The mooncake festival is over, but I finally got my hands on a bunch of double-salted-yolk ones, which are now being slowly savored out of the refrigerator on a daily basis. I haven’t weighed myself in several months and don’t want to.
I started reading David Mitchell’s Number9Dream and will probably take it in slowly over a couple of weeks. So far it’s intriguing, different, quite brilliant.
Like everyone else in the world, we saw the Squid Game series on Netflix. Most of it at 1.25x speed, because it’s unnecessarily slow moving at times, dragged out for god knows what reasons. It could have been done in fewer episodes, but that doesn’t help Netflix I suppose. Most of it was watched in the English dub, because we heard the subs aren’t entirely accurate and the dub script differs in places (so at least we get two incorrect signals to triangulate rather than just one), and also because the original performances are a little… whiny? I’ve seen takes proclaiming it the ‘most disturbing show ever’, going on about its hellish vision, saying it’s given people nightmares, and so on. I can’t understand why. There’s not much new in its rehashed survival contest/psychological horror tropes, and they even appear often in comics and anime. I remember being disturbed by videos of awful bum fights back in the early days of the internet. The real world is the most disturbing show ever.
Covid cases here exploded-ed-ed even further, nearly touching 3,000 cases a day at one point. Despite that, I went out a couple of times and had coffee with an old friend I mentioned here back in June. We hadn’t properly talked in about two decades, but have reconnected now thanks to Twitter and Telegram. She lives elsewhere but came back to town on some unexpected business, and I’m glad we had the chance to meet.
We also had a couple of friends over, and all of this irl activity hasn’t been as bad as I might have once felt. Don’t get me wrong, I still love being alone, but maybe not having to interact with people daily for work has recharged my social battery. But it’s still a broken one with <80% battery health, though. Don’t make me go to things. Especially if I have to dress up. <— Note to wife.
My iPhone 13 Pro arrived earlier than estimated, which prompted discussion of whether Apple and its delivery partners are deliberately underpromising and overdelivering, and whether they should stop this because it’s inconvenient for people who’ve made plans to be home on a certain date only to be suddenly told “it’s coming tomorrow”. It worked out fine for me this time. I am satisfied to have it, but haven’t had much occasion to test the new camera out much. More to come.
Inspired by a Twitter account I started following for its vibrant and vibey film photography, I made a preset in Darkroom that tries to get at the look: faded green shadows, soft magenta tones, lots of grain, and a steep ramp up into blown-out highlights. I also separately recreated the look of the “Positive Film” effect on my first-gen Ricoh GR, and I think I got quite close by shooting a color chart with both cameras for reference. Sadly, Darkroom removed the ability to share presets quite awhile back when they rebuilt the app, and we’re still waiting for that feature to be reintroduced.
Filter test, shot on iPhone 13 ProFilter test, shot on iPhone 12 Pro
Kanye updated Donda with a few subtle changes, so I re-added the album to my Apple Music library and put it on several times over. I haven’t been playing it much since it came out, but the music has had time to sit in my subconscious and open up. Now after this booster shot, I’m beginning to see it’s a better album than I first gave it credit for. It might be my favorite of the year in a couple of months.
The new iPhone 12 Pro does not disappoint, and I was foolish to think that I could skip this year. Well yes the camera is only a little bit better, I have no 5G networks to make use of, and the previous A13 processor was already so fast that the massive speed improvements here are imperceptible, but it all adds up. The size is just right, and the flat-sided form factor is nearly flawless (remove the camera bump and we’re there). I love that I can hold it lengthwise between thumb and forefinger with perfect stability — whose stupid idea was it to have rounded edges for the last six years?
Last night I tuned into a two-hour-long livestream about the process of developing and designing a book. It was part of Craig Mod’s Special Projects club (a sort of self-managed Patreon), and the subject was his recently released Kissa by Kissa — How to Walk Japan, Book One.
I managed to snag one of the first edition copies, and it was fascinating to be walked through it almost page-by-page by the person who put it together. We were a small group of live viewers, shadowy presences felt through a chat box, learning about unsung details and BTS production setbacks that makes me see my copy very differently. For instance, the book is not the physical size it was meant to be, but a binding challenge meant that it had to be done by hand and everything grew by about 2mm in one direction. Parts of it are perfect, and others are honest reflections of the process. I don’t think I’ve ever held a book and appreciated it as a design object this much until now. And while I’d still love to have one of the new and improved second-edition copies, supporting small projects through the ups and downs of the journey is what Kickstarter purchases are supposed to be about. 🤷♂️
Oh, and some friends came over and we got an adorable early Christmas house gift. I’d never heard of this Jellycat brand, but I am apparently in the minority. It needs a name, any suggestions?
I’ve been drinking too much and still sleeping too poorly. Nevermind! One recent addition to the liquor shelf has been Luxardo Maraschino, which you never really see for sale out in the open here; I got some online. It mostly opens up possibilities for all my ryes and bourbons.
In all likelihood, I’d encountered the Japanese rapper Awich before because her name rings a bell, but wasn’t into what she was doing at the time. Now she seems to have made a bit of a leap forward. Her new Partition EP slaps? Is that what we say now? I went back and compared it to some of her earlier stuff, and the production is way better and she’s got a great flow. Also the videos are intense.
After not going on vacation or any breaks all year in 2019 (poor me, I know), I’m now coming off about three weeks of leave that began around Christmas. We spent some time in Taiwan, my first visit, and then I’ve been mostly chilling out on the couch absorbing a good measure of reading material, films both good and terrible, and games from the infinite backlog. I often dream of living out this life for an extended period — half a year at the very least, going past the point of crushing boredom and beyond, hoping to transcend such ideas and just tip over into blissfully inert hikkikomorish life — but now I think it’s unlikely to ever happen.
The closest I ever came was a period of freelancing over a decade ago, when I’d sometimes feel quite content with my modest bank account and calculate how it could be stretched for months if I just cut down on everything and went into a sort of social and nutritional hibernation. It was pre-Netflix, but I was living that life anyway, drowning in film and anime day and night. I think I did a much better job of being an employment refusenik then; I would probably freak out today if I was staring at a life of baked beans across the balance sheet. Deliveroo makes you soft.
So although I’ve not yet had enough of the leisurely, solitary life this time around, I think the inactivity has been getting to me. I’ve not done nothing, but this capitalist world has some part of me convinced otherwise because it’s creeping up in the unusual form of mini anxiety attacks: a sort of waking nightmare state in which I’m certain I’ve forgotten how to do things I took for granted when the momentum of routine life was behind them, “simple” things like leaving the house, speaking to other people, and remembering how to do my job.
I suppose I have a low-grade case of cabin fever. Or maybe just real fever. In the last couple of days I’ve found myself breaking out into a sweat apropos of nothing. Let’s see if I make it to the weekend.
Taiwan
I was told by several people to expect a Chinese version of Tokyo, which I disagree with although I can understand where they were coming from. Taipei’s restaurants, cocktail bars, convenience stores, etc. do take cues from their Japanese cousins, and there’s a non-coincidental reverence for the Japanese way there if I’m not mistaken. But it’s ultimately its own thing, and if Taiwan had a Merlion-like symbol, only more tangible and actually useful, it would be their night markets, frequented by both tourists and locals from what I saw. They’re not really for me — every 10 meters, I’d be hit by the smell of stinky tofu and it just ruined my appetite — but hey I get the appeal of the whole thing.
What did work for me was the hot pots. I’ve always been of the opinion that shabu-shabu is the one true hot pot, and couldn’t see the appeal of Hai Di Lao and its ilk in Singapore… but now after having been to Wulao in Taipei, I think I’m ready to accept that a Chinese incarnation of hot pot can be amazing.
I also took a bunch of photos with my neglected Fujifilm X100T, easily more than four years old now. It’s still a champ, and the lovely JPEG film simulations meant I could decide to spend very little time on edits and just let them do the work. Apart from the very slow autofocus, there’s a case to be made that no one really needs the new X100V iteration rumored to be launched next month. So I tell myself. The nice thing about being a naturally nervous freak having newer cameras and then bringing an older one out is how casual and carefree it lets me be. Bumps and scrapes don’t have to be big deals.
I only reached for the iPhone 11 Pro when it was dead dark (an f2 lens and APS-C sensor are still no match for Night Mode), raining (iPhones are better weather-sealed than almost any camera), or there wasn’t time to fumble the Fuji out of my bag (pocket beats shoulder strap). When you put it that way, the iPhone seems insanely hard to beat, but the Proper Camera was still noticeably better in many ways. In hard sunlight, my phones have always struggled with overexposure, with blown highlights and grittiness in the details even when you manually stop down. This year’s crop aren’t much of an improvement there, even with Smart HDR. So… here are some photos, most of them from the Fuji.
I knew nothing about Tasmania before setting off; not even that it’s a whole separate island from mainland Australia. My schedule leading up to the trip was too busy for me to even think about it, let alone look it up on a map. Because everything had been planned by my in-laws, I just had to show up. All I knew was that I’d probably get a few good landscape photos out of it, and be horrified by the lack of fast internet access.
On the first point, it turned out to be quite a beautiful place indeed, if not very convenient to get around. You’re in for hours of driving between small towns if you want to visit the main attractions, and some of the windy roads literally border on death traps—you can slip down the side of a mountain with a swerve.
We paid Tokyo and Osaka a visit last fall, following up on my life’s goal of visiting Japan at least once every two years, and nothing disappointed — not the food, people, weather, galleries, nor multi-storey complexes designed to make me buy media and electronics. As Craig Mod alluded to recently on Twitter, Tokyo is a place that fulfills the city’s promise as a tool for human life.
I love Tokyo. It's a city that itself becomes a tool — moving through it, leaning on its infrastructure, efficient, dependable, complex but operating rationally (kind of), this is what a healthy city feels like.
The thing I love about its density and intensity is how that translates into support for all manner of subcultures and obscure hobbies. Today, you can barely find a functioning and interesting bookstore in Singapore, while in Tokyo it’s not just bookstores that thrive. One can wander into massive stores selling model train and forest diorama-building supplies, or records curated from a specific period, or vintage camera parts emporiums. We’re not large enough to incubate that kind of diversity, and the city dweller’s life suffers for it.
The retail industry in Singapore is in decline, or so the news outlets tell us every day. I wonder if they ring the same alarm bells in Japan. Online shopping and its infinite inventory can fill the gap a brick & mortar apocalypse would leave behind, but digital ~~replaces~~ overwrites our collective memory of browsing and inspecting these items in a physical space. I think it’s really important we don’t lose that, because, as one of my company’s founders is fond of saying, technology might change fast but people fundamentally don’t.
In the midst of a busy June, between jobs and dealing with a massive electrical wiring failure where we live, there was time for a week in Melbourne where it’s currently winter. Being one of the few places in the world where it’s cool right now may have had something to do with that decision. As much as I love Japan, there isn’t enough curry rice or fresh sushi in the country to make another summer visit worthwhile.
I’d decided before leaving to only shoot in B&W, but just couldn’t keep it up after a few photos. The warm, fall-like colors and architectural textures just sort of demand it. Also, I had new VSCO Film X filters (Kodak Gold 200!) to play with. I’ve found myself really enjoying shooting RAW on iPhone and stretching the dynamic range. Along the way, I noticed that I’d pretty much stopped using the iPhone 7 Plus’s Depth Effect after the first few months. I’m not sure why that is. I guess it’s not very accessible or prominent in the UI? Ideally, it would behave like Auto HDR and just capture both normal and edited stills when you’re using the tele lens.
We didn’t really have time to do anything out of the ordinary. A few exhibitions here and there, a couple of bars, some coffee, and visiting friends. But it was the right kind of city for the break I needed. In particular, rediscovering the joy of bookstores! The book retail scene in Singapore is at its lowest point ever now, with the only large chain left being Kinokuniya, and small bookstores with deliberately curated and stimulating selections are simply non-existent. I bought a couple of interesting books, and then promptly loaded up ebook versions on my phone for convenience. I can’t deal with the hassle of paper products, but I really like the store experience.
sangsara.net 