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Tag: PS5

  • Week 51.24

    Week 51.24

    This episode is brought to you by our kind sponsors at Bullet Points™: Need to keep your rambling in check while covering a dozen mundane topics? That’s a job for Bullet Points™ — creating the illusion of order since forever!

    • After wanting a simple MagSafe silicone case for my iPhone for the past few weeks, I got an $18 Amazon deal for a neutral gray one from Elago, and it’s nearly perfect.
    • In addition to having more time for informational intake and mental meanderings, I’ll probably remember the latter half of this year for the half-hearted austerity drive that’s led me to drink tea over coffee on a daily basis. This week, the Yorkshire Gold tea caddy I bought during Black Friday sales arrived, prompting me to look up the history of the tea caddy. Back when tea was too valuable to leave with servants in the kitchen, rich folk kept it locked in ornate caddies in their living rooms. Today, I store $0.12 tea bags in a flimsy tin and call it progress.
    • I’ve been struggling to read Butter by Asako Yuzuki, which has apparently been named Waterstone’s book of the year. I’m only a third of the way through after several weeks, and while there’s nothing wrong with it, it’s a bit of a compelling nothingburger. Female journalist tries to interview female serial killer. Killer encourages her to show more interest in life’s pleasures, especially good butter, and journalist slowly starts to adopt killer’s worldview. I don’t want to quit more but I’ll need to move on soon.
    • Because my book club has decided to read the sequel to A Psalm for the Wild-Built over the next two weeks, and I can’t start it until I finish Butter. A Prayer for the Crown-Shy will probably only take four hours (the length of its audiobook, compared to Butter’s 17 hours), but I don’t like multitasking with books. I already have too many ongoing TV show and game narratives crowded in my brain.
    • This year’s Goodreads Reading Challenge is in the bag anyway, with 19 proper books + four volumes of the Sakamoto Days manga completed, smashing my goal of 12 books.
    • Popular media loves a (serial) killer. We recently finished the new The Day of the Jackal series starring Eddie Redmayne as the titular assassin that the show’s directorial choices strongly encourage you to root for. It’s excellent, and the musical director is clearly a millennial who shares my taste in the classics, from the first episode starting with Radiohead’s Everything In Its Right Place.
    • We’re now watching Cross on Amazon Prime Video, based on the Alex Cross books by James Patterson, where a detective with a PhD in psychology plays cat and mouse with a serial killer. I recommend it, but the show is extremely dark AND low contrast, like someone forgot the final step in processing the image. Reacher suffered from this too, but it’s worse here. Luckily, my Sony TV has a mode that dynamically adjusts for it.
    • I rediscovered the greatness of Domi and JD Beck this week when a random video of them performing on Japanese morning TV popped up on my YouTube feed. I then went down a rabbit hole of older videos, like this one of Domi jamming with other kids at Berklee, and this one of JD headlining a Zildjian session, and am now just in awe of their incredible, otherworldly talent.
    • On Monday, we went out to see a local production at the Capitol Theater, entitled Dim Sum Dollies® History of Singapore Sixty Sexy Years. It was definitely one of the musicals of all time.
    • The end-of-year digital game sales have begun, and I urge you to add Sayonara Wild Hearts to your collection if you haven’t already. This game is both a fantastic musical album and a great playable abstraction of going through heartbreak. It’s just $7.79 on Nintendo Switch and S$8.40 on Steam (40% off in both cases). I first played it on Apple Arcade back in 2019 as a launch title for the service, but these days it’s no longer available on mobile and the fate of publisher Annapurna Interactive is in question.
    • I dusted off the PS5 to make use of my PS Plus subscription and decided to finally play a native PS5 game, since I’ve so far only played older games that were ported from the PS4, and had my socks and shoes blown off by Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. This game is an insane technical showcase for what the PS5 can do: thousands of particles flying everywhere, ray traced reflections, and massive, cinematic worlds that load instantly. Why have I squandered the potential of this machine for the last seven months?? If you have any recommendations for what to play next, especially if they’re in the PS Plus catalog, do let me know.
    • Last but not least, we went for Christmas dinner with the parents on Sunday night at one of my favorite buffets in town, and it’s made me aware I’ll have to watch my eating over the next couple of weeks.
    • Merry Christmas, dear readers!
  • Week 47.24

    Week 47.24

    People sometimes say that I’d make a good teacher if I ever tried it. I think good teachers are probably more patient than I am and love speaking in front of people a lot more than I do. But on reflection, those are both things I’ve gotten a little better at over the last decade, so maybe.

    I got a little taste of it this week when I was given the chance to hear a class of college students make their final presentations for a design thinking course, and provide assistance in the assessment of their assignments. They were asked to identify a group with needs, understand them, and then design games that could be of help. They had to prototype and test their ideas before finalizing a working version. They all did pretty well, creating solutions that were surprisingly polished.

    The general idea about deploying Generative AI tools in the workplace is that they don’t do much to enhance the work of already talented employees. But for the vast majority of average or below-average workers, LLMs elevate their productivity and quality of work to a consistently higher level, which is still a net positive for teams.

    Apple’s current ad campaign for Apple Intelligence seems to take that tack too, resulting in a message that’s so far from the Macintosh’s promise of a “bicycle for the mind” that these ads are rightfully catching some flak. But in the classroom, I saw AI tools give students (with limited time and a lack of traditional design skills) the ability to execute their ideas at high fidelity. Making card games that look and feel almost like professional products, fully illustrated without the help of artists, is not something we could have pulled off when I was their age. I’m partly envious, but also afraid that on a wider scale, execution will be confused with education.

    Earlier in the year, when I sat in on another class being taught by a friend, I was struck by how hard it is to control the chaos of a large room of modern students, and the same thing was true here. When you get over 40 laptop and iPad-equipped young adults in a room, having their attention is not a given. Side conversations are happening all the time, and listening to whoever’s speaking seems like a choice.

    Maybe it was just my experience as an English student, but our class sizes were smaller, and discussions almost always followed a single track, led by a professor pacing around the room rather than anchored to a screen at the front. There were hardly any screens, come to think of it, just books and notepads. Now everyone’s on Figma, Canva, Miro, and a host of other infinite sheets of AI-enabled SaaS paper. I’m not saying we had it better, but I worry that the option to take things slowly and still excel is disappearing. When kids today say they’re stressed, it’s hard not to believe them, having seen the performative polish that’s now standard. We’re getting awfully close to expecting students to pop out fully formed and ready for the mines.

    ===

    Over the weekend, we decided to get our eyes tested at a Zeiss-approved optician’s, to order the official prescription inserts for Apple Vision Pro. This will let me use the device on days when I’m not wearing contact lenses. The need to have them on first has admittedly been only a very minor inconvenience, but now nothing will get in the way of hopping into the uh… spatialverse.

    Of the three eye tests I’ve had this year, this was probably the most thorough one. The key seems to be patience (there’s that word again) on the part of the tester, in the sense that the testee should never feel hurried. They should be allowed to flip between options 1 and 2 as many times as they need to identify the sharpest and most comfortable images. As a result, I have a new prescription that shows my eyesight has slightly, but surely, deteriorated for the first time in over a decade.

    My last test was in 2019, when I got my last pair of glasses from Zoff. Those were so comfortable that I stopped wearing contacts regularly and became a spectacles guy again. Now I wonder if wearing contacts actually helped arrest the decline of my eyes.

    Anyway, armed with a new prescription and an appetite for vision correction, I went to the nearest Zoff outlet and ended up with a new pair of glasses. I learnt afterwards that the frames I chose were “trendy” and “perfectly suited for Gen Z styling”. Along with recent purchases of wide-leg pants and oversized tees, my fashion Bryan Johnsoning is complete.

    Side note on Japanese express optical brands: I stopped considering Owndays because all their frames are small and narrow — they literally don’t have large options. Zoff at least stocks a few, and in general they overindex on “Boston” and “Wellington” shapes, so on both occasions I’ve been able to find something I like with almost no effort.

    ===

    Media activity

    • After taking a break for several months, I returned to Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name on the PS5 and finished it. And this was a short game by Yakuza standards. I expected to feel pretty over the series by this point, but the emotional ending to Kaz’s story has got me quite excited to get started on the next game, Like a Dragon: Infinity Wealth, sooner rather than later.
    • I also returned to Luigi’s Mansion 3 on the Switch, which I started (and stopped) playing when I first got the console back in 2017. This game has just sat there for 6 years waiting for me to get back in, and all credit to Nintendo’s designers, it was stunningly easy to pick up where I left off.
    • There’s a ton of movies on MUBI due to leave in the next two weeks, so I started with Toni Erdmann (2016), which was nominated that year for the Palme d’Or. On the surface, it’s about a jokey dad whose daughter has become a miserable management consultant, and he decides she/they are not doing so well and could use a little cheering up. And yet as a film it was like nothing I’ve ever seen before: I laughed, I cried, I was bewildered. It’s simply art. 4.5 stars.
    • Another film that is leaving is a 2011 documentary by the late Austrian filmmaker Michael Glawogger, Whore’s Glory, which examined the lives of sex workers in Thailand, Bangladesh, and Mexico. The film’s biggest problem is its inappropriately “cool” millennial-era Western music soundtrack featuring Cocorosie, Tricky, and PJ Harvey. My 3.5-star Letterboxd review: “If anyone asks why I look sad, from now on my answer is ‘I saw Whore’s Glory back in 2024’.”
    • I haven’t held space to experience the new suddenly released Kendrick Lamar album, GNX, the way it deserves. Hopefully by next weekend.
    • Kim Deal of the Pixies has a new album out at the age of 63 and I quite like it. It’s called Nobody Loves You More.
    • I discovered a Japanese singer by the name of Kaneko Ayano while looking for artists with a similar sound to Happy End. She has an awesome ‘gimmick’ where every album is recorded and released in two different ways: acoustic and with a full band.
    • But for the song/video of the week, it’s Hanumankind’s Big Dawgs. I was listening to Apple Music 1 when it came on, and had to look it up immediately. He’s an Indian rapper from Kerala by way of Texas, and he’s just broken out now with this song after years of making music. His lyrical game is considerable, and as evidence I offer the existence of a YouTube comment calling him “Lendrick Kumar”.
    • I’m also embedding an older video I like, a freestyle performance, and a recent interview on Apple Music where it’s clear he’s an articulate and very driven young musician who’s going to be huge.