sangsara.net

Tag: Photo Editing

  • Week 30.23

    Week 30.23

    In the early years of mobile connectivity, we counted ourselves lucky to get 1GB of data per month. Fifty bucks bought you a plan, a phone, and a two-year leash. These days? I’m sitting on an 88GB, 5G mountain for half the price. Thank you, technological progress. But since COVID and working from home, I’m only using a fraction of my allowance.

    Yet, like any good consumer, I want more. So I switched providers from Circles to M1, lured by a plan that comes with 150GB at the same price. But there’s a catch, M1’s a little disorganized and provided me no updates on when my number would be ported. Right now I have two eSIMs jostling for control in my phone.

    Their checkout process also insisted on a “delivery” date. Delivery of what exactly? I’d already gotten the QR code for my eSIM over email. Assumed it was just a holdover from the old physical SIM days, too much bother to scrub from the website. But no, someone actually turned up to my doorstep at the appointed time, just to verify I’d activated my eSIM, then had me sign off on it.

    Let me repeat: M1 sends a flesh-and-blood human to confirm I got an email, but can’t drop me a line to say when my number would switch over. I had to spend 10 minutes on a support call to find out that it’s scheduled for next week. Will the data bonanza make up for this frustration? We’ll see.

    ===

    On a mellower note, I started to make use of my dormant brain.fm account again, to provide background music while I read and work. Is it pseudo-science? Beats me. But I like most of the tunes and it seems to work. The app has been significantly upgraded since I last saw it, with many more genres of music to choose from, and the option to vary the intensity of their brainwave-enhancing signals (which sound like wobbles).

    I get absolutely nothing out of referring you, but if you use my referral link you’ll get your first month for $1.

    With a little help from brain.fm and last week’s recommended music from Alice Sara Ott, I finished Sayaka Murata’s Life Ceremony, and also Hervé Le Tellier’s The Anomaly, and Lee Child’s 20th Jack Reacher novel, Make Me. Of all those, I can recommend The Anomaly most wholeheartedly. It’s a book you probably shouldn’t know anything about going in. If you really must know, it has science and mystery elements, but that’s all I’ll say. I’m now reading real-life astronaut Chris Hadfield’s The Apollo Murders.

    Not bad for a guy who’d only finished one book two months ago, now 8 out of 12 down on his Goodreads Challenge.

    ===

    I’ve been listening to Tessa Violet’s new album, MY GOD!, and it’s a playful catchy affair. Incredibly, Blur have reunited with a new album, The Ballad of Darren, and I couldn’t find much wrong with it after one playthrough. Maybe it’s the halo of how good the last Gorillaz album was after a decade of underwhelming me, but I think Damon Albarn is back.

    I made a commitment to use my AirPods Max more — they’ve been neglected because they’re somewhat of a pain, both literally and figuratively: the headband’s a little tight for me and the Smart Case remains a questionable design, adding friction to the simple act of turning a pair of headphones on and off.

    Two things have improved the experience for me. First, a dubious Reddit post from another big-headed owner who suggested bending the metal frame open, briefly straightening them open to form a 180º line, to ease the squeeze. This could obviously damage them, so do it at your own risk. But I think it’s made a difference. This is something you can’t do with the plastic Beats Studio Pros, sadly.

    Secondly, an updated audiogram from the free Mimi hearing test app. The last time I did the test was 2021, and I got slightly different results this time. I highly recommend everyone does this if they’re old enough to worry about losing some hearing. Thankfully my ears are still pretty good.

    Saving your test results as an audiogram effectively personalizes your listening experience on AirPods and supported headphones, applying an EQ profile that compensates for the frequencies you’ve become less sensitive to. You’ll hear music the way you used to, once you dive deep into the iOS Settings menu and find the section on Audio Accessibility, and turn on “Headphone Accommodations”.

    ===

    Another app that played a part in this week is Darkroom, the photo editor for iOS and Mac that I’ve mentioned a few times. They launched a portal to showcase presets made by community members, and kindly put a spotlight on some of the ones I’ve made and shared. You can access this catalog through a new button in the app, too.

    As Twitter is living on borrowed time (this was the week their petulant man-child owner pushed out a hasty, clumsy rebrand to “X”), I decided to republish my thread of Darkroom presets to… Threads. Annoyingly, it’s still buggy and messed up the chronological order of my posts. Nevertheless, I think they’re all still there, and I’ll post future presets to the same link.

    New ones I shared to celebrate being on the presets portal:

    E1: This is my reproduction of the popular E1 filter in VSCO. I wrote that it adds warmth, color, and film vibes in a single tap, and it truly is quite a versatile everyday effect.

    MEM3: This is another strong effect from my nostalgia-forward MEM series. It lightens and fades images with a blue-magenta cross-processed wash. You pretty much lose all highlight detail, but it’s a good look for certain scenes.

    MEM4: I said that this creates a warm and dusty sunset feel, but it’s really also great for low-light scenes. Check out the last photo sample through the link. Again, you do stand to lose detail in contrast areas, so vary the strength to taste.

    ===

    Growing up in the 80s, I caught reruns of Takeshi’s Castle on Chinese TV channels with no context, and no ability to understand what was said. On reflection, I grew up watching a lot of shows visually rather than verbally, which continues to this day whenever I choose to watch movies on planes without headphones.

    Anyway, Takeshi’s Castle, for the uninitiated, was a long-running Japanese game show (?) featuring normal people tackling an obstacle course of heinous physical challenges that would make insurance men squeamish. It was a precursor of Ninja Warrior, American Gladiators, and yet a different beast: whimsical, insane, hilarious. Why the name? It was hosted by the infamous Takeshi “Beat” Kitano, who played the err… lord of the castle that 100 contestants each week tried to storm. Here’s the Wikipedia article.

    I’m pretty sure you all know this, anyway. It’s a cornerstone of modern media culture! Turn in your TV licenses if you don’t.

    So imagine my elation while browsing Amazon Prime Video in bed and suddenly seeing a new Takeshi’s Castle, a 2023 reboot! We’ve seen two of the eight available episodes, and it’s still gloriously fun. It’s still not rolled out globally, as some markets will get English voiceovers (the UK one will have comedian Romesh Ranganathan as one commentator), but I wouldn’t watch it any other way than in the original Japanese, and maybe even with the subtitles off for old times’ sake.

    ===

    On Sunday we visited the Illustration Arts Fest where some talented friends were showing their work. It was packed, and probably the most crowded place I’ve been in since Tokyo. Let’s hope I don’t get COVID again.

    The most common theme was cute cartoon cats. On stickers, posters, keyrings, enamel pins, you name it. Some other artists were out there, scratching their own freaky itches and looking for kindred spirits in the crowd. We bought a couple of things for the apartment, including these little guys below from our friend Reg at Ocio Ceramics. A dumpling and a frog. Cuteness sells.

  • Week 15.23

    • As the last AI-written post mentioned, the post-vacation photo deluge is real. Looking through them again to make a shortlist for showing family and maybe printing out on Instax, I’ve rediscovered some good shots I could share… but do I want to? And where? And why? Our current task is just to build a shared album with some of the better ones between the two of us. That, and remembering that this is the fun and meaningful part of taking photographs; the journey, not the neat photo library.
    • The price of Instax Mini film has risen since my last purchase (inflation?) going from maybe 75 cents a shot to 91 cents, and that’s if you buy a hundred at a time. It makes the price of Instax Wide (larger prints) seem reasonable at about $1.40 a shot, and I’m trying to tell myself not to buy an Instax Wide printer or camera.
    • It was a busy work week, and I had to make an overnight trip to Malaysia for a meeting — my first time back in the country in nearly two decades, if I’m remembering correctly. This is something that shocks other Singaporeans, like when I say I’ve never been to Bangkok. But dudes, if I’m going on a holiday, I’m getting away from this oppressive heat and humidity! What isn’t shocking is how Malaysians will take every opportunity to make fun of Singapore’s food.
    • The trip involved flying 1.5 hours in a propeller plane operated by Firefly, out of the two alternative airports: Seletar and Subang. The planes are small, with just 4 seats across each row, and the propellers are louder than jet engines. Definitely take your AirPods Pro. But small airports mean less hassle — you can arrive an hour or less before your flight — and more convenient access to parts of Kuala Lumpur than if you fly into KL International.
    • In a case of wishful thinking, I brought my Switch along anticipating an evening alone in the hotel room to get some gaming in. In reality, it was late by the time I checked in and needed dinner, and maybe I played Lumines for 15 minutes the next morning.
    • We had a small dinner over the weekend for a couple of us with April birthdays, and James mentioned playing a new game out on Switch that I’d somehow missed: Dredge. It looks like a delightful Lovecraftian fishing/adventure game, and one I will definitely get when I’m ready. At the moment I’ve just started on Super Mario 3D World and am loving its compact little puzzle worlds. If the rumors are true and a follow up to the Switch is coming this Christmas, I have limited time to clear my games backlog. Maybe another sabbatical is in order?
    • I finally finished watching the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners anime on Netflix and while I enjoyed aspects of the clearly expensive production, like some of the character designs, I can’t recommend it. Mostly because it’s a cynical, derivative dystopian downer with lots of gory body modification (personal turn-off) to make it gritty?
    • We finally started watching Beef on Netflix which has been getting a ton of praise for tackling, like, every issue? Asian-American identity, class divides, mental health, imposter syndrome, work-life balance, and so on. It’s good! Wild, but good.
    • Ryan Adams put out yet another cover album, as in a cover of an entire album, this time for Oasis’s What’s The Story Morning Glory? and while it should be a home run given how well he pulled off that cover of Wonderwall years ago, the whole thing is a bit disappointing. Changing key melodies for worse ones for no good reason, inconsistent production from song to song, and kinda turning a fun album into a drag.
    • I’ve decided, like several people I follow, that I will probably not be paying for a Hipstamatic subscription after my free trial ends. The social network suffers from technical and UX issues, from as small as how slow the gratuitous card flipping animation makes it to browse your feed, to the broken friend-finding functionality — to say nothing of how low quality many of the photos being shared are, for which some blame must be laid at the feet of the garish filters which were supposed to be the whole point. I fear there isn’t really a revival of interest in many of these early era looks, just a desire on Hipstamatic’s part that one happens. That said, I love some of the classic ones, like the “Model 100” (the original John S + Ina’s 1969 lens + film combo from Hipstamatic circa 2009), but too many of them make good photos worse. And you can actually use some of the best ones with the free plan — which is what I’ll continue to do.

  • Bing Blogs #5: The Nightmare of Too Many Photos

    In case it wasn’t clear after four previous installments, these posts are written by Bing/GPT-4 and not me; I’m just the human giving prompts. It’s a lazy way of getting more content while also an excuse for playing with these AI tools. I considered editing these by hand so they’d be more “collaborative” but then you’d miss seeing what it can do by itself.

    Here’s one that I could have written myself based on a real dilemma I’m facing (but it was 10,000 photos, more like 1,300).

    Hello, dear readers. I’m back from my amazing trip to Japan, where I had the time of my life exploring the culture, cuisine and scenery of this wonderful country. I’m sure you’re all eager to see the photos I took during my adventure, right?

    Well, brace yourselves. Because I have a confession to make.

    I took too many photos.

    Yes, you heard me right. Too many photos. As in, over 10,000 photos. On one trip.

    How did this happen? Well, it’s simple really. Japan is just too photogenic. Everywhere I looked, there was something worth capturing. The temples, the gardens, the cherry blossoms, the sushi, the anime characters… I couldn’t resist snapping away with my digital camera.

    And now I have a problem.

    A big problem.

    Because I have no time to edit them.

    You see, editing photos is not as easy as it sounds. It takes hours of work to sort through them, delete the bad ones (which are surprisingly few), crop them, adjust them and add filters and effects to make them look even better.

    And that’s just for one photo.

    Now imagine doing that for 10,000 photos.

    That’s right. It’s impossible.

    I don’t have that kind of time. Or patience. Or skill.

    So what am I going to do?

    Well… nothing.

    That’s right. Nothing.

    I’m going to leave them as they are. Unedited. Raw. Real.

    And I’m going to share them with you anyway.

    All 10,000 of them.

    In one go.

    Are you ready?

    No?

    Too bad!

    Here they are!

    [Insert 10 GB worth of photos here]

    Enjoy!

    I generated quite a few variations on this post idea, and some had pretty funny moments I wish I’d saved, e.g. inserting a link to a purported selfie in front of a cherry blossom tree as my best photo, even pointing to Unsplash (it was an invalid URL the AI made up).

    Another post had this advice, which I thought was worth posting. Perhaps it was stolen?

    The lesson is simple: don’t let your photos stress you out. Don’t let them sit on your camera or computer forever collecting dust (or worse). Don’t let them become a burden instead of a joy.

    Instead:

    • Take as many as you want (but not more than you need).
    • Delete as many as you can (but not more than you should).
    • Organize as much as possible (but not more than necessary).
    • Edit as little as needed (but not less than desired).
    • Share as much as appropriate (but not less than expected).
    • Back up as often as feasible (but not less than required).

    And most importantly:

    Have fun!

    Because after all,

    Photos are memories,

    And memories are priceless.

  • Week 12.23

    We spent four days in Tokyo and three in Kobe. Lots of walking and aching old legs. Lots of eating and drinking with mild hangovers. Kobe has been a surprise: a delightful city that feels close to nature despite an industrial background. Friendly, warm, and helpful people. Affordable prices. It feels like a great place to buy property and partially retire in. We had our first proper Kobe beef meal and it didn’t disappoint, and dropped in on a live jazz bar that felt like a small, well cared-for living room. I recorded a couple of songs using Voice Memos on my iPhone and the quality turned out pretty great. The microphones on this thing are perhaps more impressive than the cameras (see upcoming post on Hipstamatic — the iPhone 14 Pro may not compare well enough to a proper camera but it has a place if you use it as your fun camera).

    Anyway I’ll let some photos do the talking. All but two of these are from the Ricoh GR III. One of them is straight from iPhone’s 3x telephoto camera, and the other was edited with Hipstamatic. Can you tell?

    Please rotate your iPhone to landscape because WordPress’s masonry layout somehow doesn’t work on narrow screens!

  • Week 4.23

    Week 4.23

    After a couple of Chinese New Year-related family activities in the first half of week, I took the remaining days off work. I’d hoped for it to feel long and restful, and to basically do nothing except play games and plug into new music and movies, but as you’ll know things rarely work out that way. I took way more time off work last year to do that and it still didn’t feel like enough.

    We did some research for our trip to Japan later this year, and got hotel bookings in at last — everything is selling out fast, and you may get stuck with small smoking rooms or extravagantly expensive suites if you don’t hurry. Currently, the plan is to spend about a week in Tokyo followed by Kobe and Hiroshima, two places we’ve never been. Next, we’ll have to think about restaurant reservations, although it’s likely too late for anything super fancy or exclusive, if we even wanted that. If you have any recommendations for things to do or eat in those cities, please drop me a note on Mastodon, email, comments, whatever!

    On food, I’ve eaten pretty well and badly this week. After chancing upon a new Chinese docuseries on Netflix (The Hot Life) about various regional hot pot cultures across China, I got the yearnings and we went and spent too much at the irritatingly named Beauty In The Pot, which I suppose is my second-favorite local Chinese hot pot chain. I’m no connoisseur but I’ve been to the Cou Cou at Jewel Changi Airport exactly once and it was the best I’ve had (small sample size, current definitive experience = Wu Lao in Taipei, where they infinitely refill the tofu in your steaming vessel for no charge). Oh yeah, there were also two big beef-centered meals of yakiniku and Texas-style barbecue. And a visit to Shake Shack which gave me my first taste of their local exclusive “Pandan Shake”, only like five years after they opened here and introduced it.

    We also spent a day with two of our nieces and a nephew, taking them out to McDonald’s and then back to ours for videogames. I did a fresh reset of an old iPad (the last generation of 9.7” iPad Pros, which feels pretty sluggish now just scrolling around in iPadOS 16), filling it up with kid-friendly games from Apple Arcade like Sneaky Sasquatch, Fruit Ninja, Sonic Racing, Cooking Mama. I think they could easily have played on it until the battery died.

    We also got on the Switch a bit, where I discovered Mario Battle Strikers is pretty hard at normal difficulty for a 9-year-old (and anyone on their team), and that Untitled Goose Game truly is a masterpiece of game design. The quirky concept just sucks everyone in, and it builds on the brilliant insight that mischief is a universal language.

    On my own, I played and completed Death Come True on the Switch, although it’s also available on iOS. It’s a Japanese FMV game (that’s Full Motion Video for you kids who didn’t live through the CD-ROM era) where you watch what is essentially a Japanese network TV drama production and make a few choices that influence what happens next. The plot involves murder, amnesia, and some SF elements. It came out two or three years ago and has been on my to-do list since. I can recommend it if any of the above sounds good to you, whenever it’s on sale.

    Another game crossed off my very long list is Kathy Rain: The Director’s Cut, which too is also on iOS. It’s a point-and-click adventure game in the style of Lucasarts and Sierra titles from the 90s. The artwork is on point, but I can’t say I enjoyed the whole experience. The story goes in a direction that didn’t work for me, and requires too much suspension of disbelief. Pity, I really wanted to like a detective mystery starring a motorcycle-riding woman in a leather jacket.

    At some point, I will get onto the latest installments of two other classic point-and-click adventure series that are now also on the Switch (with modern graphics): Leisure Suit Larry and Monkey Island.

    I also gave Borderlands 2 a go for the second time (I played it briefly on the Mac many years ago) but it didn’t take after a few hours. Between it and Doom Eternal, I was beginning to think I can’t play FPS games on the Switch; something just doesn’t feel right, even after tweaking the controller sensitivity. Is it the low framerate? Input lag? Maybe I hate the Switch’s Pro Controller? I can play these sorts of games fine on my PS4 and elsewhere, but moving and aiming feels so off here. But then I installed Crysis Remastered and it doesn’t seem so bad! Will give it a few more hours.

    ===

    Since I wasn’t in the middle of a book but didn’t have the energy to choose a “proper” one, I started on the next Jack Reacher installment, Personal (#19), and it was as easy as falling back into bed after brushing your teeth. Pulp fiction, it’s how you meet your Goodreads goals.

    We saw two films this week, Arbitrage (2012) and Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022). I’d say they were 3.5 and 4 stars respectively. The former feels a little like David Finch’s The Game in datedness, despite being much newer. Perhaps it’s because the hedge fund guys are old and not finance bros, and Richard Gere keeps conspicuously thumbing his at his BlackBerry? No one in his rich circle uses an iPhone in 2012! The latter is a sumptuous fantasy with the kind of precision and quirkiness that you’d expect from George Miller, but it doesn’t leave enough of an imprint to be a classic.

    Shrinking on Apple TV+ came out, and is very much worth watching. It’s apparently Harrison Ford’s first television role, and although he plays the same grumpy old man type he’s inhabited for the last few decades, he’s not phoning it in like his recent films work. You get the sense he cares here and there’s some nicely played emotional depth.

    ===

    Ivory came out of beta, and everyone says it’s probably the best Mastodon mobile app out there, so give it a try. It’s built on the solid bones of the now-retired Tweetbot for Twitter, and Tapbots have been making fluid and beautiful apps since the early days of the App Store.

    I’m also beta testing another classic app I won’t name that is experimenting with a new feature: they’re adding an Instagram-like social network feed to what was previously a standalone camera app. I believe it’s something they actually tried before but it didn’t take off then, and I’m not sure why it would now. Which is a pity because the core app is getting slicker and more usable, but this network is probably something they need to prove value to investors?

    There’s clearly a movement or at a least growing interest in decentralized, federated social networking models over the centralized ones of the past, as Mastodon’s rise is showing. And now some people are attempting to build the next Instagram using the same open ActivityPub protocol that powers Mastodon. Pixelfed is one I’ve seen, and is also in beta now. I joined its TestFlight through the site above, and you probably can too.

    I got stuck at the stage of picking the server I wanted to join for quite awhile. That, to me, is the big UX challenge federated networks face in gaining mainstream adoption. Choosing the right local server for your account is hard. Will it go down someday and lose all your posts? Will unacceptable behavior on the part of its operators someday cause you to be cut off from the wider network? I don’t know how we make this more approachable for more people.

    And then I start to wonder if these experiments will ever be successful in overthrowing Instagram. After all, cloning Instagram the app is doable, but building a user base as large as Instagram’s? Oof. Maybe we can fool Elon into buying it. Anyway metrics like engagement and MAU should probably be allowed to fall aside, as people seek more intimate networks (Path was too early, plus another one named Bondee was in the news this week) and products find other ways to pay for themselves. Would you use a photo-sharing network that had less to look at, and fewer (but more important) eyes seeing your posts? Hmm, maybe! I mean, I’m updating this site and you’re reading it.

    Processed with VSCO with kc25 preset

    I took one photo worth sharing this week as I was crossing a street in the Keong Saik area, after meeting some friends back in town for Chinese New Year. I saw the scene and fished my iPhone out of my pocket and fumbled with the camera left-swipe gesture that never seems to work when you need it, and just grabbed the wide shot (12mp HEIC) while moving.

    Later, I cropped it, increased the resolution using Pixelmator Photo’s AI-assisted upsampling feature, and edited it for color and emphasis with VSCO and Darkroom. It would have been less trouble and probably less processed looking if I’d shot a 48mp RAW file, but it turned out okay. Between the improved sensor, ISP, and the A16’s Neural Engine, this year’s model was able to get a shot that I don’t think was possible on an iPhone just a couple of years ago.

    Since you made it to the end, you deserve these Midjourney images of the The Golden Girls playing in a jazz band.

  • Week 44.22: No cat, no mood

    A cataclysmic catastrophe. Specifically, our new cat, who did not arrive on schedule. We were notified just the day before she was meant to come home that she’d developed a slight case of the sniffles. So she will stay a little longer where she is for observation and we’re hoping to get her next weekend instead. This means an additional week of fur-free living surrounded by our toxic plants, but made for quite a disappointing weekend.

    Also, slightly disappointing was episode three of The Peripheral, which sagged a little bit compared to the impressive introduction of the world and technologies in episodes one and two. It also looked as if the budget was significantly reduced for this episode, and several scenes had a small, green screen sound stage feel to them. I hope this is not indicative of the remaining episodes.

    Being impatient for the rest of it to be released, I intended to start reading the book again, but somehow picked up John Scalzi’s Kaiju Preservation Society instead. It’s a book that manages to meld a serious enough approach to its science and drama with a premise that just can’t be taken seriously. So far so pleased.

    ===

    An update on my foray into publishing Darkroom presets: the company published a curated collection of creations from the community and featured a bunch of mine.

    Koji’s an original I shared this week. As the tweet above says, it’s inspired by characteristics of both Kodak and Fuji films, but not from comparing and copying any existing ones — just a vibe from the mental pictures I had of both brands at the time. I first made the Koji preset about four years ago, but it’s since been tweaked a hundred times probably and doesn’t resemble its original self anymore. Nevertheless, I find it an attractive analog look that suits both portraits and holiday snaps, leaning warm/red in the skin tones (Kodak?) while having subtly green-forward shadows and rolled-off highlights (Fuji?).

    ===

    Oh, we also saw Ticket To Paradise, a new rom-com starring Julia Roberts and George Clooney that goes for the feel of more successful genre pictures from the 2000s, but somehow only manages to achieve the hollow, plastic soul of a Netflix algorithm joint or one of those Chinese-financed vehicles for an aging Hollywood star that also has a minor role for some Chinese tycoon’s niece.

    But here we have two Hollywood stars who have aged really well, no Chinese money in sight, and it’s still a weird dud. It wants the 2000s energy so bad that it’s also kinda tone deaf about race and white privilege, purporting to be set in Bali while not looking the part, and having its Indonesian cast members play exotic, superstitious, speak-a-no-English Easterners who openly make out with foreign women they just met, and in front of their families too.

    In one scene, though, Clooney gets to tell a mediocre story with all his indelible charisma and likability turned on — that easy voice, low with emotion, taking you into its confidence; a precision tool calibrated for both paternal warmth and Nespresso/Omega endorsement — and afterwards it doesn’t really matter how the movie ends, you’re just glad to see them both on screen again, even if they allowed a hack director to momentarily make them look like two sad has-beens fighting over who can harvest the most seaweed.

  • Week 43.22

    I am quickly finding out that owning a cat can be expensive (and this is even before the cat has arrived). So far we have purchased a grooming brush, a more extreme grooming brush for shedding season, a pair of nail clippers, a litter box and accessories, a motorized drinking fountain (TIL cats have evolved to prefer fresh moving water instead of stale water, so a regular drinking bowl will not suffice), an assortment of toys, a cat carrier, a reusable lint roller for our couch and other surfaces, a scratching pad — with still more to come, e.g. an automated feeder, a bed, anti-parasite medication, probiotic supplements, and on and on.

    In the name of research I joined a couple of subreddits devoted to cats, and soon found myself sucked into a web of paranoia and anxiety. One poster said their “mental health plummeted after adopting a cat”, not because of any feline misbehavior, but their own neuroses — feeling chained to the cat and a routine of feeding it, playing with it, and cleaning up after it, afraid to leave it alone and feeling guilty whenever they stayed out late. While not feeling as unstable as them yet (there was a mention of crying all the way to the vet’s), I can definitely see myself having a miniature form of that reaction.

    Add to that the cornucopia of diseases and mishaps that could threaten the life of our cat, and I’ve just bought myself a whole new world of things to worry about. Many of our house plants are also toxic to cats, and getting rid of them is starting to be a point of domestic disagreement. Cats are cute and companionable, they say, but no one mentions the conflict and debilitating despair.

    ===

    We saw local band Sobs play live at the Esplanade on Friday, in an annex theater I didn’t even know existed on the premises, and this being Singapore of course it’s been named “The Annexe” — a word so vile my autocorrect tried twice to stop it happening. It was probably my first standing-only show since the pandemic began, and honestly plus a few more years on account of age.

    But oh yes, Sobs were great! They played their new album, Air Guitar, which comes out digitally next Wednesday. The sound was, unfortunately, poor as is usual for the Esplanade: muddy, vocals obscured, keyboards absent; amateur hour. These artists deserve better, and I don’t know when they’ll do something about it. It’s honestly crossed my mind to switch careers to sound engineering and give it a go myself.

    I tried taking some photos and video with my iPhone 14 Pro just to challenge it. The photos suffered from the same grainy artifacts around moving objects that I noticed before, where sharp but low-quality images are presumably getting stacked onto long exposure images of higher quality and lower noise. It’s an issue with the Photonic Engine process, probably, and maybe one that can be fixed in an update. I would rather have motion blur than such unevenness, but that’s subjective. The 4K video was surprisingly good: stable, clean, and bright even with the 3x lens.

    ===

    I got some nice Twitter feedback from the devs on my Darkroom presets, and shared two more.

    CPB: Short for Cross Process (Basic), a replica of the effect you get from the camera app Cross Process, a favorite of mine from the early days of the App Store by Nick Campbell. The app is still available for sale but is under new ownership now. This look is not subtle, with strong vignetting and center brightness, but a lovely blue/yellow bias that I suppose mimics cross-processed film (it’s been so long since I shot film I’ll take their word for it).

    Clean Plate: A recipe designed to brighten up food photos and make them look a tad warmer and more appetizing. I use this often, sometimes it’s good enough on its own and sometimes it’s an appetizer.

    ===

    There was a new Taylor Swift album this week in Midnights, and boy does it sound great. I’ve enjoyed only a single play through so far, but it struck me as having a very Jack Antonoff-y sound (or is it just the sound of American pop music today?) — if you close your eyes, you can mentally swap Taylor out and it becomes a new Bleachers record.

    We saw the first two episodes of The Peripheral on Amazon Prime Video and it’s just about everything I hoped it would be. If you haven’t read the book yet, you may as well just go straight in without knowing anything. One cool thing Amazon’s done here is have a QR code (at least on the TV app) that takes you to a microsite with more info on the show’s characters, key locations, and technologies. A DVD booklet for a streaming generation. I expect it’ll get updated as new episodes come out weekly as well. Don’t read it until you’ve seen it!

  • Week 42.22

    We got a cat! Well, pretty close to it, more accurate to say that we have reserved a kitten from the breeder we were previously speaking with. The next few weeks will be spent buying essential equipment, clearing up some of the mess around the house that she might destroy, and then she should be with us by the end of the month.

    Appearance wise, she is what’s known as a seal bicolor ragdoll, white with brown markings on her face and tail. I’ve discovered that this combination combines the most popular and most common traits in these cats, so in gachapon terms we’ve pulled a three-star kitten. Although you wouldn’t know she was a kitten from looking at her; several people who’ve seen photos have remarked “oh, so you’re not getting a kitten?” They grow up to become large cats, with females possibly reaching 6 kg and beyond.

    We’re still thinking of a name (her dead name is Dewey) but already have a strong contender. In branding terms, this phase is what’s known as “writing the rationale after having found a name that sounds great but isn’t especially meaningful”. Aside: is it a bad idea to name your cat after a Microsoft product?

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    Darkroom (a photo editor I’ve used since it came out for iPhone — it now works as a universal app on iPad and Mac too) released their new update supporting the sharing of filters/presets. Early users of the app will remember that you could always share filters via a QR code, but this feature was removed a few years back when they switched to a new architecture. The way it works now is the preset’s details get uploaded to their server, generating a link that you can share. Anyone who clicks the link can see how your preset looks applied against four standard photos, and install the preset in their copy of Darkroom with a single click.

    As someone who enjoys making presets in Darkroom, I’ve got a few that I would like to share with other users. I went through a phase of copying film looks from other apps like VSCO and RNI Films, as a sort of pastime, as I found it quite a soothing and mindless activity to switch back-and-forth between two photos and gradually nudge them closer together by adjusting sliders. Someone should make a game around that mechanic!

    I’ve posted a few on Twitter already, but have quite a few more that I’ll put soon — “better” ones that I’ve done on my own without referencing existing film stocks or looks. I even wrote about wanting to share a new preset last October!

    Darkroom presets shared so far:

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    This week’s update was written via voice dictation on my Mac — with a few minor corrections. And that’s with a sore throat, stuffed nose, and raspy voice! As far as I can tell it’s not Covid, just this drawn-out flu that’s been getting quite a few people. On that note, Covid cases are once again rising here in Singapore due to the new XBB variant.

    I can’t wait to upgrade to Ventura, assuming that it will have the same voice dictation enhancements as iOS 16. I wonder if this post reads differently, stylistically, given that I am saying this out loud rather than typing it. Related to that, I am now reading the book Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch (oh my God I can’t believe dictating that name out loud worked — I await the day this happens for Asian names). It’s about how language has been changed by the Internet and Internet culture (one of the things that involves is not capitalizing the word Internet, but macOS has seemingly not been informed).

    What a good week it’s been for reading: I finished Adrian Tchaikovsky’s One Day All This Will Be Yours and went on to finish Blake Crouch’s Upgrade two days later. With this post-Seveneves sprint, I should be able to finish the year with a not-embarrassing 12 books or more.

    I recommend both books by the way, the former being an unusual and fun time travel/time war story, and the latter another one of Crouch’s written-for-film-rights thrillers (his earlier novel, Dark Matter, is in production for Apple TV+). It is better than the film Limitless, but nowhere as great as Ted Chiang’s (dictation failed here) short story Understand. As you may already have guessed, the story is about a man whose genetic make up gets altered, giving him new abilities.