sangsara.net

Tag: Photography

  • Week 18.24

    Week 18.24

    Last week marked the 200th installment of a blogging rhythm I wasn’t sure I could keep up for a year, let alone nearly four. I thank any readers I have, the makers of iA Writer, WordPress, and of course, my wife for graciously giving me space on Sunday mornings to engage in this act of reflection and blabbering.

    Except I’m not writing this on Sunday, no it’s currently Thursday and I’m getting a head start with some structure because we’ll be in Hong Kong for the weekend. It was a last-minute idea, driven by a primal craving for Chinese roast goose, a desire to escape the summer heatwave currently roasting all of SE Asia, and the realization that we won’t have a pocket of clear calendar space like this again for several months.

    I haven’t been back in the territory since May 2019, and so much has obviously happened since. Did you know that this very site was once blocked by the great Chinese firewall? I have no idea why, but I hope I don’t find myself unwelcome upon arrival. Anecdotally, I’ve heard the city doesn’t quite feel the same these days, and we’ve seen the numerous ChannelNewsAsia documentary features about people looking for fresh starts, emigrating to the UK and so on. But as an infrequent visitor with only superficial interactions to speak of, I don’t expect to sense any changes at all.

    What’s changed is that while I used to be excited about Hong Kong’s lack of sales tax and abundance of electronics and camera emporiums, not to mention official Apple Stores, those things are less interesting these days. I’ve got nothing on my shopping list (plus I’m in low-cost mode — see previous entries), I’m content with snapping photos on my iPhone and Ricoh GR III, and Singapore has so many Apple Stores these days I’ve started taking them for granted.

    (CW: some camera nerdery ahead)

    I am looking forward to photographing the city a little with Dmitri Novikov’s new camera app, Zerocam (in beta). The concept is an extremely simplified camera with one button; there’s not even a way to quickly look at the last photo you took. When you hit the shutter, a RAW image is captured with as little of the iPhone’s intelligent processing as possible, plus some specific settings that Novikov prefers (-0.5ev and some very light touch color grading, as far as I can tell), and then saved directly to a HEIF file.

    Unfortunately it only gives you photos at 12mp size, probably because third-party apps don’t have the option of 24mp and 24mp is a result of the computational photography processes that Zerocam avoids anyway. And while you can use Halide to capture similarly unprocessed photos (turn off “Enable Smartest Processing” in its settings), you can’t make it remember a lowered exposure setting between sessions.

    The intermediate solution I’ve landed on to retain 24mp files while getting better everyday photos is to set Apple’s stock camera app to remember a -0.7ev exposure, and tune Photographic Styles to -20 Tone and -7 Warmth. I really like the look of this “recipe” on iPhone 15, and it’s kinda like shooting with Highlight Priority exposure and the Negative Film effect on a Ricoh GR III (which I’ll also be doing).

    Actually in HK now:

    We’ve chosen a wet and gloomy weekend to stop by. Our flight was delayed by 2.5 hours, I suspect because of turbulent conditions at HK International Airport around our original arrival time. Just two days earlier, some Cathay Pacific passengers were tossed around and couldn’t land for six hours, with the descriptions of a vomit and scream-filled cabin in the news fulfilling the conditions of a personal nightmare.

    I take back a little of what I said — things do feel somewhat different. The city is grubbier than I remember; prices are higher and some people must be struggling to get by (well, HK isn’t alone in this); and there’s a hint of economic decline in the many empty shop units with ‘For Lease’ signs up.

    One tool that’s been super helpful all week has been the Arc Search app on iOS, which added a voice mode that you can assign to the Action Button on iPhone 15 Pros. When the app launched with an AI feature that summarizes search queries on custom-generated webpages, I was wary of this “browser that browses for you” concept, which gives users few reasons to visit the underlying pages being mined (thereby ruining the web), but maybe they’ve made some changes since. It’s easier to click through to the sources.

    I’ve been using it to answer questions like “what interesting art exhibitions are on in HK right now?” and it performs some light research, and I do end up visiting the linked websites for further details like location and pricing. It’s effectively a better way to present search results (albeit with the same bias and ranking concerns as search results). I hope iOS 18’s AI overhaul will see similar utility coming to Siri and Safari. Perhaps this is where the rumored Gemini partnership with Google comes in.

    ===

    Media activity:

    • I started on a new Jack Reacher book: Night School. It’s what I do when I can’t decide what to read next.
    • I’ve been watching the new-ish MF Ghost anime, which is a sort of sequel to Initial D. Some people seem to think it’s an insult to the original show, but I wouldn’t know — I might watch it after this? It’s got a funny premise: in a future Japan, electric vehicles are the norm and gas-powered cars are only allowed in a special racing tournament called MFG. But drifting has become a lost art! Enter Kanata Rivington, a hafu born in England who trained under a master who I presume is the main protagonist of Initial D, returning to Japan for the first time to find his lost father and school a nation on how to burn rubber while chucking a uey.
    • The Japanese saxophonist Sadao Watanabe is back with a new album at the insane age of 91. It’s called Peace, and I’m digging it. Speaking of, I first heard him as a child digging through my dad’s music collection.
    • I’m also loving Tigers Blood, by Waxahatchee, which I discovered on Pitchfork’s list of The Best Music of 2024 So Far. I’m aware that Anna Wintour fired a bunch of people from Pitchfork and it’s supposedly not the site it used to be, but this is a great pick. They say: “Recommended if you like — Indie-country; Sheryl Crow; Gillian Welch; that Brad Cook Sound; MJ Lenderman showing up; catchin’ skinks down by the creek; ice cream stand off the highway; letting your legs dangle off a pier”.
    • What a week in rap battle history! The beef between Drake and Kendrick Lamar has been giving us explosive drama and incredible diss tracks, sometimes more than one a day, and Kendrick’s the winner in my book but honestly I’m afraid just watching it unfold. It feels like someone’s going to get shot or jailed as a result of this.

    Oh one more thing! The Cannes Lions Festival announced the shortlisting juries for 2024’s awards, and I’m pleased to share that I’m on the panel for the Brand Experience & Activation Lions. That should keep me occupied for the next few weeks.

  • 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 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 52.23

    Week 52.23

    Greetings from beautiful Chiang Mai on this last day of the year. It’s my first time here, and I’m sure it won’t be my last. If anything, I’m kicking myself for not coming sooner — it’s currently a very cool and walkable 25°C at 11am, and temperatures go below 20°C in the evenings; Microsoft Copilot with Bing tells me it’s the safest city in SE Asia (wha?); and the food and coffee have been top notch so far.

    We’ve also been to a cool cocktail bar with live jazz in a basement speakeasy-like space, and another “live house” with a mix of bands playing each night. Coming from Singapore where jazz clubs are a rarity, and almost exclusively the domain of old people, it’s been surprising to see many young people in attendance, although I can’t be sure they enjoy the bands. They seem to pay more attention and clap louder for the pop cover bands.

    One amazing performer I heard was Joshua Lebofsky, originally from Canada, who sang and played a straight hour of jazz standards and pop interpretations on piano at The A Ter (theater). They were fantastically musical and soulful variations, and I was glad to be able to tell him so afterwards; sadly he hasn’t got a social media presence, but there’s an album from 2006 on Apple Music: Play A Little Prayer.

    If we lived here, I would be a regular patron at these places for sure (especially at prices roughly half those back home). The non-existence of a vibrant jazz scene is such a shame for Singapore, because we have quite a few talented jazz players who end up being session musicians for mandopop performers most of the time, probably due to the economics of the music scene. I guess these are the third-order consequences of necessarily narrow education policies in our early years.

    We also went on a walking street food tour and a cooking class at a small organic farm and school (where I was snapped in a farmer’s hat looking glum at having been dragged along, but ultimately it was a good time and the food was, like all of it, quite excellent). An intriguing culinary detail here is how Hainanese immigrants created their own localized chicken rice combining the steamed chicken with deep fried chicken cutlets and an entirely different chilli that’s dark and savory, with fermented soybeans and fish sauce?

    Here are some photos, all from my iPhone 15 Pro Max. I made a new Darkroom preset to handle the light and scenery here, and I think it’s a versatile look I’ll probably be using for a long while. I’ll probably share it here next year after some fine tuning!

    Anyway, Chiang Mai. Come by, it’s lovely enough to consider buying an apartment in, but I’ve only been here a couple of days.

    ===

    On the 45-minute minibus ride back from the farm last night, I managed to throw together my end-of-year playlist with some not-too-shabby transitions (I recommend turning crossfading on; 3 seconds). This is partly a diary of associated memories and partly what I’ll remember as the year’s best songs. This process usually takes much longer but everything came together on a stomach full of coconut curries and fresh herbs and spices they had us pound in a mortar ourselves.

    Here’s Listening Remembering 2023 on Apple Music.

  • Week 50.23

    Week 50.23

    Christmas is creeping closer, but the Goodreads Challenge angel won’t be darkening my doorstep as I’ve redeemed myself with two weeks to go! James Hogan’s Thrice Upon A Time was the twelfth book of my year, and definitely one of the better ones. It’s a 1980s time travel story where no time travel takes place, but it grapples with ideas about how timelines are rewritten, plus some other global topics that seem quite prescient when read today. Stylistically, it’s aged, but in that classic sci-fi way I love, which takes me back to reading books in the library after school. I think those hours, that precious access back then to a ton of books I couldn’t wait to read, were the part of going to school I looked forward to most. Anyway I’ve started a dumb new book that I should be finishing this year for bonus credit: The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley.

    If you’re looking for reading material, it may interest you to hear that I somehow managed to finish B’Fast, the AI-generated breakfast zine project I mentioned last week. The InstaZine GPT I made to create the content is also available through the same link (I updated the page with some additional usage tips today). Now that it’s done, I’m planning to make a companion breakfast-themed zine called “B’Fast (Brandon’s Version)” which will be made entirely by me, in a way that an AI presumably would not. But probably not straight away.

    ===

    Earlier this year, Hipstamatic redesigned and relaunched their Hipstamatic X app. The “X” was dropped, and they added a new social feed. It was the official replacement for their original app which became Hipstamatic Classic. Where the original was funded by in-app purchases for new filters (at a pace of roughly one new 99c release each month), the new Hipstamatic charges a $30/year subscription, doubling their income from faithful fans.

    I used the new app for some photos during my trip to Japan and mostly enjoyed the experience, but it was too buggy and the UI was still too cluttered and confusing (a longstanding problem with the original Hipstamatic app as well) for me to consider continuing with a paid subscription.

    Their main problem is that there are now over 300 filters in the forms of “films” and “lenses” and “flashes” that you can combine to make infinite looks, and no good way to make the attractive human-curated combinations they recommend accessible and discoverable. In the last version, they tried to give a few of these combinations the tangible metaphor of being unique “cameras”, each one with a different skeuomorphic body you picked off a shelf, but essentially they were presets you could call up. But you can keep, what, ten of these aside in a little drawer before you couldn’t tell them apart? And so many of the other combinations were left out of sight and out of mind.

    Now, after a week of teasing social media posts, wherein a “physical camera” was shown in videos — quite obviously a 3D model rendered in AR, but some people believed they were going to release a hardware product anyway — they’ve released a major update (v10) that tries to untangle the Gordian knot of their UX issues.

    In this new version, they’ve tried to marry what worked in the original app with a new info architecture and set of metaphors to manage the library of looks they’ve accumulated over the last 14 years. You get just ONE skeuomorphic camera to call your own and customize the look of, and this camera is capable of loading up many presets. You can either let the camera detect the scene and choose a suitable preset for it (Auto mode), or specify the preset yourself (Manual mode). There are 9 possible scenes, such as Travel, People, and Still Life, but in a puzzling and unfortunate move, when you start using the app, each of these scenes has just one or two associated presets. That means you’re going to see the same looks over and over, when there are over a hundred more hidden away in a long list. This was presumably done to allow you, the user, to customize your experience and assign your favorite presets to the scenes.

    There are two major problems at this point. One: leaving it up to the user to gain their own understanding of all the pre-existing “good combos” and assign them to 9 scene categories is insane. It’s a lot of work to hand off to a customer you hope will pay you money. The team should be doing the work of tagging each preset combo with a recommended use case, AND making it easy to assign them. It’s not currently easy. I had to move back and forth between two sections of the app looking at presets and memorizing their names to go assign to a scene, because these things aren’t placed together. Off the top of my head, it just needs an in-line list of suggested presets (from the aforementioned tagging exercise) on the same screen where you customize a scene’s presets. Perhaps this is coming. I’d argue it should have been in the MVP release of such a big redesign.

    Two: as I mentioned, there are infinite possible presets given the number of ingredients they’ve accumulated. You can make your own combos, but there’s no great way to experiment and do this — there should be a sandbox where you can explore each lens/film/flash’s characteristics and try them out in real time to find a good combo. There used to be a section of the app called the “Hipstamatic Supply Catalog” where you could browse all these effects (it was only like a static magazine, but they could have made it interactive), and this now seems to be gone or I can’t find it anymore in the maze of menus and buttons. Perhaps they’re okay with most users just using the curated “good presets” and never making their own, but it seems like a missed opportunity.

    I was feeling a mix of optimistic and bored, so I paid for an annual subscription anyway and will be trying to take lots of everyday silly snaps with this, and maybe even use it on my upcoming trip to Thailand. But if you know someone who works at Hipstamatic, please talk to them about taking on some external advice.

    ===

    • I finished watching Pluto on Netflix. It’s still a strong recommendation for me; a modern anime made with classic sensibilities and a story that really keeps you guessing. It’s also a very different Astro Boy story, suitable for people who hear “Astro Boy” and think it’s stuff for kids.
    • We started watching A Murder at the End of the World and I’m really liking it so far. Especially its star, Emma Corrin, who I’ve never seen in anything else before. They’ve got the most strikingly similar face to Jodie Foster, I was sure they were related.
    • New playlist! BLixTape #3 is done, made up of mostly new songs that I’ve been listening to since mid-October. Add it here on Apple Music.
  • 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.

  • Introducing ✨PixelGenius GPT: An AI photo editing expert

    Do you edit photos, use filters, or make your own presets? What if you had an AI tool to help create any look you asked for?

    That’s ✨PixelGenius, my first “GPT” (a custom agent built on ChatGPT). It’s a photo editing expert that creates filters, suggests improvements, and helps you elevate your craft.

    • Describe a vibe and it’ll provide the settings to make a preset/filter.
    • Emulate a classic film stock!
    • Upload photos and get editing suggestions.
    • Reverse-engineer edited photos by providing a Before and After.
    • Learn editing techniques just by chatting naturally.

    It’s designed to help beginners learn the art and color science of photo editing, while letting pros save time with great starting points. For every adjustment, it explains the intent so you learn how this stuff works.

    It gives you standard adjustment values that you can plug into your favorite photo editing app like Darkroom, VSCO, Photomator, or Adobe Lightroom and save them as your own custom presets.

    I prefer to learn by trying stuff out rather than watching videos or whatever, so when I first started using Lightroom, it was a messy process of trial and error that lasted years. ✨PixelGenius turns that into an interactive, guided experience. It’s like having a photo editing expert on demand, and you can even get into deep conversations about color theory and photographic history. All you need is a ChatGPT Plus account.

    This involved writing one of the most comprehensive prompts I’ve done so far, so I’d be curious to know your thoughts after you give it a go!

    ✨Polaroid 600 adjustments
    A dramatic look created with ✨PresetGenius
  • Week 40.23

    Week 40.23

    So-forting what?

    Remember the Leica Sofort (German for “instantly”) camera? It came out of nowhere years ago, an unacknowledged collaboration with Fujifilm that took their popular Instax Mini 90 model and rehoused it in a sleeker Leica-designed body (offered at a much higher price, nearly double if I recall right). Reviewers tried to discern a difference in the photos, but they were essentially identical cameras on the inside. For some reason, everyone danced around the similarities and at best said the Sofort was “inspired” by the Mini 90, as if it was a new Instax camera by Leica that somehow came out looking mighty similar, rather than a simple body swap at the same Fuji factory.

    This week, Leica announced the Sofort 2, which is now a redesigned Instax mini Evo (a camera I bought myself for Christmas in 2021). Where the original Sofort was a fully analog Instax camera, the Sofort 2 is one of Fuji’s hybrids: a digital camera fused with one of their Instax printers, so you can take tons of photos and then decide which to print.

    By the way I also mentioned this on Threads. You should follow me there if you’ve quit Twitter.

    In my opinion, the mini Evo is the least ugly Instax camera Fuji has made, which is one of the reasons I was excited to get one when they came out. Oh, I noticed that Jurin from XG uses one, and some of their IG posts look like mini Evo shots. But the Sofort 2 is beautiful, streamlining the body to its essential elements and removing nearly all traces of fake plastic leather and silver-effect plastic.

    Leica’s ability to wrap other companies’ cameras in minimalist industrial designs and sell them for more money is unmatched. I bought their D-Lux 7 precisely because I wanted Panasonic’s LX100M2 but could not get behind its rugged hiking shoe looks.

    Where the mini Evo is a cute plastic facsimile of a Fujifilm X100 camera, and wearing one around on a shoulder strap makes you look like a kid who’s been placated with their very own toy iPhone, the Sofort 2 looks like a camera in its own right (far as I can tell from the images). And as little as I have used my mini Evo over the past two years, it will be very hard to convince myself not to “upgrade” to this version for Christmas. And to be clear, there are ZERO functional improvements from the Fuji version, apart from not looking like a toy.

    Fujifilm makes their Instax cameras kid-friendly. They’re colorful, bulbous, fun, and recall the freewheeling sensibilities of product design before the 2008 financial crisis, when phones could look like tubes of lipstick and translucent plastics were everywhere (they’re coming back). The Leica partnership seemingly exists to provide the market with what the Japanese might innocently call “adult versions”. Why Fujifilm leaves money on the table by not doing this themselves is mind-boggling. Are they really incapable of producing understated designs? I don’t care about the Leica logo; it’s a joke on a product like this, I just want a clean-looking rounded rectangle.

    Generational shifts in photography

    And apropos of all this, I heard that Sean was getting into film photography and about to use an Olympus XA2 I once gave to Cien. Which got me talking to my Pi AI (we’ll come back to this) about old becoming new again in photography. Part of it was trying to convince myself that a Sofort 2 would be worth buying as an adult-friendly retro toy camera — a loving term for cameras with garbage image quality. I’ve owned many of the sort, like the Digital Harinezumi series, and they’re always plastic and cheap, or simply dusted-off vintage digital cameras. But this is a new! luxury! toy camera!

    So Pi sorta made the “observation” that using an analog camera is an attempt to engage with photography more deliberately. Which I already knew? Because of course using a dedicated camera instead of a smartphone today is deliberate; a “slow photography” thing, a “real photographer” flex. Of course instant film is an extension of this.

    But I’d not really appreciated it from the perspective of Gen Z people who grew up without them. Like why ordinary kids not into capital-P Photography would be interested in Instax/film cameras and old digital cameras beyond signaling coolness. Obviously we Xennials and Millennials grew up with photographic scarcity and have fewer photos of our younger days, but these kids grew up in an age of surplus, literally taking photos for granted. Phone cameras everywhere mean cheap and infinite memories. So naturally tools that force moments to be more precious, that force viewers to see events through wonky lenses, would hit different.

    I noticed afterwards that Leica’s press release for the Sofort 2 sums this up with a simple statement: “Back then, the instantly printed photo symbolized acceleration, whereas, in today’s fast-paced world, it represents a moment of caution and relief.”

    Next day update: I neglected to mention here that the mini Evo and Sofort 2 cameras are actually perfect bridges between these two approaches to photography. They are digital cameras that let you shoot in surplus, and print only the photos worth keeping in scarcity. Also, having two offerings serves buyers across the spectrum from fun/affordable to serious/expensive, which tends to be a generational divide. The hybrid instant camera is a tool that unifies photographers with different values (so long as they’re okay with 5-megapixel shots), and serves as a symbol of ‘making this moment count’.

    The Pi personal AI assistant

    Okay, so what’s Pi? It’s billed as a personal AI, a ChatGPT for your daily life. But isn’t ChatGPT already for daily life, as well as work life, I hear you ask? Yeah I know, which is why I’m giving this a go. The main difference is that instead of multiple chat threads for different topics, with Pi you just have one main chat. It tries to learn more about you and draws on past context to inform its responses. It’s built on a proprietary foundation model, so perhaps they have a way to get around the short-term memory and context collapse that I’ve seen with other generative AI text systems — so far it’s doing quite well after a few days!

    It’s free, and their privacy policy claims they’ll never share or sell your information, but yeah sure what else would they say? I’ve found it quite pleasant, and its responses are tuned to be shorter and less formal than ChatGPT’s defaults. It does feel like talking to a friendly personal assistant.

    So far I’ve had discussions with it about movies (we talked about Interstellar and why some Nolan films don’t work as well as others), python programming, economics, frameworks for building good arguments, as well as its own purpose and unique value proposition.

    I just asked it to brainstorm what a Sofort 3 could bring to the table. It suggested more AI features (lol) and making it more user friendly. I said I’d go the other way and make it more unapologetically professional, with manual controls and higher quality. It was able to say that it sounded almost like an instant film version of a Leica M, and when I asked it to price such a product, it said $800 USD or higher. That’s pretty insightful!

    Something about its simulated personality and the UX of having a single chat thread (where I don’t have to keep introducing my needs and context) makes this very pleasant to use, so much so that I might end up using it over ChatGPT for some queries.

    ===

    Media activity

    • I had Saturday all to myself so it was a movie day. I saw The Equalizer 3, which was much slower and less action-packed than you’d expect. But Denzel is still badass and he gets to have a nice Italian holiday. Just expect a chiller installment going in. I think this is the last one for Robert McCall.
    • Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny was nowhere as bad as I was led to believe. I’d say it’s actually very successful in closing out Harrison Ford’s role and setting up a possible future heir. The last one was roundly panned and tried to introduce the idea that he had a son, played by an awful human being, which failed so badly they wrote him out in the most delicious way possible in this film. I really hope Phoebe Waller-Bridge gets her spinoff out of this, but apparently she’s developing a Tomb Raider TV series for Amazon Prime? What a shame to work on the pretender when the original tomb raiding franchise is right there!
    • I forced myself to finish season 1 of Invasion on Apple TV+, just because season 2 looked good in the trailers and has a higher Rotten Tomatoes score. Season 1 is an awful plodding mess, which given Simon Kinberg’s involvement should not surprise anyone. If you’re interested in S2 and haven’t started on S1, I’d recommend you just go straight to it and try to fill in the blanks.
    • The Below Deck marathon continues. We finished seasons 5 and 6, started over with season 1 — it was disappointing in terms of production quality and crew likeability — and are now on the second.
    • Apple Arcade’s new James Bond game is quite entertaining. Cypher 007 is an isometric stealth-action game from the makers of Space Marshalls, and should scratch the itch for anyone who loves the franchise and/or Metal Gear games.
    • So much new music came out and I haven’t had a chance to hear it all yet. After hearing about how Sufjan Stevens’ Javelin is dedicated to his partner who died this April, I’ve played it through several times. I think it’ll be one I come back to over the years.
    • There’s also a new Drake album, For All The Dogs, which may not have the same longevity.
    • I enjoyed my playthrough of HOW DID WE GET HERE? by a 22-year-old Canadian pop artist named “young friend” while writing this post. Admittedly, I wasn’t listening to the words at all, but it was very pleasant and I’ll have to get back to it.
    • A new Omar Apollo EP, Live For Me, which I’ve heard one song off and am really excited for.
    • Caroline Polachek’s second album, Desire, I Want To Turn Into You, has been getting great reviews too, so I’ll get around to it next week hopefully.
    • Also, a new Jorja Smith! A new Static Selektah!