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Tag: Singapore

  • SecondHand

    SecondHand

    Launch the app

    October 2026 — It’s that hazy time of year again here in Singapore, and lots of air quality apps have been popping up thanks to this being The Year of Vibe Coding. But I hadn’t yet seen one that puts these esoteric numbers into terms we can all understand: like smoking. It’s also fitting, given how this is second-hand smoke from a country that loves its cigarettes. So here’s my contribution to the pool.

    SecondHand takes the live 24-hour PM2.5 reading for your part of the island and converts it using Berkeley Earth’s rule of thumb (22 µg/m³ over a day is roughly one cigarette). Then it puts that number in your hand! Stay indoors my friends, and keep those air purifiers humming.

    A hand holding two cigarettes in front of a cozy room with a bookshelf and a leather chair, featuring a digital display showing air quality measurements and second-hand smoke equivalent.

    Changelog:

    • Added a map view (hold down to pop it up)
    • Added a haze-free state for better days
    • Significant optimizations to size and performance
    • Copy changes for clarity
    • PSI and 24hr PM2.5 figures now scale with the simulation slider
    • Max cigarettes upped from 12 to 20, with room smoke effects
  • Week 40.26

    Week 40.26

    • I went to Apple Orchard Road and tried the Beats 360 headphones. They’re not large enough for my head; case closed. Money saved.
    • My new Apple Watch likes to try cheering me up by telling me that my body is “Ready” to “Go For It” (I assume “It” is a marathon, a swim to the far side of Australia, or something equally implausible) and that I had excellent sleep the night before, but these science and sensor-backed statements simply don’t match my reality. I’m tired; I wish I could sleep more!
    • I just took a little break (after one paragraph, natch) and went on Instagram, where I saw a post that read “Anyone else turn 40 around the start of the pandemic and now blinked and you’re somehow 46 wondering what the hell just happened?” On one hand, that sentence perfectly captures the fatigue that you’d imagine comes with being abducted by aliens and losing six years of your life — at the very least, the weariness of having to catch up with a lot of missed information, which is what being alive in this time of AI feels like, always on the back foot with lots to learn — but on the other hand, it implies not knowing at all where the time went, which I can’t identify with. Oh I know where the time went. I remember it all perfectly well, but it plays in my mind like a timelapse — hundreds of days passing, the figure getting in and out of bed, the view outside the window gradually changing.
    • Armchair theory: maybe what’s caused this ‘blink and time passed’ effect for many is the combination of massive disruption followed by repetitive discomfort. This is different from repetitive boredom, where days are long and time moves slowly. With repetitive discomfort, you’re constantly insecure and stressed, so the mind protects itself by generating summaries and discarding the details. This sharp change, followed by pain you’d rather forget, dislodges you from whatever life you were living before, making it feel like a separate country.
    • I’m listening to Apple Music 1 and three Taylor Swift songs have played in a short period of time. Without checking, I’ve known it was her from the fact that all her recent music sounds the same. It’s hard to feel bad for a billionaire, but that’s an awful place for any creative person to be. It’s like she doesn’t listen to any other music, or won’t allow herself to appear influenced by anyone else. Lonely at the top, as they say, which is why you won’t find me there (among other obvious reasons)!
    • Kim and I met Mandy for dinner one night to mark her birthday, and we went to a wine-focused place called Fiasco which has taken over the spot where Kilo used to be, that weird little building out in the middle of nothing near Lavender. The food was all really good (I forgot to take pictures), and they’re doing some really interesting things with hanger steak and pork collar, the latter seasoned to resemble a very fancy charsiew.
    • In an example of culinary R&D jumping the shark, we ate at Surrey Hills over the weekend, where my mother-in-law’s corned beef hash came partially covered with a purple sweet potato foam. Needless to say, she did not appreciate the touch. The place purports to be Australian, and with her being Australian too, I tried to gaslight her into believing that it was an authentic Australian recipe that she’d somehow never heard about. Needless to say, I was not successful.
    • I finished PARANORMASIGHT: The Mermaid’s Curse, and found it a worthy sequel, arguably better than the first game in every way unless you want a spooky atmosphere. This one can’t be classified as horror at all. It’s a mystery adventure with supernatural elements so tame they’d elicit no more than a shrug from a timid baby. Like the first game, its story concerns Japanese history and legends that one might find a little boring, but you don’t have to read all the text in its menus.
    • Playing that game unwittingly prepared me for the film Inu-Oh (2021), which I’ve had in my library for years and suddenly decided to watch. From the opening scenes, it eerily echoed story points from PARANORMASIGHT, concerning the 12th-century Heike samurai clan, and their vengeful spirits said to linger across the land after they were wiped out. Inu-Oh is a wildly ambitious and stupendously well-animated musical that is let down by, well, its music. The concept is a fusion of traditional Japanese music with glam rock, and a main character starts playing his biwa one day like an electric guitar without any explanation. The visuals work, but the songs are poorly structured to modern ears, overly long, and basically repeat the same melodies while pages of historical narrative are sung over them. Imagine Billy Corgan’s worst material, stretched twice as long, and the lyrics are all about random days of Napoleon’s life, and you’ll begin to understand how it feels.
    • We finally saw Sentimental Value (2025) and wow it really deserves its Oscar and 95% Rotten Tomatoes score. The opening scene with the house, and the title card needle drop that follows it, was so good that my body felt compelled to stand up and applaud — I didn’t allow it, but that feeling went on for much of its running length. The train oner is a wonderful bit of technical showing off, and actually the whole film’s lush 35mm look just stunts on the pervasive digital signature of Netflix movies. Everyone is great in this, making art about how art both fucks you up and saves you — 4.5 stars.
    • Found time for a grab bag of other films too: Runner (2026) — not to be confused with Gal Gadot’s The Runner (2026), Good Boy (2025), Elle (2016), Grand Theft Hamlet (2024) — the one to watch out of all of these, a very human documentary about two out-of-work actors putting on a production of Hamlet inside the GTA Online videogame whilst stuck at home during the pandemic — Shelter (2026), and Tony (2026).
    • Singapore made headlines this week because of the launch of a new dating site by the government, currently in a pilot phase only open to civil servants. It’s called FirstDate, and matches people based on compatibility assumed from their responses to a questionnaire. The idea of a state-run service has amused observers, with some seeing it as a dystopian step towards arranged marriages by Big Brother, amongst other hot takes on this strategy to combat our falling Total Fertility Rate (TFR). History rhymes, of course, and older folks will remember the existence of the Social Development Unit (SDU) in the 1980s, a pre-digital precursor to this scheme, that was something of a government-run activities club to help rescue graduates from singlehood after being encouraged (by the same authorities) to optimize for good grades instead of dating during their teenage years.
    • But it’s hard for outsiders to decide if Singapore’s environment really does produce a special breed of hapless, rizzless forever-aloners, uniquely ill-equipped to find their own mates through empathy and communication, so Singapore’s own state-run media conglomerate is providing some data in the form of a new reality dating show called Wingman. The show’s format introduces an original element to the Love Island formula, namely that each contestant brings their own wingman/wingwoman to serve as hype men/women, espousing their good qualities so they don’t have to — a perfectly valid and brilliant tweak for Asian cultures where tooting your own horn unironically is a major ick. The contestants, in addition to a few Singaporeans, are a bunch of attractive 20-to-30-somethings from the Philippines and Thailand, all of whom resemble functioning young adults who can read social cues and body language, and interact normally with members of the opposite sex (there is no LGBTQ+ representation). There’s obviously a tilt towards extroversion, which you’d expect from people volunteering to be a dating show, but even correcting for that, there’s an intriguing, discernible difference between the Singaporeans and their SEAblings that’s best seen for yourself. Full episodes are available on YouTube. We binged all 10 so far in one night.
  • Week 38.26

    Week 38.26

    • I have my new iPhone 18 Pro Max. It’s an all-round solid upgrade, and the only nits I can pick are the extra 20 or so grams of weight and the slightly worsened lens flare in dark conditions (the former I can feel, the latter I have only seen in online reviews). For a brief moment after preordering, I regretted not giving the new Glacier color a try this year, but that soon passed and I think this year’s Silver looks great. The white roundrect glass panel on the back of last year’s model was a seriously weird move.
    • There’s some doubt online about how big a deal the new wider maximum aperture (f/1.48) actually is, but I’m here to tell you that Bayer RAW photos have significantly less noise and an overall better appearance in low light scenes! On the past few iPhones, RAW (not to be confused with ProRAW) has been nigh unusable at night, with lots of weird purple color fringing around clumps of copious sensor noise. Color noise is still present, of course, but the overall aspect is smooth and high fidelity. This is on par with or even better than regular compact cameras, I think. (Edit: there’s a chance this may actually be down to the new RAW 9 engine in iOS 27.)
    Style: Natural + Film
    • The new “Photographic Styles 3” image processing engine with texture controls, such as film-like halation and skin smoothing, appeared to be an exclusive feature for these new phones — after all, the last upgrade to Photographic Styles on the iPhone 16 was not retroactively made available to the iPhone 15 — but I spied a footnote in the press release that suggests it will be coming to older models at some point. Very unusual, and very unlike Apple. After all, the Pro manual controls in the default camera app are exclusive to the 18 Pro for no apparent reason. For anyone sitting out this year’s upgrade, it should be very welcome news these new options are coming to breathe new life into the camera experience.
    • Side note: The Apple Watch Series 12 is noticeably thinner and wider coming from a four-year-old model. The cover glass/sapphire crystal now reaches so far down the sides that you can barely see the metal. I reckon this year it makes the least difference whether you choose an aluminum or titanium body; you’ll hardly see it. The effect you get when looking at it straight on is that the watch is all glass and display. This is probably a precursor to the design concept of next year’s iPhone which should have the thinnest titanium frame ever: a glass sandwich with very little filling. Most of the Watch’s other benefits are invisible in everyday use, from better round-the-clock sensing to AI features that have yet to ship in software. I’m looking forward to Siri Recap in particular, and plan to hold conversations with myself doing different funny voices all day.
    Silver goes with everything
    • I wish I could say that I’ve had a painless migration to the new phone, but it’s been terrible. And that’s all to do with telcos, not Apple. If you recall, I switched to M1 Maxx last week and marveled at how they could offer such incredible value for $12, naively forgetting to ask what the catch was.
    • The problem with eSIMs is that they can’t be popped out of one phone and chucked into another the way a physical card can. In order to be issued a QR code for installing the eSIM on my new phone, I had to go down to a physical store and wait in line to speak with a human. With Maxx being M1’s budget brand, they only opened up one service counter so the staff could stand around laughing at the broke people wasting their lunch break, while the rest of the store remained relatively empty. I waited a total of an hour. I was glad to have done this on Thursday because the line would surely have been many times longer after Friday’s launch.
    • Well it turned out that I couldn’t install it on Friday anyway, because their system didn’t register my old eSIM as deactivated after I’d done it. And these QR codes can literally only be scanned once — it seems that scanning and getting an error counts as once — so it became invalid after, necessitating another trip down to town to wait in line again. No fucking way, my friends. My solution: signing up for a new telco and porting my number away from M1 Maxx, just to get a working eSIM immediately. Total loss to this point: just $12 and several hours of my time.
    • But guess what? The new telco had problems too. SMSes either didn’t arrive or arrived hours after they were sent to me. This delay meant I initially couldn’t sign into any of my banks without my old phone, because logging into the apps on a new phone requires, yup, receiving an SMS. Later in the day, they started arriving 15 minutes late, and now on Day 2 they’re finally arriving on time. What irks me is how archaic this reliance on SMS is — why can’t companies use TOTP authenticator apps or email or (I can’t believe I’m saying this) WhatsApp? All local institutions should at least default to our national identity verification service, Singpass.
    Shut up and take my freedom!
    • This sounds like a real first-world problem but that’s what it is — we’ve built an environment where it’s hard to live when you can’t access banking apps, PayNow, and Apple Pay. I’m not saying cash is the solution — because germs — but these accounts should just be biometrically tied to us or something. I used to think the Chinese system where you can pay with a palm scan was too invasive, too dystopian, but not anymore. I’m ready to sign over my rights in exchange for device-agnostic convenience. At time of writing, I still can’t activate FaceTime and iMessage using my phone number. God help me, I might be switching telcos for the third time next week.
    • You know what works well? Services that let you sell off your used devices, like Mister Mobile, CompAsia, and SellUp. In just a minute, you can arrange to have someone come to your doorstep and give you cash in exchange for your old phone. Let me walk you through the boy math I alluded to last week: A 512GB iPhone Pro Max loses about $500 in value if you keep it for two years instead of one. That means delaying an upgrade actually costs you money. So, take the price of that new phone, deduct the $500 of avoided depreciation, subtract the doorstep trade-in cash, and toss in the pro-rated refund from canceling your unused AppleCare+ plan, and upgrading annually might even provide better returns than investing in AAPL stock, and that’s saying a lot.
    • At least it wasn’t a total waste of time going out for the eSIM QR code on Thursday. I visited my favorite curry spot after, then dropped in on Jussi and Brian at their co-working office. I had my once-yearly pumpkin spice latte from Starbucks, and sadly have already forgotten what it was like.
    • After seeing tons of hype for the new Korean film, Hope, which is distributed by Neon and MUBI and was nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes, I’ve been anxiously waiting to see it in theaters here. That day came on Tuesday, and… I have no idea how anyone could recommend this stinking mess. Just another example of the West glazing Korean cinema, I guess. It has some positive qualities, like the first act where mysterious events steadily unfold with the action ramping up quickly; and the sudden appearance of leading lady Hoyeon (of Squid Game fame) about 40 minutes in, photographed so jarringly model-beautiful and flawless compared to everyone else in the podunk town setting, wielding an over-the-top weapon (whose origins are never explained) with utter seriousness, that the moment collapses into unintentional comedy. Unfortunately the rest of its 156-minute runtime is trash, the ending is one of the dumbest I’ve ever seen, and Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander may never live down their involvement in this. 2 stars, at best.
    • The National Library has a month-long ReadSG reading campaign underway and citizens are encouraged to log their daily reading sessions on a CrowdTask website, where meager rewards can be won but more importantly, a sense of community might emerge from trying to collectively hit 7.5 million reading minutes. For my part, I’m up to 51 books this year, the last two being Neuromancer and Lily King’s Heart the Lover. Then Kim showed me this Instagram Reel from Seoul, Korea, and I couldn’t help but wish our reading festival went all out like this. It’s aspirational, romantic, and makes reading look like something you’d gladly do with your friends instead of doomscrolling together in some cafe.
  • Week 36.26

    Week 36.26

    • Drinking a lot of wine last Saturday night at what I thought was the end of my illness was not a smart move — my immune system probably felt like frontline troops betrayed by friendly fire, and by Sunday night I began feeling the stirrings of a new illness.
    • The return of the seasonal haze — caused by intentional forest fires in Indonesia — certainly hasn’t helped my throat and nasal membranes. It’s looking to get worse in the coming weeks, but one pretty side effect is a rather cinematic bloom over the city lights at night.
    Look at the daytime haze, and this is “moderate”
    • I thus spent most of the week laid up in various poses, moving between states of aching, coughing, and mucusation. So there’s really not much more to report this week, but let me wring this diaristic serviette dry anyway; let me lean heavy on the word press’s crank with my phlegmatic body.
    • One of my sad meals was a can of baked beans in tomato sauce, eaten cold out of the can. But instead of the usual Heinz, I decided to try regional brand Ayam’s slightly cheaper rendition, and learnt that the version I’m used to (less sweet, with vinegar) is called an “English recipe” in their world. The verdict: pretty good and I dare say indistinguishable from Heinz’s without a direct comparison. Caveat: I was sick.
    • This new bean acquisition was part of a larger canned food stockpiling effort that I embarked on after reading some doomsaying posts such as this one from The Guardian. Coincidentally, I learnt shortly afterwards that James had also started doing the same. That made me wonder what vegetarians stockpile, because my pantry is mainly filled with sardines, tuna, chicken, and pork products. I got my answer on Saturday when I saw him for Peishan’s birthday celebration: lots of bean-like stuff such as lentils and chickpeas. In any case, we’re not prepping on any meaningful scale — the goal would be to avoid being caught out by a sudden food shortage, for maybe a week at best. After that, the attractiveness of survival in that world probably drops off quite steeply.
    • Oh, I also found and enjoyed this video on the history of everyone’s favorite canned meat, Spam. As a lifelong aficionado of the ‘spiced ham’, I already knew many of these facts, but did not know that its main ingredient, pork shoulder, was considered a cheap off-cut back when the product was being developed.
    • I finished reading all 1,600 virtual pages of Reamde within a week, and it was an absolute blast. A very bingeable book, and one that I realize underlines a trend in my recent media habits. A couple of months ago, I was reading and playing a lot of detective and murder mysteries. Right now it seems I’m on a techno-thriller and espionage kick.
    • After finishing Tiny Bookshop last week, I started playing Jack Move, an indie cyberpunk RPG with very nice modern pixel art graphics. It’s currently on sale at a tremendous discount for the Nintendo Switch, so take a look.
    • I also bought 007 First Light for the PS5 (20% off sale) but haven’t gotten around to starting on it yet. My hopes are high not just because of the developers’ pedigree (IO Interactive, of the Hitman games), but because in making a game about James Bond as a junior agent, focused on spectacular action set pieces, they seem to have also made a game that looks like Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible movies.
    • The best spy thing of all has been Seasons 1 and 2 of The Agency, which I just finished over the weekend. Michael Fassbender is in top form throughout as a ‘magically’ charismatic manipulator in the CIA, slipping between accents and allegiances as he tries to navigate an ever-expanding web of complications. I also loved Saura Lightfoot-Leon’s turn as Daniela Morata/Acosta, a rookie agent sent on a dangerous undercover mission — a setup I alluded to as a ‘less stupid Lioness’ a few weeks ago. I liked that the show spends time looking at the psychology of the people who sign up for this job, all carrying some marvelous, self-destructive defect that makes them head towards things others run away from.
    • You know who else had a secret identity and was persecuted when he went public? That’s right, I’m talking about the original sleeper agent. We went to see the new production of his story, Jesus Christ Superstar, on its last day at the Marina Bay Sands. Tickets were bought impulsively and spontaneously by Kim, and we had a good time despite some of that rock music being quite dated now in not the best way. It was also consistently over 95dB during the fuller songs, so we used our AirPods Pro in Transparency mode to provide hearing protection while maintaining audio quality. They are super handy, and I’ll never attend a show without them.
    • As of September 1, Apple entered a new era. It’s hard to believe that Tim Cook’s been CEO for 15 years already, and I wonder if that’s because his term was marked by many smaller ripples adding up, rather than big waves that shook the world and demanded attention. I look forward to seeing how things turn out with Ternus. As for the upcoming product event next week, I’m still doubtful I could commit to a first-generation folding iPhone without a telephoto lens. After getting used to having 200mm of reach on my iPhone 17 Pro Max, giving it up for a larger screen doesn’t sound like a great trade. Let’s see if they offer any novel use cases beyond “watch bigger videos”.
    • But I saw a tweet saying Tim was asked what his legacy would be, and he answered neatly that a legacy is what others decide about you, not something you choose for yourself. Which got me thinking: I probably used to believe it was important to make good things and leave them behind to have had a worthwhile life. While I still think that’s a noble pursuit, history will happily separate you from your output if pushed. At best, people will now say ‘Annie Hall is a great movie’ or ‘Thriller is a solid album.’ The product doesn’t rescue the person’s reputation, it just stands on its own merits. It’s probably more important to try and be a good person than to write the great Singaporean novel.
    Look Ma, no memorizing and switching apps and searching and clicking and switching back!
    • In any case, iOS 27 is going to be a huge upgrade for anyone with an eligible phone. I’ve been using Siri AI to answer my everyday questions during the beta period, and I’ll say again it’s good enough to replace whatever service you’re using now, e.g. Perplexity, ChatGPT. The fact that it’s more private than those other services should be reason enough. And last night when I came across an Instagram reel recommending a handful of albums (I get these quite often now), I just paused it and asked Siri to “Add this album to my Apple Music library”, and it did. These are tasks some of us maybe naively expected to be able to ask of our devices years ago, but soon learned to stop trying when they failed to understand, or suggested that they could ‘show us some web results’ instead. Well, now we get to unlearn all that and figure out where the new limits are.
  • Week 35.26

    Week 35.26

    • The week started in a healthy fashion: Kim took a day off and we went out to play a game of not-tennis, aka padel. It is not a cheap pastime, and that’s taking the discounted rate we got from going at noon into account. It was not in the least bit overcast and I don’t think I’ll be risking heatstroke like that again. Indoors, maybe; the less strenuous variety (pickleball), maybe. Honestly, the more I think about padel, the more upset I get. It’s clearly a lazy attempt at making tennis slightly easier, and the added walls feel like an afterthought to create differentiation for the sake of it. If you want a more accessible tennis where your strategic game isn’t held up by your poor physique, go straight to pickleball; embrace the unsexiness. If you want to hit a tennis ball hard and run around, just play actual tennis.
    • Suitably sweaty already, we then went to the Botanic Gardens for an afternoon walk and lunch at the outdoor restaurant, Park Side. I had a gussied-up luncheon meat sandwich and liked the look of the menu fine — it is after all an affiliated brand of P.S. Cafe, which I frequent a lot — but Xin disliked her own experience there enough to reach out and tell me it was underwhelming. Well, I for one was whelmed. Lmk what you think.
    • A couple of days later, I fell sick with a mild flu. Was it the sun exposure, or the mall crowds we braved that evening on the way to see The End of Oak Street? I put the odds at 50-50. The movie was a lot of fun to see in the theater, and stylistically called to mind Spielberg’s best work of the 1980s.
    • Laid up at home the next few days, I got a lot of couch business done. Nintendo Switch visual novel Iwakura Aria? All endings completed. It boasts some unique artwork, and the writing isn’t too bad apart from some elements clearly contrived to add shock value. I’d rate it a cautious recommendation: if you’re into Mages’s work and are happy with a quasi-horror story, go ahead. I went in knowing nothing!
    • It was a big week in game teasers: I mean GTA VI, obvs, which I’ll probably have to buy when it comes out. It’s like being alive when the Beatles released Abbey Road and deciding you weren’t going to listen to it. This game is going to be the entire culture for at least a fortnight in November. I was also excited to see The Witcher 3 Remastered get announced, especially since I’ll be getting it as a free upgrade for the Switch 2. This is a game I bought with the highest of delusions — a massive 300-hour fantasy RPG is not my jam at all — and ended up quitting because of how ass it looked on the original Switch. Now that it’s receiving a lush graphical upgrade, I’ll finally get to be disappointed by the realization that I don’t actually want to ride around fighting monsters on horseback.
    • I also spent more time on Tiny Bookshop after hearing from Cien that she’d finished the game. For one thing, I didn’t even know it had an ending. I took it for an infinite business simulation with a fairly repetitive gameplay loop, made palatable by the fact that you were recommending real book titles for customers to buy out of your mobile caravan store. I thought I’d seen enough of what it had to offer after 10 hours, but I was wrong. (Spoiler warning) I’m now nearing the end, which ironically involves clearing a bunch of tasks so that you can… take over a not-so-tiny bookshop? What’s left for the sequel, sell out to Barnes & Noble and stock board games and blind boxes?
    • Playing that game always puts me in the mood to read more, and so I decided to start on a lengthy Neal Stephenson one, the kind that I don’t dare attempt until after I’ve completed my Goodreads annual challenge. I think Goodreads needs to make it about the number of pages you read, not books. Reamde, for instance, is about 1,600 pages on my Kobo, versus 300–400 for most other novels. So if someone committed to 12 books a year, then choosing Reamde effectively ups it to 15.
    • Anyway, I’m about 38% through it now and having some of the most fun I’ve had reading a book since… the last Neal Stephenson, maybe. I’m literally laughing out loud and shaking my head at his ability to imbue standard paragraphs with comic timing. Its globetrotting adventure core involves MMORPGs, ransomware, Chinese gold farming, and Russian mobs. Although the 2010-ish setting is quaintly anachronistic — with mentions of characters using WAP, Flickr, Facebook, and encountering problems that could be solved with cryptocurrencies and generative AI — it holds up perfectly and I never want it to end. In that regard, its length is a feature rather than a bug.
    • I’ve been listening to the new CZARFACE album featuring Tom Hardy aka Frankie Pulitzer and while he’s not a bad rapper at all (many people say he’s great but I don’t know how much is because it’s Tom Hardy doing something unexpected), I think he’s outclassed here next to the likes of Inspectah Deck; his flow is never as crisp and satisfying, and by flattening his accent to a neutral delivery, it lacks the character of, say, a Staten Island native. The beats are fire, though.
  • Week 29.26

    Week 29.26

    • I published Subconscious Samples and wrote up the app page myself instead of starting from an AI draft like I often do. The thinking is that since the agent already knows the app intimately, I just need to give it a concept and it’ll do an okay job of filling in the essential info, which I can then edit. Ironically, I don’t think many people can tell the difference between the two, and I worry that maybe I’ve internalized more of AI writing’s stylistic hallmarks than I’d like.
    • Speaking of slop, McDonald’s Singapore has a couple of new menu items to celebrate our upcoming National Day in August. One of them is a collaboration with my favorite curry puff brand, Old Chang Kee. The burger has a fried egg, a deep-fried chicken cutlet, and a thick curry paste with diced potatoes that’s reminiscent of OCK’s signature Curry’O filling. It’s as messy to eat as it sounds, and the top bun gets soggy and falls apart as you’re eating it. What makes Old Chang Kee work for me is the texture and mouthfeel of their crusty pastry, so the soft bun is a weak substitute. To make matters worse, I had the double version with twice the oily fried chicken, and felt like absolute crap afterwards. Speaking with Jose and Henry, who also ate this on the same day, I got tripartite agreement that this creation results in more regret than reward, and none of us will be having it again.
    • Michael’s collaborative crossword game, Crossmate, is finally out on the App Store! It’s free, open source, and I highly recommend it. You can import puzzle files, or use NYT’s puzzles if you have a subscription, then invite up to two other friends to play with you. It’s just like working in a live Google Doc, but funner. I’m not especially good at crosswords, but I’ve completed quite a few with him and others during the beta testing period and had a great time with it.
    • I read what was probably my first Philip K. Dick novel, as far as I can recall, Time Out of Joint, and came away slightly disappointed. Something about its style reminded me of other books from the same era, where you can almost smell the fumes from whatever they were huffing. The core ideas are good, and have been replicated in other works (including a particularly big Jim Carrey hit), but somehow the sum is less than its parts. In contrast with Rendezvous with Rama, a sci-fi classic I recently reread that explores big ideas with prosaic, forgettable writing, Time Out of Joint somehow comes away looking worse because Dick’s writing is too opinionated and rooted in his time, neither of which serves to elevate the story or its ideas.
    • I finished watching the Three Colors trilogy on MUBI with White (1994) and Red (1994). I believe White is often called the ‘weird’ or ‘different’ one out of the three, as it’s tonally and structurally quite a farce. For that reason, I enjoyed it but probably have to rate it lower relative to the emotional power of its siblings. What’s also impressive is how the director began with the legendary Juliette Binoche, and then went on to cast leading women of escalating beauty in Julie Delpy and Irene Jacob. Next up is The Double Life of Véronique (1991) which also stars Jacob, who I’d never heard of before this.
    • Despite believing that I don’t watch or enjoy horror, I think Widow’s Bay empowered me to believe that maybe I can do horror lite, so I bought a ticket to go see Backrooms (2026) on a weekday afternoon. I could have waited for a home release, but I wanted to test myself with a big screen. I have vivid memories of seeing Drag Me to Hell (2009) in a theater that was way too loud, and being so terrified by the sensory overload (despite it being quite an outlandishly funny film) that I felt like I was going to have a heart attack.
    • Thankfully, Backrooms was more fun than fatal, and I had a good time. I’ve seen the short film that this expands on, but the final result still feels a little thin. Rather than doing more expansive world building around the infinite labyrinth (ha ha) and its place in our world, it keeps the scope small, presumably for future sequels. This screening was the “Everything Must Go Edition”, with an extra 15-min segment tacked on after the credits. This strategy seems new — a way to further milk a film near the end of its theatrical run, either gaining repeat viewings from fans or convincing stragglers like me.
    • It was perhaps due to this ‘training’ that I not only endured, but enjoyed, a particular sequence in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey (2026) when we saw it in IMAX over the weekend with Peishan and James. I said before that I wasn’t particularly in a hurry to see this, and that I was anticipating Disclosure Day (2026) much more. In retrospect, it’s almost a crime to draw any comparison between the two. The Spielberg film seems made with decades of Hollywood muscle memory, and probably under healthy conditions that allowed everyone to have a life at the same time. Nolan’s film comes across more like a monumental undertaking, a transfer of life force from human bodies onto 70mm celluloid through back-breaking effort.
    • Afterwards, in trying to rank my favorite Nolan films, I decided that Interstellar (2014) is still my favorite, but this might come in second, followed by Inception and Tenet. The Batman films are dead last. When someone brought up how they were flawed, but Heath Ledger’s turn as the Joker was great, I said that I never understood the big deal about that performance: “For me it’s like if Freddie Prinze Jr. died after turning in a passable Zorro remake”.
  • Week 27.26

    Week 27.26

    • I published my Jan–Jun ‘26 playlist, BLixTape #8, in a separate post here. Most of my previous ones were stuffed at the bottom of their respective weekly posts, which was the wrong call. Oh well, the second-best time is now.
    • My mother-in-law stayed with us for a few days, which meant having to look up films with a minimum of sex and violence that we could watch together. It was through this process that I realized the vast majority of new shows out on Netflix and so on are rated NC16 and above — it seems producers have concluded that the only way to get views is to pack explicit content into everything, whether the stories need it or not. It must be awfully hard for parents of young teens who want to watch new shows that are PG-13 and don’t suck.
    • Two movies I had in my library that fit the bill: All Is Lost (2013) and Finding Forrester (2000). The former is a one-man survival adventure starring Robert Redford as a man on a boat which suffers sudden damage in the middle of nowhere, and has to find help. It’s really good, with virtually no dialogue to support its tense and realistic depiction of the challenges that a Robert Redford in his mid-70s powers through.
    • Finding Forrester is of course the Sean Connery vehicle that gave birth to that internet-famous line, “You’re the man now, dog!” It’s one of those films with the trope about an elder mentor and their gifted student from the ghetto who could really go to an Ivy League if they wanted, but first they have to overcome prejudice, yadda yada. It’s all good, and possibly even better on a rewatch than I’d remembered from seeing it in theaters when it came out. Beyond the “You’re the man now, dog” line that gave birth to YTMND.com, the other thing I’ve always remembered about this film is Connery’s rant about why socks are badly designed and should be worn inside out: “Dey put da sheams orn da inshide; it hurtch the toesch!”
    • On my own, I finished watching Widow’s Bay on Apple TV and loved it. I’m not really into horror, apart from send-ups like the Scary Movie and Final Destination franchises, so I know a little of the vocabulary but I don’t want to practice it conversationally (so to speak). That said, Widow’s Bay is really a comedy show in horror clothing, but it doesn’t go the Scary Movie route either. Fear and suspense are undercut, yes, but it doesn’t disrespect horror so much as try to find the boundaries of where comedy belongs in it. Episode 4, Beach Reads, is one of the best pieces of TV directing work in recent memory. I love it so much. Its director, Samuel Donovan, has also directed two episodes of Severance.
    • You know who else was really great in Severance? Britt Lower! So we decided to watch her (and Sam Worthington) in the new Harlan Coben adaptation on Netflix, I Will Find You. Expectations were low, because all the Harlan Coben shows we’ve seen have featured stupid stories built around ludicrous revelations that always always have their roots in some childhood events or other repressed memories. But surely Britt will elevate the material, right? Wrong. She’s dragged down into this swamp so spectacularly it now looks like maybe her Emmy was a fluke? Her agent should never have allowed this kind of reputational damage.
    • I try to log every movie I watch on Letterboxd and every TV show on an app called TV Time. Well I just got the news that TV Time is closing down because it wasn’t sustainable as a free service. I’ve decided to move to Trakt instead, which has been around for over a decade and is hopefully more sustainable. The good news for anyone else in this situation is that your data can be transferred over in a couple of minutes. Feel free to follow me.
    • My book club decided to read Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama, a true SF classic if ever there was one. According to Goodreads, I read it 10 years ago but don’t recall anything. I probably read it once more as a teen. When I say I don’t recall anything, I mean it — I’ve finished the whole book now and nothing about it was familiar at all. That is, if you ignore all the ways in which other stories have borrowed from it over the years. Michael Crichton’s Sphere, for example, also starts with some of the same ideas before going in a different direction.
    • On Thursday, I had to go into town to run an errand and thought that I might treat myself to a weekday afternoon screening of the new Supergirl movie starring Milly Alcock. Incidentally, it’s directed by Craig Gillespie, who also did the first two episodes of Apple TV’s Your Friends & Neighbors, which I’ve just started on. In the end, I decided to visit the National Gallery Singapore instead.
    • There’s currently a retrospective for the Chinese artist He Xiangning (1878–1972), on loan from China. Really lovely stuff, which reminded me of the time I spent on my own Chinese Era website, discovering classical Chinese art and poetry. Instead of an appropriately Chinese soundtrack though, I viewed all of it while listening to the clubby sounds of FKA twigs’s reissued version of EUSEXUA. Quite the trip.
    A tale of two plates
    • After that, I stopped by Maji Curry at Funan — to my tastes, still the best standalone Japanese curry rice in the country. Lately they’ve taken to declaring their curry’s base is chicken broth. Odd. In their Thailand outlets, I believe you have a choice between pork and beef-based curries. Nevertheless, still the best.
    • The next night, Kim’s brother inherited a reservation at a small private dining omakase joint run by a single chef in a strange no-nothing mall. We went not knowing what to expect, and got a pretty nice experience with lots of unusual fish directly imported from Japanese markets. Like pomfret, which is normally only eaten here steamed with ginger, or fried. It did, however, cost 10x as much as my Maji Curry meal! The other spendy patrons appeared to be on either side of our decade: in their 30s and 50s, which provided evidence against the prevailing Reddit narrative that everyone out there is struggling and jobless, respectively.
  • Week 23.26

    Week 23.26

    • Summer is suddenly upon us. Like an overbaked Instagram filter stacked on top of an already eye-searing Photoshop edit, the heat in Singapore has been turned up to unglamorous levels. It is impossible not to be sweaty; we are at SWEATCON 1; omnisweat, eversweat, permasweat; we have always been in sweat in Eurasia. It was 31.5ºC and 79% humidity in my living room one afternoon, according to my HomePod. Somebody on Reddit worked out how much it costs to run the AC, in a bid to justify their own use. They say it might last till October.
    • It’s WWDC next week and I’m looking forward to seeing what Apple’s AI story has evolved into. I don’t envy their position — if I were in charge of a billion devices owned by all sorts of users, I wouldn’t want to put an AI assistant across all their data either. I doubt it’s possible to get 100% accuracy at scale understanding people’s appointments and emails in all their permutations, to say nothing of more complex use cases. The result is someone somewhere will lose something important and learn that their phone can’t be trusted. Is that worth it? Should everything AI have a permanent “(beta)” tag?
    • Even when it comes to writing code with AI, you have to be willing to accept bugs or only build simple, generic things. I think letting AI generate small pieces of functional code for people has some promise. Google and the ‘Nothing’ company are doing vibe-coded widgets on Android, so it would be nice if Apple copied that feature along with the long-rumored Shortcuts upgrade (the idea being that a more capable Siri would use Shortcuts and App Intents to control the system under the hood).
    • I was minding my own business this week when an idea for a website suddenly hit and I started to see if I could make it. Within four hours, I had a working version and decided to just publish it and walk away. Big mistake to think that, of course. I spent the next two days fixing bugs, expanding its data sources, and adding more features. What is it? It’s called Chinese Era and it creates random pairings of classical Chinese art and poetry. Some combinations are fittingly beautiful, others make you work to find a connection. I think that challenge makes the poetry even more powerful. I’m very happy with it, because it has the feel of a museum visit, albeit one curated purely by chance. I have no idea where the idea came from — did I see some Chinese artwork recently or read a Chinese poem? Not that I can remember.
    • How does it work? I read some translated Tang Dynasty poetry from Project Gutenberg many years ago, so I knew books were out there in the public domain for the taking. I didn’t know if I could access the necessary paintings, but it turns out institutions like The Smithsonian happily provide their collections via APIs. There’s also a free radio livestream of traditional Chinese music that I was able to incorporate for more atmosphere. Appropriately, the app was created with an open-source Chinese AI model: DeepSeek V4 Flash.
    • In terms of media activity, it’s been a week of tying up loose ends. I finished a bunch of shows that have been lying about half-watched for months: Lioness S1 on Amazon (S3 starts in August), Drops of God S2 on Apple TV, and the anime Tengoku Daimakyo (Heavenly Delusion) on Disney+. I even attempted to finish Carole & Tuesday, a Netflix show I remember watching back in 2019 (!) on my iPhone 11 Pro Max hooked up to my hotel room’s TV in Manila. But it’s just not very good.
      • Later edit: I spoke too soon. C&T has some really prescient stuff going on, with a police squad called MICE (Mars ICE) violently deporting illegal immigrants, and the central plot is about AI artists replacing human musicians? This was in 2019!
    • Keeping with the theme of unfinished business, I started Yakuza Kiwami 2 on the PS5, a game I bought during my first sabbatical in 2021 and never got around to playing before I went back to work. I hope this time I finish it before the next paycheck lands.
    • Speaking of unemployment, Peishan had an afternoon off and we went to the IKEA restaurant I wrote about last week so she could see the situation for herself. This time it was like a full-on retirement village. People sat there in their groups for hours, chatting over bottomless cups of tea and the remnants of their salmon and meatball lunches. Apart from worrying about whether this is actually sustainable, I found it shameful that a Swedish furniture company might be subsidizing a better community center for our seniors than the government’s organizations. More imagination is needed.
    • I read (re-read?) There is No Antimemetics Division, in its proper final form — the first version of the book I read last year was self-published, and it was completely rewritten for release by Penguin Random House. The old version can hardly be found now, which is very fitting for a story about disappearing memories and unknowable artifacts. The new version reads very well, and it’s much clearer what’s happening at all times. However, I rated the original 5 stars on Goodreads and this one felt like 4 stars. It’s undoubtedly a better version for mainstream release, but I enjoyed the original because its concepts were so vaguely sketched, its images so hazy, its atmosphere so oddly suspended between science, fantasy, and eldritch horror.