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Tag: Playdate

  • Week 11.24

    Week 11.24

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Week 9.24

    Week 9.24

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    ===

    Media activity:

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