sangsara.net

Tag: Music

  • Week 12.24

    Week 12.24

    If you’re reading this on the web, you might notice that this site is now running WordPress’s new ‘Twenty Twenty Four’ theme, with a more traditional blog-like homepage (it has a sidebar) linking to single-column post pages. Navigation remains unchanged, but typography and minor details are improved.

    I’m happier with this than I was with the blocky grid of last year’s ‘Twenty Twenty Three’ theme, because this comes with the freedom to put up shorter posts without Titles or Featured Images. Over the years I’ve gone back and forth on microblogging here, or having all tweets mirrored here, but it’s never stuck. But at least I have the option again, especially since I haven’t properly posted on Twitter in a year and most people I want to follow are still scattered across Threads, Bluesky, Nostr, and Mastodon.

    ===

    We celebrated a little life milestone this week with a nature walk, a “Gold Class” viewing of Dune Part Two, a nice bottle of French Malbec, and a perfect Canadian pork chop with a side of the butteriest mashed potatoes. A mix of simple and simpler pleasures.

    I’ll expand: We were recently in New Zealand, and took a couple of walks in nature reserves. I’ve never bothered to attempt the same in Singapore because it’s ridiculously hot, but visiting the Rifle Range Nature Park in West Singapore was interesting for the stark contrast offered versus our recent experiences. Every step on its paths is sure footed by design; suspended walkways take you through the forest without trampling plants, and they’re so convenient all the monkeys we saw were using them as well, rather than walking in the dirt. You get the sense that everything is regularly inspected and all dangers have been scrubbed. It reflects the usual criticism of Singapore being a theme park, which is only a problem because living in a safe environment breeds complacency. At several points on the easiest routes at Te Mata Park in New Zealand, slipping off a path and tumbling into a ravine was a genuine possibility. I wonder what other metaphorical tumbles Singaporean life has not prepared me for.

    The new Dune is as superb as all reviews have indicated, and I could not imagine rating it any less than 5 stars in Letterboxd. The art direction and photography are flawless, and it looks twice as expensive as it is. Never once while watching did my brain check out and think, “oh, that’s CGI”. The only change I would dare suggest is Austin Butler’s casting, as he’s not anywhere as menacing as the movie treats him. His character is already a nepo baby who just enjoys killing defenseless slaves and servants, and Butler didn’t bring the presence to suggest he’s also one of the most dangerous people in a universe full of freaks.

    Another 5-star film for us this week was Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days (2023), which won a Best Actor award at Cannes last year for Koji Yakusho’s nearly wordless performance. I enjoyed it tremendously as a loving tribute to the city of Tokyo and its toilets (really), a meditation on repetition and routine, an ode to proud and purposeful work, and a parable about how avoiding the messiness of life might obscure living itself. The soundtrack is a Gen X dream. Visually, it’s filled with beautiful everyday moments so mundane as to be overlooked by most of us going about our daily busyness. The way all its themes and music choices come together in the film’s final minutes is worth half a star alone.

    Continuing the theme of Japanese films about appreciating life, we watched Living (2022), the transposed-to-England remake of Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952). I’ve never seen the original, but it’s now high on my list. Bill Nighy is fantastic in the role of a civil servant who learns he’s dying and wonders what it’s all about, and plays his deconstruction with impressive vulnerability. I looked at the trailer for Ikiru afterwards, and while Takashi Shimura’s performance in the same role is regarded as iconic, it was a little theatrical and may not have aged as well.

    Anyhow, the message in both these films is timeless: stop working so hard at meaningless things, smell the roses (or watch the shadows cast by leaves — ‘komorebi’ in Japanese, as the end credits of Perfect Days tells us), and make a difference to another human being’s life.

    Take a little forest bathing break with this video I captured.

    ===

    Additional media activity:

    • We finished Season 1 of Below Deck Down Under at last, and I was glad to learn that Captain Jason and Chief Stew Aesha return for Season 2, which we now must see. The leadership and teamwork these two have put Captain Lee and Kate of the mainline series to bottomless shame.
    • The new Call of Duty mobile version of Warzone has finally come out, after being delayed for about a year. As a somewhat devoted player of the original Call of Duty Mobile title, I’ve been waiting with very high expectations for this. Unfortunately, the launch has been a bit of a dud, with many complaints from the worldwide community. For one, Android devices seem incapable of running it well. On my iPhone 15 Pro Max, it runs at peak performance and the graphics are truly console quality; I was running around maps that I knew instinctively, but my brain was exploding from how different and detailed everything looked. Sadly, the phone runs hot and it drained the better part of my battery in maybe an hour. I’ll wait to see if they improve anything before calling it quits.
    • The new Kacey Musgraves album, Deeper Well, is not bad at all. It even has a song called Anime Eyes which drops a line about a “Miyazaki sky”. Very weird times we live in.
    • I started using a new social app that tries to be a Letterboxd for music: Musicboard. Unfortunately, it doesn’t automatically log/scrobble your listening activity, so rating music and broadcasting your taste is a manual affair. You also can’t start playing an album directly in Apple Music from within the app — it only supports Spotify at the moment.

  • Week 11.24

    Week 11.24

    Kim was away for work this week so that meant a return to pandemic routine for me: I worked from home every day, mostly staying in our ‘office’ room hopping on calls, flopping from chair to couch, picking up my Playdate* to kill a minute here and there, scrolling feeds (#WhereIsKateMiddleton), and mostly eating simple, low-cost, not entirely healthy meals.

    I did, however, pay attention to the bottle of olive oil in our kitchen, which is now past its best-before date, and looked into what a good replacement would be. In the process, I watched some YouTube videos on the supposed benefits of having two or more tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil a day, which can be summed up as reducing your risk of dying from several awful diseases by up to 19%. One video made a case for buying the better stuff thusly: imagine you’re visiting a friend’s home; you’d typically bring along a bottle of wine that costs between $20–30 (people who show up empty handed are so weird, right!?), which will be drunk within the first hour and followed by the opening of another bottle, and maybe another — that’s fair and normal, so why is it so hard to pay the same amount for a bottle of olive oil that you’ll use for months?

    That sold me, and I’m pledging to only use quality oil from now on. I was already aware of most of these benefits and how seed oils are comparatively terrible, but the comparison to a bottle of wine really hit it home for me and I don’t see why anyone wouldn’t spend a few extra bucks for tastier, healthier stuff if they could. Pro tip: try drinking a spoonful on its own, and see how much of that prickly, peppery sensation you get in the back of your throat. That’s a sign of the polyphenol content, which gives the antioxidant effects you want.

    At nights I accomplished shockingly little of the movie marathoning I’d imagined for my bachelor week. I saw two episodes of Red Queen on Amazon Prime Video, a series based on a “Spanish literary phenomenon” involving a woman with an IQ of 242 who helps the police catch serial killers in between psychotic episodes. And that’s about it? The rest of my viewing time was spent on YouTube watching Bloomberg, CNBC, and video podcasts over lunch.

    When Kim got back, we tried to make plans for Dune Part 2, but couldn’t find a time slot that worked, and did you know IMAX tickets are S$50 now? Even the nearest theater to us is charging nearly S$40 for their premium “Gold Class” seats, which gave me pause to wonder if we should just wait for it to come out on streaming.

    And then we watched Oppenheimer at home, on our nearly 10-year-old HDTV (that’s right, no 4K or HDR), which is totally not the way Nolan imagined. Despite the technical limitations of our screening, it was an extremely cinematic and immersive experience, and made me think some things are definitely worth the IMAX. So, maybe Dune next weekend.

    Music was just as neglected as the other arts, and the only new album I heard through was Ariana Grande’s latest: Eternal Sunshine. I didn’t register a single word, but it’s actually fantastic background R&B. That’s not a slight! It sounds good, doesn’t do anything crazy, and after a few more listens I’ll probably get into it for real.

    However, I am listening to Chick Corea’s Now He Sings, Now He Sobs (1968) as I write this, if you want something a little more challenging/rewarding.

  • Week 10.24

    Week 10.24

    Last week, I mused on the need for Super Deluxe reissues of Counting Crows’ albums, only to discover that August and Everything After had already received such an edition, with a Dolby Atmos mix, and it was already in my library. Now please do Recovering the Satellites!

    Staying on the subject of music, while watching an episode of True Detective one night, there was a scene where someone flipped through a stack of vinyls in their living room and took one out to play, at which point I paused the show to ask aloud, “why isn’t there an iPad app that will replicate that experience?” I’ve been wanting this for a while, and so this was not a new exclamation. Streaming services are great and all, but I remember the days of having cassettes and CDs, and how the tactile, spatial ritual of flipping through them, selecting one, and loading it into a player was more satisfying than typing into a search field and hitting Enter.

    The app I want would mimic this by letting me set aside a small subset of albums from my larger Apple Music library and display them on a virtual shelf with large cover art, and I would put this on an iPad positioned near our HomePod. The key is this smaller stack of “heavy rotation” picks or favorite classic albums, so I can stand there and choose something to put on in the living room. Bonus points for skeuomorphism: dragging a metaphorical disc onto a spindle would be nice. Apple is rumored to be working on an iPad dock that is also a HomePod, or a HomePod with a screen, much like less audio-centric models already offered by Amazon and Google, but I fear today’s designers will go for direct over delightful.

    If this idea doesn’t resonate with you at all, it’s okay; I think it’s just a specific millennial/xennial urge to respect and protect the album format. I enjoy singles, YouTube-only bootlegs, and melodic fragments on TikTok just as much as the zoomers, but I’ll listen to whole albums till I die. A great album takes advantage of the larger canvas to explore ambitious concepts or stories. It’s the difference between an article and a zine.

    I decided to look through the App Store again, and found that two apps I already had on my iPhone could potentially do the job: Albums: Music Shortcuts, and Longplay. I also found one called Albums – album focused player, but I decided to go with the ones I had. After some tests, I found that a recent 2.0 update to Longplay (which I’d bought long ago but ended up never really using) added support for custom “collections”, which lets me set up this smaller shelf of select LPs, because its default mode is to show all of your albums. And it syncs over iCloud, so I can update my choices at any time from any device. Longplay’s website is here.

    Dusting off my neglected first-gen 12.9” iPad Pro for the purpose, I now have this set up going and it’s… not bad. Longplay’s interface isn’t exactly what I envisioned, and I’d like it to remember that I always want to play out of the same HomePod, but it works for now. The aging (aged?) A9X chip struggles a little to scroll smoothly and filter my huge library in real time, but I was amazed to find that it supports iPadOS 16 — i.e. last year’s OS works on an 8-year old tablet.

    I still remember the launch of this iPad Pro because I was in Tokyo on holiday at the time, and was suffering a bout of ankle pain for a day or two. On November 12, 2015, the morning of the iPad’s launch, I hobbled down to the Ginza Apple Store near where I was staying, and the excitement in the room was incredible. There was a calligraphy demonstration using the new Apple Pencil and a Japanese painting app. Nerds young and old jostled to pick it up. The sheer size of it seemed audacious and unreal compared to the 9.7” iPads we’d been used to.

    Seeing it held in the hands like a magazine, with an insane Retina resolution that surpassed any laptop of that time, the potential for it to be a replacement for printed materials struck me more than ever. This was back when everyone thought the iPad would be a great platform for publishing, and almost every large company spent millions trying to design the right UX and business model for digital versions of Wired, The Economist, Vogue, or what have you. But they were often bloated, difficult to navigate, and often a worse reading experience than paper. I have some ideas on why this didn’t work out, but anyway now we’re just back to good ol’ PDFs and websites.

    I walked out in the cold air thinking, “Well, that was cool, but I’m not going to buy one.” I struggled down the road and sat down for a coffee in the now-closed Monocle Cafe in the Yurakucho Hankyu Men’s department store, followed by lunch at Sushizanmai, and I must have thought it over and changed my mind (surprise), because by 11 PM that night I was taking photos of my new iPad Pro back in the hotel room.

    Did I ever make full use of it? I remember the Apple-centric analyst Horace Dediu reviewing it as a new kind of ‘desktop computer’, owing to its power and reduced portability. I never really brought it to work and used it as a note-taking surface like I imagined. In fact, I never bought another 12.9″ iPad Pro again, always opting for the smaller version whenever I upgraded. For a number of years this one served as our bedroom TV (really a bed TV because that’s how we used it: propped up on some blankets), until it became prone to shutting down abruptly as the battery gave out. It gives me joy to see it finding a new purpose in the home as a hi-fi system.

    ===

    Media activity:

    • As mentioned, we’ve been watching the new True Detective and I agree with the internet that its tone and storyline are a very odd fit for the anthology series, and I’m not sure it really belongs. Supposedly it was pitched to HBO as a new original mystery show, but they asked for it to be changed so it could be a new season of TD. What a weird decision: it felt like supernatural survival horror at times. It was mostly good to see Jodie Foster at work.
    • Fiona Apple is back! Sort of. She features in a song with Iron & Wine called All in Good Time, from their upcoming album, Light Verse. You can listen to it now, though.
    • The new Bleachers is finally out too, and I’ve heard it through once on headphones but wasn’t super in love with it. Will have to give it more time.
    • Jack Antonoff (and Taylor Swift, who is performing her final shows here this weekend) appear in this wonderful portrait of Michael Stipe in the New York Times a few months ago that I only discovered now. R.E.M. was hands-down my favorite band as a teenager, and I loved learning about what he’s been up to, and how our idols in their old age can be such weird, vulnerable, out-of-touch, sincere human beings who are still discovering themselves, still figuring out how to live, struggling to do the work that matters. Here’s a gift link to the article.
    • The new TV adapation of Shogun has been getting so much buzz, and I have fond (if blurry) memories of the 1980 miniseries starring Richard Chamberlain, which must have aired as reruns when I was a kid, so I’ve been excited for it. Episode 1 did not disappoint; it looks like a big budget film and has non-histrionic performances from its Japanese cast. Do you think someone tells them to tone it down when they work on American productions? Because most Japanese dramas I watch are so over-the-top as to puncture the fourth wall like a gaijin’s arm through a shogi door.
    • We still haven’t seen Dune Part II, but decided to watch a 20-min recap on YouTube instead of sitting through the first movie again in preparation. I must be a terrible media reader because I swear I didn’t make sense of Paul’s visions the way I was meant to. I just recall it was the first time I’d been in a theater in nearly two years, just as Covid was unwinding, and being swept up in the sheer visual experience of seeing the world in motion. Because Dune was always more about Westwood Studios’ real-time strategy game on PC to me than the book, David Lynch film, or Syfy series, it’s Arrakis itself and the houses at war that I feel nostalgia for.

  • Week 9.24

    Week 9.24

    I finally got my hands on a Playdate! This is the tiny yellow handheld gaming device that was announced by Panic Inc. back in 2019 and came out in 2022. Longtime Mac users will know Panic as a software development company that in recent years started to dabble in games publishing — Firewatch was their first, followed by the smash hit Untitled Goose Game — and the Playdate is their first foray into making hardware. Which we all know is 1) hard, and 2) what people who are serious about software do. In this case, the industrial design came by way of the very trendy outfit, Teenage Engineering, who can hardly do any wrong and certainly didn’t slip here*.

    It’s a tiny little thing, about the size of a Post-It note and about as thick as an iPhone minus the camera bump. The screen is designed for young eyes and has no lighting: it’s purely reflective and relies on ambient light, so you won’t be playing this in bed late at night. Did I mention the screen is in black and white? Keeping things simple is exactly what a little thing like this should do, but it adds a unique input method with a little crank on the side; a gimmick so obvious and versatile it feels like something Nintendo would have done on a Game Boy in some parallel universe. Everything feels solid and extremely well put together, as it should for US$199.

    You might think this is a niche luxury retro gaming gadget, and while there are chiptunes, the software experience is very contemporary. Fluid animations, an eShop with elevator music à la Wii menus, and a catalog of modern, inventive indie games by luminaries such as Zach Gage, Chuck Jordan, and Shaun Inman. Included with your purchase are 24 original games that automatically unlock at a rate of two each week, keeping the thing fresh long enough to form a habit. After that, there’s a whole online catalog to shop from. Have a look to see if this is your sort of thing, but the first two games (Casual Birder and Whitewater Wipeout) from “Season 1” are promising and I’m eagerly waiting to see what’s next.

    When the Playdate was first released, I didn’t buy one because they didn’t ship to Singapore, but my friend and colleague Jose ordered two through a freight forwarding service, so he’s had his for a while. He offered to sell the other one to me, but I declined. My stance on companies snubbing Singapore with their shipping policies is simple: if you’re not selling here officially, you’re not getting my money. That’s why I never had an OG iPhone and don’t have an Apple Vision Pro or Steam Deck.

    * I put an asterisk above because it’s worth pointing out here that the intersection of millennials who love gaming and millennials who are drawn to Teenage Engineering products is probably very large, with Jose and myself squarely in it.

    Then a couple of weeks ago, I got an email from them to say they finally worked through their very long production and shipping backlog, so if you ordered one now you’d get it almost immediately, plus sales were open to many more countries, including Singapore. And this is ironic because the thing is manufactured in Malaysia, prominently stated on the back of the device, which is just a short drive away.

    So far my only problem with it is that I may have gotten a dud battery, or it needs some cycling before it lasts as long as it’s supposed to. File this one under Brandon’s Battery Curse: it happens (objectively!) on nearly every device I’m excited to buy, and I end up getting a replacement or just learning to live with it. It’s happened with iPhones, iPads, headphones, fitness trackers, you name it. Maybe I just notice it more than most and it drives me crazy.

    ===

    Ever since I got back from New Zealand, I’ve been thinking a lot about fragrances. I think this happened because I was mindlessly shopping at duty-free stores at airports on both sides and started looking for a good deal. I’ve been wondering if it’s finally time to freshen up my cologne collection, so to speak. I currently use just a handful (three, really) and never really think about buying new fragrances except for once every three or four years when it’s finally time to throw them out and get some new ones in.

    If you’ve been to Fragrantica.com, you’ll know what a terrible rabbit hole this can be. Instead of buying something really expensive, I decided to scratch the itch by blind buying a bottle of Davidoff Cool Water Intense EDP, because I always wanted the original Cool Water as a teenager. This one is a new fragrance altogether, characterized by green mandarin and coconut nectar notes, and is quite aggressive and long-lasting. Haters say it has nothing to do with Cool Water, but I think the idea is that it’s in the same conceptual territory — warm summery vibes, casual like a linen shirt, worn poolside at a four-star resort. It’s not bad!

    Unfortunately for me, the itch was not fully scratched, and I’ve still been looking. I’m keen on this idea of revisiting classic fragrances from the 90s with new incarnations, and it seems the industry is too: Acqua di Gio (there’s a new EDP formulation), CK All (a sort of midpoint between One and Be), and Issey Miyake’s L’eau d’Issey Pour Homme EDT (no change here, still the original). Is this a mini midlife crisis? Will it end with me smelling like a teenager?

    ===

    Media activity:

    • We finally finished Season 1 of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters on Apple TV+ and I’m gonna do a Hideo Kojima-style review here and leave it at that.
    • We also finished Season 1 of Mr. And Mrs. Smith on Amazon Prime Video and really enjoyed it. It’s the rare 8-episode season that felt like the perfect length, given the creative choice to show most of their missions as excerpts and focus on the spaces between.
    • I read on William Gibson’s Twitter account that a Neuromancer TV series is underway, and it will be only 10 episodes long. Seeing as Neuromancer was the blueprint for so much of what came after with The Matrix and other cyberpunk-indebted stories, I’m low-key hoping they’re not very faithful to the source and use this as an opportunity to go big with some fresh futurism, and draw up a new world the likes of which we’ve never seen before on screen, like Spielberg did with Minority Report. Spend that Cupertino money!
    • In line with my olfactory return to the 90s, I’ve been listening to Counting Crows again. They released a new album of two live performances from ’93 and ’94, entitled Feathers In My Hand, which has brought me back. This is a band that deserves some 20th anniversary or super deluxe edition remasters!

  • Week 7.24

    Week 7.24

    We landed in Auckland, New Zealand Monday morning and immediately flew down to Wellington, and we’ve been driving our way back north for the past few days. I’m currently writing this while sitting beside a Buddha’s head in a poolside garden, in a small new hotel outside of Rotorua.

    Four hours ago, I was parasailing above Lake Taupō in my usual urban uniform of jeans and a t-shirt — if you know me, you’ll know that I don’t sign up for even remotely dangerous things, especially over large bodies of water; in the cringey words of Below Deck repeat charter guest, Dean Slover, I said “homie don’t play that!” But Kim convinced me to, and we survived. They played Maroon 5 songs on the boat going out, and so by the time we were lifted some 50 meters in the air to float in blissful silence high above the town, I was having a good time. Lake Taupō is a volcanic caldera that’s nearly the same size as Singapore, but because it’s all flat you can just about see from one end to the other from up there. New Zealand challenges the city dweller’s sense of scale like all good nature vacations.

    Since leaving Wellington, the road trip portion of the trip so far has been mostly measured in burgers, fish and chips, and winery stops, specifically in the Martinborough and Hawke’s Bay areas where the tastings have been revealing of each company’s nature: some overly commercial and strictly scripted, versus others more informal, just going on vibes the only way they know. I think the difference shows up in the wine, with wineries in the latter category being more playful with flavor, more likely to put better stuff in a low-priced lineup. But I would say that, as someone who’s now had a crash course in holding up his glass against the light to observe the color.

    I’m now lying in bed on Sunday evening having just finished the last leg of our driving tour, which took us to the famous Whangamata Beach bordering the Bay of Plenty, and Hunua Falls, where we did another little nature walk and met a nice dog and helped its owners get a photo together with their iPad. Old people really carry full-sized iPads around on hikes to use as large-screened cameras. Mind blown.

    A couple of observations on this road trip. So much roadkill! Easily a hundred little bundles of fur spotted spread across tarmac just today alone. Some decayed and washed away, little more than stains. Some still fresh, bloating, bleeding. We avoided making contact with all but a couple. A ritual evolved, mainly to stay alert but also out of pity for these bunnies or squirrels(?): upon spotting one, I would put my palms together and say “rest in peace”, and Kim would follow with “in all your pieces”.

    FM radio is still not a great experience; it’s a wonder how people survived on it for so long. Fortunately I had a lot of downloaded music on my iPhone, which also navigated us with offline maps. CarPlay is excellent, and Apple Maps was good enough for nearly every leg of the journey. We listened to Lorde’s albums, of course, as well as the Sunkissed Summer playlist she compiled on Apple Music, and other New Zealand legends like Bic Runga and Crowded House. At one point I put on some J Dilla but learnt that rhythmic music you can sort of nod and zone out to is NOT what a driver wants over long winding roads.

    As I mentioned last week, this itinerary was drawn up with ChatGPT and my custom GPT, AI-tinerary, but we had to fact-check everything and plot the route on a map before making bookings. It’s held up well so far, with a couple of impromptu detours and chance discoveries along the way. For one, we did not realize that while passing through Napier for one night that we’d be there for the Art Deco-obsessed city’s annual Art Deco Festival, the first one they’ve been able to hold since 2020. Vintage cars were out in force, there was a Warbirds air show, and a free concert on the beach. It was packed, every restaurant was booked out. We ended up eating dinner out of a food truck by the sea. I asked ChatGPT “what’s happening in Napier tonight?” and it confidently replied, “I couldn’t find any events tonight.” At the risk of sounding like a broken record, these tools truly are starting points and aids right now, and you must resist the idea that they are final answers.

    I’ll post the final version of our itinerary next week when we’re done, in case it helps anyone looking to do the same.

    All photos were taken by either a Ricoh GR III or iPhone 15 Pro Max. The extra 120mm equivalent reach of the iPhone came in very handy, but there’s no beating the image quality of the GR when it comes to landscapes. The light was so good that some photos taken with the Standard color profile, straight to JPEG, were surprisingly “finished” out of the camera. This year’s iPhone still wants to make everything bright and sharp, which fails to capture atmosphere and preserve highlights. I edited photos daily as quickly and lazily as possible, using RNI Films for most of it — at some point they added the ability to save edits on top of original files (non-destructively), which is a key consideration I look for in photo apps. I’ve also started using RAW Power again late in the trip, which is making me want to go back and redo some edits. Maybe on the flight home.

  • Week 5.24

    Week 5.24

    Vision Pro and AirPods Max hypotheses

    Apple Vision Pro is out in the wild, and I’ve gone on the expected rollercoaster — from “of course I’ll get one, but only when it’s officially released here”, to “nah I think I’ll wait till the second iteration”, to the usual FOMO and wanting one as soon as possible.

    But it might not be such a terrible idea to wait for the second iteration, if one believes that it’ll come some time in the middle of 2025. Why then? I looked at how quickly second-generation products were released in Apple’s recent history, and it ranged from 11 months (iPad) to a year and five months (Apple Watch). I think a 12-month release cycle is plausible, and putting out new ones at WWDC makes sense as they’ll want to emphasize the visionOS platform for developers.

    Which might then suggest the global Vision Pro rollout this year will start in June. So international early adopters will be putting down at least $3,500 to use it for a year before they need to upgrade. And we know that selling a first generation AVP on the pre-owned market is 1) a tough job, if the second generation irons out obvious wrinkles, and 2) not something early adopters want to do anyway, given the sentimental value of keeping your ‘first spatial computing device’.

    While we’re out here predicting future releases, I think I’ve cracked why the supply chain analysts believe an AirPods Max update is coming this year with USB-C and new colors, but without an upgrade to the H2 chips (currently only found in the AirPods Pro) which enable Conversation Awareness and Adaptive Audio modes. The reaction to this rumor has generally been: “that would be a lame update to the AirPods Max after four years”, but okay what if it’s not an update? What if it’s a new variant model?

    Specifically, it could be the lower-cost, lower-weight “sport” model with different materials and/or a swappable headband that was rumored to be “coming soon” back when the AirPods Max first released. Everyone assumed it would be released a year after, but because it’s been so long, we’ve forgotten that was even supposed to be a product. A cheaper non-Max/Pro headphone model without the latest features would make the same sort of sense as the iPhone 5c, which had all the features of its premium predecessor — but funner. Then the real AirPods Max update can come in 2025, and honestly, if you’re making them well, five years between headphones is the right cadence.

    Electric toothbrushes

    It’s been about two weeks since I started using an electric toothbrush again, and the difference in efficacy and convenience is so notable that I don’t know why I stopped when my last one broke during Covid. There are so many essentially disposable models on the market now in the S$20–30 price range that I didn’t see how the S$200+ models justified themselves. Bluetooth app connectivity? It seemed ludicrous.

    To my untrained eyes, there were two basic designs: an elongated brush head that vibrates (this is the dominant kind), and a small circular head that rotates back and forth. I used an Oral-B one of the latter sort for a little while once but it hurt my gums and I ended up throwing it out. I decided to give it another go with an Oral-B Pro 2 model, but with an “ultrathin” head with gentler bristles this time, and haven’t had any problems. It cost me about S$75, presumably on account of having a rechargeable battery and dock, and I was beginning to think I should have just gone for the Pro 1 model that runs on AA batteries and costs S$30.

    But of course it’s not that simple. After more research, I discovered there are actually three categories of motorized tooth cleaning devices: electric, sonic, and ultrasonic. The Pro 1 has fewer vibrations per second than the Pro 2, but both probably still fall into the electric class, which is to say they clean with brush movements only, and don’t produce sonic vibrations that interact with fluids and help to knock plaque right off your teeth. Oral-B now has a range of toothbrushes called iO that combine an oscillating head with sonic vibrations, 3D teeth tracking AI (no, really), and you guessed it, they cost S$300–400.

    ===

    Media updates

    • I’ve never been into Grimes’s music because the few songs/videos I’ve encountered were awful, and of course her association with Elon Musk is a major turnoff. But I saw a tweet saying her breakthrough album “Visions” was turning 10 years old, with words to the effect of it being so great that the rest of her career was doomed to never top it — so of course I had to check it out. I’m pleased to report that it’s actually pretty good, maybe even great. For an electronic album, I didn’t expect it to sound so influenced by R&B? This whole separating the art from the artist thing is pretty wild.
    • That whole album was recorded in Garageband, and while I’m no musical talent, I wrangled it this weekend to finally clean up and join up the bootleg recording I made with my iPhone’s Voice Memos app back in Chiang Mai in December. It was 50 mins out of an hour-long solo piano set played by Joshua Lebofsky, amidst cafe noises of steam wands, fridges slamming shut, and people chatting. It starts super strong, with him singing an uncommon medley of Tears For Fears’ Everybody Wants to Rule the World and Lionel Richie’s Easy. I’m very happy to finally have it in my music library, ready to be revisited at any time.
    • I had a cab driver one night this week who sang along to songs on the radio. He was no great singer, but I loved the joy of it. The station miraculously queued up three great songs in a row — the aforementioned Tears For Fears song, followed by Sheryl Crow’s cover of The First Cut is the Deepest, and Phil Collins’s In the Air Tonight — which I remarked upon, and we got to talking. He told me he was really into Tears For Fears back in the day, and that they asked Phil Collins to play drums on their song Woman in Chains, wanting some of that magic touch. I promised him I’d listen to it again over the weekend, and I did.
    • It was decided (in my brain) that Easy might be my favorite song, and so I programmed our HomePods to play it throughout the entire apartment every Sunday morning at 10:00 AM as long as someone is home.
    • I was glad to hear from Michael that he loved the Slow Horses TV show, and binged three years’ worth (just 18 episodes, really) in a week. He also discovered that the theme song isn’t some Rolling Stones deep cut they licensed, but an actual new Mick Jagger song commissioned for the series!? I finally finished reading the first book but found the experience such a close retreading of the first season that I’ve decided not to read any more of them. It would just be like rewatching the existing seasons and spoiling the ones to come.
    • We got a chance to go and see the new Apple TV+ film Argylle at its local premiere. It’s an action-comedy about spies directed by Matthew Vaughn, who also directed other action-comedies about spies such as the Kingsmen series. This one primarily stars Bryce Dallas Howard, Sam Rockwell, and Henry Cavill, and is a fun enough time that I can recommend it. One thing that surprised me: the “new” Beatles song Now and Then features heavily throughout the film, with its melody forming a major recurring theme. I looked it up and they had the song for over a year before it came out and had to keep it a secret. Check out the symphonic version with a choir on the soundtrack.
    • Amazon Prime Video has put out all eight episodes of their new action-comedy series about spies, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, with Donald Glover and Maya Erskine playing reimagined Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie roles. We’ve seen two so far and it’s going very well.
  • Week 4.24

    Week 4.24

    A little while ago, I learnt that an ex-colleague of mine has received a stage 4 cancer diagnosis, and he’s only a few years older than me. Despite the fact that more “young” people seem to be getting cancer, it was still a deep shock because Tony was always incredibly fit and dedicated to his health. He’s been writing openly about his thoughts and experience on his Medium account, which I read before meeting him for lunch with some other former colleagues this week. It was tough seeing him in poorer shape, but true to his personal brand, he seemed extremely pragmatic and matter-of-fact about it all.

    We worked on the same team for about a year back in 2018, but were only on one project together as peers, leading design activities and client workshops together over a few months. I count myself fortunate to have had that experience, and learnt a lot from his confidence and wealth of technical knowledge when it came to UX matters — which was not my area of focus. Even then it was clear he had a knack for facing reality, and a passion for making sure the younger generation had their eyes open to the inequities of working life. Not always a popular topic, but life sucks. He mentioned that whenever he finds the strength these days, he works on his own design education materials that prepare students for non-ideal situations, and I thought that made perfect sense for him.

    Many of the things we talked about over lunch echoed other conversations I’ve been having with other friends. Maybe it’s the return of tech layoffs in the news, but negative sentiments seem as high as they were during Covid, with the questioning of boundaries and priorities taking place again. Tony understandably tried to impress upon us that some things aren’t worth having as regrets, and that we should make better choices while we still can. When I asked him what else he does now on days that aren’t lost to medical interventions, the answer was surprisingly similar to how I spent most of my year off work: reading, writing, and drawing.

    Peishan shared this Guardian article about people with cancer who’ve found the clarity to spend their remaining time meaningfully, and I thought Mark Edmondson landed the point that some people have trouble getting: the work that gives you purpose today isn’t the only purpose you’ll have.

    People (usually millennials) also mention the difficulty they have switching off from work. On a daily basis, but also when they go on vacation — taking half the holiday to get into holiday mode is a terrible inefficiency. I recall it took me months to unwind from a state of nearly burning out and to stop worrying about my “sabbatical ROI”. We should be like newer hybrid vehicles that can shut their engines down when idling at traffic lights and spring back to life quickly when needed, but instead us older cars only know how to burn gas all the time. I want to be a disused school bus just rusting in a field, bright yellow and unbothered.

    ===

    • I visited the Prix Pictet photo exhibition that’s part of Singapore Art Week (maybe it’ll be the only event I attend from this year’s edition) and found it beautiful but gosh it was mostly depressing. The theme was “Human” but it may as well have been “Human Suffering” — from communities devastated by the effects of mining and metal poisoning, to the plight of illegal refugees trekking 66 miles through jungle in search of better opportunities, they seemed to comment that there’s not much joy in being human these days. I joked halfway through that I hoped there would be a series of mundane birthday party photos at the end. There wasn’t.
    • Kim spent most of her week preparing an elaborate, successful Indian dinner from the Dishoom cookbook, but that’s really a story for her own weeknotes if they ever happen. The takeaway for me has been that, after seeing how the proverbial samosa is made, the Indian takeaways we usually get are probably quite unhealthy and we need to cut down.
    • Nintendo is having a January sale on the Switch eShop and I considered getting the remake of an apparent classic time loop visual novel, YU-NO: A girl who chants love at the bound of this world, yes, that is its title. It’s apparently the spiritual forebear of games such as Steins;gate, but after watching a short gameplay video on YouTube, I decided that since life is too short, I really didn’t want to punish myself. An anime adaptation was made a few years ago, so I will simply watch that instead.
    • We are enjoying the new British police drama Criminal Record on Apple TV+. Peter Capaldi is really good in it, although all the police work and cornering of baddies with their secrets is carried out really incompetently.
    • Can you believe that The Smile dropped a new album a couple of days ago and I had to find out from YouTube instead of Apple Music? Seriously, I’m looking at my For You page and it’s not mentioned under New Releases. This music video, where the band plays a new song for an auditorium full of young children — most of them bewildered or bored out of their minds, but with a couple really into it — is such a simple and charming concept I can’t believe I can’t name another time it’s been done.
  • Week 3.24

    Week 3.24

    I have come down from last week’s AI overpositivity and retaken control of this week’s update. I don’t know what came over me, especially when it’s so easy to see the issues that this current gen AI fever,this onslaught of enshittification, has yet to unleash. We’re poisoning a well, or maybe an orchard, that many people have spent decades building and many more depend on even if they don’t know it. I had two conversations on Monday, one about the disadvantageous state of jobs for 20-somethings and another about the Apple Vision Pro, and found myself in both of them articulating a deep pessimism that I haven’t been able to shake. Even if you buy into accelerationism, there’s clearly a risk of multi-decade spoilage here that future generations will hate us for.

    On Apple Vision (which is what I think the overall product family is called), I mentioned to Brian that I’ve been seeing a lot of Meta’s Quest 3 TV advertising whenever I tune into programs on the UK’s Channel 4, and how they’ve gone from selling immersive VR experiences with the Quest 2 to AR use cases like learning to play the piano — the same territory that Apple’s staking out. And how it won’t be very long before the Android equivalents of the Vision Pro will gain market share, on account of being several times more affordable, but hoovering up eye movement data revealing customers’ intents, attention, and probably physiological info because none of these other manufacturers will take pains to deny developers access like Apple does. We’ve seen these playbooks before.

    Brian and I have also previously discussed the ability of conversational AI products to deeply profile their users, not just by knowing what you want to know about, but how you think, react, speak, and write — what kind of person you are. A conversational interface with generative AI, trained on large amounts of data, is nothing short of a profiling machine that sees you at a behavioral and psychological level. Combine that with knowledge about what draws your eyes and sets your heart racing, and an ad-supported AR headset with built-in AI assistant is a nightmare product that will inevitably be a hit at $499.

    Thinking of the battles that ethically minded designers will have to fight and probably lose, deep in organizations intent on deploying AR/VR dopamine and AI-powered enterprise doodads without question, is what makes me tired these days.

    Later in the week, Jose shared this update on the Fujitsu postal service software debacle in the UK, a case of irresponsibly deployed technology that literally ruined and ended human lives. And that’s just the legacy stuff without any newfangled AI.

    ===

    • I’m finding the first Slow Horses book to be less enjoyable than I expected, mostly because it feels like I’m just rewatching the first season of the Apple TV+ show, nothing less and nothing more. I sort of expected more side story or entertainment than was possible to film, but it’s a rather straightforward procedural. The TV series might be the rare adaptation that’s on par with its source material, in which case I won’t read the rest after this one and will wait to watch Gary Oldman fart his way through them instead.
    • The second season of Reacher fell into the sequel trap, going for more action, more teamwork, more humor, more repeated catchphrases (this did NOT work), and losing something of its charm in the process. They decided to portray him as a sort of humorless Arnie-type killing machine who doesn’t understand normal people’s thoughts, and that doesn’t seem right to me based on his characterization as an astute detective/observer of human nature in the books. I was also hoping they’d go the Slow Horses route and just make the books in order, but they instead jumped to the 11th novel, Bad Blood and Trouble, for this season. Reading this interview with showrunner Nick Santora though, I got the feeling that making Reacher indefinitely is not something anyone on the team takes for granted, so why not go for broke while the Amazon money is flowing? Still, the thrill of seeing Reacher with his team is a payoff that has to be earned, and it’s not the same if you haven’t seen him wandering America solo for ten seasons beforehand.
    • We’ve started season 3 of True Detective, and I’m really liking some of the things they do with blending the recollections of an old man fighting a fading mind, with the disorientation and terror of his present life; they are literally blended and linked with match cuts and unifying objects — in one flashback a full moon disappears above the detective, and we come back to the present to see a fill light has gone out during the interview, and he’s shaken out of his memories.
    • I’m new to the music of Claud, but their superb album Supermodel would have made one of my lists in 2023.
    • I fired up Lightroom to see what new features they’ve added, and there was a new Denoise tool that seems to use AI to generate missing detail — fine, it’s unavoidable — and AI-powered preset recommendations. With one click, I applied a dramatic preset to an old RAW file which made it extremely noisy, and with another click removed all of it and landed on an incredibly sharp and clean image. I’m a little sad about how hard it is for small indies to compete with Adobe on this stuff. Photomator has an ML-based auto enhance feature that really doesn’t work well, often overexposing and making white balance look worse, whereas the Auto button in Lightroom makes improvements 90% of the time.