sangsara.net

Tag: Singapore

  • Week 12.24

    Week 12.24

    If you’re reading this on the web, you might notice that this site is now running WordPress’s new ‘Twenty Twenty Four’ theme, with a more traditional blog-like homepage (it has a sidebar) linking to single-column post pages. Navigation remains unchanged, but typography and minor details are improved.

    I’m happier with this than I was with the blocky grid of last year’s ‘Twenty Twenty Three’ theme, because this comes with the freedom to put up shorter posts without Titles or Featured Images. Over the years I’ve gone back and forth on microblogging here, or having all tweets mirrored here, but it’s never stuck. But at least I have the option again, especially since I haven’t properly posted on Twitter in a year and most people I want to follow are still scattered across Threads, Bluesky, Nostr, and Mastodon.

    ===

    We celebrated a little life milestone this week with a nature walk, a “Gold Class” viewing of Dune Part Two, a nice bottle of French Malbec, and a perfect Canadian pork chop with a side of the butteriest mashed potatoes. A mix of simple and simpler pleasures.

    I’ll expand: We were recently in New Zealand, and took a couple of walks in nature reserves. I’ve never bothered to attempt the same in Singapore because it’s ridiculously hot, but visiting the Rifle Range Nature Park in West Singapore was interesting for the stark contrast offered versus our recent experiences. Every step on its paths is sure footed by design; suspended walkways take you through the forest without trampling plants, and they’re so convenient all the monkeys we saw were using them as well, rather than walking in the dirt. You get the sense that everything is regularly inspected and all dangers have been scrubbed. It reflects the usual criticism of Singapore being a theme park, which is only a problem because living in a safe environment breeds complacency. At several points on the easiest routes at Te Mata Park in New Zealand, slipping off a path and tumbling into a ravine was a genuine possibility. I wonder what other metaphorical tumbles Singaporean life has not prepared me for.

    The new Dune is as superb as all reviews have indicated, and I could not imagine rating it any less than 5 stars in Letterboxd. The art direction and photography are flawless, and it looks twice as expensive as it is. Never once while watching did my brain check out and think, “oh, that’s CGI”. The only change I would dare suggest is Austin Butler’s casting, as he’s not anywhere as menacing as the movie treats him. His character is already a nepo baby who just enjoys killing defenseless slaves and servants, and Butler didn’t bring the presence to suggest he’s also one of the most dangerous people in a universe full of freaks.

    Another 5-star film for us this week was Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days (2023), which won a Best Actor award at Cannes last year for Koji Yakusho’s nearly wordless performance. I enjoyed it tremendously as a loving tribute to the city of Tokyo and its toilets (really), a meditation on repetition and routine, an ode to proud and purposeful work, and a parable about how avoiding the messiness of life might obscure living itself. The soundtrack is a Gen X dream. Visually, it’s filled with beautiful everyday moments so mundane as to be overlooked by most of us going about our daily busyness. The way all its themes and music choices come together in the film’s final minutes is worth half a star alone.

    Continuing the theme of Japanese films about appreciating life, we watched Living (2022), the transposed-to-England remake of Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952). I’ve never seen the original, but it’s now high on my list. Bill Nighy is fantastic in the role of a civil servant who learns he’s dying and wonders what it’s all about, and plays his deconstruction with impressive vulnerability. I looked at the trailer for Ikiru afterwards, and while Takashi Shimura’s performance in the same role is regarded as iconic, it was a little theatrical and may not have aged as well.

    Anyhow, the message in both these films is timeless: stop working so hard at meaningless things, smell the roses (or watch the shadows cast by leaves — ‘komorebi’ in Japanese, as the end credits of Perfect Days tells us), and make a difference to another human being’s life.

    Take a little forest bathing break with this video I captured.

    ===

    Additional media activity:

    • We finished Season 1 of Below Deck Down Under at last, and I was glad to learn that Captain Jason and Chief Stew Aesha return for Season 2, which we now must see. The leadership and teamwork these two have put Captain Lee and Kate of the mainline series to bottomless shame.
    • The new Call of Duty mobile version of Warzone has finally come out, after being delayed for about a year. As a somewhat devoted player of the original Call of Duty Mobile title, I’ve been waiting with very high expectations for this. Unfortunately, the launch has been a bit of a dud, with many complaints from the worldwide community. For one, Android devices seem incapable of running it well. On my iPhone 15 Pro Max, it runs at peak performance and the graphics are truly console quality; I was running around maps that I knew instinctively, but my brain was exploding from how different and detailed everything looked. Sadly, the phone runs hot and it drained the better part of my battery in maybe an hour. I’ll wait to see if they improve anything before calling it quits.
    • The new Kacey Musgraves album, Deeper Well, is not bad at all. It even has a song called Anime Eyes which drops a line about a “Miyazaki sky”. Very weird times we live in.
    • I started using a new social app that tries to be a Letterboxd for music: Musicboard. Unfortunately, it doesn’t automatically log/scrobble your listening activity, so rating music and broadcasting your taste is a manual affair. You also can’t start playing an album directly in Apple Music from within the app — it only supports Spotify at the moment.

  • Week 4.24

    Week 4.24

    A little while ago, I learnt that an ex-colleague of mine has received a stage 4 cancer diagnosis, and he’s only a few years older than me. Despite the fact that more “young” people seem to be getting cancer, it was still a deep shock because Tony was always incredibly fit and dedicated to his health. He’s been writing openly about his thoughts and experience on his Medium account, which I read before meeting him for lunch with some other former colleagues this week. It was tough seeing him in poorer shape, but true to his personal brand, he seemed extremely pragmatic and matter-of-fact about it all.

    We worked on the same team for about a year back in 2018, but were only on one project together as peers, leading design activities and client workshops together over a few months. I count myself fortunate to have had that experience, and learnt a lot from his confidence and wealth of technical knowledge when it came to UX matters — which was not my area of focus. Even then it was clear he had a knack for facing reality, and a passion for making sure the younger generation had their eyes open to the inequities of working life. Not always a popular topic, but life sucks. He mentioned that whenever he finds the strength these days, he works on his own design education materials that prepare students for non-ideal situations, and I thought that made perfect sense for him.

    Many of the things we talked about over lunch echoed other conversations I’ve been having with other friends. Maybe it’s the return of tech layoffs in the news, but negative sentiments seem as high as they were during Covid, with the questioning of boundaries and priorities taking place again. Tony understandably tried to impress upon us that some things aren’t worth having as regrets, and that we should make better choices while we still can. When I asked him what else he does now on days that aren’t lost to medical interventions, the answer was surprisingly similar to how I spent most of my year off work: reading, writing, and drawing.

    Peishan shared this Guardian article about people with cancer who’ve found the clarity to spend their remaining time meaningfully, and I thought Mark Edmondson landed the point that some people have trouble getting: the work that gives you purpose today isn’t the only purpose you’ll have.

    People (usually millennials) also mention the difficulty they have switching off from work. On a daily basis, but also when they go on vacation — taking half the holiday to get into holiday mode is a terrible inefficiency. I recall it took me months to unwind from a state of nearly burning out and to stop worrying about my “sabbatical ROI”. We should be like newer hybrid vehicles that can shut their engines down when idling at traffic lights and spring back to life quickly when needed, but instead us older cars only know how to burn gas all the time. I want to be a disused school bus just rusting in a field, bright yellow and unbothered.

    ===

    • I visited the Prix Pictet photo exhibition that’s part of Singapore Art Week (maybe it’ll be the only event I attend from this year’s edition) and found it beautiful but gosh it was mostly depressing. The theme was “Human” but it may as well have been “Human Suffering” — from communities devastated by the effects of mining and metal poisoning, to the plight of illegal refugees trekking 66 miles through jungle in search of better opportunities, they seemed to comment that there’s not much joy in being human these days. I joked halfway through that I hoped there would be a series of mundane birthday party photos at the end. There wasn’t.
    • Kim spent most of her week preparing an elaborate, successful Indian dinner from the Dishoom cookbook, but that’s really a story for her own weeknotes if they ever happen. The takeaway for me has been that, after seeing how the proverbial samosa is made, the Indian takeaways we usually get are probably quite unhealthy and we need to cut down.
    • Nintendo is having a January sale on the Switch eShop and I considered getting the remake of an apparent classic time loop visual novel, YU-NO: A girl who chants love at the bound of this world, yes, that is its title. It’s apparently the spiritual forebear of games such as Steins;gate, but after watching a short gameplay video on YouTube, I decided that since life is too short, I really didn’t want to punish myself. An anime adaptation was made a few years ago, so I will simply watch that instead.
    • We are enjoying the new British police drama Criminal Record on Apple TV+. Peter Capaldi is really good in it, although all the police work and cornering of baddies with their secrets is carried out really incompetently.
    • Can you believe that The Smile dropped a new album a couple of days ago and I had to find out from YouTube instead of Apple Music? Seriously, I’m looking at my For You page and it’s not mentioned under New Releases. This music video, where the band plays a new song for an auditorium full of young children — most of them bewildered or bored out of their minds, but with a couple really into it — is such a simple and charming concept I can’t believe I can’t name another time it’s been done.
  • Week 52.23

    Week 52.23

    Greetings from beautiful Chiang Mai on this last day of the year. It’s my first time here, and I’m sure it won’t be my last. If anything, I’m kicking myself for not coming sooner — it’s currently a very cool and walkable 25°C at 11am, and temperatures go below 20°C in the evenings; Microsoft Copilot with Bing tells me it’s the safest city in SE Asia (wha?); and the food and coffee have been top notch so far.

    We’ve also been to a cool cocktail bar with live jazz in a basement speakeasy-like space, and another “live house” with a mix of bands playing each night. Coming from Singapore where jazz clubs are a rarity, and almost exclusively the domain of old people, it’s been surprising to see many young people in attendance, although I can’t be sure they enjoy the bands. They seem to pay more attention and clap louder for the pop cover bands.

    One amazing performer I heard was Joshua Lebofsky, originally from Canada, who sang and played a straight hour of jazz standards and pop interpretations on piano at The A Ter (theater). They were fantastically musical and soulful variations, and I was glad to be able to tell him so afterwards; sadly he hasn’t got a social media presence, but there’s an album from 2006 on Apple Music: Play A Little Prayer.

    If we lived here, I would be a regular patron at these places for sure (especially at prices roughly half those back home). The non-existence of a vibrant jazz scene is such a shame for Singapore, because we have quite a few talented jazz players who end up being session musicians for mandopop performers most of the time, probably due to the economics of the music scene. I guess these are the third-order consequences of necessarily narrow education policies in our early years.

    We also went on a walking street food tour and a cooking class at a small organic farm and school (where I was snapped in a farmer’s hat looking glum at having been dragged along, but ultimately it was a good time and the food was, like all of it, quite excellent). An intriguing culinary detail here is how Hainanese immigrants created their own localized chicken rice combining the steamed chicken with deep fried chicken cutlets and an entirely different chilli that’s dark and savory, with fermented soybeans and fish sauce?

    Here are some photos, all from my iPhone 15 Pro Max. I made a new Darkroom preset to handle the light and scenery here, and I think it’s a versatile look I’ll probably be using for a long while. I’ll probably share it here next year after some fine tuning!

    Anyway, Chiang Mai. Come by, it’s lovely enough to consider buying an apartment in, but I’ve only been here a couple of days.

    ===

    On the 45-minute minibus ride back from the farm last night, I managed to throw together my end-of-year playlist with some not-too-shabby transitions (I recommend turning crossfading on; 3 seconds). This is partly a diary of associated memories and partly what I’ll remember as the year’s best songs. This process usually takes much longer but everything came together on a stomach full of coconut curries and fresh herbs and spices they had us pound in a mortar ourselves.

    Here’s Listening Remembering 2023 on Apple Music.

  • Week 51.23

    Week 51.23

    Merry Christmas! Let’s talk about music this week.

    I received the Beats Studio Pro headphones as an early present, in the Sandstone color, only 22 weeks after I wrote about how I thought they were set to be a fantastic update to the aged/obsolete/frankly embarrassing Beats Studio3 Wireless model. In that post, I said I would not be buying them for myself on account of having enough headphones. No promises have been broken, and I can confirm that they sound really good and are comfortable even with my big head. If you’ve found others like the B&O H95 or B&W PX7 too small to fully enclose the bottom of your earlobes, these may do the trick.

    I often try to convince myself that a pair of AirPods Pro should suffice for my/anyone’s needs, that a pocketable pair of smart, well-engineered buds are more than enough. Who needs HomePods or other home speakers, over-ear headphones, soundbars, etc.? But just as you can feel the bass from a towering set of speakers in your chest, a pair of big drivers blasting air into your ears do feel something different.

    Since I had the week off, I spent hours testing them out, thinking about what music I enjoyed the most this year. I sometimes do an annual wrap-up playlist with all my favorites, in lieu of making playlists throughout the year like I should. But this year I’ve made three: BLixTapes 1, 2, and 3, so I’ll see if I feel like it next week.

    In the meantime, I think I’ll name some personal “winners”!

    2023 sangsara.net music awards

    Best comeback: Damon Albarn (Blur, Gorillaz)

    Please note these are personal picks, and I’m not saying Albarn disappeared, but for a long time I’d written him off completely — a remnant of the 90s and mid 00s who still puts out funny tuneless projects every few years that I play through once then delete from my library. When that time came around again with this year’s The Ballad of Darren and ‌Cracker Island from his Blur and Gorillaz bands respectively, I played the albums and was stunned. Did he get his mojo back?! The jams get your feet tapping, the lyrics are somewhere between conceptual backstory and dadaist poetry as usual, and the pretty moments are so pretty they just pop into my head some mornings as I brush my teeth.

    Honorable mentions:

    • Everything But The Girl, Fuse: How often do you hear from a band after 24 years of hanging up the name, and the new stuff is up there with their best work? Sure, Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt kept busy with other projects but I never expected them to release new music together. This coming out of the pandemic was one of its silver linings.
    • Bob Dylan, Shadow Kingdom: Revisiting one’s old material with the benefit of age and experience made Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now (2000) a revelation for me when it came out, and while I still don’t know Dylan’s work well enough after all these years to appreciate every nuance of these new versions, I’m planning to put in the work.

    Best reissue: Jesse Malin — The Fine Art of Self Destruction

    The 20th Anniversary Edition of this seminal album sadly took on a different meaning a couple of months after it was released. Jesse Malin suffered a freak “spinal stroke” in New York and became paralyzed from the waist down (an update in December revealed an unfortunate lack of progress, with him now seeking stem cell treatments in Argentina). The Fine Art was somehow a formative album for me, although I had no reason to identify with its East Coast bohemian city life vignettes. I suppose it’s universal the same way Springsteen is. This new edition includes 2022 versions of key songs, and although Malin’s voice is virtually unchanged, you can hear the years on his shoulders in these slower, introspective readings.

    Honorable mentions:

    • Portishead, Roseland NYC Live 25: This came out of nowhere, a remastered 25th anniversary edition of an insanely historic performance, and now with three tracks that were previously only in the film. I remember buying it on VCDs (remember those?) from the local HMV. If only they’d remixed it in Spatial Audio… I would die to experience this like a real concert.
    • R.E.M., Up (25th Anniversary Edition): I already mentioned this one in Week 45.23. As I noticed these last two albums with 25th anniversaries, I thought “huh, 1998 sure was a special year”. And thanks to Apple Music showing other playlists where a song is included, I discovered this one: At Home With Jack Antonoff, which is entirely dedicated to the magical moment that was 1998. Check it, The Smashing Pumpkins put out Adore, Neutral Milk Hotel made In The Airplane Over The Sea, and Natalie Imbruglia sang Torn?! What was in the air?
    • Daft Punk, Random Access Memories (10th Anniversary Edition): I actually wrote a couple of sentences about this album when it came out in 2013 and accidentally found the post while searching for a more recent mention. Still a masterpiece, now in Spatial Audio.
    • Daft Punk, Random Access Memories (Drumless Edition): And this crazy rerelease idea. As I said a few weeks ago, who the hell would have thought making a version without the drum tracks would result in such a wholly new experience?

    Best single line:

    Thank God I’m fly!
    — TGIF, XG

    Best bars:

    I’m down to click out you hoes and make a crime scene
    I click the trigger on the stick like a high beam
    Man, I was Bentley wheel whippin’ when I was nineteen
    She call my number, leave her hangin’, she got dry-cleaned
    She got a Android, her messages is lime green
    I search one name, and end up seein’ twenty tings
    Nadine, Christine, Justine, Kathleen, Charlene, Pauline, Claudine
    Man, I pack ‘em in this phone like some sardines.
    — First Person Shooter, Drake feat. J. Cole

    Best new (to me) artist: yeule

    I racked my brain trying to think of another Singaporean-born artist who has achieved critical acclaim overseas singing in English (we have quite a few who make it in Mandopop, in Taiwan and so on), but couldn’t think of another besides yeule, a London-based non-binary 25ish self-taught musician who studied fashion but also paints and streams and has a way with theatrical makeup. Their latest album, softscars, got an 8.5 from Pitchfork, and the last one got 8.3. That’s a hometown hero medallion as far as I’m concerned, and for the record I really like these records. There are interviews online that suggest a tumultuous childhood, and looking at how they’re covered in tattoos and generally act and look like someone who would give an Asian parent a coronary, I can imagine the difficulties faced growing up here were potent inputs for artistry. They also have an extremely-online underground idol type of presence, with a community distributed across platforms — I’d never joined a musician’s Discord server before this one, but why isn’t more of a thing?

    One of the things I realized this year was how the ways we as fans connect with artists we love have crossed a line, and the tools and channels we use seem to be encouraging the development of parasocial relationships. This is something that maybe evolved from Asian pop and idols, e.g. handshake events, but I believe is going to become very mainstream from here.

    Honorable mentions:

    • Kassa Overall: A super talented drummer who performs a funky modern mashup of hip-hop and jazz. An indie Anderson .Pakk? Btw I discovered the Seattle radio station KEXP while looking for yeule’s performances, and discovered a wealth of great music on their YouTube channel, as well as a ton of new bands to look into. Fortunately, Kassa Overall also played a set for KEXP and it’s — to use a term Scott Forstall once tried to make happen — absolutely blow away. And that logo with his name on all the band’s hoodies!
    • Samara Joy: Another jazzy discovery from late in the year, and possessor of an incredible vocal instrument you need to hear. Here’s her album Linger Awhile on Verve Records.

    Best album: XG — New DNA

    I waited months for the New DNA mini-album. I watched hours and hours of “documentary footage” on YouTube, following the members as they struggled through five years of frankly brutal and manipulative training under their manager Simon’s direction. I learnt all seven of their names. I watched each new single and video drop, and then watched reaction videos. I watched fancams and BTS specials (but drew the line at braving a heatstroke at their Formula 1 concert here). From the moment I first heard them in February, I knew they were different. They’ve doubled their following on YouTube since (currently with 2.41M subscribers), but I think they’re still being slept on. J-Pop groups are never this polished, and K-Pop ones are never this accessible. With every song in English and a style that effortlessly unites hip-hop, electronic, and 90s R&B, these girls deserve to be massive in 2024. I wish New DNA contained all their previously released singles, which would have made a beefier release and maybe helped them break out, but I suspect that’s just the millennial in me talking. Everyone knows nobody listens to whole albums anymore, which makes this category very sad.

    Honorable mentions:

    • Sufjan Stevens, Javelin: It was close, I wanted to call this the album of the year. Deeply moving, and kinda makes up for not having any new music from Joanna Newsom.
    • Kevin Abstract, Blanket: I never listened to Brockhampton, of which Abstract is a member, and I don’t remember his previous album ARIZONA BABY doing anything for me. But Blanket is something else. Like yeule’s softscars, it draws on 90s alt-rock to create a new sound that goes beyond labels.
    • boygenius, the record: I miss the days when we had more supergroups.
    • Vagabon, Sorry I Haven’t Called: I really need to play this more often. It’s a soulful, elastic collection of ingenious songs and the opener, Can I Talk My Shit?, is one of my favorites of the year.

    ===

    Other media activity:

    • I finished reading The Paris Apartment and gave it two stars on Goodreads. Please don’t.
    • We binged the Dead Ringers TV miniseries on Amazon Prime Video. Wow. Rachel Weisz does that incredible thing actors do when they’re bored of playing one character and want to play a set of twins. You literally forget they’re not two people. Also the bloodiest show of the year, not for the squeamish.
    • Slow Horses is back, and we’re nearly done with Season 3. It’s still very very good, and even better than the last season. I’ve only just discovered they’re based on a series of novels by Mick Herron, of which there are eight, so that’s my 2024 reading challenge sorted.
  • Week 47.23

    Week 47.23

    Oof, this was a tiring week. Navigating change, physically recovering from a vaccine’s side effects, and having conversations about Christmas gifts, that shit will wear a blogger out. Helping me navigate all this was my astrology GPT, Co—Sign, who would tell me how to deal with challenging situations and to trust in my own nature, even if some decisions felt like bad ideas by other people’s standards.

    Of course, the week started off with more twists in the OpenAI management saga, which seems to have ended now with Sam and Greg back at the company, not at Microsoft, and the formation of a new board underway. This pleases me because OpenAI was a company/brand with significant momentum and destroying value of that sort for no good reason doesn’t sit well with me (this may or may not be a reference to something else happening in my life). I’m glad I won’t have to port my collection of GPTs to another product like Poe or whatever.

    I used Gen AI to bone up on Silicon Valley mind viruses like EA (effective altruism) and e/acc (effective accelerationism), which I’d kinda grokked in passing but not spent any time specifically reading up on. I have to say I feel myself falling in the accelerationist camp — given current world events, we’re not exactly proving ourselves a worthy species, so we may as well hasten our demise or salvation in every aspect from the upheaval of labor to economic principles. Incidentally bitcoin hit a new high for the year this week, going over $38,000 for a brief period.

    I’ve buried the lede, but AI voice recognition and synthesis technology has enabled my favorite gag of the year: this Chinese dubbing of Van Morrison performing Caravan with The Band. It’s sublime; a French chef’s French kiss. It caught me in a moment of weakness and I couldn’t watch the whole thing through because I was dying of laughter. Van shouting “turn your radio up” in Mandarin will live rent free in my head from this week forth. This video is so precious to me I’ve saved a copy on personal cloud storage just in case the tweet goes down.

    ===

    I was excited to hear that the Muji store in Plaza Singapura had reopened after an extensive renovation, now twice its original size and the largest in South-East Asia. We went down on the weekend to take a look, and it had things normally seen only in Japan: plants, bicycles, an embroidery service, renovation services, a wider range of furnishings, frozen food, and regional specialty goods (including $350 silk scarves). Not your average Muji! In fact, it’s billed as a “Global Flagship Store”, and I hope their gamble pays off and Singaporeans vote for more of this with their wallets.

    ===

    • Up to episode 4 of Pluto on Netflix now and it’s really the best anime series of the year for me. Just on those late 90s cybernoir SF mystery vibes. This is what the Ghost in the Shell Standalone Complex reboots should have been like.
    • Also up to episode 4 of Blue Eye Samurai and I’ll admit it’s gotten better. More complexity, somewhat interesting stakes, but the CG anime look with fake low-fps stuttering is getting a little annoying. If I had a modern TV I might actually turn on motion smoothing just to make it a more authentic experience.
    • I tried real hard to avoid buying a 4K HDR TV during the Black Friday sales and succeeded. Gotta save up funds for the dark days ahead.
    • Speaking of premonitions, we saw episode 2 of Lessons in Chemistry on Apple TV+ (mild spoiler alert) and let me tell you, my cinematic Spidey sense tingled and I called the event that happens at the end of the episode minutes before it happened. I’m usually quite bad at anticipating TV twists, but something about the atmosphere and pacing and shots just told me what was coming.
    • We also saw the first two episodes of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters on Apple TV+ and were left impressed. It’s the new series involving Godzilla and other monsters that either belong to Toho or Warner Bros now? Really, the monster custody is unclear to me. But halfway through, as new characters were being introduced in flashbacks, Kim assumed an Asian woman was the mother of a younger Asian woman we’d already seen. And I said, “maybe it’s just an unrelated Asian woman”, to which she laughed, “there are never unrelated Asians”. Which I took to mean in American shows, not the real world, and sadly she’s right.
    • Many people have been raving about Andre 3000’s new instrumental album with flutes, New Blue Sun, and I’ve tried to get into it, I have. But it’s literally put me to sleep a couple of times, so I’m assuming it’s just not for me.

    (This week’s Featured Image is a Dall•E representation of a Chinese Van Morrison impersonator performing in a Muji store.)

  • Week 44.23

    Week 44.23

    I’ve been on the edge of a flu, with intermittent fatigue and headaches and a warm scratchy feeling at the back of my throat that makes me remember being ill and nauseous, but it hasn’t gone full blown. Maybe I’ve actually got the flu, but the vaccine I got a few weeks ago has inspired my immune system to resist and now my body is locked in a hundred-year war. I write this on Saturday with a full-day social test (wedding party) to attend tomorrow that will probably push me over if this doesn’t get better.

    While on the subject of health: I suppose you’re officially old when you buy yourself a blood pressure monitor. It was a conversation about strokes that got me on it, and it was a very quick impulse purchase that went from idea to research to purchase in under half an hour.

    I think this is the Omron model I got. I didn’t know they made them this small nowadays, not to mention that you can measure BP from a wrist! It connects to your phone via Bluetooth, and the Omron Connect app also syncs with the Apple Health app — which was the selling point for me. Omron’s app looks overly complicated and isn’t very pleasant to use, but it doesn’t matter since you can just overanalyze and freak out over your data more comfortably in Apple Health alongside your other health metrics.

    ===

    The only music news of the week that mattered was the release of the final Beatles song, Now and Then. This was the third and last John Lennon demo on the tape that gave us Free as a Bird and Real Love back in 1995. The audio quality on this one wasn’t good enough for it to be finished back then, but now it’s relatively trivial to separate vocals from instruments using tools built on machine learning — one music YouTuber reviewing the song literally demonstrates it himself using an online service — and so Paul and Ringo were finally able to complete the song using guitar bits George recorded in the ’95 sessions, making it probably the last song we’ll ever get with all four Beatles on it.

    It’s a lovely song and I’m glad we’re around to enjoy this historic moment of celebration and closure. I don’t mind posthumous vault releases as long as they’re done with love, care, and good intentions, and the short film above goes to lengths to assure everyone that John would have gotten a kick out of this. Real Love is one of my all-time favorites, just for the beautiful melody in its chorus and refrain, and the existence of these three songs together are like a treasure from a parallel universe where the Beatles never broke up (a scenario that the Apple TV+ show For All Mankind tantalizingly visualizes for a moment in one episode). It’s extra heartbreaking that all three songs read to me like products of John’s regret and wish for reconciliation.

    The incredible clarity they were able to get out of the tape recording, though, makes me want new versions of Free as a Bird and Real Love, remastered with modern technology. I don’t care who complains about opportunism or George Lucas-ism, it should just be done to close the chapter off neatly and in the best possible way for fans. Get it done, money men!

    ===

    Other bits:

    • Normally when you see too many sequels and the drawing out of stories, it comes with lowered quality, formulaic laziness, and/or the jumping of sharks, but Only Murders in the Building topped itself with the third season and now I can’t wait for a fourth. (Spoiler) I didn’t expect them to really go down the musical route with proper abandon, but they did and that bloody Pickwick Triplets patter song was stuck in my head for days. And they only got bloody Meryl Streep to be part of it, Christ.
    • Okay, but you know what IS a scummy money grab? The Backbone controller company pushing their old designed-for-Android USB-C models at the launch of the new iPhone last month, telling early adopters to step right up and get them (and then messing up the release so many of us received ones without the iPhone-supporting firmware), KNOWING FULL WELL they had a 2nd-generation model waiting in the wings that would support the new iPhones even better! Old inventory cleared at full price, the new model then quietly dropped, with redesigned dimensions that mean the camera bump no longer presses up against the chassis, bending it, and even supports being used with a case on. I was a big supporter of their work, but no longer. They’ve apparently been deleting critical posts from their subreddit, if you can believe such foolishness.
    • Three months ago I switched mobile telcos from Circles to M1, lured by a bigger data package for the same price. Shortly after that, M1 migrated many users to new plans (it was not a very smooth process either, fraught with confusion and poor communications), and sort of reneged on a basic tenet of my “contract” (technically it’s a contract-free plan): once free, 5G would now be a paid add-on after six months. Fudge that, I said, and now I’m back with Circles for (yet again) even more data and a lower monthly price to boot. The porting process was also flawless compared to my experience moving to M1.

    While looking for the above link to my own recent post, I chanced upon older entries talking about local telcos and got sucked into reading notes from my younger self. It’s one of the greatest joys of keeping a blog, and yet I rarely take the time to. I’ll post a few links now.

    • As the iPhone and Android wars heated up, I asked in 2015 what telcos could possibly be thinking by advertising Xiaomi devices alongside iPhones in their weekly newspaper advertising spreads. I said they were legitimizing cheaper Chinese devices that customers could easily buy through other retail channels for a couple hundred bucks, which would come back around to hurt telcos by dispelling the idea that one should sign a two-year contract (with high margins baked in) to get a good phone. I think I was right? Who gets a phone with a contract these days?
    • Back in 2006, I noted the opening of the Fifth Avenue Apple Store in New York and called it the most beautiful storefront I’d ever seen and wanted to visit someday — it would be 10 years before I did. And then there was this post from 2017 when Singapore finally got our first Apple Store.
    • Reader, I was even there when the fresh and ultra-luxe ION Orchard mall opened its doors in July 2009 — a fact that seems mindboggling today; hasn’t that building been there forever? At the recent team barbecue at a colleague’s condo overlooking Orchard Road, we were discussing some of the visible buildings and I discovered that our youngest team members are so young they don’t remember how the site of ION Orchard used to be a grassy mound of park-like open space. They were rightfully incensed when told that it used to be a popular picnic spot for Singapore’s domestic helpers until ION’s construction drove them away.
    • That just reminded me of the famous murder case where a bag of body parts was found dumped near that park.
    • In a 2016 post, I said that the future of gaming looked like cloud saves, cross-platform compatibility, and game designs that allowed you to play for both hours on a console or minutes on mobile. Back then, my signal was universal binary games on Apple TV that also ran on your iPhone. In 2019, Apple Arcade launched and that model was a core requirement for developers: all games had to support Mac, Apple TV, and iOS. And this week, Resident Evil Village launched for iPhone 15 Pro, as well as Macs and iPads with M1 chips or newer, the first in a new wave of console-quality titles you can both play at home and on-the-go. I think it’s a direct threat to whatever the Switch’s successor will offer, but the picture won’t be complete for a few more years.
    • Reading my posts from the year of living well (on sabbatical) is so bittersweet. On one hand, I was a bum reading books, watching films, and drawing all day. On the other, it was not unfulfilling? The little bit at the end of this weekly update from Jan 2022 reminded me how great a game Disco Elysium was and that I should replay it someday soon.

    (This week’s featured image was created by DALL•E from the idea of “The Beatles Resurrections”)

  • Week 43.23

    Week 43.23

    Bacheloring, breakdowns, and beverages

    Kim was away again for work most of the week. This effectively gave me the gift of freedom from our Beyond Deck addiction, cold turkey. So I played a little Super Mario Wonder, drank too much bourbon, watched Bitcoin YouTube, and lazed around unproductively on my iPhone.

    And on the days I decided to work from the office, I was richly rewarded with elevator breakdowns, mall escalator maintenance, and other inconveniences that made me wish I’d stayed home. I don’t think I’ve mentioned my recent obsession with Luckin Coffee, the Chinese chain that’s been expanding nationwide, including an outlet in my office building. Bosses forcing a return to office take note, getting one of their iced coconut lattes in the morning is one of the reasons I head in. I was looking forward to my fix one of these cursed mornings but found the branch closed for upgrading.

    Luckin’s model is fully app-dependent and most branches are just pickup counters, with no seating. You order on your phone, pay via card or Apple Pay, and pick it up by scanning a QR code. You don’t interact with staff, and they don’t handle any filthy cash. For comparison, you can do the same thing with Starbucks’s app, as well as order in person like a boomer. To get you past the friction of downloading the app and setting up an account, your first drink at Luckin is just $0.99. Subsequently, you’ll get hit with a barrage of discount vouchers ranging from 35% to 60% off, so much so that I haven’t paid full price for a coffee yet.

    For the record, their drinks are priced around $8 each, and they’re somewhere between a Starbucks tall and grande. The discounting is an aggressive acquisition play, of course, but I’ll take low margin coffees while they last, not least because they’re actually pretty tasty! Like Starbucks Reserve, they offer a range of single-origin specialty coffees, and even give you beautiful little info cards with tasting notes. The absurdity is not lost on me, given their quick-service image it’s like if McDonald’s gave you facts on the cow in your Quarter Pounder. Nevertheless, on that day my Luckin outlet was closed, I went to a Starbucks for the first time in quite a while, and it felt like comparatively much less value.

    ===

    From clicks to chats

    I went over a new trend report my company put out, and there’s a large focus on generative AI as one might expect, which led to a couple of interesting conversations about how much work is ahead of us when it comes to overhauling the touch points we use to deal with merchants, service providers, and even governments.

    In a way, the graphical interfaces we use today evolved as proxies for “natural” verbal and gestural communication. Similar to how we used mouse cursors because we couldn’t touch displays directly, we have menus and buttons and screens filled with data because we can’t directly ask computers for complex outcomes. The promise of large language models is that now we might.

    There have been think pieces this week about how Apple was “caught off guard” by this gen AI wave and is now scrambling to catch up. I think they have plenty of time; here’s why:

    What’s at stake isn’t smaller-scale improvements like the transformer-based autocorrect in iOS 17; it’s about whether gen AI can bring a more radical change in how we use computers. You can already see the hunger for this — the dream of J.A.R.V.I.S. — in a dozen half-baked AI-powered product announcements. We’re not far from Humane’s wearable phone alternative, Rewind’s Pendant which will process everything you say or hear, and Meta has great-looking new “smart” Ray-Bans which can put their new AI voice assistant(s) in your ear (US-only).

    The basic version of conversing with AI looks like a text chat, and on the other end of the spectrum is a “multimodal” natural chat that takes a user’s body language, tone, and facial expressions into account. Putting aside the fact that such a model hasn’t been trained yet, just the massive amount of personal data this would involve means only a company positioned to put privacy first might get any traction. And then there’s the staggering hardware requirements of doing this in real time. If only someone was working on a new kind of computer equipped with industry leading silicone, and biofeedback sensing that can even predict you’ll tap a button before you do it…

    Assuming this is the right thing to do at all, the Apple Vision Pro with its microphones, retina scanners, and hand-tracking cameras should be well positioned for a future where you can simply sit down in front of an AI relationship manager from your bank, have a free-flowing discussion, and see the appropriate figures and charts pop up — instead of poking around a UI to find out how your money is doing. But the stated purpose of the Vision Pro is spatial computing, which is only a step towards natural computing.

    So like every other time in history, Apple will wait while others jump the shark first, and hopefully clean up after with a more sensible execution. They have the time; it’s just a shame for impatient people that the hardware looks so ready. But as a wise man once said: technology moves fast, while people change slowly.

    ===

    Pints and pop music

    Ex-colleague and friend Bert is back in town for the first time in over four years, so we met up twice to catch up and see some other faces we’ve missed in recent years. This meant many pints of Guinness (if ever I associated a person with one drink only, it’s Bert and Guinness), which compounded with the aforementioned bourbon and a gut-busting, sodium-loaded visit to Coucou hotpot for a physically taxing week. Every organ is straining to detoxify and I really felt the effects all weekend.

    • We watched half of the third season of Only Murders in the Building and I’m happy to report it’s much better than the second. I think there’s even a self-effacing joke at one point about how the first season of the in-show podcast was more likable than the second. It comes down to a clearer story with fewer detours, the kind I’ll probably remember a year from now unlike, say, season two’s.
    • Sigrid has a new four-song EP out: The Hype. It is extremely Gen-Z in that it has a shoddy photograph on the cover and looks like it was made in Canva. The music is much better, but she’s just doing more of the same, which I won’t complain about because if Coldplay just kept doing the same thing as in their early albums maybe they wouldn’t be so insufferable today.
    • Taylor Swift’s 1989 is finally out in (Taylor’s Version) form! I think this was the first album of hers to ditch the country pop style and just go straight pop? Did it have something to do with leaving Nashville for New York? In any case, it was the first album of hers I played for myself, and also the one Ryan Adams liked enough to cover I guess. I’ve been mostly playing both versions this weekend and came across a debate I never knew I needed: is 1989 a beach album about the Hamptons or a city album?
  • Week 37.23

    Week 37.23

    First things first. As you know, we’re big curry rice fiends over here, and I recently found out that Maji Curry (Kanda Curry Grand Prix winner 2018/2022) has had a Singapore outpost for the past year and I never heard about it. This curry fiend may need some curry friends; I’m clearly not plugged into the scene.

    I went there this weekend and was not disappointed: their signature Hamburg steak curry with soufflé cheese sauce is a winner. It has the fragrant spices associated with Indian curries, but meets Japanese curry’s lower heat level and sweeter profile halfway. Let’s pray they stick it out and thrive here, unlike Go Go Curry (I’m still holding out hope for their resurrection).

    ===

    I was browsing YouTube one evening when I came across a live premiere of a DJ set by Taku Takahashi, playing “only Utada Hikaru”. Being a fan of his remix of their latest song, I stayed for the whole thing, and it was great! And then the next night, at the same time, they did another one with another DJ! And the next night again! They were all shot at the same event hosted by Amazon Music Japan, but the three-day release schedule was pretty smart.

    I also learnt that Jay-Z pretty much wrote the iconic song Still D.R.E. for Dr. Dre’s 2001 album. When the doctor was stuck with just a beat and no words, he sent it off to Jay who reportedly returned with a demo in under an hour, performing both Dre’s and Snoop’s parts in imitations of their voices. Apparently that was it; the whole song was done.

    This sent me off on repeated plays of Jay’s The Blueprint and The Black Album this week. It’s been years since I played them straight through, and I’m humbled to say it’s given me a newfound appreciation of Jay-Z. There was a period years ago when I harbored an intense dislike of him, probably because of how popular he was whilst being technically a less interesting rapper than many other better ones who deserved success. Also, all the clownish ad-libs and general timbre of his voice were just so annoying.

    But you wrote Still D.R.E.? Okay, RESPECT.

    Vagabon’s new album Sorry I Haven’t Called also came out, and I highly recommend it. Her last album featured the song Every Woman, which was one of my favorites of 2019.

    ===

    There was a big tech event this week, and of course I’m talking about the latest Nintendo Direct! There are so many great titles still on the way, this late in the Switch’s lifecycle. A handful of new and remade Mario/Luigi/Wario/Peach games, a Detective Pikachu sequel, a Spy × Family title (an anime game with a simultaneous Western release!?), and even a new Prince of Persia game. The fact that the slate is still so full going into 2024 makes me confident that the Switch 2 will have backward compatibility with the whole catalog.

    I’m kinda sure I played Another Code a little back in the days of the Nintendo DS, and a great looking remake of it and its Japan-only sequel are coming out soon, under the name Another Code: Recollection. But available immediately after the Direct was Trombone Champ, which I bought immediately. Imagine Guitar Hero, but with a comical sounding instrument — an absolute no-brainer. You can even play with up to three friends in local multiplayer, but Kim has not yet agreed to it.

    Oh, it was also time for the new iPhones, and practically all important points had already leaked: titanium frames for the Pro models, a new folded zoom (rumored to be a periscope lens but instead a tetraprism design) only on the Max models, smaller bezels, USB-C, and the removal of leather products from Apple’s entire supply chain. Apparently they’ll even progressively remove existing leather furnishings from their stores.

    I… am not against leather, though I can understand that it’s a net negative for the world at Apple’s scale. But there’s no great substitute: synthetic leather is awful, and early impressions of Apple’s new recycled fabric, a material they’re calling FineWoven, suggest it’s not as premium feeling as hoped. In any case, it’s a woven textile product sitting in for a smooth, supple skin. Not really comparable.

    If Apple added FineWoven products to the lineup any other year without removing leather at the same time, there would be far less scrutiny. After some consideration, I decided to get a leather case from Nomad for the times I’ll need one (going out for drinks is one recommended occasion). I dislike their ribbed power button design, but couldn’t find any better options. Bellroy makes one, but with a cutout and not a passthrough button for the new Action Button. I’m glad I also snagged a last few Apple leather straps for my watch before this happened.

    Back to the phones, though. The one thing that hadn’t leaked was a big one for me: the new A17 Pro chip has a GPU and Neural Engine powerful enough to do real-time ray tracing and AI-powered upscaling. These will literally allow console-quality games (a term carelessly bandied around in mobile gaming quite frequently, but seemingly for real this time) to be played on iPhones. There was the surprise announcement that Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding Director’s Cut would be ported over this year, along with Resident Evil Village (previously announced for the Mac), the remake of Resident Evil 4, and the next Assassin’s Creed game, Mirage, in 2024. These games suggest the iPhone is basically capable of running PlayStation 4 games, but without active cooling (a fan).

    The possibility of playing these games on the go, along with the 5x telephoto lens exclusivity, pushed me to pre-order a 512GB Pro Max model this year. Ugh. As said in too many words last week, I find carrying such a large phone around too much of an inconvenience, but the bigger screen and longer battery life are justified this year. And thanks to the move to USB-C, I had to order a new Backbone One controller as well. I love my original Lightning connector model; it’s a well-built, great-feeling, very clever gamepad.

    On the camera front, there were mentions of a new improved Photonic Engine in the iPhone 15 Pro, which gives me hope that we’ll get less artificial looking photos this year. I was very pleased by the new feature which lets you choose from 24mm, 28mm, 35mm, and 48mm crop settings when using the main camera sensor. These nods to photographic tradition are befitting of a “Pro” model, and help users learn about different focal lengths. You can even set one of them as your default (this isn’t the Apple we knew), and I think I’ll be choosing 35mm. If only we could set a 3:2 aspect ratio to go with it.

    I’d read online that iOS 17 changes something about how photos are processed on the iPhone 14 Pro, making them less aggressively sharp and HDR-ed, and I was sure I could see an improvement after updating to the RC. I really believed they were looking more natural, especially in the 2x and 3x lengths, but after comparing photos from two iPhones on iOS 16 and 17, I can confirm that it was all in my imagination. So you’ll have to get the new iPhone to “fix” the processing if it bothers you.

    You do gain the ability to save photos in “HEIC Max” quality on iPhone 14 Pros, though. This saves 48mp HEIF files, with all the smart processing, which previously required an app like Halide to do. The ability to change a portrait photo’s subject and focal point after the fact will also be available on older phones with iOS 17, in case you aren’t planning to upgrade this year.