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Tag: Netflix

  • Week 46.23

    Week 46.23

    Album of the week: Daft Punk released a “drumless” edition of Random Access Memories and the simple act of removing elements adds an unexpected amount of value. The album strikes a delicate balance between novelty and nostalgia. By removing the drum tracks, it reveals intricate instrumental interplays once masked by robust beats, offering new perspective on familiar melodies. Within minutes, you’ll be surprised at how different this feels. I don’t know how many other albums have been rereleased like this, but it’s a great idea — one made less cynical by the streaming model, as Michael observed in a chat. In the old days, this would just look like trying to sell you a CD you already bought.

    Speaking of cynical purchases avoided, I saw and held the Leica Sofort 2 in person this weekend while attending a talk and exhibition at their annual Celebration of Photography event. The glossy front plastic was not as fingerprint prone as I’d feared, and overall build quality felt a touch better than on the Fujifilm Instax mini Evo: the rocker button on the back panel had more click resistance, the “film advance” lever that prints photos was sturdier and more satisfying to activate, and the flimsy USB port cover on the bottom was slightly firmer and seemed to stay in place. For me, those were the top 3 basic problems that needed to be addressed. The software menus were simply reskinned and not redesigned, as expected. All in all, Leica did the minimum they had to do to make the Fujifilm product a little more premium, but without improvements to image quality, it’s still a very odd product to bear a red dot. I did not feel the urge to replace my mini Evo on the spot.

    Shot on iPhone, edited with looks by ✨PixelGenius

    With Leica’s latest attempt at opening my wallet rejected, my week was free to absorb excesses of a different kind when I met up with Jianjia for a farewell lunch. She decided we would eat Mala at some place called YGF. It turns out that she schedules every meet-up she can there, because she’s addicted to their high sodium spice blend. When I pointed out how salty it was (after she had drunk all her soup, and for the record I couldn’t finish my massive bowl), she was like “huh, maybe that’s why I like it so much. I never had much salt in my food growing up”.

    We are all the products of our childhoods, each messed up in our own special ways, which is something I was discussing with a colleague in a work-related conversation one day when I thought, “ooh, I should make a GPT therapist!” Which I called Doctor Talkabout, and tried to bias it towards exploring barriers to happiness that originated in childhood. On the whole, the unlicensed doctor is now quite good at discussing all manner of problems, and I hope it gives better perspectives than vanilla ChatGPT. And just in case psychology and psychoanalysis are a little too… “real” for you? I also made a GPT therapist based on astrology, inspired by Co—Star. I honestly get a kick out of both, and discussing my problems with them has been more effective at managing my feelings than just going in circles on my own.

    The number of GPTs I’ve made this past week is now in the double digits (including one for work and a private one for editing text), and so I’ve had to make a category page to see them all on this site. Please check them out.

    And yes, some shit is afoot at OpenAI, after CEO Sam Altman was ousted early Saturday morning. Too early to say why, but ChatGPT has noticeably struggled to perform quickly of late, and they’ve both turned off new signups for ChatGPT Plus AND reduced the rate for paying members from 50 to 40 messages every three hours. I have a feeling they might renege on their commitment to open a GPT App Store and share revenue with creators. Time will tell. I wasn’t going to quit my day job for this anyway. And as of Sunday afternoon, he’s supposedly been asked to come back and the board of directors will resign? Pure insanity.

    I watched the first episode of Netflix’s acclaimed Blue Eye Samurai Western anime series, and it felt like something an AI wrote. I don’t get the rave reviews just yet; two people described it to me using Kill Bill as a reference point, and you’ll see why in the super derivative first episode. It even uses the same Tomoyasu Hotei song, Battle Without Honor or Humanity, in a cliche sword-forging and training montage sequence. I mean, Kill Bill itself was a pastiche of samurai movie tropes, but this warms them over without any shame. It also has a dash of Afro Samurai to it, however both of these are examples of how to do homage without feeling like copies. Netflix shows are like cloud kitchen-brand versions of fast food items that were inspired by restaurant dishes.

    Somehow the show has some talent signed up to it: George Takei, Ming Na-Wen, and Kenneth Branagh provide voices. Its writer and co-creator, Michael Green, was involved in Blade Runner 2049 (but also Branagh’s trilogy of Hercule Poirot films which I do not love). But I’ll give it a second chance anyway; there may be other themes at play here beyond the Othered protagonist seeking revenge. But having seen this, I feel like I have a pretty good idea of what AI-generated mass entertainment would look like, and I’m not down for it anymore. I’d like for AGI to come and take away all the other jobs in the world, leaving us humans free to come up with new and more creative ways to show sword fights.

    So imagine my surprise when I started up Pluto (also on Netflix) after two episodes of Blue Eye Samurai, and found it the total opposite in terms of quality. You don’t know where the story is going even if some ideas, like androids that grapple with unexplained dreams from a past life, are familiar and were explored before in other works. It takes its time with characterizations, and aims for a timeless beauty that goes beyond slow-motion action scenes. Polygon has a nice piece about it, but don’t read anything before you’ve seen the first episode, just trust me on that.

  • Week 39.23

    Week 39.23

    Kim returned from a business trip to Vietnam on Thursday with a nasty bug, which as of this moment I’ve still avoided. We also had a medical checkup done and I got a double vaccination out of it (one in each arm, both of which are SORE) for tetanus and the flu. Firstly, why doesn’t anybody talk about tetanus jabs for adults? I don’t think I’ve had one since I was a kid but apparently adults are meant to every 10 years. Secondly, I’m not sure if the flu jab is going to make me more susceptible or more resilient to her germs right now. I guess I’ll find out as the work week starts!

    If I do wind up too sick for work, I hope to still have the strength to do some gaming on my new iPhone and Backbone One controller. The USB-C one I ordered on September 13 (the day after the iPhone announcement) was supposed to come with a new firmware version on it that would work with both iPhones and Android phones, but it didn’t! And so nothing happened when I plugged it in. I complained online through various channels, and they sent me a free replacement within a few days.

    FWIW, the first one can be made to work if I plug it into an Android phone and use their app to update the firmware. For some reason, they can’t do the same through an iOS app, which seems… weird? I’m sure I’ve owned hardware that updated itself through an iOS app, but maybe it can’t do that over the USB port. So they have to ship out replacements to people without access to Android, and going by Reddit, it seems there are quite a few of us, which is unfortunate for their business.

    Gris is a beautiful indie game that I bought years ago on the App Store and never played, and if you’re an Apple Arcade subscriber you’re in luck — Gris+ is now available in the catalog. I finally started on it awhile back on my iPhone 14 Pro and Lightning-ported Backbone, and finished it on the new equipment this week. The larger screen definitely adds to the experience, and probably comes close enough to the Switch experience to justify this new “console gaming handheld” positioning. I really can’t wait to see how Death Stranding will play (and be priced) on it.

    Japanese Rural Life Adventure is another new chill title on Apple Arcade I’ve enjoyed checking out. It’s played in portrait orientation, so no room for a Backbone controller here. But it’s exactly what it says on the tin. A game where you move to the countryside and clean up a busted old house, start planting vegetables, and getting to know the town.

    ===

    • The musical highlight of my week was the long-awaited release of XG’s first mini-album, New DNA. We’ve heard most of it by now except for the last single to be released, Puppet Show (YouTube), which I didn’t quite love at first but is slowly growing on me.
    • We’ve been watching the new season of The Morning Show on Apple TV+ and it’s getting good. I barely remember the second season somehow, but after a bit of a warmup, things in Season 3 get quite satisfying in episodes 2 and 3.
    • Also on the service is a new songwriting rom-com called Flora And Son, by the director of songwriting rom-com Begin Again and Once (haven’t seen this one myself). I enjoyed it, even after finding out that the lead actress is Bono’s daughter. 4 stars.
    • I also watched an entire episode of Foundation on the iPhone 15 Pro Max, which was quite enjoyable! As we don’t have an HDR-capable TV at home — the 8-year-old HDTV refuses to die — this is probably the best screen I have for watching video. The whole time I felt like a “real” character in a show, the kind who watches TV on their phone with dead eyes while eating lunch before getting back to their dead-end job. There’s a scene or two of that in Flora And Son.
    • But the most unexpected, most time- consuming, most addictive new media we encountered had to be Below Deck, which I reluctantly started over the weekend and ended up binging an entire season of. Local Netflix only has seasons 5 and 6 of this nautical reality tv show which follows the crews of pleasure yachts as they take on “charters” — several-day trips booked by rich people who leave tips of at least $15,000. It’s a different kind of workplace drama, and the screwups, often obnoxious guests, and interpersonal relations are just so easy to keep watching.
  • Week 38.23

    Week 38.23

    After 71.5 hours of dungeon crawling, coffee brewing, curry cooking, high schooling, part-time jobbing, and maid cafe patronizing, I finally finished the incredible game that is Persona 5 Royal. If you count the 30 or so hours I put into the original non-Royal version on my PS4 back in 2016, this has been a long time in the making. There’s a remake of Persona 3 coming next year, so I’m looking forward to that.

    For the uninitiated, Persona games are a spinoff series from another series of games called Shin Megami Tensei, which all involve harnessing the same stable of supernatural beings and doing turn-based battles. It’s Pokémon with demons. The SMT games are grittier and flirt with horror themes, but the Persona ones (at least the ones I’ve seen) incorporate more slice-of-life activities and are generally lighter.

    What’s next? Not sure. For now I’m gonna pass a little time finishing the final episode in Ace Attorney Chronicles which I paused over a year ago. I still don’t feel up to Tears of the Kingdom.

    On the TV front, we finished season 1 of Poker Face and it’s a show I’d recommend to almost anybody. Brilliant writing within a formula that is equally happy to revel in, but also subvert itself from time to time. The twists, the characters, the plays on genre, they’re straight out of an Ace Attorney game (minus the goofiness).

    Netflix also released season 3 of Kengan Ashura, a hyper-violent manga to anime adaptation that I do not recommend to anyone, except I watched the first two seasons ages ago and feel invested in finishing it. Truly, the Venn diagram of people who make this and make Mortal Kombat games is just a circle of sickos. The people who enjoy this are probably in the same circle.

    So I’ve partially fast-forwarded myself through it up to episode 9 now. Hilariously, the main character has been in a coma since the end of episode 1, and while the fight scenes (it’s centered around a Bloodsport-style martial arts tournament) are rendered in a 3D engine that simulates an anime look, all other scenes are drawn in traditional 2D, and boy does their lack of budget show! Some scenes (mostly flashbacks, to be fair) are literally sketches passed off as a stylistic choice.

    ===

    I got my new iPhone, and rejoining the Plus/Max club hasn’t been as bad as I feared. Granted, this is my first large iPhone with flat sides, a design I highly prefer to the rounded sides we endured for many years between the iPhone 6 and 11 series. Flat sides are simpler easier to hold, especially between fingertips when taking a photo in landscape orientation.

    So now with the reduced weight, flat sides, and thinner bezels, I think the Max form factor is finally becoming something I can love. The benefits of the larger screen are undeniable and without a case on the whole thing feels amazing. It’s more of a joy to use for every task: watching videos, writing text and reading pages, editing photos, gaming, you name it. The increased battery life is also a great comfort, especially after the disappointment of the 14 Pro in that area. After a year of regular use, that one is down to 85% battery health.

    There have been complaints about the build quality of the early iPhones 15, with reports of wonky antenna lines, discolored titanium frames straight out of the box, and so on. I did notice the same odd rectangular ghost lines at certain points on the sides of my Natural Titanium Pro Max, but they rubbed away with no issues. I commented a single word, Stains;Gate, on a Threads post from 9to5mac about it but sadly no one appreciated the anime reference.

    Where I have more concern is the fit and finish where the back glass meets the metal frame. New this year are rounded edges, not angular, not chamfered, but with a curve in the metal and maybe even a little in the glass. Some areas on mine are quite well rounded and comfortable to touch, but unfortunately the lower left and right sides where my hand makes contact have a slightly sharper feel to them. It’s clearly a minor defect, with a gap between the glass and titanium that’s probably measured in micrometers, but I can feel it, and that’s that.

    If I were a YouTuber I might make a video where I try to grate cheese with the edge or something. I’ll put up with it for now and see if it “settles in” after awhile, and try an AppleCare+ replacement if I can’t stand it.

    It’s now emerging that the 15 Pro Max’s titanium frame is susceptible to overflexing when pressure is applied, causing the back glass panel to break with nothing more than force from one’s bare hands. You will recall the iPhone 6 Plus’s “Bendgate” issue, where YouTubers were able to bend and break the devices quite easily. Apple reinforced the following year’s iPhone 6S, I think with steel inserts, but doing that with the 16 Pro Max would defeat the purpose of this entire switch to titanium. In the video above, the smaller 15 Pro survives the same bend test. It’s just a problem with the larger models.

    Anecdotally, there’s always some risk involved in buying the first Apple products out of the factory gate; I’ve experienced many odd defects over the years from underpowered speakers in the first-gen iPad Pro (was blown away by the actual volume when I got a new unit after a display fault)to battery and sound issues with AirPods Pro (even acknowledged with a replacement program). Usually waiting a couple of weeks will ensure you get perfect devices. But I haven’t got the patience for that!

    But the cameras! They are indeed an improvement. More natural processing, less sharpening, and the 24mp files have more resolved detail. I’m enjoying the 5x reach, which as one reviewer pointed out, is a more meaningful role for an extra lens than 3x, given that the main camera is already capable of providing a good 2x image (at 12mp), which is close enough to 3x. Portrait Mode does extremely good segmentation now, and I haven’t taken any photos yet where the edges on people or objects were not perfectly recognized.

    A pair of 5x photos, processed in Hipstamatic
    120mm (5x) through a window — sorry, stranger
    28mm low-light shot (not Night Mode)
    28mm close up
    268mm (10x digital zoom)

  • Week 35.23

    Week 35.23

    The nation voted for a new president this weekend and the winner was Mr. Tharman Shanmugaratnam, which autocorrect changes to “That Man” (a tad disrespectful in my opinion). He got 70% of the vote which is pretty solid, but nobody’s surprised on account of how well liked and competent he is. It’s worth mentioning how painless the process was: my vote was in the ballot box less than three minutes after I showed up, and I was back home watching TV in 15.

    Appropriately, we started Jury Duty on Amazon Prime Video and I think it’s gonna be great. It’s a pseudo-reality show where one man thinks he’s on the jury for an actual case but the whole thing is staged and everyone else is an actor. I’m watching this and wondering if everyone’s following a tight script or just improvising based on their characters, because there are events happening all the time whether the mark witnesses them or not.

    That real-time play concept always makes me think of The Last Express, a classic but underplayed PC game by Jordan Mechner set on the Orient Express. It kicks off with a murder onboard and you have to move around the train investigating and staying alive amidst political intrigue and wartime spy stuff. Events are always happening, and if you’re not in the right place at the right time, you’ll miss crucial conversations. You can experience this for yourself on iOS but the app hasn’t been updated in five years and may be removed by Apple soon if they stick to their controversial plans.

    A lot of other TV was seen. We finally finished season 3 of For All Mankind, an extremely strong show on Apple TV+. I binged all of the anime Oshi no Ko which is as great as everyone says; I don’t think I’ve ever seen a stronger (or longer) first episode. It’s a 90-minute movie in itself. I’m now midway through another highly rated anime: last year’s Lycoris Recoil, on Netflix. And on Michael’s recommendation we started on a Japanese drama, My Dear Exes, which is very enjoyable so far, maybe because it doesn’t feel like typical Japanese TV. It’s snappier and funnier somehow.

    Oh, if Jordan Mechner sounded familiar earlier, it’s because he’s the man who created Karateka and Prince of Persia. And if you want to experience the making of a gaming classic, a new playable history lesson on The Making of Karateka is now out. And in a case of lovely things cosmically coming together, it was helmed by former Wired games editor Chris Kohler, who also wrote the article on Japanese curry that probably changed my life.

    Staying on topic, we went down to the Japan Rail Cafe (operated by the actual JR East railway company from Japan, for some reason) in Tanjong Pagar because I’d heard they were doing a tie-up with the Kanazawa style Japanese chain, Champion Curry, for one month only. I had my first Champion Curry back in March, after meaning to check it out for years, and while it didn’t unseat my current favorites, it was still decent by Japanese standards and incredible by Singaporean ones. They sold a small sized plate here for S$19.90 including a drink, but it was sadly inauthentic. The curry’s consistency and deployment over the rice is not going to qualify for a Kanazawa cultural medallion any time soon, but I guess it was good enough that I’d take it any day over most local competition. But I still hope they open a proper operation locally someday and accomplish what Go Go Curry failed to do.

    Champion Curry in Japan
    Champion Curry in Singapore

    ===

    I was suddenly inspired to make a new series of playlists, which will periodically capture what I’m listening to, sequenced like a proper mixtape. If I had the skills to make a DJ mix of them, I would! Here’s BLixTape #1 for my Apple Music fam.

    And the tracklist for people still on *ahem* lesser services:

    1. Gold -Mata Au Hi Made- (Taku’s Twice Upon A Time Remix) — Hikaru Utada (I said I wasn’t a fan of the regular version but this remix works!)
    2. TGIF — XG
    3. bad idea right? — Olivia Rodrigo
    4. You Are Not My Friend — Tessa Violet
    5. Dancing In The Courthouse — Dominic Fike
    6. For Granted — Yaeji
    7. Bittersweet Goodbye — Issey Cross
    8. To be honest (SG Lewis Remix) — Christine and the Queens
    9. Sprinter — Dave & Central Cee
    10. DON’T EVER DISRESPECT ME — NEMS, Scram Jones, & Ghostface Killah
    11. Iceman (feat. Morvasu) — Earth Patravee
    12. ETA — NewJeans
    13. Silent Running (feat. Adeleye Omotayo) — Gorillaz
    14. Kill Bill (feat. Doja Cat) — SZA
    15. a little more time — ROLE MODEL
    16. happy im — UMI
    17. Rainy Days — V
    18. Memory — Sezairi

    Making this involved a detour into the world of NewJeans’ music videos, which are pretty conceptually twisted and seem to comment on the parasocial relationships fans have with them. For example, in the mostly sunny poppy video for ETA, the girls might only be hallucinations seen by a sick fan, telling her that her boyfriend is cheating on her with someone at a party. So she ends up murdering him and the girl with her car! I guess this is what it takes to stand out now.

    Let’s end on a nice note with another video I came across on YouTube while checking out more electronic music. This guy Don Whiting also does a great job killing it on the road — performing a two-hour drum & bass set on a bike, accompanied by a huge entourage of other cyclists. It looks like an awesome day out, at a pace even I could probably handle.

  • Week 25.23

    • The week in Melbourne went largely as planned. I managed to read about half of Daniel Suarez’s Critical Mass, the sequel to Delta-v, and played some Persona 5 Royal in my downtime.
    • Because the Airbnb had a basic Android-powered smart TV and spotty wifi, I only managed to watch one thing of note: the first Extraction film on Netflix, because my dad was talking about it. It came out a couple of years ago but is getting a bump in the charts now that a sequel’s just been released, imaginatively titled Extraction 2. It has a lot of impressive shots that look like single-takes, and I’d definitely recommend it if you’re in the market for a dumb action flick.
    • We did go out as well, of course, and I enjoyed the ACMI’s Goddess exhibition on women in cinema, and their entirely redesigned (since I last saw it in 2018) permanent exhibition on the history of the moving image, from shadow puppets to video games.
    • The National Gallery Victoria (NGV) had two large exhibitions on: Pierre Bonnard and Rembrandt, and puzzlingly did not offer a combined ticket plan. The cost to see both was around $60 AUD, so we decided to just see the Bonnard one and take our time. It was quite worth it, but I do regret not having bottomed out the whole place with the Rembrandt. The next day we spontaneously dropped in at the NGV’s Ian Potter outpost in the CBD, which is completely free, and dedicated to Australian artists. All in all, a good time.
    • Food-wise, many of the essentials were hit. Croissants at Lune; lunch at Rice Paper Scissors; coffee, pastries, and seafood at the South Melbourne Market; kebabs; wine in the Yarra Valley; cocktails at Union Electric; Korean BBQ at Bornga; some relatively good pho; pretty great pizzas.
    • I’m also glad we managed to stop by The Paperback Bookshop, a cozy little place that manages to hang on — it seems to be thriving, actually. We bought a few books. The last time I came by, I bought some that I ended up reading the ePub versions of, just because I’ve grown out of the paper habit. But I’ll happily keep buying physical books because you can pass them along and every year I trust digital media to stay accessible less and less.
    • This was of course the week that a dumb DIY carbon fiber submarine went missing on its journey to visit the wreck of the Titanic, and it captured public interest to the point that I ended up having a conversation about it with a friendly cafe owner when I was the last customer around (reading Critical Mass). She’d only heard bits and pieces on the news, whereas I, extremely online and living in social feeds, had many factoids and theories to offer, which fanned her disbelief and led her to say the billionaires had “more money than brains”. Later on I saw this very appropriate tweet and thought “it me”, but in my defense I did not bring up the topic first!
    • I didn’t take many photos, but most of what I did get was captured in Halide (12mp HEIC) and processed in VSCO. Then I deleted the originals. Yolo.

  • Week 22.23

    Yes, I made this with Midjourney

    Six years after I booted up my Nintendo Switch for the first time and slotted in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s cartridge, I finally took on the final boss this week and finished the game. Before you think this game is a monster (although it is), I effectively took a 5.5 year hiatus.

    My first experience with the game was both exhilarating and overwhelming — here was a non-linear open-world adventure designed to be an exercise in self determinism. Yes, the princess has been locked in a bubble, literally waiting 100 years for you to wake up and save the kingdom, but that didn’t mean you had to hurry. You could decide to be a chef and spend time gathering rare ingredients and experimenting with recipes. You could examine every curious crevice of the natural landscape to discover the Korok seeds deviously placed by the designers, or climb foreboding mountains just for the hell of it (you’d probably find Korok seeds for your trouble).

    This was a game that demanded longer play sessions — no dipping in for just five minutes — and frequent ones at that. You kind of had to remember what you were last doing and where you wanted to go next. So, faced with too much commitment and mental load, I started to distance myself from it and play other games instead.

    If you’ve been following along in recent weeks, you’d know that the release of the sequel, Tears of the Kingdom, spurred me to try completing it once and for all. And it’s been quite the journey: I had to re-familiarize myself with the game’s laws of physics, Link’s complicated powers, and in the process discovered that I’d spent those first 40 hours or so essentially mucking around in just one corner of the world.

    By last week, I’d finally uncovered the whole world’s layout, but with some places still unexplored and doubtlessly many secrets left to be found. I’d gotten good at fighting, and was told that I was ready for the final showdown with “Calamity Ganon”. Except… I wasn’t, not mentally.

    So I spent this week’s game time mucking about and doing inconsequential side quests, like helping a group of arguing scientists collect evidence of giant monster skeletons using my digital camera (yes). And then, on Friday night, I said ‘fuck it’ fought my way to the center of the map, took the big baddie out, and saw the credits roll. It was an absolute anticlimax, partly because I was in a hurry and took a bunch of sneaky shortcuts to the final fight, instead of exploring the giant castle like I suppose I was meant to do.

    So I guess the moral of the story is err… heh… it’s the journey, not the destination? And as I was telling Cien earlier that day, the game is designed so that it’s possible to start the game and simply walk a beeline straight to the final boss and kill him instantly, if you had the skills and weren’t interested in slowly unfolding the whole experience for yourself. So this implicit message was always present, and I’m glad I took the time this year to enjoy more of it.

    ===

    Speaking of picking up old games again, I re-subscribed to the New York Times in order to play their crosswords. The last time I played a lot of them was when they released a Nintendo DS game back in 2007. In recent weeks, a group of people at work starting playing them collaboratively, and I found the experience fun enough to give it a shot. The current promotional price is just $20 USD for the first year of All Access membership ($90 afterwards).

    With the installation of the NYT Games app, I’ve also got the main news app again, of course. It does a couple of things really well, namely it presents simple text and images beautifully with a handful of layout variations, and it has a personalized tab called “For You” that is finite and completable each day.

    I didn’t realize how much I’d missed having a primary source of news in my life, with its own Home Screen button, but of course I’m prioritizing it only because I paid for it. I’m still enjoying Artifact, and I’ve just told it that I have an NYT sub now and it promises to prioritize it for me. Artifact has a real chance here of being the winning news aggregator.

    It makes me upset how Apple Music’s personalized tab could be so much better, like an AI-compiled digest of what’s new in music that I’d be interested in. Fingers crossed for WWDC next week! (Disclaimer: I know nothing.)

    ===

    Friday was Vesak Day here and a public holiday, so I spent the afternoon with Peishan and Cien visiting two cafes, and let me just say I am disappointed that we are allowing so many Instagrammable cafes to flourish. They’re all variations of the same bare concrete interior, tables and stools placed closely together, serviceable coffee + $20 and up full English breakfast plates template of an F&B business. We managed to land in two that offered differented value: Acoustics on Neil Road, which understands that bare concrete is a terrible environment to have conversations or listen to music in, so they invested in sound dampening wall panels and impressive looking speakers; and the Allpress pop-up cafe down the street on on 73 Duxton Road which, well, offers Allpress beans.

    ===

    Back to AI, Jose pointed me at the Planet Money podcast which is currently producing a series of episodes about GPT. They’re using it to write and create a full actual episode, and documenting the process. Parts 1, 2, and 3 (the actual AI-produced episode). Listening to the first episode, I observed them going through the same cycle of revelations that I went through recently as I experimented with using AI to do elements of my own job. The initial curiosity and excitement, the sudden surprise at how good it is, the disbelief when it’s sometimes even better, and the slow acceptance of the chaos to come as you realize no one knows how this is gonna turn out. We live in interesting times.

    ===

    I watched the finale of Ted Lasso’s third and possibly final season. Season 1 is everyone’s pick for the strongest arc, but I think Season 3 is right behind it now. Season 2 was disjointed and strange to me, so quite a distant third place.

    I said of the episode in a group chat:

    The Ted Lasso finale is one of the best I’ve ever seen. On brand, unashamed, fan servicing, heavy-handed symbolic closure with all the love in the world. 5 stars.

    There’s a line in it about how absolute perfection is boring, and by being imperfect on its own terms, the final episode was effectively, truly perfect. They made some polarizing choices this year and didn’t give us what we wanted at times, but the last episode gives it all. It mirrors the beginning, it offers thematic and narrative closure, and it gives room for the satisfying character growth it nurtured to show itself off.

    Their choice of song to play over the final minutes was spot on, obvious, schmaltzy, perfect. It might have been better if they’d used my favorite version featuring Fiona Apple, but what do I know.

    ===

    A couple of weeks ago Michael pinged me to talk about Daft Punk, after I wrote about Random Access Memories, saying sheepishly that Discovery was probably his favorite album, as if RAM was a purer musical endeavor and Discovery was sonic candy for philistines. I was mostly surprised that anyone could fail to love RAM best, and admitted that I hadn’t heard Discovery in many years and hardly knew it well.

    Then I saw this YouTube video by “Digging The Greats”, in which they break down the achievements in sampling that Discovery contains. Absolute magic. I keep telling myself to spend more time on shows like Song Exploder and Watch The Sound on Apple TV+ and This Is Pop, but I never seem to make the time. What I love about this 15-minute video is they don’t just play the samples and show you what Daft Punk did; they load them up and perform the melodies live on an MPC to show you how the band did it.

    Then on Sunday night, the algorithms delivered me this endearingly old-fashioned 20-minute talk from Pearl Acoustics (they seem to make loudspeakers) in which their technical director, Harley Lovegrove, inducts RAM into his list of Great Recordings, and proceeds to discuss why he thinks the production and musicianship on it are noteworthy. He’s got a trained ear as you’d expect, and spends quite a bit of time talking about the incredible Giorgio by Moroder, pointing out things like how there are two different drummers on the track (I had no idea!). What makes it more fun is the fact that this is clearly not the kind of music he normally reviews — other Great Recordings include Jacqueline Du Pré’s Elgar Cello Concerto (this often moves me to tears on good headphones), and Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. Anyway, loved this video and it helped me appreciate a favorite album even more.

    ===

    A different sort of band, but I bought the 2023 Pride band for my Apple Watch. Rather than the heavy and vibrant rainbow bars of previous versions, this year’s design has a white base with scattered color pills. It looks like birthday cake sprinkles or confetti, which is a fun vibe you don’t see in any other official Apple Watch bands, almost like something Swatch would do.

    ===

    And now, for this week’s conclusion, brought to you by GPT:

    In wrapping up, there’s something uniquely human about picking up where we left off, be it a beloved video game, a trusted news source, or a favorite TV show. That’s the joy of life’s continuity, the pleasure in seeing where a journey takes us, especially when it’s one we didn’t quite finish the first time around. These past weeks, I’ve immersed myself in familiar worlds, marveled at the capabilities of AI, and watched characters grow, and it made me realize how we continuously strive for balance, exploration, and ultimately, an understanding of our own story. We may stumble, we may take detours, but isn’t that the beauty of life’s game?

  • Week 21.23

    It was one of those weeks where not an awful lot happened outside of work. I don’t talk about work here but let’s sort of circle it.

    Reflections on AI

    One thing I can say is that I started making a presentation deck about the use of generative AI and GPT in design, initially to share my findings so far but increasingly as an exercise in structuring my thoughts into anything at all useful.

    A couple of things, on reflection: an AI assistant or collaborator poses significant risks for a lazy human in certain tasks since it tempts us to quickly accept its output without evaluating potential improvements. Assuming AI can do a job to 90% of a human’s rigor and quality, figuring out what the other 10% is without having done the same work yourself is quite the challenge. So the efficiency gains may not be as significant as you think, not until we figure out some smarter processes.

    An example of what I mean: you can feed ChatGPT with notes from an interview conducted with a customer about their experiences and how a product fits into their lives. Supply enough interviews, and ChatGPT can do the work of summarizing them in aggregate, presenting key themes and areas worth looking into, like maybe everyone thinks the price is too high, but it’s because they don’t fully understand the value of what they’re buying.

    It can create a bunch of frameworks to illustrate these findings, like personas and service blueprints. And it can even suggest solutions, like better marketing materials to explain this value to customers. The AI’s output might look pretty good, similar to what a team of human designers would (more slowly) produce, and a company might be tempted to make business decisions based on it. In fact, a team of human designers who haven’t read the interview notes themselves or thought deeply about it might also look at the AI’s work and say it’s good to go.

    The level of confidence and finality inherent in these AI outputs is incredibly convincing. But if a human were to go through all the interviews, listening to the recordings perhaps, they might realize there was a missing element, a feeling subtly unsaid on the margins, that means some customers do see the extra quality, they just wish there was a cheaper version of the product that did less. Skimming through the finished research report crafted by the AI, you wouldn’t even begin to guess where in the sea of correct conclusions this exception could be hiding.

    But there’s no question that this stuff is ready today to do some tasks like image editing, seen in Photoshop’s impressive beta release of a “Generative Fill” feature this week. I took a stock photo and doubled its height, and it was able to get the context of the scene and fill in the missing ceiling almost perfectly. That would have taken an experienced image compositor at least a few minutes, and anyone else way too much time. Just a couple of clicks now.

    I also looked into what Adobe is building with its Sensei suite of AI marketing tools, and that dream of generating and sending personalized ads, as in a unique package of art and copy tailored to a single customer’s behavior, would seem to be already here. I’m not 100% sure how this works everywhere, but in the past, you’d still need copywriters and art people involved in the process after marketers had identified the “customer journeys” and content-goes-here templates. With the opportunities now being identified, advertising messages crafted, and email offers all sent with a single click by the same person, there’s hardly a crack in the door left for the traditional artists and copywriters to make their case. Yet, the quality is good enough to satisfy all but the most discerning of corporations.

    You may observe that the two of the largest advertising platforms are already in this space.

    What do you think about the current advancements in AI and their implications? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

    (One more example: I asked ChatGPT to help suggest edits for this post, and it rewrote one of the above sentences to be better. I liked it, but on closer inspection, there was a glaring semantic error I had to fix myself. It also suggested the call to action above, to increase engagement. Talk to me!)

    ===

    Personal updates

    There seems to be yet another wave of Covid sweeping through the city, based on the fact that several people I know have come down with it, and every bus and train car I’ve been on this week had more people wearing masks, suggesting that they, too, know people who’ve come down with it.

    Kim is going away for a couple of weeks, and I’m hoping she doesn’t run into it out there either; one of her colleagues caught it while traveling in the region a few days ago. I’m planning to stay home as much as I can during this time, and finishing as many video games as possible.

    ===

    Media activity

    • Not a ton of progress in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which I’ve been playing consistently now for the past few weeks — a streak unmatched since the game first came out six years ago (I abandoned it out of fatigue shortly after that initial burst). I’ve now got all four Divine Beasts pointing at the castle and now just need to build up the nerve and arsenal to storm it and be done with this. I seem to be procrastinating instead, exploring areas in the massive world that I never checked out before.
    • The girl band I would say I’m rooting the most for in pop music, XG, performed at the Head in the Clouds festival in New York, and I watched some fancams of their set. The audio quality is terrible in all of them, so I won’t recommend starting there, but they are undeniably polished and tight as a group. Here are two music videos. I think I discovered them back in February, and at the time I said they’re gonna be monstrously huge this year. I stand by this.
    • If you watch the documentary series their label has put on YouTube, you’ll understand why they’re performing at this level: they’ve been physically and psychologically abused for the past six years of training, starting from when some of them were just 12. It’s horrendous to watch, but also probably par for the industry. While it’s good that someone decided to plainly put this footage out there, I’m not seeing much of a backlash, so it’s probably too late and already normalized. Some of the stuff their boss/producer says and does is straight up toxic emotional manipulation (he apparently came up as an idol himself so it’s like Ted Lasso says in the latest episode, hurt people hurt people).
    • Ted Lasso is almost done with its third season, one episode to go. I’m still liking it much better than season two, although it is sooo uneven and odd in its choices. You know the adage, “show, don’t tell”? It’s like the concept of season three is going against that conventional wisdom; a challenge the writing team decided to issue themselves: Can we take lots of scenes that people want to see (scenes of closure, catharsis, and vindication!) and make them happen off-camera and between episodes? And after doing that, can we still make people care through the strength of our set pieces and touching monologues? That’s the only explanation I have for what’s been going on. And to the team’s credit, it works some of the time. It’s not conventional TV, and maybe that’s the point.
    • Platonic, the new sitcommy show on Apple TV+, is much more conventional. It’s about a male and female pair of friends who are really just friends (so far), and a comparison to When Harry Met Sally is drawn in the very first episode. They had a fight and haven’t spoken in years, and then reconnect on the cusp of middle age, when it’s notoriously difficult to form new friendships, let alone platonic ones. I think the concept and set up are strong, but the execution is a little spotty. I’m not really into Seth Rogan’s work, and his character here feels exactly like what you’d expect from one of his characters, but by the end of episode 2 I think I’ll keep watching. The most jarring thing is Rose Byrne’s quasi-Australian accent which raises too many questions about how they met and got along in the past.
    • Speaking of actors whose strong accents shatter the suspension of disbelief, Arnold Fucking Schwarzenegger is back in a NETFLIX TV SERIES which sounds like a dreamy reboot of True Lies. The show is called FUBAR and it’s about a father and daughter who both secretly work for the CIA without knowing about each other’s involvement. I haven’t seen any of it yet, but I’m dying to.
    • It strikes me that in the future, one could give a crazy brief like the above to a generative AI system and start watching something like FUBAR within minutes.
    • My first music discovery of the week is Eternally Yours, a new Alphaville album that sees the band doing symphonic rearrangements of songs such as Big In Japan and Forever Young with a full orchestra. Yes, in Dolby Atmos spatial audio. This is a band that was formed 41 years ago and the lead singer’s voice is still incredible, iconic.
    • The second is Tears can be so soft, the new song by Christine and the Queens. It’s simple but surprisingly soulful, and sonically recalls Massive Attack’s best work.

  • Week 17.23

    • I discovered that Midjourney has an alternate set of models called Niji (aka Nijijourney) dedicated to creating anime-styled imagery. It’s astoundingly good. It has four stylistic modifiers: standard, cute, expressive, and scenic. Look at all the implicit context and environmental storytelling in these scenes. I really wonder where they came from.
    An izakaya where bears and humans drink together
    “Cute” version
    This was meant to be Singapore but I don’t see any evidence of it
    • I also found Draw Things on the App Store, for both iOS and macOS, which can download an array of open source AI image generation models off the internet and run them locally on your devices — no fees, no internet connection required. Grab it while you can. Of course they are nowhere as advanced or fast as the paid services, but you know they’re going to get there soon, especially if Apple continues to crank up their proprietary silicon. Incidentally the anime-focused version of Stable Diffusion is called Waifu Diffusion.
    • My Retroid Pocket Flip arrived from China and I was relieved to find it quite a solid product. The build quality is good, no looseness or wobbles; the D-pad and all buttons feel great; the screen is incredibly bright; and the giant 5,000mah battery and active cooling make it more than just an Android phone with physical controls attached. It’s a really nice way to run emulated ROMs. I used to love playing Lumines and Every Extend Extra on my PSP, like over 15 years ago, and being able to revisit them again on this little $164 USD device is quite a thrill.
    Processed with VSCO with kc25 preset
    Processed with VSCO with kc25 preset
    • If I hadn’t impulsively pre-ordered this while in Japan, literally while walking to our anniversary dinner in west Shinjuku, then I would definitely be buying an Anbernic RG35XX right now for a mind-blowing $56 USD. It’s a Game Boy Pocket-inspired device with a bright 640×480 screen and the ability to emulate all 32-bit consoles, and maybe even the N64. I can’t believe how cheap and good these things have gotten, and there are so many of them on the market too.
    • I finally finished watching the Korean revenge drama series The Glory — it took awhile because Kim wasn’t interested and so I only get to see it on my own time. It’s the rare TV show that dares to wrap up its core story in the first season, and The Glory gets some very satisfying closure in. The remaining threads could make for an interesting second season (now in production), but also it could have been canceled and everyone would be okay.
    • We started watching Drops of God on Apple TV+, which starts off with an immediate deviation from its manga source material about the world of wine: a Japanese male main character has been replaced by a French female one. This adaptation is an international joint production that switches between English, French, and Japanese, and each episode begins with a reminder ‘not to adjust your television’. Anyway, I think they’ve managed to keep the main idea while toning down the big, overdramatic ah hah! moments you’d expect from manga/anime. It still has people honing and demonstrating their near-superhuman skills (taste and smell, in this case), which is always fun, even when said skills aren’t the usual martial arts, boxing, tennis, math, golf, you get the idea.
    • Everything But The Girl’s comeback album, Fuse, is officially a hit. It debuted at #3 on the UK charts, a stunning career best for Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt. It’s so good to see musicians from <wheezing> our generation </wheezing> coming back after a long hiatus to demonstrate absolute mastery of their craft (as opposed to embarrassing themselves, e.g. U2, The Smashing Pumpkins).
    • Michael also mentioned the greatness of Karma Police out of nowhere, which led me to play the song in my head, and I commented that it simply sounds like nothing else. I tried asking Apple Music to make a radio station from similar songs but it was totally wrong, just songs from bands in the same wide category, but none of them actually sharing the same vibe or brilliance. Somehow this led to me revisiting Keane’s very strong first album, which I have many strong emotional attachments to. It came out in 2004, I think, and I must have played the hell out of it.