On Saturday morning there was a circular rainbow across the sky, it’s a circle rainbow all the way, yeah, oh my god. Well officially it was a “sun halo”, and it seems everyone got a photo of it too.
It happened right as we were walking out of a new-ish brunch cafe, where I waited what must have been close to an hour for an expensive plate of scrambled eggs, some kale that was actually edible, plus sausage, mushrooms, tomatoes, and pork belly. I’ll take the heat; going for brunch was my idea, but I don’t know why everyone still does this on weekends. The place was packed and a line was still forming at 1pm.
I went out and met people several times this week, and on Thursday I managed to drop in on the new Maji Curry outlet at the Funan mall with Brian. I’ve mentioned them several times in the past, and they are probably the most authentic and interesting Japanese curry spot in all of Singapore, although (not to take anything away from Maji) there’s practically no competition. I hope they do so well that other brands have no choice but to enter the market or stop slouching (I’m looking at you, Coco Ichibanya).
As a group, I think us millennials have been brainwashed to perfection by advertising algorithms because the first thing Brian pointed out when we met was that we were both carrying the same Bellroy sling bag, albeit in different sizes and colors. I said I’d bought mine on a whim very recently because my mother-in-law was after some sort of small pouch, and for reasons I couldn’t explain, I’d recommended we take a look at Bellroy’s offerings. I couldn’t believe it when he said his in-laws were also in town and he’d bought his under the same circumstances. What the hell, man?
Studio Nuevo.Tokyo & Héliographe launched their long-awaited black & white film simulator app, AgBr, which stands for Silver Bromide, of course. It’s currently 50% off as a launch special (S$14.98, one-time purchase, no subscriptions), and I’d recommend it to any fan of black and white photography. The purchase gets you the app across iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and they’re promising a new film preset every month for the rest of the year. Funnily enough, I think the best way to use AgBr is to pair it with the similarly named Halide app, shooting RAW files in “Process Zero” mode. Sure, you can process a normal iPhone photo with a Fujifilm NEOPAN 400 preset, but the HDR exposure won’t look quite right.
I watched the new Metallica concert video that Apple TV+ put out for the Vision Pro. At 25 minutes, it’s the longest show they’ve put out so far, and I’m ready for more. Don’t make the same mistake as I did: watch it with AirPods. I used only the built-in audio pods, and while they sounded fine, I think the immersion will be even better if you turn things all the way up. They perform three songs, captured from 14 cameras, and it’s a truly new experience in this world to be right up next to each musician doing their thing on stage, in your own home. My main criticism: the crowd is quite low in the audio mix, so you don’t truly get the feeling of being there with all that energy (they could have offered two audio tracks to choose from, maybe).
With this, Apple has tried four immersive presentations of music on the Vision Pro: A traditional music video (The Weeknd), an intimate band rehearsal in the studio (Alicia Keys), a Concert For One where the artist is right there with you (Raye), and now a full-blown, live arena show. Next up is Bono’s full-length documentary on May 30, Stories of Surrender. I personally can’t stand the guy, but if this changes my mind, then that’s really saying something about this new format.
I spotted this familiar Mario statue (?) at the Courts/Nojima/Nittori electronics and homeware frankenstore on Orchard Road, in the old Heeren building. He pops up in the gaming sections of Japanese stores like Yodobashi Camera, and I saw him at least twice last month in Tokyo, so it was a surprise to see him here. It was mostly a sad reminder that our electronics retailers sell junkier crap and aren’t anywhere as fun to browse.
For the past couple of months, I’ve been writing these posts in Apple Notes, solely because of its integration with Apple Intelligence, which does a quick QA check at the end. However, rich text formatting in Apple Notes is quite laborious (having to select text and choose styles from a menu), and often I lose some of it anyway when pasting the text over into WordPress. It became more trouble than it was worth.
I’m now back to using iA Writer, my tried-and-trusted Markdown text editor of choice, where text formatting is simply done with in-line symbols so you can focus on writing. It makes much more sense on mobile devices. This is an excuse to mention Apple Intelligence, which has recently been in the news for falling behind schedule and possibly the rest of the industry. I’m not super reliant on AI to correct my writing, but it has definitely helped catch the odd typo and missing word. By right, I should be able to use it systemwide, in iA Writer and any other app on my iPhone, but the implementation is inconsistent and so the “Proofread” feature can’t walk me through the changes it makes; it just makes them and I can accept ALL the new text or not at all. This is what I would prefer we get in iOS 19: a rigorous cleaning up of bugs and rounding of corners so that what we already have works better than what’s on any other OS. If we have to wait a couple more years for truly agentic edge AI from Apple, that kinda sucks, but we’ve been here before. I remember the days of wanting a bigger screen and having to put up with the iPhone 5 and 5s for two years. 🤷♂️
TV: We finally started on the new season of Reacher now that enough episodes have come out. We also decided to pick up House on Amazon Prime Video from the beginning of season 5, since I’m pretty sure we finished four seasons back when the iPhone first came out or thereabouts. House uses a flip phone. It’s terribly formulaic but also fun, and the perfect kinda show for watching at the end of the night.
I made it home safely on an ANA flight. To be honest, I expected a lot from the Japanese carrier but their seats were noticeably narrower than SIA’s, and the food was also disappointing compared to other economy class meals in recent memory. The only area they clearly beat Singapore Air in was probably cabin crew service. They were either as genuinely earnest and eager to please as they looked, or at least well drilled in rigid protocols. For instance, I noticed them bowing deeply to no one in particular each time they passed through the curtains to enter and leave a cabin section. The ‘Singapore Girl’ is only a part-time persona, but omotenashi is a lifelong affliction.
In my last couple of days in Tokyo, I embarked on a Doctor X viewing marathon and managed to complete season 5. I downloaded seasons 6 and 7 offline on my iPad and hoped to watch them back home, only to discover later that those later seasons don’t have English subs at all. I guess they never got international distribution and so no one bothered. It turns out that this is actually one of the biggest shows on Japanese TV, with some episodes having up to 25% national viewership!
So after binge-watching nearly 30 episodes of people collapsing from brain tumors and hidden afflictions, I became convinced that 1) I was probably very sick and should get a health exam soon, and 2) I couldn’t leave Japan without a Doctor X souvenir of some sort. That led to a hectic visit to the TV Asahi store at Tokyo Station on my last afternoon (is the Character Street ever not crowded?), where I picked up a ballpoint pen emblazoned with her catchphrase, and an extremely overpriced little figurine of the series mascot, an orange cat named Ben Casey.
Coming back to the heat and humidity has not turned out to be as unpleasant as I feared. Actually, it’s been a slight relief — after a month in the dry winter’s air, and lacking the natural instincts to moisturize thoroughly and regularly, I’ve developed pretty dry skin in some places. It got bad enough that the pad of my right thumb became rough enough to get in the way of using my iPhone’s screen. And now, after just a few days back in the soupy Singaporean air, everything’s returning to normal.
Media Activity
It was good to be reunited with my Vision Pro. I’d considered bringing it, but didn’t think it would be essential given the presence of a smart TV in the apartment, and not a whole lot of free time to be sitting around watching movies or anything. In the end, I think that was the right call, but coming back to it has felt great. I’ve only seen one of the two new Apple Immersive Video features that came out, the “Deep Water Solo” episode of Adventure, and although some have said the rodeo documentary is better, it was still extremely cool and nerve-wracking to watch.
A bunch of other new apps and experiences came out in the last month, and I tried Synth Riders for the first time because there’s a new Kendrick Lamar stage featuring the song HUMBLE. It’s an Apple Arcade rhythm game not too dissimilar to Beat Saber, where you hit targets and trace lines rushing towards you with your hands. I’m not great at it and at this age, my hand-eye coordination will probably never master its intricacies, but it’s certainly a thrilling game. I agree with critics who say that AVP gaming needs physical controllers, because the lack of haptic feedback does hold the game back from total immersion.
We caught up with Severance on Apple TV+, and this show deserves all the attention it’s been getting for episode 7. Visually and conceptually, there’s nothing else out now that comes close to its artistry. Supporting the creation of prestige TV of this quality is reason enough to keep buying iPhones, imo.
Over on Netflix, where the shows look like ungraded LOG files with scenes lit at random, we found their new limited series Zero Day a pretty satisfying watch. I expected Robert De Niro to fully phone it in, but hey, it’s okay! The set-up is a good one, and very much like a 90s Michael Douglas thriller, but I also loved that it reminded me of Neal Stephenson’s Interface, in which an American president has his integrity compromised in a really interesting way.
I’ve started on two games on the Nintendo Switch. Bunny Garden is like if you took the hostess club minigames out of the Yakuza/Like a Dragon series and made them into a standalone title. So it’s just making conversation choices and optimizing a job loop to make more money to buy more gifts and level up your relationships.
The other “game” is Witch on the Holy Night, by the developer Type-Moon. The original is a legendary classic that came out in 2012, but this 2022 remastered version has updated graphics and is probably the most kinetic and impressive visual novel I’ve ever seen. There is so much beautiful, animated art accompanying the text, and with so little repetition, that it feels like an impossible achievement: a triple-A visual novel. It’s just too bad there’s no gameplay here, no choices to make at all. It’s an animated book with an audio track.
In terms of traditional books, I finished reading Pierce Brown’s Red Rising, a YA book that feels very much cut from the same cloth as The Hunger Games. I started off not liking it much (possibly for that reason), but it has some unique twists and tensions, and I found myself enjoying it more and more. By the end, I was ready to read more of the series, of which six books are currently out. Well, I’ll get to them someday.
After literal decades of putting it off for fear of the staggering challenge, I’m now reading Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, and loving it. It’s been years since I’ve read one of his books, and I’d forgotten how playful, funny, ingenious, and inventive his writing is. It’ll probably keep me busy for the next month at least.
Before diving into the deeper end of Japanese literature as previously mentioned, I thought I should warm up with at least one Haruki Murakami novel first. My gut said that it’d been maybe a year or two since the last one I’d read, but no, Goodreads informs me that I finished 1Q84 in May 2020! So I picked up Norwegian Wood from the library and finished it in a few days. I now want to watch the 2010 film adaptation because there’s so much spicy dialogue in this that I can’t imagine them using. Also, Rinko Kikuchi and Kiko Mizuhara play the two female leads, and that is the most 2010 Japanese casting ever.
My new Kobo Clara Color started acting up during this, freezing and needing to be rebooted, losing my current progress, and draining its battery rapidly overnight. I have a post from 2013 about how I fixed similar battery issues on my Kindle, and it’s one of the most visited pages on this site. Sadly, I didn’t find any tips online about battery problems with this Kobo model, so I just did a factory reset and things seem to be going okay so far. I suspect it has something to do with using Calibre to load EPUB files on it, if said files were not perfectly formatted.
My friend Cong is always saying Singapore lacks authentic Vietnamese food, specifically pho, but he recently found a place that he found good enough and that’s generous with the herbs and vegetables that are hard to find here. I went with him, Mavis, and Jose to check it out for lunch on Friday, and I can say that it was a fine bowl of noodles (but can’t speak to its authenticity). No gatekeeping; it’s called Lang Nuong 1980’s on Hamilton Road near Jalan Besar.
I’ve never put in the time to get good at shooting video and mastering all the techniques that go into making little films, so I rarely post video ‘stories’ on social media and vacations are only documented through stills in my photo library — isn’t it funny that we still call them photo libraries (e.g. iCloud Photo Library, Google Photos) even though they contain videos? This week I found myself experimenting a little with the form, thinking I might try to make myself what people used to call a “home movie” (before sharing your life with strangers was a thing) during my time in Japan.
When it comes to shooting footage, I’ve found Kino and Blackmagic Cam to be the best. They let you record 4K video in Apple Log, process the video in real-time using color-grading LUTs, and save them in a standard color space in compressed HEVC files. This is much better for almost anyone than using the default iPhone camera which saves Apple Log videos using ProRes, which results in massive files. I prefer Kino a little bit more because it includes a bunch of LUTs out of the box. It also has a more beginner-friendly UI, and takes care of most things automatically to get you more cinematic results.
One thing it doesn’t do, that I don’t think any app does, is use your location to influence your video settings. What do I mean? I may be oversimplifying, but here in Singapore (where PAL is the broadcast standard), you get flickering lights when shooting at the common 24/30 FPS speeds because our electricity grid operates at 50hz instead of 60hz. This causes lightbulbs to pulse at 100 times a second, and you see it happening at 24fps because 100 does not divide as cleanly by 24 as it does by 25. You can apparently counteract this through some combination of shutter speed/angle, but that’s beyond me. I just know I shot a bunch of footage at 24 FPS and there was flicker all over it. It’s 2025 and it sure would be nice if an app just knew what to do!
When it comes to editing, I played with a bunch of the most popular apps, including the super popular CapCut by ByteDance that I believe most IG/TikTok influencers use. It’s definitely a comprehensive tool, but wants you to pay a subscription for many of its most useful features — S$105.98/yr is a little steep for amateur dabblers like me imo.
I hadn’t fired up iMovie in a long while, and was surprised to discover a “Magic Movie” mode was added two years ago, and it’s not bad if you’re happy to give up fine-grained control. Just select a heap of clips, and it’ll string them together with a dynamic soundtrack (the music ends naturally when your video does), transitions, and a smattering of fonts and title styles you can choose from. Being a free Apple app, I think this is probably enough for most amateur dabblers… except it doesn’t support 9:16 videos. It’s an app for boomers.
That restriction probably won’t affect me as I intend to shoot my videos in traditional landscape orientation anyway, but it’s nice to have options. That’s when I discovered LightCut, a completely free Chinese app that looks suspiciously like CapCut and tries to opt you into a data-sharing program (you can say no, and also deny it Bluetooth permissions while you’re at it), but is otherwise a very attractive and powerful tool for the price! Like with CapCut’s paid AI features, it can drop your clips into suitable pre-made templates and make a pretty professional-looking video with little effort on your part. I think it’s a good alternative to iMovie if you need the flexibility of freely placing text on screen, adjusting the brightness/color of individual scenes, and so on.
On Wednesday, I decided to visit the National Gallery again and see the special exhibitions leaving next week. Here’s a low-effort “Magic Movie” of my visit, just a heap of random clips shot with Kino and assembled by iMovie. I finished the whole thing on my phone over a cup of tea at the café afterwards.
One thing I don’t like about being in a ‘video mode’ while walking around is that it takes you out of being in ‘photo mode’. I probably took just three photos that day, and don’t know if there’s any way around it except practice.
I still can’t decide what the best way to shoot photos on an iPhone is right now. I vacillate between shooting Bayer RAW with an app like Halide, shooting ProRAW with the Leica LUX app, ProRAW with the default camera app, and just embracing the iPhone’s “Photonic Engine” and getting 24MP HEIF files with the default camera app.
Bear with the neurosis, but as part of obsessing over the above question, I’ve been testing Nitro Photo, the new-ish pro photo editing app by former Apple Photo Apps group CTO Nik Bhatt. His last app was RAW Power, which I’ve owned for years but haven’t used that much, partly because I rarely shot RAW and partly because its UI is a little clunky. Nitro is a re-imagining of RAW Power, built from the ground up with modern frameworks and a redesigned UI. From a functional and technical perspective, I think it offers a level of control that no other app, short of Adobe Lightroom, does on iOS. Neither Darkroom nor the recently acquired-by-Apple Photomator have the ability to tune RAW/ProRAW images like Nitro. You can do things like adjust the tone mapping on ProRAW photos, for instance, to get a more natural look without Smart HDR effects, or control how the Apple RAW engine renders sharpness. I’ve ported over a few of my own presets over as LUTs, and am getting into it to the point that I might plonk down $100 and make it my main photo editor. The worst thing about it is still the UI, which I must stress is not bad; just a tad dated as touch UI conventions go. Darkroom is much more pleasant to use on a small screen, but the broken state of preset syncing there has really turned me off lately.
This is where you say, “But Brandon, if you shoot everything in ProRAW, doesn’t that take up a ton of storage? Especially if you don’t have an iPhone 16 Pro that can employ JPEG XL compression?” Well, yes, and that does bother me. So imagine my excitement when I discovered the NO RAW app, which claims to strip out the RAW data from photos that are RAW+JPEG bundles in the iOS file system, once you’re done with editing and know you won’t go back again. I knew deep down that it’s not possible for an app to do that on iOS, but had to pay S$3 to find out how it worked. The answer? It’s essentially a solution you can build on your own in Shortcuts.app: make a new copy of your image as a HEIC file (retaining metadata), and then delete the original bundled file. Boooo! My free HEIFer shortcut does exactly this, but for JPEGs. And NO RAW has the same “flaw” as my shortcut. Namely, that the correct chronological order will only be retained if you sort your photos by Date Captured. If you sort by Recently Added, then all of these former-RAW photos will appear at the bottom. I should have known, but I’ll still use NO RAW as it gets the job done and has a date picker UI that beats any shortcut, but I might update HEIFer to do the same if anyone wants it.
Media activity:
I finished watching the anime series Dead Dead Demon’s Dededede Destruction. I’d heard about it before, and then when Dandadan came out, I mistook it for this and only realized they were separate shows like many episodes later. They are eerily similar in name and synopsis: school kids dealing with an alien invasion. But Dededede is much less kinetic/comedic/wacky. 3.5/5 stars.
We finished Squid Game 2 and despite initially liking how it was handled, I got a little bored towards the end as the slow, dramatic deaths started to pile up. When will we get a third season, and will I care? Probably not.
I watched The Gleaners and I (2000) Because it’s leaving MUBI. It’s the kind of documentary you get when an experienced director picks up a novel tool (a digital video camera, in this case), and starts messing about around a topic that interests them. Here, Agnès Varda starts by interviewing people who still practice the lost art of gleaning — picking through recently harvested fields for uncollected produce — and ends up doing a cross-country investigation of waste and poverty. 4/5 stars.
I discovered the American YouTuber and illustrator Linh Truong aka @withlovelinh through a Japan travel/haul video she made last spring and found myself binging the last couple years of her content creator journey. She started doing vlogs in high school and has kept going with cozy life updates that interior decoration tips and other sorts of young adult life-hacking. She recently graduated from college, and it’s extremely sweet how many of her commenters say they’ve grown up with her over the years and are proud that she’s making it (1.2M subscribers and making sponsored content for Nintendo, Notion, et al).
Rainy season is reading season. After finishing There Is No Antimemetics Division for my book club, I also wrapped up Taylor Lorenz’s Extremely Online, which is sort of a brief history of social media and the influencer economy. I highly recommend the former for fans of SF stories involving time, unreliable memories, and the nature of reality; some members of the book club who are into Doctor Who likened it to that, but I wouldn’t know.
Then I decided to start getting into the mood for our holiday by reading some Japanese fiction. I began with Mieko Kawakami’s Heaven (a rough story about school bullying), which I thought would keep me occupied for a while, but before I knew it, I’d finished it along with Satoshi Yagisawa’s Days at the Morisaki Bookshop and More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, two entries in the cozy Asian fiction wave dominating the local charts. Other entrants include Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop and Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Hwang Bo-Reum and Toshikazu Kawaguchi, respectively. When the going gets tough, people start fantasizing about quitting their jobs and opening cafes or bookstores, and I think that explains the sudden popularity of this micro-genre. Incidentally, I bought a couple of these books for my mother on her recent birthday because I thought she’d enjoy the vibes, although already retired.
For the avoidance of doubt, all of the above books were three stars for me on Goodreads with the exception of Antimemetics, which got a 5-star rating. But the Morisaki Bookshop series makes reference to many great works of Japanese literature, and so I decided to try reading some Mishima on this trip. I’d read The Temple of the Golden Pavilion as a young adult, and it probably just glanced my frontal lobe at the time.
In a flash of pure coincidence soon after, I was scrolling through MUBI and came across Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985) by Paul Schrader (who wrote Taxi Driver), an American Zoetrope biopic executive produced by George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola. I watched it immediately, and it’s an incredible work of cinema — why isn’t this talked about more? It only covers the last phase of his life, up until his famous act of terrorism/suicide, which makes up only one of the four chapters. The other three are dramatizations of his work, literally staged on theatrical sets and shot with more care and inspiration than anything you could buy today with $100M in streaming service money.
In a further act of cosmic coincidence, I saw a Facebook post from Paul Schrader being shared on Twitter, having an AI moment of crisis when he found that ChatGPT outdoes him when prompted to provide “Paul Schrader script ideas”.
Writer of the legendary movie Taxi Driver is having an existential crisis about AI pic.twitter.com/5H89SWUKn9
Looking back on holiday photos from March 2023, I rediscovered my rediscovery of Hipstamatic, which had just launched its new subscription-based app at the time. Looking at those photos brings back fond memories; they are “ruined” in a good way — mundane everyday scenes somehow imprinted with the nostalgia of the moment through imperfect filters (it helps that I know that the original, normal photos lie underneath and can be accessed with a tap of the Revert button). My setup at the time was to use the Ricoh GR III as a main camera for all photos that needed to look good and accurate, and to reserve the iPhone + Hipstamatic for casual, silly snapshots. Otherwise, you have two tools competing for the same job. I’m now finding that idea attractive again, except both Hipstamatic apps are quite a pain to use, UI-wise.
I watched this video of “Best Apps in 2024” from the MKBHD Studio team, and decided to give Dazz Cam another try. It’s surprisingly powerful! Some of the vintage “cameras” you can choose from use RAW processes, and you can have it save both the original RAW file and the filtered results separately. So I may end up using this to “gimp” my iPhone rather than Hipstamatic. Plus, the subscription to unlock all its features is only $10/yr compared to Hipstamatic’s $40/yr. I don’t even think you need it as some of the free filters are good enough. I only wish it would use the underlying RAW and not the JPEG when importing an existing image from your library.
We had free tickets to the ART SG fair at the Marina Bay Sands over the weekend and dropped by for a quick look. It was crowded as hell and I was reminded why I don’t think these things are a great way for the general public to see art; it’s mostly a trade show geared towards buyers, and so the scale is too overwhelming for anything to really be appreciated. Not only that, but the selection this year didn’t really make much impact. I was looking out for more of the humor and playfulness I saw at the 2023 edition, something to make light and sense of the trauma we’ve normalized, but it was sorely lacking. I did like the pair in the featured image above, though, as they reminded me of some other works I’ve seen before, including the Act of Emotion digital series by Kelly Milligan.
Trump launched his own memecoin on Solana this weekend, days before the inauguration, and I believe it went up to a market cap of $70bn. That would qualify as a very funny and absurd art project, from ‘probably the greatest’ (scam) artist, if it wasn’t real and thereby depressing.
True to early January patterns in Singapore, it’s looking gloomy, rainy, and dare I say even a little bit chilly out there (lows of 22ºC). My memory of Chinese New Year each year, though, is that it’s always intolerably sunny and hot. So unless climate change has mucked that up, things will flip in a couple of weeks.
If you’re reading this on the web, you may notice the site sporting a refreshed design for the new year. This came out of a chat with Michael about tools for cross-posting to Bluesky and elsewhere. I said that it’s been a longstanding wish of mine to just post everything, including short “tweets”, here on WordPress and have them go out to social networks automatically. At which point I remembered that WordPress’s new annual theme was due out, and that’s what you’re looking at now: Twenty Twenty Five.
The basic architecture is the same, but there are several improvements that I’m happy about. For one, the home page now supports showing full posts, so you don’t have to tap through to read them. You can also hide page titles on specific pages, which I used to get around with a hack. The new default font (Manrope) isn’t bad, but I wasn’t happy with the line spacing and weights they chose, so those have been customized. Wordy bullet lists are also displayed in a more pleasing manner than before, which is great for these updates.
I moved some other components around to make more sense to me, but no one else will probably notice. I also took the opportunity to inject some classic sangsara.net yellow into the header, a callback to how this site looked 20 years ago. I literally had to go dig into my file backups to find a reference for the color code.
I’ll probably improve the About and Archive pages when I run out of other things to do.
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Have you ever started mentally packing your bags for a trip because it was too early to physically pack, but the anxiety of wanting to sort it out was getting too strong? That’s me now, and I’ve started to decide what devices and chargers I’ll need and how to organize them, and also what bags to bring for different purposes.
It’s at this point that I realized I’ve somehow become one of those “bag guys” — not so hardcore that I keep up with every new release from Peak or WaterField or côte&ciel, but more that I have way too many for a person who really stays in a lot.
A couple of days ago, I started seeing online mentions and reviews of the new S$40 Uniqlo ‘Multi Pocket Shoulder Bag’ and decided that it could beat Peak Design’s 10L Everyday Sling for carrying headphones, camera, Switch, iPad + keyboard, down jacket, and a bevy of other bits on the flight over. It’s lightweight, water-resistant, and so cheap as to be disposable/replaceable if damaged. It’s also structurally unassuming, and can be used for the “everyday carry” of just a few items if needed, whereas the Peak Design bag can’t flatten down on a crowded Tokyo train even if it’s mostly empty.
If the Uniqlo bag looks familiar, that’s because it’s a ‘dupe’ of a similar Porter bag that costs 20x more. I’m going out later today to pick one up, but can’t decide between boring black and ordinary olive. (Later: I went with black.)
A few more travel points:
I signed up for a YouTrip debit card and have frankly been impressed by how well the app/service works. I used to rely on my bank’s multi-currency account + card for overseas use, but it turns out that their exchange rates are awful compared to YouTrip’s, and even Wise and Revolut’s rates. YouTrip will exchange your SGD on-the-fly as needed, or you can exchange currencies ahead of time if you like the rate. My bank requires exchanging funds ahead of time, and if you don’t have enough to cover a purchase, the entire transaction defaults to SGD (incurring high fees), even if you have enough foreign currency to cover 99% of it. What are banks even good for?
With this, I sadly realized I could have been using YouTrip for every online USD purchase over the past few years, instead of my credit cards which come with 2–3% foreign currency transaction fees 💸.
I selected Saily for my eSIM needs (discount code for $3 off: BRANDO3576). It’s a new service by NordVPN, and 20GB of data in Japan currently costs $23 USD, which I of course paid with YouTrip. Being from NordVPN, it has a good app that lets you toggle ad/malware blocking on the server side, as well as spoofing your location via their network of IPs.
I tried to get an updated Covid vaccine and was denied by the GP because I didn’t fall into the risk categories (e.g. over 60 years of age). This was news to me, as I thought it was available to anyone who wanted it. The Ministry of Health’s website suggests as much, but now I’m annoyed enough by the back-and-forth that I won’t get one.
Many years ago when I was trying to learn basic Japanese, I found some free podcasts from JapanesePod101.com, and this week was surprised to find them still around, and active on YouTube. So I’m dedicating some time over the next few weeks to watching their videos and studying up on some vocabulary which may come in useful.
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I rewatched Tenet (2020) after hearing it was recently rereleased in IMAX theaters in the US, using the Vision Pro to recreate the large-screen experience at home. It was incredible, and the film was so much better than I’d remembered it. I rated it 3.5 stars on Letterboxd before, but I’ve now upgraded that to 4.5.
[Spoilers ahead] I read some other reviews that agreed ‘this film gets better with every viewing’, and I think it’s because you spend your first viewing trying to decode 1) what is going on, 2) how the time mechanic works, 3) what the next twist is going to be. Once those things are kind of understood, you can appreciate the craft and execution. How did they plan and stage those fight scenes, where one person is moving forward in time while the other is in reverse? And then taking that concept and applying it to driving, shootouts, and a whole bloody army? I don’t think I paid any attention to Kenneth Branagh the first time, or noticed how good Robert Pattinson really is, or the locations, or the madness of crashing a real airplane into a hangar. I was probably having a headache trying to understand catching a bullet with a gun.
This episode is brought to you by our kind sponsors at Bullet Points™: Need to keep your rambling in check while covering a dozen mundane topics? That’s a job for Bullet Points™ — creating the illusion of order since forever!
After wanting a simple MagSafe silicone case for my iPhone for the past few weeks, I got an $18 Amazon deal for a neutral gray one from Elago, and it’s nearly perfect.
In addition to having more time for informational intake and mental meanderings, I’ll probably remember the latter half of this year for the half-hearted austerity drive that’s led me to drink tea over coffee on a daily basis. This week, the Yorkshire Gold tea caddy I bought during Black Friday sales arrived, prompting me to look up the history of the tea caddy. Back when tea was too valuable to leave with servants in the kitchen, rich folk kept it locked in ornate caddies in their living rooms. Today, I store $0.12 tea bags in a flimsy tin and call it progress.
I’ve been struggling to read Butter by Asako Yuzuki, which has apparently been named Waterstone’s book of the year. I’m only a third of the way through after several weeks, and while there’s nothing wrong with it, it’s a bit of a compelling nothingburger. Female journalist tries to interview female serial killer. Killer encourages her to show more interest in life’s pleasures, especially good butter, and journalist slowly starts to adopt killer’s worldview. I don’t want to quit more but I’ll need to move on soon.
Because my book club has decided to read the sequel to A Psalm for the Wild-Built over the next two weeks, and I can’t start it until I finish Butter. A Prayer for the Crown-Shy will probably only take four hours (the length of its audiobook, compared to Butter’s 17 hours), but I don’t like multitasking with books. I already have too many ongoing TV show and game narratives crowded in my brain.
This year’s Goodreads Reading Challenge is in the bag anyway, with 19 proper books + four volumes of the Sakamoto Days manga completed, smashing my goal of 12 books.
Popular media loves a (serial) killer. We recently finished the new The Day of the Jackal series starring Eddie Redmayne as the titular assassin that the show’s directorial choices strongly encourage you to root for. It’s excellent, and the musical director is clearly a millennial who shares my taste in the classics, from the first episode starting with Radiohead’s Everything In Its Right Place.
We’re now watching Cross on Amazon Prime Video, based on the Alex Cross books by James Patterson, where a detective with a PhD in psychology plays cat and mouse with a serial killer. I recommend it, but the show is extremely dark AND low contrast, like someone forgot the final step in processing the image. Reacher suffered from this too, but it’s worse here. Luckily, my Sony TV has a mode that dynamically adjusts for it.
I rediscovered the greatness of Domi and JD Beck this week when a random video of them performing on Japanese morning TV popped up on my YouTube feed. I then went down a rabbit hole of older videos, like this one of Domi jamming with other kids at Berklee, and this one of JD headlining a Zildjian session, and am now just in awe of their incredible, otherworldly talent.
On Monday, we went out to see a local production at the Capitol Theater, entitled Dim Sum Dollies® History of Singapore Sixty Sexy Years. It was definitely one of the musicals of all time.
The end-of-year digital game sales have begun, and I urge you to add Sayonara Wild Hearts to your collection if you haven’t already. This game is both a fantastic musical album and a great playable abstraction of going through heartbreak. It’s just $7.79 on Nintendo Switch and S$8.40 on Steam (40% off in both cases). I first played it on Apple Arcade back in 2019 as a launch title for the service, but these days it’s no longer available on mobile and the fate of publisher Annapurna Interactive is in question.
I dusted off the PS5 to make use of my PS Plus subscription and decided to finally play a native PS5 game, since I’ve so far only played older games that were ported from the PS4, and had my socks and shoes blown off by Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. This game is an insane technical showcase for what the PS5 can do: thousands of particles flying everywhere, ray traced reflections, and massive, cinematic worlds that load instantly. Why have I squandered the potential of this machine for the last seven months?? If you have any recommendations for what to play next, especially if they’re in the PS Plus catalog, do let me know.
Last but not least, we went for Christmas dinner with the parents on Sunday night at one of my favorite buffets in town, and it’s made me aware I’ll have to watch my eating over the next couple of weeks.
I’ll try for a shorter bullet point update this week.
It’s hard to believe we’re already done with the first week of December. Every year, I say Christmas crept up on me and I don’t feel it coming at all. Now I accept that it’s just the nature of Christmas in the tropics (without winter), and if I don’t surround myself with visual signifiers of the season, the mind forgets what the body doesn’t feel.
Nintendo released Animal Crossing Pocket Camp Complete, the offline, self-contained, definitive version of their mobile AC game, and I decided to buy it after all. I played the live service version briefly when it came out, but soon decided I didn’t like the in-app purchase model. This is much better. So much better, in fact, that I have spent several hours this weekend fishing and harvesting fruit.
The game was actually mentioned in my first-ever weekly post back in July 2020. After 7 years of iteration, it now feels like a massive game with tons of content (clothing and furniture to buy and craft) and new functionality bolted on. Currently, it’s snowing in the world and the seasonal events have got my campsite decorated with sleighs and piles of gifts and I’m wearing a reindeer hat… and dare I say? It kind of feels like Christmas is coming.
If you’re playing too, add me to your world with the Camper Card below! I believe it’s just a one-way thing, and we won’t get to interact for real since there are no servers involved. And don’t forget, the game is half price now and will go up to $20 at the end of January 2025.
We collected our Zeiss Optical Inserts for Vision Pro (prescription lenses that click in magnetically), and the setup experience was pretty cool. The device detects that they’re in, and makes you redo the eye setup process. Then it registers the new lenses on your profile by having you look at a QR code printed inside the box. Given that my contact lenses are “weaker” than my regular glasses, I’m now seeing everything in the Vision Pro with even more clarity than I was before.
Leica fixed a deal-breaking bug in Leica LUX where your preference of ProRAW or HEIF file format wasn’t remembered between sessions. They also fixed some other small things that bothered me but aren’t worth mentioning. This makes it a viable camera app for everyday use because it gets you HEIF files with the gentler/less sharpened look of shooting in ProRAW. Plus you can choose a “Leica Look” color profile to start from, and non-destructively try others or revert to the underlying original photo afterwards. I like it enough to put a shortcut on my Lock Screen.
Our home broadband plan was up for renewal, and I got a call from the company to that effect. They wanted me to give the last 4 digits of my national ID number over the phone for verification before they would even tell me anything. “How do I verify you’re really from the company?”, I asked. “Can you tell me something you know about me?”, I offered, to which they said “We can’t share any customer information”, and agreed when I asked if I was just supposed to trust them. I said that didn’t work for me, and so they could just send me whatever special offers they wanted via email instead.
The offer was fine, and I decided to stick with them for another two years because it’s the best price I’ve seen anywhere. And as a bonus, we’ll be getting an upgrade to a 10gbps line. We’ll only be utilizing a maximum of 2.5gbps though, because that’s the maximum supported wired input on the WiFi 6E router I just got a few months ago.
Renovation noises at home continued, and someone lodged a complaint with the housing board against our new neighbor’s contractors. It wasn’t us, but I can see how this might not be the warm welcome anyone would hope for. There are also reports from other residents that they’ve been seeing ceiling leaks during the recent storms, and mysteriously, these are people lower down in the building! Fingers crossed this doesn’t grow to affect us, because I can’t take any more drama.
One noisy afternoon, I decided to finally pay a visit to my local library branch after talking about it for the last six months, and… it’s not much to write home about. Lots of retirees sitting around playing Pokémon Go and reading magazines. Afterwards I decided to eat at Yakiniku Like, a place that seems well designed for solo diners. I got my own little personal grill, and ate 200g of beef short plate with 300g of rice (and a huge mound of shredded cabbage) for a little over $20 and went home very happy.
We went out for a much nicer dinner on Thursday, checking out Hayop on Jose’s recommendation. It’s affiliated with the Manam restaurant in Manila, a fact that only landed as I was looking at the menu — I ate there a couple of times back in 2019 when I was there for work. The prices here have been proportionately raised, but the food is nearly as good as I remembered, so that’s fair. I like Filipino food because it respects the power of pork fat.
Testing the Leica Lux app with these
It turns out that writing bullet points ≠ shorter updates when you’re a typer-yapper like me.
I wanted to binge an entire anime series in a week and decided to go with Summertime Rendering. It’s a time loop story that feels like a visual novel game adaptation, but actually started as a manga series. I was hoping more for sci-fi but it’s really a supernatural thing. At 25 episodes, it became a bit of a slog near the end as the multiple timelines became too convoluted to follow. Don’t really recommend.
Netflix released a new 6-part spy series called Black Doves, starring Keira Knightley and Ben Whislaw (aka Q in recent James Bond films, and the voice of Paddington). I was optimistic, but while it’s not as bad as most Netflix shows, it still suffers from the Marvel-ization of popular culture where any seriousness or suspense is immediately undercut by comic relief before it can mean anything. That’s not the only problem with it, but the result is a show that feels like background fodder for phone fiddling.
Months after the Katseye moment, we watched the Pop Star Academy show that shows their formation and training over two years. It was interesting to see non-Asian idols like Lexie chafe against unethical manipulation in light of HYBE’s recent troubles with NewJeans. I don’t think the industry’s current models will hold up well as talent starts to realize they hold the keys to their fandoms and can stream online on their own. It’s like K-Pop’s In Rainbows moment.
I also think HYBE made a strategic error in greenlighting this behind-the-scenes show with Netflix, and it’s translated into Katseye’s failure to take off with an international (beyond K-Pop) audience. Fans of J-Pop and K-Pop aren’t surprised to see the rough training and emotional abuse their idols go through, but people seeing that shit for the first time probably feel terrible about supporting the whole business, especially when adult music execs gleefully admit on camera that they fucked with the teenaged girls’ trust in each other to create more drama.
Yiwen shared her Spotify Wrapped on IG and I learnt about the artist known as Night Tempo, a self-proclaimed “retro culture curator” who puts out city pop-inflected music that sounds exactly like how the perfect night drive must feel. Check out his latest album, Connection on Apple Music.
For something less weeby and more eclectic, Jean Dawson’s new album Glimmer of God is worth a playthrough. I’m going to be putting the opening song Darlin’ on playlists for quite awhile, I’m sure.
ROSÉ’s debut album rosie dropped, and what I’ve heard so far sounds like competent pop with a teenaged guitar girl’s poetry notebook slant. That’s not a knock; it’s as satisfying a sub-genre as a sad man’s whiskey-soaked heartbreak blues. I’m still feeling good about my prediction that she’ll turn out to be the most musically interesting Blackpink alum.
It’s been a minute since I checked the National Gallery out, so I wasn’t sure what Peishan and I would find when we dropped by on Tuesday afternoon. Fortunately, there were some new SE Asian pieces either freshly out on rotation, or that I’d forgotten, and there was enough to see without having to shell out for the special exhibits.
There’s plenty of time to see them yet, as they don’t refresh things very often. I looked it up online later, and some of the stuff we saw will be on display for 3–4 more years. Apparently only 10% of the total collection (stored somewhere in Jurong) can be on display at any one time, so I don’t know why they rotate so infrequently. Show me more of the stuff before I die, dammit.
We went by because Peishan took the day off and we’d planned to have lunch nearby. It struck me that I haven’t been appreciating the privilege of my free time enough — I should be doing things like this on my own more often.
We saw a brilliant video artwork series of Thai farmers and villagers sitting on the ground out in the fields, contemplating large Western paintings set up in front of them, casually discussing what they saw. Just saying things like “The man is sleeping soundly. He looks happy because they’ve harvested so much food”. I wanted to stand there and watch it in its hour-long entirety when it struck me that there’s nothing stopping me from coming back another day to do that. To be one of those people who has a whole hour to spend sitting in front of one painting. So maybe I will!
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My mother-in-law (who has no stomach for violence or misery) came to stay with us for a couple of days, which meant that I could only watch the family-friendly movies from my collection and MUBI watchlist. We started with Charade (1963), a classic I can’t believe I’d never seen before. Audrey Hepburn was a phenomenon — utterly faultless and impossible to look away from. With Cary Grant we’ve got our modern day version in George Clooney, but I don’t know who could ever be like Audrey.
We also watched Futura (2021), an Italian docu-feature where young people across the country were interviewed about their hopes and dreams. To me, it only reinforced the idea of Europe in decline, and yet maybe that’s… okay? What’s so bad about living in the shadow of a greater civilization and inhabiting what’s left of their magnificent buildings. Someone’s gotta do it.
And then a movie that has been so hyped up by everyone who’s seen it that there was little chance it would live up: Paddington (2014). Nicolette, whose cats we also visited this week (see below), was a major promoter and reckons it’s a five-star film. I gave it 3.5 but plan to watch the sequel soon—I think it’ll fare better now that my expectations are properly calibrated.
I was left to my own questionable watchlist on Thursday and Friday, which meant seeing Festen (1998), the first official ‘Dogme 95’ film (painful in its overall ugliness); Ema (2019), a dance-centric exploration of fucked up families and urban frustration starring Gael García Bernal and Mariana Di Girolamo as two assholes who adopt a kid; and In the Fade (2017), a German revenge story with Diane Kruger avenging her son being blown to bits by modern-day Nazis.
The absolute standout film of the week was So Long, My Son (2019), a Chinese language film by Wang Xiaoshuai with a three-hour running time. It follows two families over a period of three decades, living with tragedy and being tossed around by the rapid, true-story evolution of Chinese society. I expected the time to pass slowly but everything was handled with such authenticity and emotional power that I hardly noticed.
On TV, we caught up on season 2 of Netflix’s Rhythm + Flow rap competition reality show, and none of the contestants are really standing out the way Flawless Real Talk and D-Smoke did in the first season. It looks like Netflix decided to cheap out and rush the audition process, basically only holding one in Atlanta whereas S1 held them in three cities. So it never feels like you’re seeing the very best talent the streets have to offer.
The main effect of watching the show so far has been an increased desire to play Kendrick Lamar’s new GNX album on repeat. It also made look up Old Man Saxon from S1, so was delighted to find that he released a new EP and single recently.
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It was Thanksgiving week in the US, and trust me I tried to find a Black Friday deal that I wanted to spend on, but the only things I’ve bought for myself on Amazon were cheap alkaline batteries from Japan (the Verbatim brand is alive and well there!) and several boxes of Yorkshire Gold tea.
It feels weird, spending hours online and hardly finding anything I want to buy. On Sunday we spent a few hours at the Paragon mall for some Christmas shopping and I found myself a new 6L Venture Sling by Bellroy. It was cheaper than the online Black Friday price, but only because they wanted S$16 for shipping.
I also considered this 4L Everything Sling from Moment, but I think it’s too small to be the Goldilocks bag I need. I have Uniqlo’s round mini shoulder bag like 98% of the world, but need something between that and a laptop messenger/backpack. Just enough to bring around some combination of e-reader, Switch, camera, power bank, umbrella, JisuLife fan, and water bottle.
The only things left might be digital game purchases that I might have time to play in December, such as Metaphor: ReFantazio, the latest masterpiece from the director of the Persona games, or Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth.
While the Persona games are undeniable masterpieces, they’re also looooong. Sometimes it’s nice to just sit down and finish a game in one sitting, so that’s what I did with Thank Goodness You’re Here, which is published by Panic Inc. (Untitled Goose Game, Firewatch). It’s a cartoony comedic platformer set in Northern England, filled with authentic accents, dialects, and small-town imagery — what you’d expect from a British company named Coal Supper. I highly recommend it, especially if you can find it on sale during the holiday season.
sangsara.net 