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Tag: Shoes

  • Week 35.25

    Week 35.25

    • We lost a grand aunt at the close of last week, and attended her funeral and cremation on Tuesday. It got me thinking about qing ming, which is a day in early April (I had to look this up) where Chinese families traditionally visit their ancestors’ graves and do some neatening up. I have vague memories of being dragged along to do this as a kid, and even being allowed by my parents to skip school for it. I mostly remember the smell of burning joss sticks mixed with the dewy morning air and damp soil. For some reason we stopped going by the time I was a teen.
    • I talked about this with Cien and Peishan and they seemed to still be in touch with the practice of visiting graves, or in these days of diminishing real estate, a columbarium. If you asked me where my family members are buried or stored as ashes, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. I assume many of them have been scattered, either into local waters or some faraway favorite destination. Honestly, I like the idea of not being tethered to a single spot. If your spouse is still alive, maybe they’d like to keep you near, in some vessel at home. But if too many, or too few, people are sharing you then it’s better to be everywhere. A memory triggered by some food, place, or figure of speech. An algorithmically assembled photo collage tossed up by a personal computing companion one morning. A mention in some dusty book on a top shelf in a library, waiting to be seen by a future student or recycled into a supermarket receipt. I’d be fine with any of that.
    • Back to the funeral: it was held at the Mandai Crematorium and Columbarium, one of only three cremation facilities serving the whole of Singapore, and I was upset by how much it is in need of some design intervention. I wonder if any of the people managing the place have tried to look at the process with fresh eyes, or at least through the tired and grieving eyes of the people passing through it. Because they’d see so many moments that could be made kinder, more understanding, more dignified. The script could use a rewrite. Playing ‘Amazing Grace’ out of tinny $40 Bluetooth speakers in the final viewing halls is not it. For Chrissakes, please also remove the ugly MS Word-designed notices plastered on the viewing room windows, they obstruct the view of the caskets as they’re delivered (by industrial forklifts!) into the flames. I’m not exaggerating.
    • My shoes fell apart. They were the second pair of New Balance 990s to do so, doing nothing more strenuous than supporting my occasional walking about town. The last pair lasted three years; these only made it to two. At around S$300, these are supposed to be the best shoes that NB makes, but I’m beginning to think their ‘Made in the USA’ label is more a statement of liability than superiority these days. The Chinese-made models could probably survive a decade. Alas, with my big feet and aversion to swooshes, the 990s are some of the only shoes I’m comfortable in, so I’ll be buying yet another pair — online, too, since they stopped local distribution of the wide sizes.
    • Google upgraded Gemini with the Nano Banana image model that’s been trending on Twitter, and the bar for impressive generative AI has been raised again. It’s extraordinarily capable (and fast) at combining images with accuracy, as well as reimagining them in different styles and from different perspectives. A few months ago, Gemini was an also-ran, but maybe something’s shifted at Google and they’re an actual contender again. As much as I try to avoid Google services, I suppose I find them preferable to OpenAI and Meta. Take a look at the example above where I asked it to redraw a scene I photographed last month in Melbourne, but from above.
    • On Thursday I met two friend-couples, who I’ll call Mong and Jogina because it sounds amusing, for a rare weekday afternoon lunch where it was made abundantly clear that I’m behind the times for not having seen K-Pop Demon Hunters yet. Circumstantially, we’ve all got the time and flexibility to do these weekday catchups more often than once or twice a year, and maybe we should.
    • Aside: I did see the movie later, and it’s really good! My main gripe is the use of stuttering frames for the character animation, which worked fine in Sony’s Spiderverse films but break immersion here. The frame rates also seem uneven from scene to scene? Speaking of Sony, I’d hate to be the person who decided to sell this to Netflix for just $100M.
    • Afterwards, some of us went on to check out a nearby Crocs store (hear me out!) because a new collaboration had just launched: Animal Crossing! I just tagged along for a look, but became increasingly afraid as we got nearer that I would end up buying a pair. Kinda like how I bought the first iPad at Funan mall in 2010, that I absolutely wasn’t interested in… until I joined the line. Thankfully, my senses returned, and they only carried the smaller women’s sizes. God bless my big feet!
    • The book club is still reading Cloud Atlas, and at one point, a character mentions Carole King’s Tapestry album playing at a low volume in the background. I realized that I’ve known about this album forever but never heard it. So I put it on while reading. And boy did I know half the songs on this. I was beginning to wonder if it was a covers album, that’s how familiar they were. Incredible work, and a deserving #38 on Apple Music’s Top 100 Best Albums list.

    And finally, a little gaming episode:

    As previously mentioned, I’ve been playing the first Shinchan game on Nintendo Switch as a way of marking the summer — never mind that it’s always summer here in Singapore. It started well but I found it increasingly repetitive and uninteresting, and have been trying to just get it over with. The game features a time loop, where you replay the same week over. I spoke to Evan about it while I was on the second week, and he told me to hang on until the fourth week.

    >> I was like, “there’s four fucking weeks??”

    >> He said, “the real game BEGINS after week four!”

    >> “How is that possible?”

    Reader, I’ll tell you, I was ready to delete the game then. At the end of the third week, it seemed that I had all but completed the game. All my tasks were done. Then as the credits rolled, I texted him back:

    >> “Dude, I’ve finished the game, what’s going on?”

    >> And he says, “You haven’t, that’s just the beginning, get ready.”

    >> “I don’t believe you, don’t mess with me!”

    By this point, I had put in about 7.5 hours and couldn’t take it any more if this was just an extended prologue. There was just no way. The game was surely done! Then he asks me if I’ve done a certain thing yet, and I’m like:

    >> “Uh yeah… long ago? In the first week?!”

    Suddenly, I realized he’d spent the first three weeks mucking around and not doing any of the main game’s tasks, and only got started on the story just before time ran out. So yes, I had finished the game. Thank fuck for that.

  • Week 41.24

    Week 41.24

    It’s Monday, and for the time being, my schedule for writing these updates has shifted out by a day as Monday mornings now find me in a co-working space, and writing this gives me an opportunity to blend in better than, say, watching films or playing games whilst surrounded by people grasping their foreheads, stroking their chins, and sighing loudly. Yes, those things just took place around me.

    It’s Monday, after a massive storm, and my feet are soaked from wading through puddles to catch the bus. You’d think this would be a common occurrence in Singapore, where the tropical rain gets heavy, but only a few occasions stick out in memory — those mornings where the office walkways are cluttered with umbrellas opened up to dry, like caltrops or anti-tank barricades; my damp, socked feet perched on top of sneakers I hope will dry before lunch; everyone else’s teeth a-chattering in vicious air-conditioning calibrated for sunny days.

    Earlier this week, I shuffled my feet while sitting here and felt something come loose: the right heel of my (only) three-year-old New Balance 990v4 sneakers. So much for ‘Made in the USA’! I borrowed some black plastic tape to conduct unglamorous field surgery, and they lasted till I got home. I have two newer pairs (v5 and v6), and sure hope they hold up longer.

    iPads are pretty great, actually

    My daily companion over the past four days here has been my 11” M1 iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard, somewhat neglected of late. I’ve found that it does everything I need to pass an entire day, from library books and magazines with the Libby app, to gaming, video, web browsing, chat, and photo editing. My MacBook Air would be better for watching movies, but that’s mainly it. If anything, that only makes me surer that my next iPad will be a 13” model.

    Unfortunately the new iPad Pros with M4 chips are priced on par with MacBooks, making the choice between the two much harder (and in favor of MacBooks if I’m being honest). Recall that the original iPad launched for just $499 USD, and its marketing tagline was “A magical and revolutionary product at an unbelievable price”. That’s still how the iPad lives in my mind: a powerful alternative device that does way more than its price suggests. So it occurs to me that the iPad Pro is no longer the right choice for me, and the iPad Air is a truer heir to that original proposition. (Put aside the product now simply called ‘iPad’, because at $349 USD it’s actually even cheaper than the first generation and more like a budget “SE” model.)

    We’re seeing Apple push its ‘Pro’ lines further this year, packing them with innovative features that are useful for a small subset of professional users, but which most customers won’t need or appreciate. Things like streaming multiple 4K video feeds from iPhone cameras to a single iPad for production in real time. Or recording LOG-format video to massive ProRes files, including studio-quality audio from four microphones.

    Adding these capabilities and pricing accordingly means some current Pro buyers might want to downgrade to the ‘mid’ models. In order to avoid losing them, Apple would need to elevate those products, and avoid artificially holding back features for the sake of differentiation. We’ve seen that happen with this year’s iPhone 16, which packs an OLED display, Dynamic Island, 48mp camera with a 48mm focal length option for the first time (!), Camera Control thingy, and even things like next-generation Photographic Styles and Audio Mix which they could have reserved for the Pro phones. The only thing it needs is a 120hz ProMotion display. I’m expecting next year’s iPad Air and iPhone updates will finally include that.

    I love that the iPhone 16 is now a great enough product for almost anyone’s needs, but I’ll likely keep buying the Pro models as long as they offer better camera features. I can entertain switching to an iPad Air because I don’t even know what camera hardware it has and won’t ever use it.

    A quick word on cameras and my presets

    I mentioned before that I’ve been beta testing an app called Fig Camera. It has two standout features: great “natural” processing options that dial back Apple’s aggressive defaults, much like Halide’s Process Zero mode; and the ability to process photos on-the-fly with your own custom look. As someone who somehow finds it fun to make photo filters/presets, and has fortunately had some success with them, I love that I can now take photos with my favorite styles directly applied. It’s like how Fujifilm cameras’ “Film Simulations” obviate the need for post-processing. I can now snap photos in Fig that look great to me and don’t need any further editing.

    Shot on iPhone with Fig Camera and my work-in-progress film LUT

    I posted a few recent photos using a film-style sim on IG and Threads and asked something like, ‘should I become one of those preset guys and offer my own as LUT files you can buy?’, to which several kind people said ‘sure’! So I’m thinking about it. This particular look is inspired by the “Positive Film” effect on earlier Ricoh GR cameras (they changed it for the worse with the GRIII), but slightly more “dry” like Fujifilm Classic Chrome. I’ve been using and tweaking it for over a year now, so the trick will be knowing that it’s DONE.

    Immersive Video and Submerged

    I’m still sitting here and my shoes are still wet. I’ve thought about bringing my Vision Pro to this open-plan space—not for the attention, but because it would be nice to have a huge screen that no one else can see. There are many things in my MUBI backlog that would not be cool to watch in public. And what’s even better than a 13” iPad? How about a thousand inches?

    We watched Submerged (2024) over the weekend, Apple’s new Immersive Video release exclusively for Vision Pro. It’s the first film they’ve done that isn’t a documentary or music performance — I guess the right word is fictional? I’m sure I said early on that this new immersive format (a full 180º view) lends itself best to video that puts you somewhere incredible, and wouldn’t be good for movie storytelling, with fast movement (nausea hazard) and quick cuts. I’m here to admit I was wrong.

    Submerged, by Academy Award winner Edward Berger, is only 17-minutes long but about a 12GB file when downloaded offline. You can view it as the first experiment in what filmmaking with this new technology could look like.

    I wrote on Instagram:

    Apple Immersive Video is a new medium. People will be experimenting with how to tell stories with it for years to come.

    Submerged is a great first step, the only movie I’ve ever seen that felt like “being inside” of it. More than seeing Avatar in IMAX 3D even.

    That’s different from the “being there” of POV video — it’s 100% a film with directorial intent. You experience it like a spirit summoned into the world and held down by a seance, without knowledge of your body. Your consciousness is pure camera.

    What I was trying to say was that making films for this format will require inventing a whole new set of techniques. Regular immersive video is easy: plonk a camera down in one static location and let people experience what it feels like to stand there and observe the action. This is the courtside seat at a basketball game, the front row of a performance. It’s amazing to us anyway because the viewpoint is rare, but a film made like this would only be a play.

    In the near term, we’ll see directors converging on a few approaches that work. Like how early 3D movies always had things flying directly at your face. The key question for me is how do you make an audience look at the thing you want them to notice, when they can look almost anywhere around the world you’ve built?

    Berger answers that in three ways. The first is action; big movements. When something explodes and water gushes out of a pipe a second later, you’re bound to notice it. The second is depth of field; like how I remember Cameron pushing and pulling focus at several points in Avatar (2009) to highlight subjects. This goes against natural vision and is more jarring in a wide-angle format like Apple Immersive Video, since you’re choosing for your viewer what they can and cannot look at, but it’s a filmic device everyone is familiar with.

    The third is a combination of Dutch angles and heavy vignetting that produces a novel effect in Immersive Video. When you watch a film like this, you are a disembodied viewer (what I meant above by a summoned spirit), without the ability to see even your own hands. You are severed from the real world. Your viewpoint changes according to the director’s will; sometimes a subject is extremely close and larger than life, other times they are small and distant. Berger often cuts to shots where the edges of your 180º view are shrouded in darkness, and/or where the camera is tilted at an angle, such that you feel yourself almost falling towards the zone of interest. This serves to direct your gaze, as to look in the opposite direction of gravity unconsciously takes more effort.

    I can’t wait to see what else emerges as more filmmakers play with this.

    Other media activity

    • I’m watching Lady in the Lake on Apple TV+, a 7-part series starring Natalie Portman that no one seems to be talking about. It’s rather good, but a slow burn and not one to be binged.
    • Another show that we discovered on a recommendation from Jose, and that no one seems to be talking about, is Ludwig, a 6-part BBC series starring David Mitchell as a reclusive professional puzzle-setter who gets enlisted to help the police solve murders. It’s very good, and sidesteps many of the elements that make other episodic murder-of-the-week procedurals tiresome. Well, it’s short enough that you never reach that point. I’m hoping they renew this.
    • I read Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention — and How to Think Deeply Again, by Johann Hari. This was inspired by an article in The Atlantic about how American college students today can’t even read an entire book anymore because their attention spans have been destroyed by social media, and book-reading on the whole is in serious decline. Utterly depressing. In order to get better sleep myself, I’m now trying to limit caffeine in the afternoon, alcohol, and phone use before bed. I’ve always detested multitasking—so much so that I avoid using external monitors with my laptop—and I’m now trying to be more mindful of distractions while reading or writing. As I made my way through the book, I was horrified to notice that I was picking up my phone every five minutes to check messages or look up completely unrelated topics.

  • Week 25.22

    • It felt like a long week, mostly dominated by work. I thought it was just me, but several people have agreed that something strange happened with time. The stretch between Tuesday and Friday felt like two whole weeks somehow.
    • We haven’t settled on a back-to-office rule, and I don’t think it makes sense for companies to have a hard stance on this if people can manage themselves. This week, I headed in three times to meet with various people, restock our candy stash, and er… collaborate analogally. Why isn’t there an antonym for “digitally”?
    • Going out meant a chance to break in my newest pair of shoes: blue Allbirds that Kim brought back from California. They’re actually made in Vietnam but you can’t buy them in these parts, sadly. Apparently they’re an abomination to sneaker heads, only chosen by tech people who value featureless basics over funky fashion, but hey that sounds like me! And they’re plenty comfy.
    • Using her return home as an excuse to overeat Asian food, we had a particularly bad week: chicken rice, and two separate all-you-can-eat affairs for sushi and Korean BBQ respectively.
    • Over the weekend we visited Peishan and James’s new pad, which is a marvel of color and style coordination, at least from the perspective of this fashion-challenged tech-adjacent bro.
    • I heard a story from my mom she’d never told before, or at least not that I remember. Back in the 70s when she lived in London (Earl’s Court, specifically) with my dad, someone followed her home on the way back from the supermarket, into the building, up the stairs, and then forced his way into their apartment to hold her up at knifepoint. She managed to convince him she had no money, offering all her groceries, and told a story about being poor immigrants, and somehow the guy ran off with nothing!
    • A few years ago, we took headshots of everyone in the team for various purposes, e.g. bio slides and org charts. After Covid happened, none of us got new name cards, and all the new joiners had no standardized photos. I don’t know if I’m the only person among us somewhat happy to operate a camera, but several people asked for it, and I took a bunch on Friday for people who were in the office. My underutilized Sigma DC DN f1.4 45mm equivalent lens for the Leica CL did pretty well, and it felt like the best thing I’ve done since returning.
    • After putting it off for months, I caved and ordered a Ricoh GR IIIx off Shopee. The last one I got was the APS-C Ricoh GR back in 2014, during an impromptu post-lunch drive to Cathay Photo with a colleague. We were trying to “crack a brief” at work, as it was called, and getting nowhere — as I like to say: when the going gets tough, the tough go shopping.
    • (Monday update) My camera order was canceled by the seller, presumably because they didn’t have any stock on hand. Part of me is relieved; money saved and all that. Not sure if I’ll place another order, or perhaps I’ll get the cheaper 28mm GR III instead.
    • We saw the new Apple TV+ film, Cha Cha Real Smooth, which was really good despite being hard to describe in a way that would convince anyone to watch it. A lot of it comes down to the astounding talent that seems to be contained in Cooper Raiff, the film’s 24-year-old director, writer, and star. It’s only his second film, and yet, he’s 24 and it’s his second film. And it’s sooo assured and authentic (and awkward).
    • I’ve been revisiting The Tipping Point, from 2004. What a solid album. When people say “the golden age of hip-hop”, they mean another decade completely, but I think it was this period, when The Roots were at the top of their game.

  • Week 44.21

    • This is the first post to be late since I started over a year ago. Apologies to myself; I/you were busy all day yesterday on Monday, which I guess I’ll only explain in the next report.
    • Apart from walks around the neighborhood, where I was surprised at my surprise to see a few Halloween-decorated houses because who does that right now + it’s nice that we think we could or should, I went out exactly once this week: to meet Cien for brunch and coffees on a weekday. Doing this after a long time kept in the cubicle cage leads one to wonder, “who are all these other people lounging, chatting, walking dogs in athleisure, looking jobless?” It’s perhaps a process of normalization for the brain; this gestures at ongoing freedom is a legitimate community too, transitory or not.
    • Transitory is probably going to be some dictionary publisher’s Word Of The Year.
    • After lunch, about an hour’s walk in blazing sun and humid air, getting wound around on top of our own footsteps, lost in the Tiong Bahru area while taking photos with my underutilized CL. I shall try to make it something I don’t leave home without these days.
    • I came across this article about the New Balance 990, a classic “dad shoe” the likes of which are now cool on account of looking uncool, I think. Back in the day, they were coveted in some circles for being the high-end of the low at $100, the best shoe that NB knew how to make in the USA, and so a bit better than “premium mediocre” actually; they would have been more comfortable and better-made than most. Well, I’ve recently had to toss out a few pairs of sneakers after wearing them black and broken after many years, so I immediately ordered a fresh pair of these after reading. They arrived in two days from an outlet in Chinatown. They look so dorky but I like them.
    • A cousin’s Chinese wedding dinner over the weekend. The first I’ve attended in Covid times: the rule is now five to a table rather than the customary 10. Where courses would normally be displayed in the center and doled out for sharing, accessible for any who wanted seconds, it’s now individual portions delivered directly. All expected, all logical, an improvement to the experience in many ways, deficit in other intangible ones, hindering interaction and breaking connection with our traditions and past — “that’s just how it’s always been done”, until one day, no longer.
    • As NFT floor prices crashed across OpenSea over the week, I found myself irrationally tempted to buy into some formerly (and really, still) overpriced collections. I had to talk myself down, but I’m glad I managed. Outside of Bitcoin and DeFi, there’s a lot of potential in the so-called crypto space with token-based projects and DAOs, namely new models of ownership and running a business, but this stage looks like pure spaghetti-on-walls and speculation. I accept that it’s part of the process, but I want to fast-forward to the next bit where it happens without so much get-rich-quick motivation. And the less is said about play-to-earn, the better.
    • On Netflix, we’ve been watching El inocente, yet another Harlan Coben TV adaptation. I think this will be the last one because it feels too much like the other we saw a few weeks ago: mechanically reliant on outlandish coincidences and undisclosed (to the viewer only) pasts to provide the twists it thinks are necessary to keep you hooked. Well, maybe they are.