you’ve been watching Alien: Earth you’ll catch a Weyland-Yutani reference. It’s almost too much fun for this franchise but I had a good time.
Then Now You See Me, Now You Don’t: schlocky heist nonsense with too many characters and Magic Castle consultants providing magician’s jargon nobody asked for. The absolute best trick here is Rosamund Pike’s South African accent. Watching her joyfully inhabiting the villain squares the ticket price.
Then Bugonia. Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone, remaking the Korean Save the Green Planet! Don’t look anything up, just watch it. I’ve avoided their recent work but Stone is so good here I felt like I was seeing her for the first time — not the competent actress I knew but someone operating on a completely different level. The film makes pretentious orchestral choices that annoyed me until the final sequence paired music and image so perfectly I forgave everything. That experience of an artist asking for your trust and then paying it back in spades is something special.
Which brings me to ROSALÍA.
I’ve never paid attention to Spanish-language music beyond casual exposure. Ricky Martin and Shakira. Didn’t even know how Latin American and European Spanish differed until this week. But her new album LUX kept appearing in my feeds and so I listened. Then I listened to MOTOMAMI. Both of them, over and over.
With this, I think she’s up there with Lorde, Billie Eilish, FKA twigs, Kendrick Lamar, Janelle Monáe — artists creating boundary-pushing work that questions everything while being unapologetically emotional. Maybe necessarily spiritual. LUX’s multilayered beauty and complexity feels like an impossible accomplishment. You don’t need to be a musician or watch her Zane Lowe interview to know it took years to create. You can hear it.
Then I found an angry essay calling her a colonizer. It claims she (and her fellow Spaniards) stole flamenco from Romani people, conveniently rebranded herself as Latina to enter the Latin Grammy awards, and now that ICE is deporting brown people, the evil ROSALÍA is finally revealing her true face: a White European plumbing the Christian-orchestral tradition with an album where she poses as a fair and chaste nun on the cover.
I found it very tiring, and wondered if policing cultural appropriation is just another form of gatekeeping. Because it turns out the Latin Grammys are open to all Spanish-language artists — more about language and tradition than ethnicity. But my real issue is this idea that curious minds have no right to explore and remix the world they encounter. It’s like saying Yo-Yo Ma shouldn’t play Bach because he’s Chinese-American, rather than celebrating how his contributions have enriched the canon. ROSALÍA’s reverence for these traditions is obvious in the music itself. I don’t need a sworn affidavit listing her inspirations to hear it.
When you discover something this good — something you should have found years ago — you don’t want to be told it’s problematic. You want to understand why it works, why it moves you, why someone else’s cultural exploration can become universal art. That’s what great artists do. They don’t stay in their lane. They take what they love from everywhere and make something new that can belong to everyone.
I woke up from one of those dreams where you need to go to the bathroom, so you visit a bathroom (in your dream) but it’s very unpleasant and almost in a state of dilapidation. For example, the sinks and toilets might be taped up to say “out of service”, or the tiles and floors are all ruined, and it’s clearly not a functioning toilet — but you gotta go! And then later that same day, someone mentioned having a recurring dream about a gross “squat toilet” in their childhood home, and a light clicked on in my head. Maybe everyone has these dreams, and it’s the brain’s way of saying “don’t pee now!” I’d bet this is a universal experience.
I learnt on Instagram that the singer D’Angelo passed away. He was only 51, and they say it was cancer, maybe pancreatic. That would make it at least two world-changing visionaries to go that way. Voodoo remains one of my favorite albums of all time, one of those that exists fully as a complete work — there’s nothing that can be added or removed, and even the idea of a super deluxe edition with remixes or outtakes feels unnecessary. It’s so loose and hard to pin down in terms of genre and style (he reportedly hated the “neo-soul” label and said he simply played Black music), that I don’t think I knew what I was listening to as I played it the first hundred times. He brought together everything I love about hip-hop, jazz, funk, soul, R&B, Prince’s ecstatic falsetto… into a single masterpiece. What’s also tragic is that he never released the promised follow-up to 2014’s Black Messiah and I don’t know how to feel about it being dug out of the vault and released someday.
Speaking of deaths, I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki has moved to the top of my reading list after its author Baek Se-Hee passed away this week at 35. News reports only say she died, but everyone is surely wondering if it was suicide on account of the book being about her journey with depression. It makes me wonder why suicides are often sidestepped in the news these days. They could at least say that it wasn’t? It just seems very weird to not address the question. Maybe they’re afraid of copycats, or there’s some assumption about shame on the side of the surviving family. I think for anyone who was so open in struggling with the decision, letting people know that they did what they wanted is actually kinda respectful.
Speaking of existential questions, my book club has elected to read Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot, which I was reluctant to revisit. The last time I read it was in secondary school — I read just about every science fiction novel, and probably all the Asimov ones, they had in the school library. As I feared, it doesn’t entirely hold up to the lofty memories I had of encountering The Three Laws of Robotics for the first time. The writing is a little, shall we say, 1940s? But that’s not to say this isn’t an absolute miracle, because it was written in the 1940s. It’s a compilation of short stories, each concerned with testing the boundaries and interpretation of the Laws in different ways, and basically highlighting the importance of rigorous prompt engineering! Reading this in 2025 is a trip. Asimov holds up a mirror to humanity more than anything, and we see people behaving rudely to AIs as if they were slaves or farm animals, but also others becoming attached to them as if they were “real”.
I’m also halfway through The Optimist, a biography of Sam Altman and his path to leading OpenAI. It’s as much about the Valley as it is about Altman, to be fair, and I’m learning a lot about the history of Y-Combinator and other companies along the way. I might have been influenced by all the hit pieces on Altman’s character, but I’m mostly skeptical about him being a force for good. An analyst’s note I heard on Bloomberg the other day went something like, “Sam has the power to destroy the global economy for the next decade, or to lead us to the promised land”. And as a mad prophet once said: “no one man should have all that power”.
Over the weekend we visited the National Museum where I saw a kid playing RealSports Volleyball on an Atari 2600. Way to make a guy feel old — I played that myself at his age and now it’s in a museum! He looked to be enjoying it, which just goes to show ancient software can still hold power over the lizard brain (as long as it hasn’t been exposed to Fortnite).
Then as we headed to the last stop, a new permanent exhibition called Singapore Odyssea, we discovered that we were too late and it had closed for the day (at 6pm). I wasn’t even particularly interested in it, but felt pretty bummed out that we missed it anyway. Then Kim pointed at a family and noted that I was having the same reaction as their kid, who was being consoled by his parents, “it’s not that we don’t want to go sweetheart, but it’s closed.” Hmph. People are always like, ‘stay young at heart’ and ‘don’t lose your childlike wonder’, but then they don’t want the grumpy tantrums that come with it!
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.
I’ve been with Gomo (budget SingTel) since last August, barely scratching my absurd 600GB/month plan. But after reading Michael’s blog post about switching telcos, I jumped back to Giga within the hour — they’ve finally fixed 5G support for iPhones, and it’s a 5G Standalone network (better) as well. Overall, this will save me a few bucks each month, drop me down to a still-generous 400GB limit, and give even more international data. This new trend of bundling roaming data is a boon for travel; I’ve managed to do without buying separate eSIMs on a few trips now. Until next year, then.
After finishing the Shinchan game last week, I started on a game that I fell in love with at first sight: Tiny Bookshop. It’s almost as good as I was hoping — you do run a tiny bookshop, stock its shelves, and recommend real book titles to fit people’s needs, but the core gameplay loop is quite simple. That’s not a bad thing — it just means this is the sort of cozy and casual game you play alongside something more involved and epic. One thing that did happen almost immediately: it gave me a hankering to do some reading.
I got tired of waiting for my book club to inch through Cloud Atlas and finished it on my own. It’s not as groundbreaking as I recall it feeling when I read it in 2013, but perhaps that’s because many of its moves have been copied in popular media since. It’s also a lot less sci-fi than I remembered, and much more like a genre writing exercise with several loosely (and one might argue unnecessarily) connected stories. In my Goodreads review, I called it a 3-star concept with 5-star execution.
Much more sci-fi: I also finished John Scalzi’s The Ghost Brigades, which I’ve been reading in parallel over the past couple of weeks. It’s a lot of fun, and a sequel that’s even better than the first book, Old Man’s War.
Speaking of old, Ryan Adams released a reworking of his seminal album, Heartbreaker, for its 25TH ANNIVERSARY (!?). Where did the time go? Incidentally, I came across that album the year it came out when a friend in the army recommended it. I remember borrowing his copy to burn a CD-R because I couldn’t afford to buy my own. I haven’t seen that guy in 20 years, but coincidentally this month, I discovered that Kim knows him through work and sent my regards. The original record was a lightning bolt: raw, full of yearning and reckless honesty. The new version sands it all down into a flaccid bore. He’s taken a hungry debut and embalmed it in strings and piano. Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now is an example of how to do this well. A few tracks survive the treatment, but most of it lands like one of those Disney live-action remakes: glossy, lifeless, and unnecessary.
Speaking of old, it was Peishan’s birthday this weekend and we hung out for a brunch that went from noon to evening. Nice day, no notes. The discussion touched on topics that have come up on ChannelNewsAsia programming recently — it turns out I watch too much of this — such as home-based businesses, which is incidentally where our coffee came from. I also thought for a brief moment that it might be fun to do a podcast from the future, recorded in an underground bunker after the fall of society, discussing found pop culture artifacts from our present day and guessing at the role they played in the apocalypse. Things like Labubus, Season 4 of Entourage, Magic: The Gathering, Blackpink, live-action Snow White. Maybe call it “Funintended Consequences”.
We also talked about the different approaches men and women (generalized) take to making podcasts. Men apparently are happy to record hours of conversation that’s interesting to nobody else, refusing to edit it down to only the useful bits; basically having no interest in the needs of their audiences, as seen in real life in a meeting room near you. I figured that this makes sense because men get together and record podcasts mainly as an excuse to hang out and shoot the shit with friends. At least, that’s been the motivation every time people I know say they should start one.
Speaking of old, I put on Apple Music’s “Classic Hip-Hop” radio station (algorithmic, not human hosted) expecting to only hear the usual 80s–90s boom bap, you know, the stuff I was too young to hear in real time, but oh my… there was some Jay-Z and Dr. Dre material from the 2000s mixed in there. We’re the classics now.
We lost a grand aunt at the close of last week, and attended her funeral and cremation on Tuesday. It got me thinking about qing ming, which is a day in early April (I had to look this up) where Chinese families traditionally visit their ancestors’ graves and do some neatening up. I have vague memories of being dragged along to do this as a kid, and even being allowed by my parents to skip school for it. I mostly remember the smell of burning joss sticks mixed with the dewy morning air and damp soil. For some reason we stopped going by the time I was a teen.
I talked about this with Cien and Peishan and they seemed to still be in touch with the practice of visiting graves, or in these days of diminishing real estate, a columbarium. If you asked me where my family members are buried or stored as ashes, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. I assume many of them have been scattered, either into local waters or some faraway favorite destination. Honestly, I like the idea of not being tethered to a single spot. If your spouse is still alive, maybe they’d like to keep you near, in some vessel at home. But if too many, or too few, people are sharing you then it’s better to be everywhere. A memory triggered by some food, place, or figure of speech. An algorithmically assembled photo collage tossed up by a personal computing companion one morning. A mention in some dusty book on a top shelf in a library, waiting to be seen by a future student or recycled into a supermarket receipt. I’d be fine with any of that.
Back to the funeral: it was held at the Mandai Crematorium and Columbarium, one of only three cremation facilities serving the whole of Singapore, and I was upset by how much it is in need of some design intervention. I wonder if any of the people managing the place have tried to look at the process with fresh eyes, or at least through the tired and grieving eyes of the people passing through it. Because they’d see so many moments that could be made kinder, more understanding, more dignified. The script could use a rewrite. Playing ‘Amazing Grace’ out of tinny $40 Bluetooth speakers in the final viewing halls is not it. For Chrissakes, please also remove the ugly MS Word-designed notices plastered on the viewing room windows, they obstruct the view of the caskets as they’re delivered (by industrial forklifts!) into the flames. I’m not exaggerating.
My shoes fell apart. They were the second pair of New Balance 990s to do so, doing nothing more strenuous than supporting my occasional walking about town. The last pair lasted three years; these only made it to two. At around S$300, these are supposed to be the best shoes that NB makes, but I’m beginning to think their ‘Made in the USA’ label is more a statement of liability than superiority these days. The Chinese-made models could probably survive a decade. Alas, with my big feet and aversion to swooshes, the 990s are some of the only shoes I’m comfortable in, so I’ll be buying yet another pair — online, too, since they stopped local distribution of the wide sizes.
Google upgraded Gemini with the Nano Banana image model that’s been trending on Twitter, and the bar for impressive generative AI has been raised again. It’s extraordinarily capable (and fast) at combining images with accuracy, as well as reimagining them in different styles and from different perspectives. A few months ago, Gemini was an also-ran, but maybe something’s shifted at Google and they’re an actual contender again. As much as I try to avoid Google services, I suppose I find them preferable to OpenAI and Meta. Take a look at the example above where I asked it to redraw a scene I photographed last month in Melbourne, but from above.
On Thursday I met two friend-couples, who I’ll call Mong and Jogina because it sounds amusing, for a rare weekday afternoon lunch where it was made abundantly clear that I’m behind the times for not having seen K-Pop Demon Hunters yet. Circumstantially, we’ve all got the time and flexibility to do these weekday catchups more often than once or twice a year, and maybe we should.
Aside: I did see the movie later, and it’s really good! My main gripe is the use of stuttering frames for the character animation, which worked fine in Sony’s Spiderverse films but break immersion here. The frame rates also seem uneven from scene to scene? Speaking of Sony, I’d hate to be the person who decided to sell this to Netflix for just $100M.
Afterwards, some of us went on to check out a nearby Crocs store (hear me out!) because a new collaboration had just launched: Animal Crossing! I just tagged along for a look, but became increasingly afraid as we got nearer that I would end up buying a pair. Kinda like how I bought the first iPad at Funan mall in 2010, that I absolutely wasn’t interested in… until I joined the line. Thankfully, my senses returned, and they only carried the smaller women’s sizes. God bless my big feet!
The book club is still reading Cloud Atlas, and at one point, a character mentions Carole King’s Tapestry album playing at a low volume in the background. I realized that I’ve known about this album forever but never heard it. So I put it on while reading. And boy did I know half the songs on this. I was beginning to wonder if it was a covers album, that’s how familiar they were. Incredible work, and a deserving #38 on Apple Music’s Top 100 Best Albums list.
And finally, a little gaming episode:
As previously mentioned, I’ve been playing the first Shinchan game on Nintendo Switch as a way of marking the summer — never mind that it’s always summer here in Singapore. It started well but I found it increasingly repetitive and uninteresting, and have been trying to just get it over with. The game features a time loop, where you replay the same week over. I spoke to Evan about it while I was on the second week, and he told me to hang on until the fourth week.
>> I was like, “there’s four fucking weeks??”
>> He said, “the real game BEGINS after week four!”
>> “How is that possible?”
Reader, I’ll tell you, I was ready to delete the game then. At the end of the third week, it seemed that I had all but completed the game. All my tasks were done. Then as the credits rolled, I texted him back:
>> “Dude, I’ve finished the game, what’s going on?”
>> And he says, “You haven’t, that’s just the beginning, get ready.”
>> “I don’t believe you, don’t mess with me!”
By this point, I had put in about 7.5 hours and couldn’t take it any more if this was just an extended prologue. There was just no way. The game was surely done! Then he asks me if I’ve done a certain thing yet, and I’m like:
>> “Uh yeah… long ago? In the first week?!”
Suddenly, I realized he’d spent the first three weeks mucking around and not doing any of the main game’s tasks, and only got started on the story just before time ran out. So yes, I had finished the game. Thank fuck for that.
In a week that didn’t feel like a lot of forward motion, I realized I spent it looking back on and revisiting old experiences to see if they’ve changed, or if maybe I have.
Upon my return from the UK back in 2005, I realized that it was extremely hard to find good fish and chips in Singapore. No one seemed to like splashing malt vinegar and lashing salt over everything; it was always tartar sauce and lemon slices. And then a little place called Smith’s opened at Balmoral Plaza and it was as close to the real thing as you could find here.
Earlier this year, it seemed like Smith’s would close down after nearly two decades, another victim of high rents, rising ingredient costs, and a weakened consumer. But the regulars cried out, social media amplified it, and they got a lease extension into the summer. In a recent turn for the better, the landlord capitulated and they got a good price on the place for another year. That’s about the time I started seeing more advertising from them on Instagram.
You can guess what happened next (for someone who used to make ads, I’m surprisingly susceptible to suggestion). I dragged my parents down for dinner — my first visit since 2018, according to my records on Swarm. Yes, I was part of the problem, but here in Singapore I don’t exactly feel like eating it every week the way I once did! Prices are indeed a lot higher than they used to be; S$30 for a cod and chips stings like lemon in the eyes, but I don’t blame Smith’s. The Guardian made a whole video showing things aren’t much better back in the UK. The food was good, by the way, save for some watery curry sauce that I wouldn’t bother with again. I know it looks a little light on the chips above, but we all left satisfied.
As promised last week, I threw caution to the wind and upgraded my Vision Pro to the developer beta, mostly motivated by the need for a more realistic Persona. And it really is a huge upgrade in resolution and fidelity from exactly the same scanning process. There’s even a pair of glasses in there that looks just like mine. Disappointingly, the UI looks exactly the same, and neither the new design language nor the Liquid Glass material have been implemented. This is a curious state of affairs: all other platforms have a new look and feel that were purportedly inspired by visionOS, but they’re now “further ahead” than visionOS itself, which risks looking dated with more opacity and frosting. I sure hope this isn’t because glass elements don’t actually hold up in a mixed reality setting. I can see how the bright chromatic aberrations might actually be too distracting when they’re 8-feet high in your living room.
One of the earliest apps that I installed upon getting my Vision Pro was Explore POV. It’s a library of immersive (16K, 180º, 3D) videos shot in some of the world’s wildest and most beautiful environments. Think forest trails in New Zealand, blue Caribbean waters, the Swiss Alps, but also the Eiffel Tower. As the name suggests, they’re first-person POV and mounted on someone actually hiking the mountain’s edge and so on. Depending on your relationship with heights and VR motion, the effect can range from thrilling to nauseating. When it first came out, there were maybe just three videos on offer, and I didn’t really take to it because of all the other apps and content I wanted to check out first.
I went back into the app this week after hearing that they were running a summer sale, and decided to pay S$50 for six months of access. They’ve leveled up their video production game, and the latest videos are shot with Blackmagic URSA Cine cameras. Their crew are actively shooting around the world and there’s even a community poll for people to vote where they should go next (I voted for Nepal). It’s third-party stuff like this that we really need to see succeed for the long-term success of the platform, and unlike some casual iPad game ported to 3D, it really shows off the magical qualities of this device.
Thanks to my book club voting to tackle David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas next, I’m breaking three of my usual rules. One, I don’t really make time to re-visit books I’ve already read, but given that the last time was in 2014, I’m interested to see if it’ll feel different now. My memory of it is roughly “very good, sort of like The Fountain (2006), but also claustrophobic and harrowing somewhere in the middle”. Two, I usually cheat at book club and read the whole book at once rather than stopping where agreed each week. I thought it’d be nice to experience it at the same time as everyone else for a change, which leads to my third broken rule: Only reading one book at a time. Since Cloud Atlas is going to take about six weeks, I’ll have to read another book in parallel if I’m going to read anything else at all.
I just finished Nick Harkaway’s Tigerman, which is such an odd duck I don’t know how to tell you about it. It’s only my second book of his that I’ve read, and so different in setting and language from Gnomon, which I also enjoyed. He blends real-world references with imagined details that create a sense of — not fantasy exactly, but unreality. Within that space, absurdist humor sits comfortably alongside themes of family, colonialism, mental health, geopolitics, and bursts of comic-book action. 4 stars.
The year has so far seen a lot of exciting music releases, and there are even more to come. I’m really hyped for the next few drops from the “Legend Has It” series. The albums from Raekwon and Ghostface Killah have already dropped, but new material from De La Soul? Nas and DJ Premier? Oh my.
Despite (or because of?) all the great stuff coming out, I feel like I haven’t spent enough time listening to music this year. Maybe it’s the lack of commuting time, which is where I would normally get to put an entire album on and listen closely. So it’s also taken me from January till now to finish BLixTape #6, the latest in my poorly named series of “currently listening to” playlists. Hopefully the next few will be quarterly. Here it is on Apple Music.
In Melbourne at the moment, getting some relief from the heat of summer which seems to be getting worse with every year for no reason anyone can see at all! There’s no plan, just chilling at cafes, bars, and hanging with some friends for a few days.
Our friends in the city have built an incredible home for their three kids, rabbits, chickens, and visiting mothers-in-law. And for now, us as well. It’s the sort of setup that you can almost never find in Singapore, not without incurring generational debt, and it almost justifies all the dreaming Singaporeans do over a retirement in Australia. Almost. Because those people are surely forgetting to consider one crucial detail: hairy spiders the size of your hand.
I’ve brought no camera besides my iPhone. I’ve got my Kobo and iPad to read and draw, but left the Switch 2 at home. It feels nice having less stuff to keep track of, and I never understood the attraction of playing video games on holiday anyway. Why would you escape reality only to… escape reality again?
Before leaving, I met Brian for beer and ramen — the former at an Irish pub in Singapore that was entirely populated with middle-aged white men when I walked in. When the bartender told the waiter who to send the pints of Guinness to, I heard him call me “the Chinese man”, which is a description that would normally never help you in Singapore.
We talked a bit about Bosch because I’d recommended the Amazon TV series to him awhile back and he’s now enjoyed all seven seasons of the mainline show. He did, however, notice that season 7 felt a little different (I personally can’t remember), and found out that some network suits came in at that time and tried to make changes to the show. Right after, the series moved to the Freevee channel and became Bosch Legacy, where the vibes became noticeably different again and the supporting cast changed. I still love them all though.
And now there’s a new 10-episode Bosch spinoff series, Ballard, starring Maggie Q. I’ve yet to start on it, and while I want it to be good in the same ‘LA Noir’ way that Bosch was, I gotta be realistic and prepare for a load of network exec bullshit.
On the flight over, I finished reading Old Man’s War, a very entertaining John Scalzi sci-fi novel about signing up for an intergalactic war at the age of 75; read Blake Crouch’s Summer Frost, a solid short story about AI that could easily become a film; skimmed the popular financial self-help book Die With Zero; and started on Nick Harkaway’s Tigerman without knowing a thing about it but it’s already going well.
sangsara.net 