I made myself a spot in the apartment to sit and rot the hours away. This was achieved by moving the comfiest chair over to the dining table and plugging in my iPad Pro and Magic Keyboard into power. From here, I can also watch the TV. The plan was to spend all of Monday sitting here and finally getting some rest from going out every day and walking over 10,000 steps, which has driven my Apple Health metrics up by 2x for the past two weeks.
I think my body has been surprised/broken by this sudden surge in activity. It doesn’t help that the bed here isn’t the best, so the morning backaches haven’t been fun.
But I ended up going out on Monday after all, because a day spent home is a day I’m not eating curry. I noticed a line for Alba Curry while in Akihabara last week, and made my way to a nearby branch of theirs for my third plate of curry rice in as many days. They’re a Kanazawa-style curry joint, but as far as I know, that doesn’t necessitate the use of baseball references? They have a one-with-everything menu item like Go Go Curry’s “Grand Slam”, except theirs is called the “Home Run”. It comes with a single pork katsu, a fried egg, two sausages, and a fried prawn. The fried egg with a runny yolk was a nice touch, but sadly, the rest of it was average. The curry was a little stodgy and lacked the punch of flavor I was looking for.
I had better luck with Hinoya Curry, a favorite of recent years that I’ve never had the chance to eat more than once a trip. Unlike the others, it actually has a little heat while managing a fair amount of fruit-like sweetness. I ordered a plate with only a raw egg, vegetables, and two sausages because I didn’t understand the ordering system and thought it would include a pork cutlet. No matter, it was very good as it was, and now I have an excuse for one more visit before I leave.
On Tuesday, I made my way out to MOMAT: the Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, a place whose existence I was only alerted to when Michael blogged about his visit last year. It was a particularly bright and sunny morning, which made for a nice visit given its proximity to the Imperial Palace’s moat and picturesque grounds. The museum has a massive collection of over 13,000 works, but only displays about 200 at a time with bi-annual rotations. I like this approach much better than the one taken by Singapore’s National Gallery.
In any case, this moment in time seems to be a sort of dead zone for the big museums. Many are preparing for new exhibitions that only begin in March, which is a shame but not a blow because what’s on now is still just barely manageable with the time I have.
On the way back, I stopped by Kitte Marunouchi and spotted the Qoobo for sale at the “Good Design Store Tokyo by Nohara”. I first saw this adorable, tail-wagging robot/cushion online many years ago and immediately wanted one, but was resigned to it being an only-in-Japan product. It’s now available internationally if you look hard enough, albeit with a significant markup. After doing the girl math, buying it here was too good a deal to pass up (about S$150), so I guess I’ve found the souvenir gadget I’ve been looking for.
Last week, I complained about us tourists overcrowding the city, but it’s everyone; Tokyo is simply up to its observation decks with people. At several points while out and about, I’ve wanted to stop in somewhere for a coffee break but had to hit up multiple cafes to find a free table. Even after 2 p.m., when you’d expect the office crowd to be back at their desks, many seem parked in cafes to work remotely. I saw people doing video calls and some looked set up there for the long haul with stationery, chargers, and other accessories strewn about to make personal workspaces.
In the vicinity of MOMAT, I discovered the JCII (Japan Camera Industry Institute) Camera Museum, a small basement space packed with photographic history: hundreds of vintage cameras including the iconic Leica I Model A, which turns 100 this year. Ironically, the museum prohibits any photography of the space or its exhibits. For a mere ¥300 entry fee, I got an hour’s entertainment poring over weird and rare designs — on the whole, the majority of industry players are copycats and follow innovative leaders, quite like how smartphone hardware and software today have converged on similar designs. Virtually every camera I’ve ever owned, or at least some cousin of it, was in this priceless collection.
My body has really had enough after all. Three weeks of walking and stair-climbing amidst the coughing masses, drastic temperature changes, and drier air than it’s used to has led to me being mildly ill now. That has regrettably meant calling off some plans, but my new goal for the rest of my time here is to recuperate at home while eating 7-Eleven food and bingeing Doctor-X: Surgeon Michiko Daimon on Netflix. I mentioned this admittedly cheesy but comforting TV show back in 2023, and at that time, a few seasons were still available for watching in Singapore. Today, the show isn’t on any local service, but being geographically in Japan means I can pick up where I left off on Netflix, in the middle of Season 3 (of 7).
Rereading that old post, it seems that I experience the same renewed excitement for gaming, that I mentioned last week, every time I come here. I still think this atmosphere hinges on the large presence and floor space given to physical game retail, but this may not last much longer with digital sales on the rise everywhere. Of course, one can also attribute this cultural presence to the relative outsize of the game economy here (including mobile games).
One of the games I saw in a box in a store was Shinjuku Soumei, a visual novel I’d seen on the Nintendo eShop before but wasn’t enticed by. I decided to buy and at least start on it while here, and I’ve just finished “playing” it through while resting at home (it’s not very interactive at all, just a click-and-read VN).
I mentioned PARANORMASIGHT last week, and while I won’t start playing it until I’m safely home, I did go out to visit one of the Sumida landmarks featured in this creepy supernatural game: Kinshibori Park. It’s not much to look at but there’s a statue of a famous kappa in one corner, one of the “Seven Wonders of Honjo” which the game seems to be based on.
By the way, I’m half certain we saw the actress who plays Doctor-X on the streets of Ryogoku a couple of weeks ago. There wasn’t anyone else around, so I couldn’t see from others’ reactions if it really was her. It sure looked like her to me, though, so I’m sticking with that story.
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.
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.
People sometimes say that I’d make a good teacher if I ever tried it. I think good teachers are probably more patient than I am and love speaking in front of people a lot more than I do. But on reflection, those are both things I’ve gotten a little better at over the last decade, so maybe.
I got a little taste of it this week when I was given the chance to hear a class of college students make their final presentations for a design thinking course, and provide assistance in the assessment of their assignments. They were asked to identify a group with needs, understand them, and then design games that could be of help. They had to prototype and test their ideas before finalizing a working version. They all did pretty well, creating solutions that were surprisingly polished.
The general idea about deploying Generative AI tools in the workplace is that they don’t do much to enhance the work of already talented employees. But for the vast majority of average or below-average workers, LLMs elevate their productivity and quality of work to a consistently higher level, which is still a net positive for teams.
Apple’s current ad campaign for Apple Intelligence seems to take that tack too, resulting in a message that’s so far from the Macintosh’s promise of a “bicycle for the mind” that these ads are rightfully catching some flak. But in the classroom, I saw AI tools give students (with limited time and a lack of traditional design skills) the ability to execute their ideas at high fidelity. Making card games that look and feel almost like professional products, fully illustrated without the help of artists, is not something we could have pulled off when I was their age. I’m partly envious, but also afraid that on a wider scale, execution will be confused with education.
Earlier in the year, when I sat in on another class being taught by a friend, I was struck by how hard it is to control the chaos of a large room of modern students, and the same thing was true here. When you get over 40 laptop and iPad-equipped young adults in a room, having their attention is not a given. Side conversations are happening all the time, and listening to whoever’s speaking seems like a choice.
Maybe it was just my experience as an English student, but our class sizes were smaller, and discussions almost always followed a single track, led by a professor pacing around the room rather than anchored to a screen at the front. There were hardly any screens, come to think of it, just books and notepads. Now everyone’s on Figma, Canva, Miro, and a host of other infinite sheets of AI-enabled SaaS paper. I’m not saying we had it better, but I worry that the option to take things slowly and still excel is disappearing. When kids today say they’re stressed, it’s hard not to believe them, having seen the performative polish that’s now standard. We’re getting awfully close to expecting students to pop out fully formed and ready for the mines.
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Over the weekend, we decided to get our eyes tested at a Zeiss-approved optician’s, to order the official prescription inserts for Apple Vision Pro. This will let me use the device on days when I’m not wearing contact lenses. The need to have them on first has admittedly been only a very minor inconvenience, but now nothing will get in the way of hopping into the uh… spatialverse.
Of the three eye tests I’ve had this year, this was probably the most thorough one. The key seems to be patience (there’s that word again) on the part of the tester, in the sense that the testee should never feel hurried. They should be allowed to flip between options 1 and 2 as many times as they need to identify the sharpest and most comfortable images. As a result, I have a new prescription that shows my eyesight has slightly, but surely, deteriorated for the first time in over a decade.
My last test was in 2019, when I got my last pair of glasses from Zoff. Those were so comfortable that I stopped wearing contacts regularly and became a spectacles guy again. Now I wonder if wearing contacts actually helped arrest the decline of my eyes.
Anyway, armed with a new prescription and an appetite for vision correction, I went to the nearest Zoff outlet and ended up with a new pair of glasses. I learnt afterwards that the frames I chose were “trendy” and “perfectly suited for Gen Z styling”. Along with recent purchases of wide-leg pants and oversized tees, my fashion Bryan Johnsoning is complete.
Side note on Japanese express optical brands: I stopped considering Owndays because all their frames are small and narrow — they literally don’t have large options. Zoff at least stocks a few, and in general they overindex on “Boston” and “Wellington” shapes, so on both occasions I’ve been able to find something I like with almost no effort.
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Media activity
After taking a break for several months, I returned to Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name on the PS5 and finished it. And this was a short game by Yakuza standards. I expected to feel pretty over the series by this point, but the emotional ending to Kaz’s story has got me quite excited to get started on the next game, Like a Dragon: Infinity Wealth, sooner rather than later.
I also returned to Luigi’s Mansion 3 on the Switch, which I started (and stopped) playing when I first got the console back in 2017. This game has just sat there for 6 years waiting for me to get back in, and all credit to Nintendo’s designers, it was stunningly easy to pick up where I left off.
There’s a ton of movies on MUBI due to leave in the next two weeks, so I started with Toni Erdmann (2016), which was nominated that year for the Palme d’Or. On the surface, it’s about a jokey dad whose daughter has become a miserable management consultant, and he decides she/they are not doing so well and could use a little cheering up. And yet as a film it was like nothing I’ve ever seen before: I laughed, I cried, I was bewildered. It’s simply art. 4.5 stars.
Another film that is leaving is a 2011 documentary by the late Austrian filmmaker Michael Glawogger, Whore’s Glory, which examined the lives of sex workers in Thailand, Bangladesh, and Mexico. The film’s biggest problem is its inappropriately “cool” millennial-era Western music soundtrack featuring Cocorosie, Tricky, and PJ Harvey. My 3.5-star Letterboxd review: “If anyone asks why I look sad, from now on my answer is ‘I saw Whore’s Glory back in 2024’.”
I haven’t held space to experience the new suddenly released Kendrick Lamar album, GNX, the way it deserves. Hopefully by next weekend.
Kim Deal of the Pixies has a new album out at the age of 63 and I quite like it. It’s called Nobody Loves You More.
I discovered a Japanese singer by the name of Kaneko Ayano while looking for artists with a similar sound to Happy End. She has an awesome ‘gimmick’ where every album is recorded and released in two different ways: acoustic and with a full band.
But for the song/video of the week, it’s Hanumankind’s Big Dawgs. I was listening to Apple Music 1 when it came on, and had to look it up immediately. He’s an Indian rapper from Kerala by way of Texas, and he’s just broken out now with this song after years of making music. His lyrical game is considerable, and as evidence I offer the existence of a YouTube comment calling him “Lendrick Kumar”.
I’m also embedding an older video I like, a freestyle performance, and a recent interview on Apple Music where it’s clear he’s an articulate and very driven young musician who’s going to be huge.
I managed to go a whole week without visiting the Apple Store.
We did visit a new branch of Go! KBBQ at Bukit Timah Plaza; the original on Amoy Street is perpetually busy and comes recommended by the Korean community (so I’m told), and even has its own aging room in the back with a viewing window. The new one lacks the aging room but IS in an aging suburban mall, which increases your chances of getting a table. We overestimated as usual, and ordered a 690g set of pork belly, neck, and jowl. They do the cooking for you — there are illustrated STOP! signs telling you not to even attempt it yourself — and everything was perfect.
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I was saddened by the passing of another senior relative, aged 86, apparently from heart failure. The shock was compounded by the fact that I had just seen him a few weeks ago for the first time in years, at another uncle’s memorial, and he looked in great health. I remember him for hosting some of the more enjoyable Chinese New Year get-togethers of my childhood, where I learnt to play blackjack at the dinner table together with adults, spinning the lazy Susan around to draw cards off the pile, sweeping the pot (ashtray) of coins into my arms after winning a big hand, then experiencing the pain of losing everything — great preparation for the Terra Luna collapse decades later.
Due to a contagious illness at my parents’ place, I attended the wake alone and discovered a massive 9-storey building in Woodlands with multi-faith halls and columbarium facilities. The majority of these that I’ve attended have been at Singapore Casket in the Lavender district, a much humbler affair. Woodlands Memorial feels modern, which is to say efficient, cookie-cutter, and almost soulless. That joke is nowhere as distasteful as the marketing position I found on one of their posters: “Singapore’s premier one-stop afterlife venue”.
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I spent almost all of Monday installing Windows XP on my iPad and MacBook using the newly approvedUTM SE app from the App Store. The goal was to play an old Windows game that I have fond memories of: High Seas Solitaire. It’s really not much to look at, and the entire package weighs in at under 800kb. Published by ZapSpot, the game was part of a series of ad-supported titles that make Flappy Bird look like a big-budget production.
But in the early 2000s, I was stuck in a dreary clerical job that involved juggling Microsoft Excel and Access, stacks of official papers, and a cabinet full of file binders. High Seas Solitaire was on my Win95-powered computer, and it might as well have contained an entire 3D metaverse. When I found the above gameplay video on YouTube, I was shocked at how much detail my nostalgic brain had invented: I remembered a calming nautical world with ocean sounds, a creaking wooden ship, and seagulls flying overhead. In reality, the game has like four SFX clips that it plays at various times and that’s it.
I’ve forgotten the exact rules, but it wasn’t your standard solitaire game. You had to match cards that added up to 14, but pairs could also be matched, I think? It was just very satisfying to complete, and easy enough to do that a few times during each lunch break. I haven’t found any game based on the same mechanics since, but I dream about it.
Alas, while I managed to get Windows up and running, the game itself would not run. This led me to install VMware and try other online emulators, repeatedly install Windows, and even create CD-ROM images containing the game file for the virtual machines to mount. But each time, the game wouldn’t get past the loading screen. Finally, I asked Ci’en if she would try running it on her PC, and when even that didn’t work, I threw the whole project out of the window. Small comfort: perhaps even if I had succeeded, the CrowdStrike BSoD debacle this week might have wiped out my VM.
When I’m rich, I’ll bankroll the creation of a new, truly immersive version for visionOS.
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I watched two video essays from the Digging The Greats YouTube channel which usually focuses on music history and song breakdowns, but these were about an “experiment” where the host tries to only listen to music off an iPod for a month. He deletes streaming apps on his phone, commits to use aux cables for in-car listening, and eventually goes down a rabbit hole where he also quits social media and starts using a dedicated digital camera and prints photos in lieu of Instagram (why? It’s not as if he was using Instagram to take the photos).
This sort of modern tech consequence confluence happens over and over throughout the videos. He says this experiment changed his life and his whole outlook on music, especially regarding the influence of algorithms. Because he has an iPod with finite storage and no internet connection, he has to make choices about what music to buy and load onto it; he can’t just rely on an omnifarious cloud library. Thus he makes it into a whole personality: he introduces the idea into his everyday conversations and asks musicians and DJs he meets for music recommendations. He thinks ahead about what music he’s going to listen to. And music takes up even more space in his mind (if that were even possible).
None of these benefits actually required an iPod! He could have conducted the same experiment on his iPhone with some self-discipline, e.g. only listening to music downloaded offline, which can only be done at home near a laptop. But the iPod is a physical object that makes limitations tangible and the experiment is a construct that reminds you of a goal — these sorts of things are great for creativity and focus. It’s the intentionality and “mode setting” of what he’s doing that’s producing the results. And this is something we can and should all practice from time to time.
A few years back, I committed to taking only black-and-white photos for an entire month. I can now identify that period very easily when scrolling through my photo library. It was an exciting, liberating, and frustrating exercise all at once that forced more conscious decisions and felt like I was working with new gear (sans the expense). When you keep a mission like that at the front of your mind, you look out for interesting photos everywhere, which is why so many people take their favorite photos on holiday.
The same applies to writing (“I will blog every week”), music (“I will write an entire album in one key”), or anything that gives you joy (“Let’s do an Arnie movie marathon this weekend”).
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Media activity
💿 Apropos of the above: I listened to that new Travis album during a long cab ride and it was okay but didn’t make a huge impression. I considered deleting it, but then thought, “if I’d bought this on CD years ago, I’d listen to it at least a few more times, and the songs would probably stick in my head and years later I might even be thrilled to hear one of them come on somewhere in public”. That’s how my relationships with many of my favorite albums began anyway. This endless queue of options and dopamine-driven consumption pattern is not good for culture.
🎮 Ghostopia Season 1 continues to be an intriguing journey on the Nintendo Switch. It reminds me a little of Doki Doki Literature Club, not in content but in manner: layers of subversion and unexpected metaphorical depth under cuteness and comedy. I will be sad when it’s over (soon).
🎬 The following were all watched on MUBI.
Saw a Tsai Ming Jiang short, The Night (2021), which is nothing more than a series of still camera takes of nocturnal Hong Kong street scenes. The bright, digital-looking aesthetic resists the traditional romantic notion of Hong Kong as a neon-soaked, tattered metropolis. It’s dirty, yet cold and empty. Perhaps that was the point, but it did nothing for me. 1 star.
Saw One More Time with Feeling (2016), the first of the two Nick Cave films by Andrew Dominik. The inconsistent use of black-and-white footage upsets me. I probably should have watched this before This Much I Know to be True, but coming off that one I’m feeling that Dominik has a limited approach to getting things out of Cave, and when you hear him in the background asking questions, he can barely articulate them, sometimes letting his fumbling interrupt Cave’s train of thought, and that to me is an awful shame. He and the film crew also seem to greatly irritate Cave, which sadly continues in the sequel. They’re also transparently making a film, not a documentary, directing naturalistic actions to be repeated so they can be shot on the 3D camera. 3.5 stars.
Saw 24 City (2008), another pseudo-documentary, this time about the closure of a long-running factory in China. As you may have heard, the scale of these operations makes them cities in themselves, with the children of workers attending school within their walls and identifying more as ‘of the factory’ than the communities around them. There are interviews with real people recounting their lifelong experiences at the factory, including some devastatingly emotional stories, interspersed with actors being interviewed as characters for reasons unexplained. This dilutes the effect and makes it hard to stay invested as you never know when you’re being ‘lied to’. One scene has the legendary Joan Chen playing a factory worker who grew up with the nickname “Little Flower” because of her resemblance to a character in a film played by Joan Chen. I mean, that’s some genius casting but also too much. 3 stars.
🛣️ I also rewatched David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997) and ended up writing a longer review, below:
This film made a huge impression on me as a teenager, the early scene with the Mystery Man’s wide-eyed mask of a face staring spookily at Bill Pullman like Ryuk the ‘shinigami’ in Death Note — so grotesque and caked in unearthly tones that I remember it as employing special effects, but no, it was just Robert Blake’s face — talking to him from both sides of a phone call, surreal and inexplicable just like much of this entire film, it scarred me deep.
It seemed like a shockwave of audacity to have a main character morph into another person completely without any satisfying followup, just rolling into a new story completely. I remembered that, but mostly forgot the ending where the two halves converge. Making sense wasn’t the point anyway, it was a vibe. It’s jazz cinema.
I don’t think I had much early exposure to challenging art and I was making up for it through a phase into which Lost Highway fit perfectly, like William Burrough’s cut-up texts and visual poems like the Qatsi series: peering into randomness for meaningful patterns, meditating on nonsense to glimpse truth. Maybe even more than the film itself, I was really into the soundtrack, which featured David Bowie right in the middle of his Outside/Earthling era (which is where I started with him), the Nine Inch Nails, Rammstein, The Smashing Pumpkins. Teenager catnip. Was it also the first time I heard Antonio Carlos Jobim? Maybe!
Rewatching it now over two decades later, I expected to understand things at a deeper level, but maybe I’m just a boring old guy now or got stupider because all I can focus on is how ugly or sloppy things are from a craft perspective: Pullman’s tacky LA apartment with odd furniture, the awkward fight scene between Pete and Andy that ends with a forehead embedded in a glass table, the VHS look. Sure, I have theories about what it’s all about but come on, who casts Gary Busey as a caring dad? It’s all corny af. The cinematic vocabulary hasn’t aged well and the once-cool cyclical timeline where the end is the beginning is the end isn’t mind-blowing anymore, just lame. Marilyn Manson’s inclusion in a snuff porn excerpt isn’t edgy, it’s enabling a sex offender. The Mystery Man has lost all menace and looks pathetic in his white makeup; I bet I could take him. Yeah I’m boring now. 3 stars.
Kim’s post-trip illness last Sunday turned out to be Covid, so we shuttered ourselves home all week and tried to sleep it off. Since it was our last test kit, I didn’t get a chance to test myself, but I assumed that the lingering illness I’ve had since returning from Hong Kong was probably it, or else I’d just get reinfected (which didn’t happen). We received new tests on Thursday and, thankfully, both tested negative.
Games
Being stuck at home allowed me to clock over 10 hours in Yakuza: Like A Dragon (#7 in the series) which, unlike its predecessors, is a turn-based RPG. Since Kiryu Kazuma rode off into the sunset in Yakuza 6: The Song of Life, this installment has a whole new cast, from ex-Yakuza henchmen to ex-detectives, ex-nurses, and ex-hostesses. It’s more ridiculous than any of the other entries: one side quest has your party fighting adult Yakuza men wearing diapers after you crash their bizarre infant roleplaying session. After beating them, you make up by sharing a milk toast from baby bottles. You get the idea.
According to HowLongToBeat.com I’ve probably got another 40 hours to go, which puts my massive backlog even further back on the calendar and makes me a little impatient tbh. I should take on shorter games, like the slew of great-looking new indie titles that just dropped this month. Luke Plunkett at Aftermath asks how the hell we’re supposed to find the time for this embarrassment of riches. For my part, I’ve already bought 1000xRESIST and Little Kitty, Big City. Backlogs are a neverending to-do list, even for the unemployed.
Film and TV
There’s a new 6-part drama series on the UK’s Channel 4 called The Gathering, and some people involved in the excellent show Line of Duty are supposedly involved in it. It looks at the effects of ‘toxic ambition’, class lines, and online behaviors on the lives of some teens and their families in Merseyside. It was good enough for us to see the whole thing over the weekend.
We also binged all available episodes of Dark Matter on Apple TV+, a show I’ve been looking forward to since it was announced. I’ve enjoyed Blake Crouch’s novels for awhile, and they are always conspicuously written as if selling their film rights is his real goal. That’s fine! They are fast-moving sci-fi action movies in book form. Unfortunately, the series gets off to a slower start than I’d like. I find it frustrating when characters in films behave as though sci-fi tropes don’t exist in their universe. Mild spoiler alert, but if I come home and find my house looks completely different and my wife is a different person, it wouldn’t take me days to deduce I’m in a parallel universe, especially if I’m a scientist who’s worked on the bloody idea before. Things do pick up after episode 2, though. It’s made me resolve to read more sci-fi in the next few weeks.
I mentioned starting on Sugar last Sunday, the new Colin Farrell show that is best enjoyed with zero knowledge going in. It was so good we finished all episodes the next day. I am proud to say that I called the events of the final episodes very early on. But I want you to enjoy it, so I won’t say anything more. Except… its love for classic Hollywood cinema made me resolve to spend more time watching films in the next few weeks.
Did you know that Singapore’s National Library Board (and I suspect many others globally) has a deal with a streaming video service called Kanopy that gives you unlimited access to their catalog? It even has an Apple TV app! See if your library card lets you in; they’ve got a ton of classics and indie films.
We saw Woody Allen’s Wonder Wheel (2017), which was more remarkable for its cinematography by Vittorio Storaro (Apocalypse Now, The Last Emperor) — light and color saturation/tonality are constantly changing in the middle of scenes, making full use of this “channel” for communicating the story — than for the fact that Kate Winslet, Jim Belushi, and Justin Timberlake?! are in it. 3 stars.
But wow was I wrecked by She Came to Me, a weird little film that I held at arms length but found myself fully embracing by its absurd and perfect operatic ending. I don’t know how to judge acting, if I’m honest, but Peter Dinklage, Marisa Tomei, and Anne Hathaway inhabit their characters effortlessly and subtly. I had to look up writer and director Rebecca Miller afterwards, and oh, she’s only Arthur Miller’s daughter and Daniel Day-Lewis’s partner and the author of several books that I will now read. 4 stars.
I also resumed watching Blue Giant, the anime film about a trio of young men striving to make it as jazz musicians, and it perfectly captures the intensity and ecstasy of a great performance in a few superb animated sequences (at one point during a solo, the protagonist’s body soars through space past a black hole depicted in the style of Interstellar). It’s like the performance scenes from Whiplash rendered in the style of Into the Spider-Verse. It made me resolve to spend more time listening to great jazz albums on my headphones in the next few weeks. 4.5 stars.
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Channel News Asia, the Singapore-based er… news channel, puts out some good documentaries from time to time, but they’ve outdone themselves with the scope of their latest three-part series, Walk the Line.
It follows a group of Chinese citizens eager to escape poor financial prospects and/or persecution in their country, as they make a dangerous journey through South America to become illegal immigrants in the US. It’s heartbreaking and insane how they persevere through the difficult journey, and how naively they think America will somehow be worth it.
After arriving in Monterey Park, California, they join thousands of others vying for dishwashing jobs and so on. It’s a story that’s been told in other media before, but CNA’s team really did the field work and it’s worth a watch.
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Books
I finished Jack Reacher #21, Night School (Jack goes to Europe and gets involved in something big that still feels as intimate as the usual conspiracies he deals with, 3 stars), and decided to try something different. Boy did I regret it.
The chosen detour was Anxious People, by Swedish author Fredrik Backman, who I saw giving a jokey ‘I don’t normally give talks about being a writer but here goes’ kinda talk on social media that someone shared with me. I should have known from that video he would have a dad joke sense of humor, and it was excruciating in the novel. Covered in a layer of schmaltzy philosophizing about life that came off like a motivational quote poster in a school counselor’s office, the thing somehow has a Goodreads review average over 4 stars. I made it through about 37% before returning the ebook to the library and giving it a 1-star rating. Just reading it filled me with pure hatred.
Now desperately in need of a palate cleanser, I decided to embark on R.F. Kuang’s Babel which Munz has been recommending to me for a year, and oh god it’s exactly what I needed. I never had the young adult experience of reading a Harry Potter book, but I imagine this is what that must have felt like, with ample magic and intrigue, but a more literary and historical take with colonial criticism and racial identity crises to round it out.
It’s been a full week since I fell ill but this virus seems to have booked a late checkout, so we have no choice but to wait. Once they’re gone, housekeeping can get to clearing out the sinuses and emptying the phlegm bins. Even worse, it’s now Kim’s turn on the back of some work travel to Bangkok, so maybe I’m headed for Round 2. Is/was it Covid? A test said no, but anything’s possible. The news is reporting a doubling of local cases last week, at a rather alarming 26,000 cases.
Fortunately, I haven’t had much occasion to leave the house. I did go out to the nearby supermarket once to get some supplies, but despite leaving Kim a message that I’d gone grocery shopping, she also dropped by on her own way home and bought some. So now we have about 29 eggs knocking about the house. 😑
The awards show shortlisting is going well and has become a regular afternoon activity, but there’s so much of it to do. I don’t know how anyone with a full-time job is managing this without giving up a weekend or two. Looking forward to sharing some of the more impressive work I’ve seen when this is over.
Speaking of the industry, I saw an ad for Merge Mansion (a Candy Crush sorta mobile game) starring Pedro Pascal a few months back and downloaded the game, but forgot all about it without even playing. Well, I did this week and now I’m bloody hooked. It’s monetized on a timer and energy-based system, meaning you run out of moves and have to wait for more (or pay), so I’m constantly hitting that wall and checking the app several times a day to make a little progress. Games like these are cruelly designed to exploit those with a lot of free time throughout the day: children, homemakers, the jobless, me.
Another gaming loose end is Lost Judgment , which I bought for the PS4 the last time I was on sabbatical but then I ran out of time and never started. The purchase included the PS5 version, so when I got the console last week I decided it would be my first game. After some 20+ hours, I’ve completed the main story and don’t feel excited enough to play through the DLC or remaining side quests. It might be because it repeats much of what was in Judgment, its predecessor, or because I’m anxious to get on with the rest of the ‘Like a Dragon’ series in my backlog (of which the Judgment games are a part).
For reference, I’m planning to play
Yakuza: Like a Dragon (#7)
Like a Dragon Ishin! (a spin-off set in about the same era as the recent Shogun TV series)
Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name (#7.5)
Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth (#8).
And that’s skipping Yakuza 0, Yakuza 2 Kiwami, and the remastered fourth and fifth games! Those might have to wait for the next time.
As if that wasn’t enough, I’m also committed to finishing Astral Chain on the Switch, which plays fine but looks like an Xbox 360 game in visual terms, and really can’t compare to the current generation. I don’t think it maintains 30fps and the characters’ faces don’t even move during in-game cutscenes. I need to play all these ancient action games before I get spoiled by the likes of Stellar Blade on the PS5, where every surface gleams in ray-traced splendor.
If I had to describe the Switch’s value proposition in light of now owning a PS5, it’s a fantastic portable console better suited for indie games (and Nintendo exclusives, of course), especially 2D platformers and puzzlers. For example Animal Well, which just came out to overwhelmingly positive reviews; and the poker roguelike everyone says is digital crack, Balatro. Oh, and visual novels too. I powered through and finally completed an awful one this week that I’ve been “playing” for the last couple of months, which has prevented me from doing anything else on the Switch. I’m glad it’s finally over, and no, I don’t recommend it (Our World is Ended – 59% on Metacritic).
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Side note: OpenAI showed off an impressive demo of a new GPT-4 model that is omni-modal, smarter, and works in nearly real time. I’m also pleased that these features will supposedly be coming to free users too, along with the use of custom GPTs like the ones I’ve been making. I recently canceled my ChatGPT Plus subscription since I don’t have any regular jobs for it to do at this time, apart from helping me edit this blog, but now I may even be able to keep doing that.
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Media Activity:
Started on two episodes of Sugar on Apple TV+, and I’m locked into its modern LA noir mystery. There’s something weird going on beneath the surface with its meta-Hollywood thing, but what I immediately loved was how visually fresh and uninhibited it is.
After languishing unfinished for what feels like a year, we recently picked up season 1 of Acapulco again and can’t recall why we ever stopped. Just like its setting, it’s sunny, breezy, and takes your mind off everything — perfect end-of-day TV. The best part is there are two more seasons just waiting now.
I started watching the anime movie Blue Giant on Saturday and was halfway through before realizing I wasn’t in the right mood and should save it for later in the week. It’s based on a manga about an earnest guy who moves to Tokyo to be a jazz musician, and is just steeped in the jazz culture there with the kissas and live houses. I saw a bunch of promotional art for it in Tower Records a whole year ago when we were there, and I’ve been wanting to watch it since. It’s just that I’d read something about it not having a huge budget, and so wasn’t expecting too much from the animation. But it turned out well and sounds amazing!
There’s so much new music out this weekend that I have to break the format.
Let’s start with an album I enjoyed back in the day and have just rediscovered through Michael’s weeknotes, Tourist by St Germain. I didn’t even know it received a digital remastering and Deluxe Version re-release in 2012, but it sure sounds great. This could come out today and make waves, apart from having some light Cafe del Mar vibes.
Billie Eilish’s new album HIT ME HARD AND SOFT is out now. I played it once through in the background and plan to give it some closer listening, but it’s already surpassed my expectations. I was afraid she’d settled into consistently making very samey music, but sonically this sounds fresh and does some interesting things.
Apple Music is doing a list of their “100 Best Albums” (of all time), and I was happy/disappointed to see Portishead’s Dummy land at #67. There’s no overstating the impact of that band on my tastes, and Beth Gibbons’ voice is a huge part of that. So I’m really afraid to put her new (second) solo album on. Even the title, Lives Outgrown, gives me goosebumps of nervous anticipation.
There’s also a new Kamasi Washington album, Fearless Movement! A new Andra Day album, CASSANDRA (cherith)! A new A.G. Cook TRIPLE album, Britpop! A new reworking of a 2020 Childish Gambino album that I never heard, Atavista! And a Deluxe version of the last self-titled Bleachers album that I didn’t like that much!
I used to (sporadically) log my mood and mental state in a great free app called How We Feel, but ever since iOS 17 came out with a similar feature in the Health.app, I’ve been doing it there. It’s nowhere as good, though, and the act of recording how you feel is (surprise!) so much better in How We Feel. Apple’s version makes you scroll a list of feelings like Anxious, Content, and Sad, sorted in alphabetical order.
The other app arranges feelings in a colorful 2×2 grid, from high to low energy, from unpleasant to pleasant. An example of a high-energy unpleasant feeling is Terrified, while a low-energy pleasant feeling might be Serene. This grid is a much more logical and visual way to find the right word and quickly record your feelings throughout the day. Anyway, the rumor is that iOS 17.1 will be out next week, and I’m hoping the new Journal app is part of it, because I want better ways to record and look back on my state of mind.
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We attended the local premiere of Martin Scorsese’s new film that everyone’s talking about online: Killers of the Flower Moon. In a theater, no less! It’s an Apple Original Film, and will be coming to Apple TV+ after this irl run is over. I can’t remember the last 3.5 hour film I saw under such circumstances, unable to take a break, forced to focus. If I’d seen it at home I’d probably have paused it no less than five times, and so I’m glad that I couldn’t, because it’s the kind of film that quietly spends its budget building a world so absolutely intact and complete that you’re left to focus on the people, the time, and the weight of its historical crimes. As a true story, it’s devastating. “People are the worst” is pretty much my 4-star Letterboxd review.
On the flip side, we saw disgraced filmmaker Woody Allen’s 2019 film, A Rainy Day in New York, which has pretty poor ratings online, and really enjoyed it. I’m aware that he has approximately, oh… one style? And a hallmark of it is neurotic, pretentious characters in awkward romantic situations who spout smart alecky jokes in an artificial, stage performance cadence… but I like it. It’s also amusing to see current generation stars like Timothée Chalamet and Elle Fanning as his stars, but playing their roles exactly like Woody. Is it because they’ve seen his old films and think they have to? Or do the scripts just demand that delivery? Also, Selena Gomez is in it, and I can’t help but see this performance as a superior version of what she does in Only Murders in the Building.
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I got jabbed for Hepatitis A & B on Friday, and it was a doozy. I felt lightheaded and weird all afternoon afterwards, and I have to go back for two more boosters over the next few months.
Contributing to the feeling all weekend has been my new contact lenses, the first ones I’ve worn in maybe 8 years? The right eye prescription is a little underpowered and so I’m suffering with blurry images that are driving me crazy. I’ll need to try and get them exchanged next week.
Why am I wearing them at all? I got an annoying pimple/scratch behind one ear, exactly where the arm of my glasses sit, and so I decided on some disposable dailies while it heals. On one hand, the feeling of freedom is amazing — I really miss this about wearing contacts, which I did regularly in my younger days. Just things like being able to do a spontaneous facepalm! But now everyone has learnt that “my look” is “guy with glasses”, and suddenly my normal face looks weird, even to me gazing in the mirror, and I don’t need to freak people out any more than necessary.
The blurriness has had a slight impact on my enjoyment of Super Mario Wonder, the latest and greatest Mario game which just came out. I wasn’t planning to buy it, because I wasn’t planning to play it any time soon, being still in the middle of another old Mario game on the Switch, Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Revenge. But peer pressure got to me, and talking to Jussi got me justifying it to myself that playing a 2D and 3D Mario game at the same time isn’t a problem — it’s like reading a fiction and non-fiction book at the same time!
Super Mario Wonder is the 2D one, for the uninitiated. It’s a modern take on the classic Mario games, far more inventive and deep-reaching than even the New Super Mario Bros. series of games that tried to breathe new life into the side-scrolling platforming formula. Wonder has incredibly detailed and expressive animations all throughout: Mario and friends move and react to things like characters in a proper animated movie (was this planned to coincide with this year’s film? I don’t know), bursting with character, while the levels and events are literally psychedelic festivals of invention. This is a blockbuster game that spends its budget conspicuously, gleefully.
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In playing with DALL•E 3 some more (within ChatGPT Plus), I discovered that it goes a great job of replicating the look of classic 80s anime. You literally just have to ask it for that. I tried some classic scenes, and then asked for couples hanging out near a 7-Eleven drinking Strong Zero, and then for screenshots from a movie about a female detective investigating a case of financial fraud, and it’s that last one that made me think this thing is a new milestone in tools for visualizing stories.
There was a period about a year ago when quite a few new moms all had ideas for children’s books, and wanted to use DALL•E or Midjourney to illustrate them. I got questions about whether it was feasible to do this, and if you’ve been talking everyone’s head off about this stuff too, you probably had the same conversations.
I think this level of natural language interface with GPT-4 and DALL•E 3 coming together is finally making it possible for anyone to direct images with consistent settings and characters. I read somewhere that Midjourney v6 is going to make prompting easier as well, so perhaps we’ll get a flood of storybooks next year.
There was also a thing going around on Threads that basically asked participants to “paste your Threads bio into an AI art tool” and see what comes out. I saw a few people doing this, all floored by the accuracy of the people they saw gazing back through the black mirror, I suspect afraid of how accurately they were seen from just a few keywords — one lady said “I own all of those tops”.
I think this is a pretty strong signal for the mainstreaming of generative AI, that a meme like this can spread without instructions attached. Everyone who is online enough knows what it means to invoke an electronic genie that grants image wishes, knows very well how to go find one and get the deed done. Next year is going to be wild.
But anyway I wanted to try it out, although my bio isn’t like “Founder/CEO (he/him), hustling 24/7 🇸🇬, new book out 20/12, always up for coffee ☕️ and meetups 🤝”; it’s currently “Designer, sense-maker, aesthete, imposter, garbage, scum.” which gives you results like this:
sangsara.net 