sangsara.net

Tag: Switch

  • Week 13.23

    • We traveled from Kobe to Hiroshima via Shinkansen, then went back to Tokyo for a few days until a red eye flight back to Singapore on Saturday. As with most holidays, it didn’t feel long enough; I could have used another week. But I’m thoroughly pooped from all the walking and general lack of sleep. It was wonderful to see Japan again after five years, and our chat with the old taxi driver who spoke English with us on the way to Haneda Airport indicated that Japan might almost be as happy to have us tourists back. I fantasize about dropping in for another week within the next year, but who knows how long it’ll be again.
    • Hiroshima felt very different from Kobe, partly because of its terrible history, and the gravity of it which pulls every experience towards a discussion about peace, awareness, and suffering. It has quite a few museums, and they all inevitably address the atomic bomb in some way. I had bad dreams each night. I’m not normally one to believe in this sort of thing, but there is so much death there and so recently, that my first thought was “bad vibes”.
    • While we were there, though, the sakura bloomed fully across the city and it was beautiful to see.
    • We visited a Picasso exhibition at the Hiroshima Museum of Art (beautiful building, galleries were a bit dingy though in the basement), and also lots of art and exhibitions dedicated to remembering the atomic bomb at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). We didn’t have energy or syllables left for the Hiroshima Prefectural Art Museum. MOCA was wonderful though, newly renovated after two and a half years and opened for less than two weeks when we visited.
    • Did you know Picasso created a series dedicated to the horrors of the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima? No? What are these then, AI-generated photos from Midjourney v5?
    • After many years of being a Go Go Curry fan curious about Champion’s Curry, the Kanazawa-style curry franchise that Go Go supposedly ripped off down to the signature yellow, I finally got a taste of it. And… it was sadly disappointing. It’s soundly beaten by Go Go’s richer flavor and dedication to excess — there’s no preset that comes with the works. On this trip, if I had to rank curries, Hinoya might come first, followed by Coco Ichibanya, closely followed by Go Go in third and Champion’s in last place.
    • I saw a Japanese toothpaste ad of some sort that demonstrated people brushing their teeth in a curious way: holding their brushes like pens or chopsticks. Is that how everyone does it? I’ve never seen it. Perhaps it’s time for a new Japanese Wisdom Fad to go global: the secret art of teeth cleaning. Anyway I tried it out for a laugh and was surprised by the ergonomic improvement! Holding the toothbrush in pen grip means your elbow stays close to the body rather than sticking out, and your forearm is perpendicular to the ground. This gives you more power in the up-down motion by moving your entire arm rather than your wrist. Combine that with the added directional precision from being able to move your fingers, and it feels easier to do those small away-from-the-gumline strokes you’re meant to do, versus holding in an overhand grip.
    Please excuse the iPhone finger sketch
    • You may remember that I became quite fond of watching a live street webcam in Shinjuku about a year ago, leaving it up on the bedroom projector as a sort of video wallpaper or magic window into another world while I read or did other things. Well, we finally got to stand on that very street and see ourselves on the screen! With tourism back, the street is much busier than it was a year ago, uncomfortably so, but now I finally know what the inside of the ramen restaurant looks like, and confirmed my suspicions that there’s a gap under the steps of the KBBQ place where the rats probably hang out. We waved at the camera and tooks a couple of photos from a street-level POV. What’s great was that there were many other people obviously there to see the cameras too… my weird little Kabukicho webcam community!
    • I ended up not finding very much to buy in terms of electronic souvenirs. I don’t need another camera or headphones, as mentioned a couple of weeks back, and I couldn’t even bring myself to buy a phone case that I don’t need and that will be obsolete in half a year when the iPhone 15 comes out. I did however get a little $12 plastic robot at Don Quijote that plays their unforgettable jingle with the push of a button. It’s going to get a lot of use in my home, I think.
    • Wait that’s not correct, we got a portable massage gun called an Exagun Hyper from the Doctor Air brand. Not an insignificant factor in this decision was the advertising campaign featuring Ryoko Yonekura, also known as Doctor-X in the TV series of the same name. She was clearly hired for that reference alone and seems to relish it. I’m kinda sure they even pronounce Doctor Air with the same flourish that “Doctor-X” is usually delivered with.
    • If anyone in Singapore is wondering why Netflix removed the first six seasons of Doctor-X and now only has Season 7, it may be a licensing issue with Amazon. Seasons 1–5 are now on Prime Video locally, so you have a chance to catch up and hopefully Season 6 will turn up someday. Be warned though, this is not strictly speaking good TV. It’s a cheesy, overly dramatic manga-style live action show about a doctor with miraculous surgery skills and no social ones. Like House but turned up even further.
    • I also got some tees and socks from FamilyMart, because I’m always on the lookout for good black t-shirts and their white/green/blue brand socks were an internet sensation a year or so ago. Oh, and some sake straight from their Kobe breweries. That’s about it for physical souvenirs.
    • What I have brought back intangibly, though, is a renewed enthusiasm for gaming on mobile and the Nintendo Switch — I didn’t bring my Switch along and now I’m dying to play through my backlog. It’s hard to explain but the media and cultural environment there for gamers is immersive. You see giant ads for Splatoon 3 in the subway. Billboards and TV spots for mobile games like Dislyte and Genshin Impact. Late night shows on TV where people play trading card games. Most of these games aren’t even Japanese in origin, but they’re part of the landscape and it’s encouraging? Inspiring? To feel your hobby validated as a visible part of society. Nearly none of that is the case in Singapore, the irl city.

    A selection of (sakura-centric) photos from this week follows. Please rotate your iPhone to landscape because WordPress’s masonry layout somehow doesn’t work on narrow screens!

  • Week 6.23

    Tl;dr: I moved to a new Mastodon server and signed up for a fun omg.lol account. Plus some thoughts on AI after playing around with ChatGPT this week.

    The operator of my queer-friendly, anti-Nazi Mastodon server (mastodon.lol) decided to shut it down after receiving too much hate and harassment. I don’t blame him for prioritizing his own safety and peace, and any disappointment is aimed at humanity in general. But this episode highlights the problems with Mastodon that I’ve been thinking about since adopting it. Namely, ground-up decentralization creates weaker nodes, and the UX friction of asking new users to choose a great first server that they can stick with for life. I joined mastodon.lol a scant three months ago!

    I also only found out about the shutdown by pure luck, chancing upon his announcement toot as I scrolled the timeline. We have three months before it goes offline. Without a sorting algorithm and/or the time to read every single post, it’s more likely people are going to miss the message than see it.

    My new address is @sangsara@social.lol, a paid Mastodon instance run by the omg.lol service which I learned about from Michael who also uses it. If you were already following me, you should have been automatically shifted to the new address. But migration on Mastodon doesn’t carry over posts, only followers and bookmarks, so my 67 entries will be wiped when the old server shuts down.

    I could have gone with one of the big, semi-official servers like mastodon.social or mastodon.online, but as soon as I started exploring omg.lol, I kinda fell in love with its idea of a scrappy nerdy community built around a series of web tools. I used to buy silly domains and dream about turning them into useful services — but lacked all of the skills and vision to actually pull it off. But here for $20/yr, you get a bunch of things riding off that great domain name: a personal web address with a profile page, an email address, a blogging service and /now page if you want, a statuslog service, pastebin, a permanent URL tool, access to their IRC/Discord server, and now, Mastodon.

    Based on this experience, I also decided it was time to redesign the About page here, which is my one true profile page on the web.

    ===

    I had a conversation late last week about generative AI and how it can steal many creative jobs away, but also increase access to higher quality creative work. It reminded me of that Steve Jobs interview where he said the way we “ratchet up our species is to take the best and to spread it around to everybody, so everybody grows up with better things”. If you put copyright and capitalism aside for a minute, because illegally trained AI leads to a sort of creative socialism, you can imagine how this plays out. There’s a ton of top-notch, high-budget creative work out there, but it’s not evenly distributed. What happens when any dive bar can have a Wednesday night promotions poster on the front door that looks like it was designed by TBWA? There will be a chaotic leveling and raising of all boats, and then any humans left standing and still able to think will figure out what’s next.

    ChatGPT has gone incredibly mainstream in a short time, and while I’m usually one of the first in line to try this sort of thing, that wasn’t the case here. I read about it, saw the screenshots shared online, but never actually signed up to try it myself until this week. I was too engrossed in the imaging/Midjourney side of things, and maybe some part of me that identifies as a copywriter knew that this was going to be a threat and I wasn’t in a hurry to face it.

    Now that I’ve played with it, though, including some amusing and convincing conversations about the nature of design and intelligence, I’m more excited and concerned than ever. It’s not only that generative AI tools will replace skilled human jobs and force a rethink of ethics, ownership, and labor in society — it’s that we’re not ready for the pace at which it will happen. We have not had the time and space to discuss this as communities, families, and countries.

    Text runs the world, and a text genie is squeezing its way out of the bottle. Legal documents, performance reviews, applications for access, convincing arguments for sales and solutions, and professional emails (that are now just a style to be applied to quick bullet points) will be passed off and leveled off. And those are just the use cases I’ve tried this week! Powerful tools are being put into untrained hands overnight, and as we’ve been hearing everywhere, companies are rushing to irreversibly build them into the digital engines that run everything. From search and Microsoft Office to project management and customer service. Some of it is safe and logical, and some could do with a little more thought.

    Ted Chiang wrote an excellent piece on the subject that I need to read again.

    I did get a kick out of David Guetta’s enthusiasm, though. There is so much potential here for fun and creativity, if you’re also the kind of guy who can give an unironic shoutout to a murdered man’s family.

    ===

    One of the things I “trained” ChatGPT to do in one long session was help me to write better Midjourney prompts. Here’s a series we made of objects that look the way they sound. It was a difficult challenge to attempt, requiring an understanding of abstract synesthesia that was beyond either AI, but I’m not too upset about the results.

    Media:

    • If you can separate the art from the artist, Ryan Adams has yet another new album out. This one is a track-by-track cover of Blood on the Tracks (Apple Music), kinda like what he did with Taylor Swift’s 1989.
    • We are caught up to episode 5 of The Last of Us and it’s strikingly good. Jose asked if I noticed a key character in episode 3 was also the hotel manager in season 1 of The White Lotus and I had not. When they say an actor disappears into their role, I suppose this is what they mean.
    • I got started on Persona 5 Royal (Switch). I played the original version on the PS4 and abandoned it maybe three or more years ago, blaming a lack of time in front of the TV and the non-portable nature of the experience. No excuses now. Except… I have put it on hold after the tutorial because I’m not sure I want to spend the next 60 hours on this just yet. It’s a young person’s game and I need something a little more casual.
    • Despite probably seeing The Third Man many times over the years, I don’t remember it clearly at all. Here’s my Letterboxd review: “I have probably tried to see this film about three or four times. Tonight I succeeded, and it is the sum of all previous attempts, including vague memories of staying awake in film class in university. What a strange and meandering film, with intriguing technical aspects and unexpected emotional depth, and an ending scene for the ages. I thought four stars but I’ll be damned if I didn’t give it all five.” It has only strengthened my resolve to see more old folks and read more old books. This foray into the contemporary over the past decade has been a waste of time!
    • Do you think Seth MacFarlane has modeled himself on Orson Welles in some ways?! There’s a physical resemblance + the multihyphenatism.
    • I saw Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. What a crock of shit.

  • Week 2.23

    We kind of started planning our trip to Japan later this year, but there’s still a lot to figure out in terms of what to do, and where to spend our time. It seems a lot of the popular hotels and destinations are selling out fast, if not already sold out, because of the resumption of travel out of China. I’m going to use this as a test of two new collaboration features in iOS and macOS: shared Safari Tab Groups, and the new Freeform whiteboarding app. In theory this should allow us to gather links to interesting ideas and plot them out together across our devices over several days.

    On Friday afternoon, I was excited to see an article saying that one of the best bowls of ramen I’ve ever had was finally coming to Singapore. In fact, it was their opening day, and we decided to just go down right after work to try and get a seat. After about 20 minutes of queuing (which was nothing compared to the maybe three hours we spent in line for the main restaurant in Tokyo), we got into Nakiryu at Plaza Singapura, and were sorely disappointed. For starters, their signature Szechuan-style Tan Tan/Dan Dan noodles were sold out. We ordered shio and shoyu ramen instead, and they were roundly mediocre. The service was also spotty and uncoordinated.

    It’s a pattern that the local franchisee Japan Food Holdings (who’ve done the same thing with Afuri and others) seems to be repeating: bring in a brand people are excited for, then do nothing to capture the original taste and quality. I suspect if you did a side-by-side comparison of the ramen from several of their brands, you’d find they’re just selling the same product under different names. Sadly, they’ve probably got the connections to get these deals and as long as the money flows in, the original companies don’t care how badly it’s done outside of Japan.

    ===

    SEA Focus NFTs: Art by @ykhaamelz, music by @discokid909

    Singapore Art Week is back and we attended two events: SEA Focus and the creatively named Art SG. The former’s at Keppel Distripark where the Singapore Art Museum’s temporary spot is, and features a little NFT art corner sponsored by Tezos. In contrast to the other exhibits, I found the work in there refreshingly playful, modern, vibey.

    Art SG

    At Art SG (a large and mostly serious gallery fair over two floors at Marina Bay Sands), I also found myself reacting more to the digital or digitally inspired work. There was a large print of a CloneX pfp, attributed to Murakami, mounted on a wall that I saw from across the hall and made a beeline towards. The Pace gallery (which I only happen to know because of their collaborations with Art Blocks) space featured teamLab’s NFT project, and a James Turrell projection. The teamLab one is cool: anyone can download and run the artwork (an app) on their PC or Mac. These are regarded as authentic and valid copies of the work. However, one can also own an NFT of the work (there are only 7), and these collectors can change the text seen in the art for everyone else. Oh, and they’re $200,000 each.

    Unknown work at Art SG (forgot to take notes!)

    Elsewhere, I saw a work that was a white flag printed with a surrender message that I’d read before but didn’t know where. I googled the text but nothing came up. Later, I found a tweet from early 2022 referencing it: an on-chain exchange between two MEV… “searchers”? The tweets only have between a couple hundred and a couple thousand likes, so it’s probably not a widely known thing. But I definitely saw and remembered it from last year, which means I’ve spent too much time spectating in a very small fringe community. And my time spent appreciating generative art has definitely ruined traditional abstract art for me.

    The Field #290

    Speaking of which, I was excited to add an edition of The Field by Beer van Geer to my collection this week. It’s an interesting (animated) work in that all 369 pieces are different views of the same “territory”, starting at random points, zoom levels, and rendered with different palettes, but viewers of any section can move away from those starting points and explore. As I understand it, the field itself was created from noise data created by aggregating hundreds of images from the artist’s body of work, trying to derive a sort of pattern map or artistic fingerprint from their ouevre. Isn’t that so much more exciting than static paint on canvas??

    ===

    Ricoh announced a new special edition of the GR III compact camera, called the “Diary Edition”. Yeah it sounds like one of those translated-from-Japanese names that sounds slightly awkward in English, but I like it. As a name, you can’t get much clearer about the concept of a camera that you’re meant to carry around to intentionally document everyday life, and it even comes with a new “negative film” look that will also come to older GR III models via a firmware update. Whether or not this behavior is one that users will actually embrace when they already have smartphones, I don’t know. I suspect not, outside for a few glorious weirdos. But the atmosphere and quality of these photos could hardly be more different than your smartphone snaps, unless you go the film route.

    As a new colorway, I also love the look of the Diary Edition.

    Here are a couple of photos I took with my GR III on the way to the art fair:

    ===

    • We watched a couple of spy TV shows, of which Jack Ryan’s season 2 was the undisputed best. We’ll start on season 3 soon.
    • Miyachi’s second album, Crows, is out. I heard it through once and it’s a bop. I don’t know what he’s rapping about but I’m sure it’s slightly problematic.
    • I finished Arcade Spirits but can’t recommend it if you’ve got many great games in your Switch backlog. To recap, it’s a Western visual novel about running a video game arcade. Some of the background art is basic and not very polished. I was struck several times by the thought that a game creator today could create far better generic bar/beach/arcade interior background art in seconds using AI. And they probably will/are already. So as an artifact of our pre-AI phase, Arcade Spirits stands out as a bit lacking in the production quality department.

    Here’s a tweet showing a game prototype someone purportedly threw together using AI tools to create the graphics, icons, and voice acting!

    • Quite coincidentally, I started experimenting with Midjourney prompts on Monday trying to get the EGA/VGA PC game look of the Sierra games I played in the 80s and 90s. I found a good solution and started using it to visualize screenshots of #fictionalgames from the golden era of PC games, ones that never existed, or that might be made today with modern concepts.
    Police Quest 5: Capitol Invasion
    Quest For Glory 6: So You Want To Be A Private Military Contractor
    Where in the Bahamas is Carmen Sandiego?
    Leisure Suit Harvey: In the Land of the Casting Agents
    Command & Conquer 2022

  • Week 1.23

    Creative Technologies’ founder and CEO Sim Wong Hoo suddenly passed away at the age of 67 this week, which was pretty big news locally. The Verge explained the significance of his career as creator of the Sound Blaster line of PC audio cards which put Singapore on the consumer tech map in the 1980s.

    My first PC was their homegrown Cubic CT, basically an IBM-compatible XT 8086 system, with a CGA (Color Graphics Array: just four colors) graphics card, 5.25” floppy disk drive, and no hard drive. I’m pretty sure my dad drove down to Sim Lim Square or somewhere like that and picked it up in person. After a few years, we upgraded to a non-Creative made system based on the Intel 386SX chip (how that SX suffix haunted me, making me feel like I had an inferior machine! The DX was the model you wanted; the SX lacked the dedicated math co-processor, not that I ever really knew which programs made use of it).

    Neither of these first two computers had proper audio capabilities, just the awful default “PC speaker”, as it was called back then. You could only get beeps and boops. One needed a dedicated audio card like an Adlib or Roland or Sound Blaster to hear proper music or sound clips. So every PC game I played had awful crude calculator music you wanted to turn off, but when I went over to play at my cousin Bryan’s house (he had a 286 with EGA graphics — 16 colors! — and a Sound Blaster), those very same games would have synthesized orchestral instruments and realistic sound effects. I wanted a Sound Blaster more than anything and wouldn’t have one until we upgraded to a Pentium system much later.

    The best quality image I could find of my old MP3 player, from the PDF manual

    Years before I got my first iPod and switched over to a Macintosh, my first MP3 player was a Creative-made device. The year was probably 1999 or 2000. I was looking to move on from the MiniDisc players I’d been using for years, and these new devices let you carry tons more music around without a folder full of discs in your backpack (this was really a thing we did). The model I chose was a Creative MuVo, a nondescript white plastic square with a tiny LCD screen and a soft joystick nub for control. It played WMA files as well as MP3s, which was a deciding factor for me as you could stuff more music in at an equivalent quality using the WMA format at the time. That little guy kept me company through two long years of mind-numbing administrative work during my national service.

    Years later, after graduating and stumbling into my first proper full-time job, the very first task they gave me was writing video treatments for a Creative Technologies product demo DVD. Creative happened to be one of the agency’s longtime clients, and the viral video above was one of the things that happened under their watch before I joined. I remember my partner and I excitedly pitching a direction to our bosses only to be shot down and told to try again. Weeks later, after going out west to Creative’s offices and getting their feedback, it turned out we had gotten it right the first time. That was probably the end of my journey with the brand, although I was intrigued by their attempts to bring a new version of their X-Fi surround audio tech to market in recent years. I almost bought a pair of their headphones to try it, but now Apple’s spatial audio on AirPods has one-upped their approach by delivering a massive library of professionally mixed Dolby Atmos music instead of relying on fake surround processing on stereo tracks.

    His death is a sad loss and I wonder what the company will do from here. Looking back on the various products I’ve owned or tried over the years, they offered unquestionable technical merit, above average build quality, and always great value for money.

    ===

    • The new year got off to a gluttonous start with an impromptu visit to one of my favorite buffets, followed by Chinese hotpot, and then an all you can eat Korean BBQ (these were three consecutive days). Then I rested for a day before hitting Mexican cocktails and an izakaya with 1-liter highballs on Friday, and then rounding off the weekend with a burger from Blooie’s Roadhouse on Sunday.
    • Incidentally, that last meal was my first time at The Rail Mall, which most Singaporeans are probably familiar with, and which I used to pass on the bus daily during the aforementioned two years of national service but never stopped at. There were a few other interesting places we’ll probably be back for, like a craft beer taproom and an all you can eat wagyu yakiniku (so, like, probably tomorrow).
    • I got into the hottest beta program around: Ivory, the new Mastodon client from Tapbots. It builds on their work for Tweetbot, and it makes using Mastodon as a primary social media platform very enjoyable. I’ve checked Twitter a lot less this week as a result.
    • I finished my first playthrough of Citizen Sleeper on the Switch and will probably not be back for more until a little later. So many games! I’ve started on Arcade Spirits, a Western visual novel about working in a video game arcade. Not to be confused with Arcade Paradise which is a business sim that lets you run an arcade cum laundromat. If Spirits doesn’t pick up soon, I’ll probably abandon it for Kathy Rain or the Monkey Island sequel.
    • In need of a new book, I picked up Eugene Lim’s Dear Cyborgs but it didn’t click. I cut my losses after about an hour.
    • King Princess’s Hold On Baby would probably have been my pick for Best Album of 2022, if I’d chosen an Album of the Year. I’ve played it through about four times this week and still can’t enough. As with quite a few things I really love, I kinda hated it at the start. I mean, I used to hate Macs and Korean food.
    • We did a deep clean of the fridge and freezer on Sunday. If you’re ever doing the same, Apple’s Cleaning The House playlist may help.

    Here’s some AI art I made this week:

  • Week 53.22 – Day 1.23

    • So maybe 2022 was not the best year for many things: my mental health, the markets, avoiding Covid, Goodreads reading challenges, making more time for people, etc. and it ended on a fittingly crappy note as I realized that I’m too neurotic to be a pet owner either. But we have to be thankful for the things we do have, and I am. Here’s hoping 2023 turns things around some 🤞
    • I saw someone toot that their only New Year’s resolution every year is “Use your stickers”, and I liked that enough to try and actually adopt it as a resolution (I normally think they are dumb). In essence, stickers do nothing for no one when saved on a backing sheet; you should put them to use somewhere, and eat all those mince pies you’ve been hoarding while you’re at it. Use and enjoy your things while you can, mindfully.
    • My Hotels.com rewards were expiring and I was kinda planning to let them go unused. But they are stickers! So I redeemed them for a night’s stay at a boutique hotel in the Ann Siang/Amoy Street area, which gave us an opportunity to eat at Maxwell hawker center, visit a few cocktail bars (Native is excellent), and get away from things for a little while.
    • I spent more time playing Citizen Sleeper on the Switch and still recommend it. Minor spoiler: early on there is a sort of timer mechanic hanging over your head, that you can’t help but work towards negating as a main quest. It’s always there in the background of what you do, making you uncomfortable. Once you manage to clear it, though, the game becomes almost too leisurely. The issue is still there but your character can skill up enough that it’s not a threat, only a minor annoyance. I’m not finished yet, so maybe there’s more urgency around the corner.
    • My last book of the year was Gabrielle Zevin’s brilliant Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, which I finished in the final hour of 2022 (for a total of 13 books read). It’s so good, an easy five stars. I would give it six, even. In my world it would be mandatory reading for anyone born between 1975 and 1985, and strongly encouraged for the rest of you. Heartbreaking, beautiful, real, nostalgic, and ripe for TV adaptation.
    • We binged both seasons of The White Lotus at some point between this week and last. It’s the sort of show you can’t stop thinking about afterwards, but it’s also a little pretentious and heavy handed with its imagery (oh lord here comes another moonlit interstitial shot of waves).
    • Going through people’s best shows of ‘22 lists, I saw Hacks and Reservation Dogs being mentioned a lot and gave them a try. The latter’s first episode didn’t take, although I can see what they’re going for; it’s just too depressing. Whereas Hacks follows a proven buddy formula with laughs, and teases character development. It’s a nice change of pace from most of our recent serious viewing.

    ===

    I tried making some city-specific illustrations in Midjourney and was surprised (again) by how good and coherent they can be. They’re not entirely accurate but the vibes aren’t off — Singapore is a time warp of golden era post-war colonial architecture and vehicle design, “exotic” southeast Asian street activity, and modern skyscrapers.

    Singapore street scenes
    Paris
    Tokyo
    Brooklyn + Manhattan
    Nairobi

  • Week 50.22

    Our new cat continued to be ill, with a progression to some kind of feline flu or respiratory infection. She started sneezing quite a bit, so we took her to a vet who found her temperature a little high and her lymph nodes a little swollen. Add that to the existing stomach upset from last week and it’s all been quite a handful.

    ===

    We had some guests from Korea visit the workplace this week, and communicating was a novel challenge. They had been informed that chilli crab was the thing to eat in town, so we took them to Long Beach Seafood one night.

    If you’ve never been to a seafood/zichar restaurant as part of a big group, you need to know that ordering appropriately is an art form, best left to the most local, most food-obsessed person at the table. That ain’t me, but there was no one else in our group who could either, so I did my best. When in doubt, hit the top charts: black pepper and chilli crabs, fried mantous, salted fish fried rice, broccoli in oyster sauce, kailan, stir fried beef and peppers, cereal prawns (the most surprising and impressive dish for our guests), roast chicken/duck. I should have done a salted egg something but really it was more than enough.

    ===

    After I mentioned Jesse Malin’s new Christmas single a week or two ago, I’ve been listening to his first three albums and loving them all over again. While looking him up on social media to see what’s been happening, I then learnt that the 20th (!) anniversary of his debut album The Fine Art of Self Destruction is coming up next year AND he’s re-recorded the whole thing for a February release! So the two tracks on the new single are first looks at what the sessions sound like. Incredibly, his voice has barely changed in all this time but the new takes have a more introspective forlorn feel.

    There’s going to be a live performance of the whole album in New York next year on March 25, with special guests like Lucinda Williams, and for a brief moment I considered booking flights down just for that one event. If you never heard this album back in the day, I highly recommend it.

    I’ve been listening to Stormzy’s new album, This Is What I Mean, and loving it. Also the new Metro Boomin album, which I wasn’t really expecting to like.

    While dealing with my troubles over the past few weeks, I found myself humming the Charlie Chaplin song Smile, which I hadn’t thought about in years. And then one day at the office Jose was playing music out loud and it was unmistakably a new recording of Smile. I asked him what it was, and it’s a new record from the Ezra Collective called Where I’m Meant To Be.

    ===

    We finished The Peripheral on Amazon Prime Video and it’s uneven and frustrating in places, but I’ll take it. They nailed the casting of Lowbeer to my mind, and Chloe Grace Moretz is a fine fit for the role (does her peripheral need such bright red lipstick though?).

    Then we got onto Netflix’s new J-drama based on and named after Utada Hikaru’s classic song, First Love. And hey it doesn’t suck! It’s been very nice to get back into watching TV series again, after spending the last few weeks just on YouTube and a British daytime tv show called Four In A Bed, which is a very chill reality tv competition between bed and breakfast establishments. It follows the Come Dine With Me format where the contestants all visit and stay at each others’ establishments before passing judgment. There are 20 official full episodes on YouTube if you’d like.

    Got some game time in with Robotics;Note Elite on the Switch for a couple of evenings. I’m intending to pick up GameDec on sale too — it looks like a cyberpunk Disco Elysium (although I’m not expecting that level of brilliance to ever be repeated), also from an Eastern European developer. It’s about being a detective hired to solve mysteries in virtual worlds, in a future where I suppose many important life events take place in them. You know the word for this thing. Don’t say it.

  • Week 47.22

    My camera roll and expense tracker tell the story of a quiet week, mainly spent at home getting this cat to like me (I think it’s working) and not die by falling from the second floor or chewing electrical cables. She’s become more comfortable climbing up and down the stairs, and now joins us to watch TV in the living room without being forced.

    Achievements yet to be unlocked: switching her to occasional dry food, giving her a bath, clipping her nails, trimming the fur around her butt, sitting still in my lap for more than a few seconds, and trusting her enough to be left roaming the house at night.

    My Nintendo Switch profile tells the story of actually playing a game this week, completing Sifu at the Student difficulty level. I have not gotten the hang of parrying attacks and dodging combos, so I think my character was in his 40s when I beat the last boss. For those who haven’t seen it, it’s a cinematic martial arts game with a novel aging mechanic: each time your character dies, he/she is revived by a magic amulet that ages them by a year. So you can start the game in your 20s and finish as an old wizened kung-fu master in their 60s. Maybe even older! As you get older, your maximum health decreases but your attack strength increases, plus you unlock new skills along the way.

    My Goodreads profile (you get the point by now) attests to my also finding the time to read again, finishing John Scalzi’s Kaiju Preservation Society which was a fun little side quest — it had seemingly been described by its author as a pop song, a necessary gift of levity to the world, written during Covid and referencing it (it’s not about Covid). That brings me to 12 books in 2022, short of my overly ambitious goal of 24. It’s like I forgot I was going back to work this year or something.

    I spent more time in Mastodon this week as Twitter continued to burn. Musk’s comically shit handling of layoffs and code reviews that aren’t code reviews have been so absurd that there’s no more room for shows like Silicon Valley to parody it. Just like with The Onion and real news headlines these days. If science fiction imagines technological futures that we become compelled to realize, satire sends us towards irresistibly amusing hellscapes.

    In doing so, I decided that my original Mastodon identity (which used “brandon” as a user ID) wasn’t great for people looking to find me, so I’m now at @sangsara@mastodon.lol. It’s kinda dumb that you can’t change your user ID; I’m not sure if it’s a result of Mastodon’s federated model, having to support legacy links and all that. So the only way was to create a new account on a new server and “migrate” over. The migration process does NOT move your old posts, only your followers. If you want to follow the same people you did before, it’s an extra manual step of exporting and importing the database via a .csv file, and it’s not mentioned as part of the migration flow. I found out myself, after I had already manually re-followed everyone.

    This is what people mean when they say Mastodon’s a little rough around the edges, but what open source software isn’t anyway? As software, as a service, I like it a lot already. As a community, as a place where I can find the opinions and recommendations I want, it will take time. And the final, unmistakable collapse of Twitter. I don’t think a critical mass of people will choose to use both at the same time.

    My Apple Music listening history shows that I’ve enjoyed Fred again..’s latest installment in his Actual Life series. They are sort of mixtapes, except I’m not sure people in electronic music use that term? Anyway, Actual Life 3 (January 1 — September 9 2022) is great stuff; try it on your commute.

    It’s that time of the year again, but we’re getting some actually good Christmas projects. Brett Dennen has a Christmas EP! And Jesse Malin, another longtime favorite of mine, has also rerecorded two older songs to put out as a two-track single entitled Xmas, Etc. Alicia Keys’s Santa Baby looks promising, but I haven’t been in the mood yet. The holidays still feel so far away.

    However, Kim decided it wasn’t worth me waiting another month to get the new AirPods Pro as a gift I already knew about (nor worth her hearing me talk about them for another month), so Christmas came early! They’re actually a big improvement: the XS tip fits my problematic ear quite well, everything sounds both clearer and more fun, and the ANC is way more comfortable. I’ve never had a problem with the “pressure” that turns some people off noise canceling, but it’s so absent here thanks to the redesigned acoustic vents that… they feel open? It’s like how Transparency mode makes it feel like there’s nothing in your ears, but with silence.

    On Sunday afternoon we visited an exhibition organized by Leica Singapore at Gillman Barracks, featuring some extraordinary work including Nick Ut’s famous “Napalm Girl” shot from the Vietnam war. We had a chance to speak with Rosalynn Tay about her evocative travel photography which I really loved (if they were NFTs I would have bought them on sight) and will probably attend her talk next week. The exhibition is on until Nov 27, registration seems to be required.

    Caught this while having a beer on the way home

  • Week 37.22

    Big week for Splatoon enthusiasts: the new game finally dropped for the Nintendo Switch! But I’m… not actually a big Splatoon player. I just love the aesthetic and music and bonkers world it takes place in. I clocked about 10 hours in Splatoon 2, most of them losing to much better players, and it never became a habit.

    But that game came out five long years ago, and I wanted to see how Nintendo would squeeze the last dregs of performance out of their aging hardware with Splatoon 3. Initial reactions: loading times have been greatly improved and it kinda looks like a current-gen game, which I mean in the best way possible! It’s colorful and sharp and the action is very fluid — almost too fluid. I basically suck at this; there’s so much visual chaos with paint being thrown everywhere, plus your enemies can swim in the paint virtually invisibly. But I’m having fun anyway.

    ===

    Big week also for iPhone enthusiasts: what was expected to be just a camera-focused upgrade to the Pro model (that a strong enough person [not me] could shrug off and then go hibernate for another year), turned out to be a little more substantial. First up, I decided not to go with “Deep Purple”. It’s not really my favorite color + the “gray” model is called “Space Black” this year (it was actually “Graphite” last year), so I went with that. Apple usually reserves “Space Black” for things that are pretty much black, so I’m hopeful it’ll approach the iPhone 5’s yet-to-be-surpassed black and slate color scheme.

    The Dynamic Island is early adopter catnip; it changes the core everyday experience of interacting with an iPhone in the biggest way since the iPhone X introduced the Swipe Up Multitasking interaction model. How could you not want to play with that? Like everyone else who read the last-minute leaks that the new sensor cutouts would be visibly “joined with software” into one solid black area, I took that at face value: they don’t want a distracting dot and oval visible all the time, so they’d make it one solid black entity. I didn’t think about you could do something interesting by embracing that concept. The little announcement video that shows the island morphing to become a secondary Dock of sorts sold me instantly.

    Some people on Twitter think the animations are superfluous and will get annoying after the first few times, and while I agree, they’re kinda delightful and novel now and will probably be turned down over the next few years of iOS releases. Like most of iOS 7’s jarring and annoying changes!

    Oh, I also ordered a new watch from the Series 8 lineup. It’s one of the smallest hardware updates ever, with hardly anything new except a new temperature sensor and accelerometer, but I’ve been on my current model for four years and even having an always-on display is going to feel like a big upgrade.

    AirPods? I’m err… content with my current ones. Or at least content enough to not pay full price for improved noise cancelling. I can wait for the eventual price drop on Shopee maybe six months from now. Fortunately, the new Personalized Spatial Audio feature doesn’t actually require new AirPods. After upgrading to iOS 16, you’ll be able to scan your ears and use the personalized profile with older AirPods. I installed the iOS RC on my phone this weekend to try it out a few days early, and it’s definitely made a difference to the feeling of immersion with head tracking on.

    ===

    Kim got back from her work trip, and we got started on Season 2 of For All Mankind, which is such a good series I don’t recall why we put it off for so long. We also saw Nope, and while most people I know loved it, and I get what it’s doing and some of that was very much appreciated, I just couldn’t give it more than three stars on Letterboxd. It’s essentially a two-hour build up to a Jaws joke. With that, Jordan Peele’s batting average with me is 1/3. I was talking to a film buff about it, and was drawing comparisons to Shyamalan’s work: how he showed almost his whole hand with his first film, and then spent the next few struggling to break free of expectations and his own language, which was really a well-practiced, keen sense of cinematic tradition more than the Twists. He films the way Bumblebee talks in the Michael Bay films: in pastiche, homage, and remixes. Which I happen to Really Like, by the way. Nope is Peele’s Signs. There’s even a scene where a slow, freaky motion by an object you can’t quite make out sends a chill down your spine, just like the first time you see the thing in Signs. Anyway, the other guy thought I was talking about Peele, not Shyamalan, and agreed. So I guess there really is something in that comparison.

    ===

    In between meetings one afternoon, I found myself near where I keep my always-growing Monocle backlog (I subscribe but ever hardly read) and flipped through an issue from last year. I’m confident I’ll clear the pile soon. Whilst reading about Veja sneakers and the 10th anniversary of their Monocle 24 radio station, I realized it’s been awhile since I tuned in.

    And thus I discovered Enfance 80, an instant classic of a song from 2020 by the French electronic duo, Videoclub. I don’t exactly know what they’re saying, but it’s something nostalgic about childhood in the 80s, and by god does the sound nail that vibe (as remembered in the 2020s).

    The other song that I’ve had on heavy rotation this week is Paul McCartney’s The Kiss of Venus, both his original and Dominic Fike’s reworking of it. The base melody is super pretty, which Fike dials up with Beatle-esque organ parts, but it’s his addition of a funky new bass line and electric energy in the chorus that are pure bliss. And like all great songs, it ends far too soon.

    I also heard Santigold’s new album, Spirituals, once through and really liked it.

    Here’s one MidJourney artwork inspired by a song and a couple more I made this week.

    The Kiss of Venus, co-created with MidJourney