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Tag: Snoopy

  • Week 18.26

    Week 18.26

    We had a pretty good week in Tokyo and are now back with painful foot and leg muscles that haven’t been worked this hard in a while. There was one notable moment of weakness where a decision was made to take a taxi back to Ginza from Meguro, rather than deal with the evening crush in the train system. Surprisingly, it was only about S$30 — one more sign of prices equalizing between Singapore and Japan. You may have seen the same reports I have on the rising cost of living there, and how convenience store onigiri now starts around the ¥200 mark, nearly twice what it was a few years ago. But while the onigiri in Japan may soon cost nearly as much as the versions we get in Singapore 7-Elevens, the two are still incomparable in terms of quality.

    No surprises here, but alcohol continues to be significantly more affordable than in Singapore. I posted a picture on my Instagram of Buffalo Trace bourbon (750ml) going for about S$25 in Meidi-Ya, a nice supermarket. That’s about a third of the price you’ll find in Singapore, if you can even find Buffalo Trace at retail. I’m beginning to form an alcohol and lifestyle arbitrage theory that says if one earns in dollars AND drinks enough, it may make financial sense to live half of each year in Japan.

    Maybe one could sell an apartment in Singapore and fund two small apartments, one in Tokyo and the other in Thailand or Australia (depending on said value of initial apartment). Australia’s reverse seasons might make it possible to live in a perpetual fall/winter state, with an occasional summer when you get too depressed.

    Or when your skin gets too dry. I’m no good at moisturizing, so after just a week I’m beginning to feel my skin noticeably drier. However I’d take lotion any day over the stifling >80% humidity and gloominess that greeted us upon return. Apparently it rained most of the week we were gone; the kind of tropical heat that makes you feel sweaty in every crevice. “Why do we live here again?”, I asked Kim on the way home. Oh right, zero capital gains tax and responsible governance.

    It’s also been a week since I touched my MacBook so I may have broken the app development habit. I just have one tiny improvement I need to make to Crumbs now that I’ve used it to log my locations on this trip…

    Some things I remember doing:

    • I met Michael for lunch on Monday, and like a good friend he brought me to a Sapporo soup curry joint in Yotsuya. There’s always the risk of splashing and curry stains with soup curry, but I think he exaggerated the mess he made because I’ve seen people come into the office with far worse. I think we ended up talking for two hours, and we didn’t even get around to John Ternus and rumors about upcoming products.
    • Kim came out to meet me later and since we were already in the area, we decided to walk down to see the iconic steps featured in Your Name (2016). I cannot believe it’s been 10 years, by the way.
    • At the National Film Archive of Japan, which I might be visiting for the third time, we saw a small showing of Japanese film poster art. It was excellent, and just ¥250 including the permanent exhibition. I instantly recognized two of the earlier posters: Philip Glass’s score for Koyaanisqatsi (1984) was the inspiration for some of the music in my DataDeck project, and I just watched Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962) last week on MUBI.
    • We bought advance tickets to the Ron Mueck show at Mori Art Museum, his first showing in Japan in over 15 years iirc, which was a refreshingly tight collection of 11 sculptures. Some of his work is massive, like In Bed, and the level of detail is so astounding you can easily spend over an hour just looking at them.
    • I say refreshingly because there’s a tendency for exhibitions to pack so much in that your mind just goes numb. That’s what tends to happen when I visit the National Art Center in Roppongi. Still, I love the idea of a building with massive exhibition halls that are regularly rented out by “amateur” art and photography groups showing off their members’ works. I think having such a venue fertilizes the hobbyist landscape and reinforces the value of art. Singapore would do well to have more such places and encourage a forward-looking, arts-attuned society instead of, say, building yet another temple to our origin story.
    • The Tokyo Photographic Art Museum in Meguro is still one of the best. I’ve missed it the past few times we were in town, but there’s nothing like looking at great photos after too many paintings. The free exhibits at Fujifilm Square in Roppongi are also consistently excellent, even as their product lineup becomes more ossified and oversold.
    • We also visited the Snoopy Museum Tokyo in Machida which I will freely admit was a highlight for me. It’s the only official one outside of the Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, CA, and a very well-designed facility — exactly the right size, with something for all ages. When I told Michael we were going, he remarked that it was interesting how relevant and popular Peanuts remains, compared to the likes of Garfield (no shade). I said it was because of how much storytelling latitude it has built in, in no small part thanks to Snoopy’s flights of fancy. Whereas Garfield is reducible to a few things, like a love of lasagna and a hatred of Mondays. To which he observed how it’s weird Garfield hates Mondays at all, because he’s a cat without a job. He just says he hates them to be relatable!
    • Did you know that it was only after 20 years of the Peanuts comic strip that Snoopy stopped walking on all fours like a normal dog and started becoming the odd character he is? I learnt that off a little fact card at the museum, where Schulz is quoted as saying “It was one of the best things I ever did.”
    • I’m more of a cold shower and cold anything kinda guy, and my heat tolerance is very poor. Like some of the hotels we’ve stayed at before, the one we booked this time had a sento, a hot public bath, and after being urged to by Kim I thought I might as well try it. It was fine. Going by how it appears in film, I thought maybe people stayed in the water for quite awhile, but I was ready to get out after 10 minutes, and it seemed the same for other people. Funnily, one guy said goodbye to his wife as she went to the women’s side, and then spent 15 minutes washing himself in the stalls and never even got into the water. Maybe he was another anti-hot tub guy who just got tired of saying no and pretended to do it. Like those salarymen who get fired but don’t tell their families and sit in parks all day with their briefcases.
    • Speaking of the hotel, I’d initially booked us into the same hotel I stayed at back in 2012 when I went with a couple of colleagues from Sweden and the US. The day before our trip, we looked at recent photos online and decided it was probably not sufficiently well maintained, and booked a nicer place nearby. Free cancellations on Hotels.com are a fantastic feature. The new hotel was great, and although our corner room was billed as having 30 sqm of space — an almost suspicious amount for central Tokyo — a lot of it was used for a hallway area. Nevertheless, it was useful for keeping our suitcases out of the way and for the drying of umbrellas. I would definitely stay there again.
    • We had a nice walk through Yoyogi park and Kim used one of the famous transparent toilets. Despite having already conquered public nudity with the sento, I did not experience them myself (there was someone waiting and I didn’t need to go).
    • We were on our way to a coffee shop in Ginza one morning when we spied a line of people waiting to get into a tendon restaurant when it was due to open at 11am. Following the Singaporean/Lemming instinct of letting social signals decide what to eat, we abandoned our plan and joined the crowd. It was very good, foreigner friendly, and great value. ¥1,600 for a large bowl with conger eel, two shrimp, a squid/clam mix, half-cooked egg, shishito pepper, and seaweed.
    • Will told me about the Creative Museum Tokyo in Kyobashi, so we stopped by for the Sorayama retrospective that’s currently on. You may know him through his work designing the first Sony AIBO, and the cover art for Aerosmith’s Just Push Play. His work isn’t for everyone, but I loved how this guy just loved drawing naked female robots, did it all his life to the point of mastery, and now brands like Dior are just dying to collaborate with him. No selling out on his part, the dude just loves his gynoids.
    • At the above venue, I noticed the same phenomenon I saw many times over the week: a lot of people employed to do mindless, redundant work. Like standing at an obvious door to point you in a very obvious direction, or posted near a small bump telling you to mind your step. I hope that this is just what extra labor is deployed to do during downtimes, and that they actually have more to do most of the time, but I’m skeptical. Still, AI can’t take your job if your job wasn’t necessary in the first place!
    • Some time was spent revisiting shops I tend to drop by every few years, like the Nintendo Store in Shibuya, or Village Vanguard in Shimokitazawa, or Tsutaya books at Daikanyama T-Site. The latter two are always fun because there’s so much stuff I would buy if I could teleport them home immediately. If I ever buy that Japanese apartment someday, I fear it might be filled to the edges with magazines and useless tchotchkes.
  • Week 9.26

    Week 9.26

    • The featured image above is the result of having Geese’s Au Pays du Cocaine in my head all day. The line about a sailor in a big green boat and a big green coat made me think of Puffer Jacket Snoopy, and of course I had to realize the joke.
    • We got the sad news that Deliveroo is shutting down operations in Singapore. This comes on the back of an acquisition by DoorDash who must have run the numbers and decided that a 7% share of the local food delivery market after a decade wasn’t worth investing further in. We use it all the time and prefer it over Grab and Foodpanda — it is by far the better app and their subscription service is better value for money, but we’ve seen this movie before. It’s like how Uber lost out to Grab; the market doesn’t always choose efficiently.
    • I will probably switch to Foodpanda because Grab as a brand has the same icky halo as, say, Facebook or Spotify.
    • Google released Nano Banana 2, the new version of their hit image generation model. This one is cheaper to run and kind of almost as good as Nano Banana Pro, so they’re making it the default for everyone. Paid users can still access the Pro model, but it’s hidden behind some menus. It’s a regression in quality, a slight improvement in speed, and most importantly, a boost to Google’s bottom line. Since I only do silly things with these tools, it doesn’t bother me tremendously, but imagine the same happening at an enterprise level for more important work.
    Screen recording of an AI panorama
    • One of the new things Nano Banana 2 can do is generate very wide panoramic images, so I asked it to render some “panoramas taken with an iPhone” in various locations. I then upscaled those and opened them in my Apple Vision Pro. They don’t have the photorealistic quality of images from Nano Banana Pro, and the resolution leaves a lot to be desired, but they’re still immersive and impressive when viewed in this way. You can see where this might go.
    • There’s been a lot of talk lately about how AI vibe coding could upend the SaaS market, if not replacing dependable enterprise tools with individually created ones, then at least giving IT departments a billion more unapproved apps to worry about. A viral essay from last week posited that AI coding could kill DoorDash, though I’d say they did a good job of that themselves out here. The other oft-discussed idea is that AI could replace the App Store, and everyone will just make their own apps instead of buying them from developers. Michael has been blogging about vibe-coding his own to-do list app based on Clear. I’ve been wanting to try this myself, making more little tools of my own to solve niche problems, but the opportunities have been slow to materialize.
    • This week the right idea presented itself and I made a web app using Gemini: an album cover collage maker that searches for the artwork or lets you upload your own. I’ve looked online for something like this before but only found a few that were quite lacking. Making one to my own specifications took maybe five minutes of prompting and testing. Then I thought it would be nice if you could drag the images to different locations. Gemini added that feature like it was nothing. I’m pretty hyped that even someone like me with zero current coding knowledge could will this into existence. If you’d like to try it, I’ve deployed it at usecollagen.netlify.app.
    • Otherwise it was a sort of decompression week where I just read a lot, listened to the records I bought/ordered last week, and was regrettably glued to my phone watching day trading losses (Chekhov’s gun has fired!) and social media feeds.
    • It took a couple weeks of dawdling but I finished John Le Carré’s Call for the Dead, his first novel featuring the spy George Smiley. I may continue reading the series, seeing as his son Nick Harkaway (whose work I really enjoy) has decided to continue his father’s legacy and written one more already: Karla’s Choice. This one was a little dated and not particularly thrilling, but a fine introduction and scene setter.
    • It was immediately followed by Adrian Tchaikovsky’s The Expert System’s Champion, sequel to The Expert System’s Brother which I read at the end of last year. I recommend both as examples of sci-fi stories set so far in the future that humanity has looped back around to the beginning. It reminds me of the “middle chapter” in Cloud Atlas, if you remember that.
    • Then I read Hu Anyan’s I Deliver Parcels in Beijing, a modern memoir that reportedly did well in China when it came out in 2022. It details the author’s dual career as a writer and on-and-off gig economy worker, which is made more interesting by also being a portrait of what it’s like to live in the lower brackets of Chinese society today.
    • I also had time to tackle Rob’s recommendation of Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall, which was written in the 1960s but doesn’t feel that way, unlike Le Carré’s spy novels. He called it the best book he read last year, so I could hardly say no. It starts off like an intriguing sci-fi novel: a woman visiting friends in the Austrian alps wakes up one morning in the log cabin to discover she’s alone, and there’s an invisible wall separating her from the outside world. Things then focus on survival and what it means to live and be human in solitude, and in nature. Which, given that I’ll be home alone next week while Kim is away again for work, means I’m already in the appropriate headspace.
    Some of the better books I’ve read this year
  • Week 28.25

    Week 28.25

    • Despite a brief setback, we ended up going to Bangkok for a few days as planned.
    • After spending hours in traffic the last time, I stayed within a smaller radius this time and walked a bit more. There wasn’t any agenda, really; Kim had some things to do and I wanted a change of scenery.
    • There was a jam coming in from the airport, of course, but we were thankfully in a very comfortable ride provided by the hotel. Ours was one of many cars squeezing down the narrow side lanes on the freeway — those buffer zones you don’t normally think cars should (or could) be using. Other cars in the ‘proper lanes’ skooch over to make way for this to happen, and it struck me as a neat metaphor for designing permissive, flexible systems with a normal mode but hiding ample bandwidth to accommodate emergencies.
    • Amidst more news of layoffs and economic rockiness, I think using AI in design (or most things, maybe) should be the side lane to ‘proper lanes’ of humans doing work, but we’re trying to do the opposite. Someone showed me a new customer research platform called GetWhy, where AI personalities conduct interviews over video calls with people, and synthesize some manner of insights automatically. They call it “human depth at survey speed”, which I knew AI would eventually enable: a merging of qualitative methods with quantitative scale. I saw it coming a couple of years ago but didn’t have the strength to look at it directly and figure out the pros and cons. At a gut level, I think it’s a shame that companies will now be able to insert another artificial layer between the people working on services and the people they’re supposed to be serving (or, more cynically, extracting profit from).
    • Anyway back to Bangkok. I saw three films to pass free time in the afternoons. Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning for a second time; Jurassic World Rebirth, which was so terrible and completely lacking in the magic of the original film, the lasting fumes of which this franchise is still somehow able to sustain itself on; and James Gunn’s Superman, which I accidentally saw in Thai, without subtitles. I decided to sit through the whole thing and get by on just the visual language of it, and I think the experiment went okay! I probably couldn’t watch Tenet (2020) this way, though. 3/5 stars with the above qualification.
    • On Brian’s suggestion, I visited the Thailand Creative & Design Center (TCDC) which is a government office in a historic postal service building, mostly notable for its extensive resource library. You have to be a member to enter, although day passes are available for about S$4. It was a good way to pass a couple of hours, and I flipped through some interesting books that are now on my Amazon wishlist.
    • One of them was For the Love of Peanuts, by Elizabeth Anne Hartman, which covers the Peanuts Global Artist Collective — a project where seven artists reimagined Schulz’s characters through public art and exhibitions. There’s more information and photos through the link above. I was coincidentally thinking about learning to draw Snoopy recently, the “correct” way, and seeing this book was such a jolt to my narrow way of thinking — it had simply never occurred to me that I was free to recreate Snoopy however I wanted. Lots of new synapses to build here.
    • At the last minute, I decided not to bring my Switch 2 and it was fine. I always imagine hours of downtime on vacation where I might actually want to play a game, but it never happens. I did use my iPad Pro and am going through a sort of second wave of love for it. I recently got a third-party Smart Folio-type case, for just $12 off Amazon, which makes it much thinner and lighter than Apple’s Magic Keyboard case. The original Smart Cover (launched with iPad 2) is/was such a brilliant and minimal design, giving the device a perfect midpoint between versatility and portability, and having it again with this case is great for traveling.
    • It’s worth mentioning that each night back at the hotel I’d get into a trashy reality tv cable channel dedicated to “courtroom cases”. The quote marks are because I don’t know if you’d call these actual legal courts (but with the US, who knows?), but the two series I saw were awful and entertaining. Paternity Court sees couples come in and argue about their children, usually born on the side with another man or woman, culminating in the results of a DNA test revealing whether the man really is their father. Divorce Court is better, because you get other sorts of relationship issues being worked out, and the judges are sassier and give out strong advice. The name is a misnomer; some of these couples aren’t even married or looking for a divorce, they’re just airing their shit on TV. You can watch full episodes on their YouTube channel.
    • On the flight home, I caught Doctor-X: The Movie Final (2024), the supposed concluding chapter to the long-running Japanese medical drama that’s so bad I fell in love with it. Back in February, I spent an absurdly cost-inefficient chunk of my Tokyo trip watching Seasons 4 and 5 on local Netflix. Seasons 6 and 7 don’t have English subs, so I don’t know when I’ll get to see them — unlike Superman, this is too important to risk rawdogging in a foreign language.
      The movie… well, they went for higher stakes: explosions, AI, helicopters, the works. But that also meant less of the dumb fun and weird humor that makes the regular show a cult favorite. Or maybe not so cult at all — maybe it’s unironically loved in Japan. I kinda hope so.
  • Week 15.25

    Week 15.25

    • Kim was away for work again, so I mostly stayed in and spent more time with the Vision Pro. Apple’s new VIP video series that takes you to major sporting arenas doesn’t sound like my sort of thing on paper, but the first episode on Yankee Stadium was a surprisingly entertaining watch. The crowds feel real and the only thing missing was a closeup of a hot dog. It was filmed last June, I think, and feels like a document of a much saner time. There are still many more apps and videos I have yet to check out.
    • Back in the present, Trump’s wacky tariff rollout drama continued, with the latest being a series of takesies-backsies that is great news for Apple and other makers of computers and smartphones: exemption from whatever the crazy current rate is on imports from China. 125%? Or was it 155%? Everyone now expects the stock to surge on Monday’s open, but come on, none of these pronouncements stick or mean anything now. The best move might be to sell all US-based assets and spend the next year off-the-grid on a beach somewhere.
    • Starbucks has done a collaboration with Peanuts (that’s Peanuts × Starbucks, for readers who were here last week), and of all the merch they put out, it was a yellow stoneware mug that I liked the best. It features the whole gang sitting at a long table, with Snoopy dressed as a barista and serving up espressos in his latest persona, a corporate caffeine shill stupidly named “Joe Kind”. I like Snoopy, probably on account of being exposed to the Apple TV 4K’s wonderful Snoopy and Woodstock screensaver, so I’m turning a blind eye to this sacrilege. Anyway I received my mug in the mail this week and it’s my new teatime go-to.
    • I did go out fairly early on Saturday morning to go hang out with a bunch of coffee nerd ex-colleagues who spent more time messing around with grind sizes than I ever thought possible (my contribution was a bag of beans fresh from Ho Chi Minh). It was a good time, and the occasion gave me a novel writing prompt to try out, which brings to me to my latest ChatGPT-based hobby…
    • About two years ago, when we were just grappling with the GPT-3 model and what it could do, I spent quite a lot of time trying to get it to write passable poetry. The most successful approach I found was to provide it with a detailed character backstory and ask it to write from that person’s perspective, taking into account their preferred styles and word choices. I managed to eke out some genuinely good stanzas (imo), was moved and amazed, and then moved on to other experiments and forgot about it.
    • Until this week, that is, when I wondered how the latest models would fare given the same tasks. I put my old prompts together into a custom GPT, and asked for the first silly idea that came to mind: a poem about growing older but ironically becoming more attracted to cute things like Snoopy. It did an honestly good job with just that. Then I asked it to write one about the story of how he got his name — a true story: Charles Schulz’s mother daydreamed they’d buy a family dog when she recovered from cancer, but she never did — and the result was good enough to refine further. So I went back and forth on it with the bot (who I named Penrose), combined several attempts, intervened slightly, and here’s where we landed.
    She Gave Him the Name

    “If we ever get another dog,”
    she said,
    “we should call him Snoopy.”

    It was a small thing,
    tucked between errands
    or waiting rooms,
    the kind of sentence
    you don’t expect to echo.

    He was fifteen.
    Maybe he nodded.
    Maybe he carried it like lint in his pocket,
    forgotten
    until everything else was gone.

    Years later,
    drawing alone in his studio,
    he gave the name to a dog
    who danced on rooftops,
    typed novels no one would read,
    stood in for joy
    and for all the feelings
    boys weren’t supposed to have.

    Snoopy caught on.
    So did the quiet boy with no luck,
    the girl who loved too hard,
    the blanket dragged across the years.
    The world came to know them
    and needed their steady kindness.

    Maybe that’s what it means
    to miss someone forever,
    to take the smallest thing they gave you
    and let it become
    the sky above everything you make.
    • And here’s one from another session where I asked it to identify a core human paradox and write something about it. It chose to explore how we want freedom but crave structure.
    The Night I Rearranged the Furniture

    I moved the couch against the other wall
    just to see if the room felt different.
    It didn’t.
    I stared at it like it had betrayed me,
    then moved it back.

    It was past midnight.
    The kind of hour
    when you wonder
    if this version of your life
    is the one that sticks.

    I opened the window to let in some air,
    but it was the same air as yesterday.
    Nothing new came through.

    I thought about driving somewhere,
    but didn’t know what I’d be driving to.
    The gas tank was full.
    The fridge was full.
    I was full of something I couldn’t name.

    They say people like me
    always want to leave,
    but never go far.
    We change the wallpaper.
    We cut our hair.
    We imagine new cities
    without maps.

    The truth is, I love knowing where the forks are.
    I love the sound the radiator makes
    right before it kicks in.
    I love the old light switch that sticks
    unless you press it just right.

    But still—
    some nights I crave an airport gate,
    a highway at dusk,
    a conversation in a town
    where no one knows what I used to be.

    I don’t go.
    I just stay up too late
    and move the couch.
    • It feels unreal to have this tool for S$30/mo. I can ask it for poems about any random scenario or feeling, and it tends to throw out lines and images that catch me off guard. I’ve now taken to giving it things I half-wrote long ago and never finished, and it gives pretty good notes. An unexpected side effect of this is that I’m feeling more inspired myself, and now I’m asking it to give me prompts, and I’ll write things for it to review.
    • Here’s one I reworked this week.
    He died in his 17th year

    And flowers were laid by the side of the road
    Fit to be swept within just a fortnight

    Parents kept his memory alive another thirty years,
    Until grief or emptiness took them too

    I used to think we were made for more
    How clever bones and cells can seem

    But a body is mostly waiting to be undone
    And our home keeps going around the sun
    While out there
    Nothing waits for no one
    • While I was messing with Penrose, OpenAI launched a new feature called “Memory”, where ChatGPT is able to reference all your past conversations across previously separate chats. The way they chose to showcase it was to suggest you let the AI describe you, the black mirror lighting up to reveal a camera was recording all along. I didn’t expect them to so transparently demonstrate how this technology is a more powerful, more dangerous profiling machine that anything Facebook or Google has ever put online, but I suspect they think there’s nothing we can do. I asked it to guess how I felt about certain topics, like Nolan’s Batman trilogy or the Fujifilm X100VI camera. It didn’t exactly read my mind but they were very educated guesses. Not very reassuring. It offered to guess other things like my favorite cocktail (it said Negroni; not my absolute favorite but one of them), my favorite beer (a Belgian saison; not even close), and my favorite band (Radiohead; they might be in second place).
    • This reminded me I was due another playthrough of OK Computer to keep my millennial card intact. It only gets better with time. I’ve also been listening to Counting Crows’ Hard Candy again recently. Some of those songs are the best that anyone or any AI will ever write.