The featured image above is the result of having Geese’s Au Pays du Cocaine in my head all day. The line about a sailor in a big green boat and a big green coat made me think of Puffer Jacket Snoopy, and of course I had to realize the joke.
We got the sad news that Deliveroo is shutting down operations in Singapore. This comes on the back of an acquisition by DoorDash who must have run the numbers and decided that a 7% share of the local food delivery market after a decade wasn’t worth investing further in. We use it all the time and prefer it over Grab and Foodpanda — it is by far the better app and their subscription service is better value for money, but we’ve seen this movie before. It’s like how Uber lost out to Grab; the market doesn’t always choose efficiently.
I will probably switch to Foodpanda because Grab as a brand has the same icky halo as, say, Facebook or Spotify.
Google released Nano Banana 2, the new version of their hit image generation model. This one is cheaper to run and kind of almost as good as Nano Banana Pro, so they’re making it the default for everyone. Paid users can still access the Pro model, but it’s hidden behind some menus. It’s a regression in quality, a slight improvement in speed, and most importantly, a boost to Google’s bottom line. Since I only do silly things with these tools, it doesn’t bother me tremendously, but imagine the same happening at an enterprise level for more important work.
Screen recording of an AI panorama
One of the new things Nano Banana 2 can do is generate very wide panoramic images, so I asked it to render some “panoramas taken with an iPhone” in various locations. I then upscaled those and opened them in my Apple Vision Pro. They don’t have the photorealistic quality of images from Nano Banana Pro, and the resolution leaves a lot to be desired, but they’re still immersive and impressive when viewed in this way. You can see where this might go.
There’s been a lot of talk lately about how AI vibe coding could upend the SaaS market, if not replacing dependable enterprise tools with individually created ones, then at least giving IT departments a billion more unapproved apps to worry about. A viral essay from last week posited that AI coding could kill DoorDash, though I’d say they did a good job of that themselves out here. The other oft-discussed idea is that AI could replace the App Store, and everyone will just make their own apps instead of buying them from developers. Michael has been blogging about vibe-coding his own to-do list app based on Clear. I’ve been wanting to try this myself, making more little tools of my own to solve niche problems, but the opportunities have been slow to materialize.
This week the right idea presented itself and I made a web app using Gemini: an album cover collage maker that searches for the artwork or lets you upload your own. I’ve looked online for something like this before but only found a few that were quite lacking. Making one to my own specifications took maybe five minutes of prompting and testing. Then I thought it would be nice if you could drag the images to different locations. Gemini added that feature like it was nothing. I’m pretty hyped that even someone like me with zero current coding knowledge could will this into existence. If you’d like to try it, I’ve deployed it at usecollagen.netlify.app.
Otherwise it was a sort of decompression week where I just read a lot, listened to the records I bought/ordered last week, and was regrettably glued to my phone watching day trading losses (Chekhov’s gun has fired!) and social media feeds.
It took a couple weeks of dawdling but I finished John Le Carré’s Call for the Dead, his first novel featuring the spy George Smiley. I may continue reading the series, seeing as his son Nick Harkaway (whose work I really enjoy) has decided to continue his father’s legacy and written one more already: Karla’s Choice. This one was a little dated and not particularly thrilling, but a fine introduction and scene setter.
It was immediately followed by Adrian Tchaikovsky’s The Expert System’s Champion, sequel to The Expert System’s Brother which I read at the end of last year. I recommend both as examples of sci-fi stories set so far in the future that humanity has looped back around to the beginning. It reminds me of the “middle chapter” in Cloud Atlas, if you remember that.
Then I read Hu Anyan’s I Deliver Parcels in Beijing, a modern memoir that reportedly did well in China when it came out in 2022. It details the author’s dual career as a writer and on-and-off gig economy worker, which is made more interesting by also being a portrait of what it’s like to live in the lower brackets of Chinese society today.
I also had time to tackle Rob’s recommendation of Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall, which was written in the 1960s but doesn’t feel that way, unlike Le Carré’s spy novels. He called it the best book he read last year, so I could hardly say no. It starts off like an intriguing sci-fi novel: a woman visiting friends in the Austrian alps wakes up one morning in the log cabin to discover she’s alone, and there’s an invisible wall separating her from the outside world. Things then focus on survival and what it means to live and be human in solitude, and in nature. Which, given that I’ll be home alone next week while Kim is away again for work, means I’m already in the appropriate headspace.
It was a rainy Chinese New Year week, which is a rare occurrence if our collective memory serves correctly. The holiday usually occurs sometime in late January, and my impression is that it’s always scorching when we’re out visiting relatives. The gloominess added to a feeling of intense tiredness, and I was glad to see the end of the week. If social batteries were like lithium-ion ones, I’d say mine is aged and doesn’t hold a charge like it used to (more on this later).
While my parents were visiting with my in-laws, the topic of where our dads got their haircuts came up, and I used Gemini’s Nano Banana model to visualize a bunch of alternative styles for them to consider. It was pretty funny to see our old men in dye jobs and top knots, with loud matching outfits like floral jackets. The real reason for this was of course to demonstrate how realistic and easy these deepfakes are in 2026, and hopefully they’ll be a little more wary of scams.
There are fewer kids and unmarried young adults to give angpows (red gift envelopes with cash) out to these days, but it still adds up. To try and make up the deficit, I decided to make a return to day trading (really just gambling) directly on my phone while out and about between appointments. I’m glad to report that I not only avoided losing all our money but managed to hit my goal by the weekend!
If you were wondering how the showdown between Gemini and Claude has been going since last week, I think Claude is still way ahead in terms of writing and editing. Not just producing output, but being able to understand what makes a piece work and replicate it. Gemini seems to take away the wrong conclusions when analyzing text.
I saw Rob a couple more times for beers and a visit to the National Gallery with his kids. We were joined by Aqila and her daughter, which was really nice. The whole outing tanked my social battery again, in part due to the swarms of Chinese tourists in town this week — the gallery was fully packed and some sections of the French Impressionists exhibition were painfully overcrowded despite allocated entry timings.
On my way home from that, I stopped by the record shops in the basement of The Adelphi and broke my 4-week no-vinyl streak. I picked up The Beatles’ Abbey Road and R.E.M.’s New Adventures in Hi-Fi, telling myself it was fine since these are some of my favorite albums. I should have known that once you open the door just a crack, there’s no shutting it. The next day, I ordered Mac Miller’s Circles and Lorde’s Melodrama off Amazon. Kanye’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is waiting in my cart. These are some of my favorite albums, okay!?
We decided that it was time to start on The Pitt, given that seven episodes are out. We binged them immediately and now it’s going to be hard switching to a weekly schedule. It’s more of what we liked about the first season, but I do wonder how they’re going to sustain this over the next few seasons. How many eventful single days is it realistic to have, and how much variety can you get within that constraint? These hospital shows are all built atop the same GSWs, industrial accidents, cancers, and mysterious illnesses, but the relationships and characters usually have time to develop over a season. The Pitt’s real-time concept doesn’t allow for that — the progression happens off-screen between seasons, and the audience puts the pieces together in the first few episodes. You can withhold a few characters’ reappearances until midway through (as in season 2), but that structure is too transparent to keep using every year.
I finished playing the first Paranormasight on the Switch, and it’s probably the only game with a branching narrative — as in, the kind where you are literally shown the story map — that I’ve actually enjoyed. These Japanese story-based games with the multiple endings that you have to keep replaying and retrying events to complete are usually a pain in the ass, but this one works because it embraces the meta-game angle completely. You’re an outsider, outside of time and space, and your jumping between the events is what unlocks progress. Characters in one “scene” might be stuck and paused until you motivate some others elsewhere to do something, which changes the circumstances in the first instance.
I read George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo, an “experimental novel”, on someone’s recommendation and let me just say I am not passing on this recommendation to you. It didn’t help that I know and care very little about Abraham Lincoln, or that aspect of American history, but it’s not really about him anyway. It’s about his son’s ghost being lost in the graveyard amongst hundreds of other ghosts, and through their archaically written little vignettes you get a sense of what life was like in that era and also how the author is a massive wanker. The New York Times ranked it the 18th-best book of the 21st century. Agree to disagree!
A quick follow-up on one of last week’s topics: it turns out that some posts on Moltbook may have been faked because there were security holes allowing people to get on there and post directly (instead of being a bot-only place as promised). Doesn’t change the main point that future agents will collaborate not just on one computer, but sync up across wide networks with effects most of us can’t fathom. Look at the crowd that gathered to discuss Clawd a couple of days ago, to see how much excitement there is for this box that says Pandora on it.
I read a fantastic sci-fi short story that sort of involves AI: Julia, by Fernando Borretti. If you also enjoy fiction that drops you into a context and makes you swim, and then shows you strange and beautiful ideas as you break above the surface, you’ll love this. Like how China Miéville uses ornate language in The Book of Elsewhere to suggest Keanu Reeves’s… I mean the protagonist’s immortal, mystical otherness, Borretti uses a dense, intellectually dominating host of references here to illustrate the POV of an artificial mind at the end of humanity’s time. I haven’t stopped thinking about it.
What will we do when all the jobs are gone? A young entrepreneur in our neighborhood has started a home-based business selling smashburgers, and we bought some for dinner midweek. They were good, and I’m slightly afraid of what this proximity will do to my waistline. For those unaware, this was a bit of a trend last year and local media outlets like ChannelNewsAsia ran stories (example) about how such businesses were springing up as a result of low employment opportunities and rising rents.
Retreating further into the virtual world is another option. A bunch of new experiences became available on the Apple Vision Pro recently, and I caught up with some of them. The cutest is an immersive documentary on Apple TV called Top Dogs (two 15-min episodes), which looks at the annual Cruft’s dog show in Birmingham, UK. You get really up close to some of these beautiful animals, and the urge I felt to reach out and pet them was extremely strong. It wouldn’t be the same seeing this on TV. Here you get a sense of their size and presence, see them in incredible detail — everything but smell them. Apparently there are 25,000 dogs at the convention center each year, but I imagine these are all shampooed and much more pleasant than your average wet dog.
There’s also Retrocade, a game on Apple Arcade that uh… simulates an arcade. The game is playable on other devices, but on Vision Pro you get life-sized arcade cabinets standing in front of you, playing licensed retro titles like Space Invaders and Bubble Bobble. The only thing that breaks the illusion is of course that you can’t reach out to grab the sticks and mash the buttons. Instead, you have to use a connected game controller.
Speaking of emulating old hardware, I played and finished a game on Switch (also available on PC) called The Operator. It’s one of those where the entire UI is a computer’s desktop and you have to chat, look into files, and do hackery stuff to experience the story. I think this can be filed along with the other murder mystery games I’ve played lately. It’s fairly short at under four hours, almost completely linear, and not something you’d play twice. Wait for a sale, I think.
You know who else is a hacker? The lead character in Apple TV’s Tehran, a show that came out in 2020 and has since been renewed for a fourth season. We watched Episode 1 back when it came out, liked it enough, but for some reason completely forgot to go back until this year. It’s been topping the charts lately, maybe because of the recent civil unrest in Iran. Having just finished Season 1, I can say it‘s a really good espionage thriller, and we’re keen to keep going.
Oh and check this out. Someone has managed to license Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series and made a free-to-play (i.e. shitty) mobile game: Foundation: Galactic Frontier. It even has an Apple TV logo appear on startup?! And the next day, I saw this insane animated ad for it pop up on Instagram and couldn’t believe my eyes — I took a screenshot to prove it. In all fairness the actual game isn’t anything like this, it’s just a heinous misrepresentation that probably has Asimov spinning in his grave.
There was no New Year’s Eve hangover and if we’re being honest, there hasn’t been one for many years. We read in bed until midnight with the usual Mediacorp countdown broadcast left on in the background — “Are you readyyyyy Singaporeeeee?” and many more examples of amateur MC energy.
Last week I should have mentioned that this new buying and enjoying of analog recordings is really related to themes I’ve been touching on over the past year. How imperfect translations (and in this case, physically vulnerable reproductions of music) can carry more emotional value, along with how friction — the thing we spend so much time trying to iron out of our products and services — actually adds tactility and affordances that the human mind kinda likes. When everything works perfectly, when the surfaces are too seamless, the mind only gets bored and seeks trouble.
Me getting into music ownership again is definitely a form of seeking trouble. I posted a couple of times on Instagram about this new hobby and Stacy pointed me to a record sale going on this weekend in the basement of The Adelphi, an old shopping center mostly known for its hi-fi focus. I stopped by and bought three LPs that already bend the rules I set out for myself last week.
One of them was Beth Gibbons and Rustin Man’s 2002 masterpiece, Out of Season. I gasped out loud when I came across it in the crate, and immediately pulled it out so no one else could buy it first. That thrill, and the experience of browsing the mall’s other record shops afterwards, was a nostalgic return to the days I would spend hours in CD stores after school. Yesterday was probably the first time in 20 years that I’d set foot in a local music store — after the iPod and streaming quality got good enough, I simply stopped. I’ve definitely missed it, even though it’s logically ridiculous to be buying when I could just tap ‘Add to Library’ in Apple Music instead.
In one of those stores, I ended up having a long and wide-ranging conversation with the shopkeeper about record collecting, hip-hop, local music stores we patronized in the 1990s, HK films, and the celebrities who’ve now become Singapore citizens. I told him straight out that I was a beginner when it came to vinyl, and that his inventory was too hardcore for me: audiophile collector’s editions starting at $150 and up to $700 for a 90s pop album I saw, but he didn’t seem to mind. When I described my journey back to buying physical music after 20 years, from having the idea a few months ago to getting a turntable for Christmas, he laughed. “Die lah.”
So where do things stand since last week’s initial purchase of 9 albums? I bought five more records and… inherited around 20 more (!) from my parents. There were some real gems, like Bowie’s Heroes and The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. My mom found them in a drawer where they’ve sat untouched since the 1980s, and my dad told us a few stories as he handed them over. One of them is a signed copy of Ralph McTell’s Streets of London, which he got directly from the man in Glasgow one time. He was a sailor then, and one of his shipmates was friends with McTell. They met up with him at a pub when they pulled into town, where McTell got a hero’s welcome and free drinks all night. He wrote my dad an accompanying message on the sleeve, one that would be considered racist by today’s standards, but was meant as a compliment along the lines of “I didn’t know you Chinese guys could drink”.
The others I bought in shops this week: Lorde’s Solar Power, Maggie Rogers’ Surrender, Oscar Peterson At Carnegie, and Eric Dolphy At The Five Spot.
There’s one more record that I’d love to have someday, and that’s J Dilla’s Donuts. I’ve started reading Dan Charnas’s Dilla Time, a journalistic biography of the late producer and his lasting impact on modern music, and Apple Music’s extensive catalog of his posthumously compiled beats and finished songs is keeping me company while I do. So the vinyl can wait.
I’m totally stopping here for the time being. It’s a pattern I know too well, getting caught up in the building of a collection and neglecting the part where I actually enjoy it. The collection soon becomes a backlog. An albatross. Don’t call it a new year’s resolution, but I’ll be trying to spend more time with the things I’ve got. Unfortunately, I’m beginning to feel that maybe the B&O speaker isn’t quite good enough…
Anyway, I thought I should list the albums of 2025 that I enjoyed the most, so here are ten picks I can stand behind.
Ps: We stumbled upon a BOOK•OFF pop-up at The Heeren. I guess they thought to try selling some of the more popular weeb items from Japan at even more inflated prices? Unfortunately nothing much I found interesting. Part of the appeal of the -OFF shops is the crate and junkpile digging, looking for gold in a giant closet. A corner of curated items isn’t the same thing.
After listening to ROSALÍA so much last week, I decided I wanted to experience LUX closer to the reality it was conceived in. So I reinstalled Duolingo, which I haven’t touched since maybe 2017? After several days, I’m now at Level 9 in Spanish, whatever that means. The biggest obstacle to Español perfecto is my inability to roll my ‘R’s, which I will simply need to practice out loud until it clicks. I can only do this while alone because Kim tells me to please stop por el amor de dios.
I met up with some old friends and acquaintances this week: one about to have their second child in the midst of questioning their career trajectory (aren’t we all?) and another who’s just come off living on a boat with their family for the past seven years, sailing from port to port in an unusual nautical retirement. Their youngest child practically grew up on water but will now have to stay in one place, join a normal school, and get accustomed to land life. In thinking about both situations, I reflected that personal freedom might be the most valuable asset to have when dealing with difficult times.
Later, I mentioned the old D&D character alignment framework to Cien and Peishan, and how it related to our personalities which I thought were evenly spread across Lawful to Chaotic. It hadn’t crossed my mind that Chaotic was actually about valuing freedom, but it kinda is — freedom to follow your whims instead of rules and expectations?
Then I visited the Artscience Museum on a weekday afternoon for a futurism exhibition called Another World Is Possible – a hopeful title promising alternative models for living, maybe even freedom from our current constraints. My expectations were high because it was yet another collaboration with ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image) out of Melbourne. Alas, I left feeling rather annoyed and unfulfilled.
The space itself is inadequate for multimedia shows. There’s not enough surface area, and the adjacent rooms without doors bleed sound into each other at an atrocious level. Near the end, there were some screens with a peaceful computer-generated nature scene meant for reflection, but all you can hear is music blaring from another video installation.
But regarding the actual show, several of the items presented were clearly AI-generated slop, unlabeled. The wall text just says things like “12-minute audio/video presentation” or “14-inch giclée print.” I don’t want our institutions of culture to charge $20 for mediocre renderings one could Midjourney at home. Hard to feel like ‘another world is possible’ when the medium represents what’s wrong with the present one.
Racism came up during my book club meeting this week, which gave me a chance to traumatize the Americans with “Darkie” toothpaste. It’s a brand that’s been ubiquitous in these parts since I was a kid. The name is bad enough, but they also put a minstrel on the box, highlighting the contrast between black skin and white teeth. It rebranded to “Darlie” at some point and made it somewhat arguable that the man wasn’t black, but we all know. It was only in late-2021 that its Chinese name changed from 黑人牙膏 “Black Person Toothpaste” to 好來 “Bright Future” (my translation). Reading the Wikipedia page, I was surprised to learn that it had a market share as high as 50% in Singapore in the 80s!
But hey, cultural theft isn’t just about race. Kill Bill is getting a theatrical re-release next month — both volumes cut together with unseen footage into the 4hr 40min epic Tarantino originally intended. Maybe no cinema in Singapore will take it up, but this means there’s hope for an updated digital release at some point.
That iconic siren when the camera zooms into Uma Thurman’s rage-filled eyes? Sampled from the Shaw Brothers film Five Fingers of Death aka King Boxer (1972), which I saw for the first time this week on MUBI. The Chinese title 天下第一拳 translates to “The Greatest Fist Under Heaven” — not “in the world” but “under heaven,” which is somehow more evocative and poetic.
A bunch of these old Shaw Brothers wuxia flicks are leaving MUBI in the next few days so I’ll be on a little martial arts marathon in the coming week.
And since we were talking about cultural appropriation last week (I’m cool with it), you know who else loves sampling kung-fu movies and helped Tarantino put the sound of Kill Bill together? That’s right, the RZA aka the Abbott, who resurfaced this week with the release of Japanese rapper Awich’s new album Okinawan Wuman, which he produced.
Apart from a little cringey self-caricaturing from Awich — the usual “we say arigato” shit, not unlike Utada Hikaru singing “You’re easy breezy and I’m Japanesey” back in 2005 — it’s a solid album on first listen. Maybe I’m being too critical about someone trying to break into another market by dumbing down their own culture, but she’s already got the RZA in her corner. She doesn’t need to prove anything. Feel free to switch up languages and drop the most obscure Okinawan slang! ROSALÍA’s success has proven that you can trust listeners to find their way to you.
Awich’s promotional video has a Japanese hip-hop expert explain, by way of establishing how monumental it is that RZA has produced this Japanese lady’s album, that the two most important acts in history were the Wu-Tang Clan and De La Soul. What good fortune for us, then, that this week saw the latter’s first new album in 9 years, Cabin In The Sky! We eating good, mi familia.
I spoke too soon. Jinxed it. Stupidly counted my chicks. By which I mean I had another vertigo episode out of nowhere after thinking I was safe. It came just from tilting my head down to look at something, and suddenly it felt like the floor fell out from under me. I immediately put my head back, and it only lasted like half a minute, but it was enough to burst my bubble of security that maybe the earlier incident was a one-off.
According to the online literature, recurrences are common with BPPV, and it’s just something you have to learn to live with and manage. Some lingering unsteadiness followed for the next couple of days, which is annoying but survivable. I’m mostly worried that I’ll get a bad case of it on a plane at some point, because pressure changes can apparently trigger it.
PSA if you also have this: it seems people with vitamin D deficiencies are more susceptible. So I’m going to be more religious about taking supplements and see if that helps.
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For the second time in two weeks, I decided to break my weekday lunch routine by going further out to a Sushiro, followed by a little cafe reading time. Eating alone in a walled-off solo dining booth sounds sad and lonely but is surprisingly cozy; just ask Japan.
Later, I came across a Reddit thread discussing local restaurants and when Sushiro came up, someone replied “if you’re in Bangkok, try it there — it’s a world of difference in quality, price, and size.” Well then! That’s something I’ll be in a position to verify next week because I’m actually going to be in Bangkok for several days (hence the airplane vertigo worries, pray for me).
My itinerary as a traveling husband is still quite open — while Kim’s at work I’m planning to check out this new mall with a rooftop park, visit some exhibitions, and watch Predator: Badlands in a cinema superior to anything we have in Singapore. And depending on how I feel, maybe even stay in with my iPad and enjoy the very nice hotel for a bit.
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Speaking of touchscreen devices, I’ve been waiting for the full reveal of the Anbernic DS handheld emulation console, and now that it’s up for pre-order, my excitement has been considerably reduced. Enthusiasts online have been disappointed by the choice of a weak processor which, when paired with an Android OS, means it’ll struggle to run any 3DS games and maybe even some DS games. I’m not up to speed on DS emulation, but I’ll take their word for it that things could be much better here.
The original DS Lite was my favorite handheld of all time because of its minimal clamshell design, which also housed its tiny stylus. The Anbernic DS does not include that critical feature. What’s the point of recreating the DS if you have a separate, chunky stylus to carry about and lose?
Anbernic has also earned a reputation for releasing improved variants shortly after launching new products. So I’m hoping we’ll see a faster, more polished version out in six months. Wake me up when that comes out.
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Media activity:
I’m reading Wraith, which is Book 1 in the Convergence War series. It’s shaping up to be a fun if not-so-elegant “assemble a team and go on a big space adventure” action story. I’d recommend it if you’re looking for a palate cleanser in between more challenging fare.
I started watching the popular Apothecary Diaries anime series that Netflix has been aggressively pushing, and it’s not bad! Essentially a medical procedural set in ancient China, with other dramatic hooks like a super-competent main character who wants to stay invisible but can’t help stepping in to fix things, plus royal court politics.
After watching The Woman in Cabin 10 last week, we looked for more murder stories on boats and started on Death and Other Details (a murder on a cruise ship) before finding out it was canceled after one season. Still, it’s been okay and stars Mandy Patinkin as the detective.
If you’d asked me about Death and Other Details a few days ago, I might have said it was “pretty good”. But after watching the first two episodes of Apple TV’s new tentpole series, Pluribus, the bar is now insanely high. Don’t read anything about it, not even Hideo Kojima’s reaction tweet, just go straight into watching it on the nicest screen you can find. Based on what I’ve seen so far, this is looking like the kind of show I’ll think about long after it’s over.
I woke up from one of those dreams where you need to go to the bathroom, so you visit a bathroom (in your dream) but it’s very unpleasant and almost in a state of dilapidation. For example, the sinks and toilets might be taped up to say “out of service”, or the tiles and floors are all ruined, and it’s clearly not a functioning toilet — but you gotta go! And then later that same day, someone mentioned having a recurring dream about a gross “squat toilet” in their childhood home, and a light clicked on in my head. Maybe everyone has these dreams, and it’s the brain’s way of saying “don’t pee now!” I’d bet this is a universal experience.
I learnt on Instagram that the singer D’Angelo passed away. He was only 51, and they say it was cancer, maybe pancreatic. That would make it at least two world-changing visionaries to go that way. Voodoo remains one of my favorite albums of all time, one of those that exists fully as a complete work — there’s nothing that can be added or removed, and even the idea of a super deluxe edition with remixes or outtakes feels unnecessary. It’s so loose and hard to pin down in terms of genre and style (he reportedly hated the “neo-soul” label and said he simply played Black music), that I don’t think I knew what I was listening to as I played it the first hundred times. He brought together everything I love about hip-hop, jazz, funk, soul, R&B, Prince’s ecstatic falsetto… into a single masterpiece. What’s also tragic is that he never released the promised follow-up to 2014’s Black Messiah and I don’t know how to feel about it being dug out of the vault and released someday.
Speaking of deaths, I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki has moved to the top of my reading list after its author Baek Se-Hee passed away this week at 35. News reports only say she died, but everyone is surely wondering if it was suicide on account of the book being about her journey with depression. It makes me wonder why suicides are often sidestepped in the news these days. They could at least say that it wasn’t? It just seems very weird to not address the question. Maybe they’re afraid of copycats, or there’s some assumption about shame on the side of the surviving family. I think for anyone who was so open in struggling with the decision, letting people know that they did what they wanted is actually kinda respectful.
Speaking of existential questions, my book club has elected to read Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot, which I was reluctant to revisit. The last time I read it was in secondary school — I read just about every science fiction novel, and probably all the Asimov ones, they had in the school library. As I feared, it doesn’t entirely hold up to the lofty memories I had of encountering The Three Laws of Robotics for the first time. The writing is a little, shall we say, 1940s? But that’s not to say this isn’t an absolute miracle, because it was written in the 1940s. It’s a compilation of short stories, each concerned with testing the boundaries and interpretation of the Laws in different ways, and basically highlighting the importance of rigorous prompt engineering! Reading this in 2025 is a trip. Asimov holds up a mirror to humanity more than anything, and we see people behaving rudely to AIs as if they were slaves or farm animals, but also others becoming attached to them as if they were “real”.
I’m also halfway through The Optimist, a biography of Sam Altman and his path to leading OpenAI. It’s as much about the Valley as it is about Altman, to be fair, and I’m learning a lot about the history of Y-Combinator and other companies along the way. I might have been influenced by all the hit pieces on Altman’s character, but I’m mostly skeptical about him being a force for good. An analyst’s note I heard on Bloomberg the other day went something like, “Sam has the power to destroy the global economy for the next decade, or to lead us to the promised land”. And as a mad prophet once said: “no one man should have all that power”.
Over the weekend we visited the National Museum where I saw a kid playing RealSports Volleyball on an Atari 2600. Way to make a guy feel old — I played that myself at his age and now it’s in a museum! He looked to be enjoying it, which just goes to show ancient software can still hold power over the lizard brain (as long as it hasn’t been exposed to Fortnite).
Then as we headed to the last stop, a new permanent exhibition called Singapore Odyssea, we discovered that we were too late and it had closed for the day (at 6pm). I wasn’t even particularly interested in it, but felt pretty bummed out that we missed it anyway. Then Kim pointed at a family and noted that I was having the same reaction as their kid, who was being consoled by his parents, “it’s not that we don’t want to go sweetheart, but it’s closed.” Hmph. People are always like, ‘stay young at heart’ and ‘don’t lose your childlike wonder’, but then they don’t want the grumpy tantrums that come with it!
The results from last week’s health screening came back clear of all major issues, so I’ll sleep soundly on that front for a little while at least! The only note was that I could cut back a little on the carbs and saturated fats, which makes me wonder what I’ve done differently since the last test. Could it be… that I was eating more healthily when I went to the office more often? Those downtown mall lunches were more expensive than the kopitiam/hawker fare I get more frequently now, but I didn’t expect them to be healthier. I’ll have to look into this a little more.
It’s no secret that one of the more reliable indicators we’re in a frothy bull market is a rising number of people mistakenly believing they can quit their jobs and live off day trading, and while that wasn’t my plan, I’ve certainly done a touch of it this year. What can I say? Gambling is fun! But then Trump declared another tariff war on China this Friday, troubling markets and triggering major liquidations on some altcoins. I know it was bad out there because my feeds were full of people urging others not to kill themselves. The coming week is probably going to be a very interesting one on Bloomberg, which I expect to have on the TV in the background all day.
That is, if the internet is even working. Our ISP has been struggling with at least two outages this week during waking/working hours. The connection is down right now as I write this bit on Saturday evening, which is surely an unpopular time for the net to go down. I’ll bet someone’s been called in to reboot a server rack somewhere right now. In times like these, I’m thankful for my irrationally large mobile data plan and our local NAS media server. There’s some kind of strategic error being made by governments here. Centralizing all the angry-mob-placating media on the cloud where it can go down in the middle of a crisis? The kind where you tell people to stay indoors and wait? I’ll bet DVDs actually played a role in maintaining law and order in the old days.
Speaking of shutting down a digital grid, I had the opportunity to see the new Tron: Ares film with Brian the night it premiered and had a great time despite Jared Leto taking the titular role. It’s not a franchise that aims to make sense, or be scrutinized for narrative integrity — it’s about the neon lights, banging electronic music, and videogame-ish eye candy, and this new one delivered on all counts. I can’t even get mad; it really is just a good time as long as the volume’s way up.
Quick aside: I’ve been using Claude more than ChatGPT recently to give it a fair shake, mostly spurred by curiosity after their recent marketing campaign, and honestly? The outputs seem more insightful, more strategic, and it’s a better writer. It feels more my speed, and I’m a new fan.
Still on the topic of digital networks, I got roped into helping start and moderate an online alumni group for the design agency I used to be part of, and we quietly launched it this week. What set this one workplace apart was the feeling of being a truly connected team where, for a brief period in time, absent any territorial agendas or business borders, people could share knowledge across (and even move freely around) the different global offices. And it’s been really nice to see many people say as they join the #introductions channel on our Slack that it remains the best job they ever had. Where does it go from here? I think that depends on how many atypically extroverted designers we can get to foster some sort of social infrastructure.
Coincidentally, I met one of those ex-colleagues for an overdue breakfast: our first intern and proper employee in Singapore, who’s also a regular reader of this blog. Hi Xin! I hadn’t seen her in a year, so even after 90 minutes of catching up it still felt like there was lots we didn’t get into. Anyway, you wouldn’t have known it was a random weekday morning from the line waiting to get into the suburban cafe/bakery we chose. Every table was occupied by both foreign and local-looking unemployed bums alike, all enjoying $28 breakfast plates and $18 slices of toasted sourdough topped with avocado. We’re constantly being told local restaurants are barely hanging on, but then you see the brunch scam still going strong and it’s like wha…?
More counterdata was encountered while celebrating a very belated birthday dinner for Kim at Cudo, a South-American-ish sort of restaurant in the Amoy Street area. It was fully packed out (albeit on a Friday night), and I highly recommend them on account of solid tropical cocktails (Bourbon! Coconut! Pineapple!), a really nice selection of starters (Romaine lettuce with blue cheese and anchovies; warm crab queso with tortilla chips; truffley torched yellowtail), and even better mains (wagyu rump; chorizo and ricotta pasta) at pretty palatable prices.
I can afford this baller dining-out lifestyle because I saved a ton of money on the Amazon Prime sales this week (yup it’s #girlmath). I bought replacement razor blades, a physical copy of The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, dental floss, a 1TB microSD Express card (finally!) for my Switch 2, protein bars, LED bulbs, LEUCHTTURM1917 notebooks, and a lifetime supply of Uni-ball Jetstream RT pens — only the best pens ever according to The Wirecutter.
I wasn’t planning to get any of this stuff soon — they’re all things I might have bought eventually. Like the 1TB card to replace the 256GB one in my Switch 2, for example, which I thought I’d upgrade to in maybe a year’s time. This made me realize that on top of driving impulse purchases, these sale events are actually about pulling forward purchases and recording future sales today to juice numbers (at slightly lower margins). Businesses are valued based on expected profits, individuals buy based on expected needs, and I guess I’ve been binging carbs and fat based on expected hunger!
sangsara.net 