sangsara.net

Tag: Television

  • Week 45.25

    Week 45.25

    I spoke too soon. Jinxed it. Stupidly counted my chicks. By which I mean I had another vertigo episode out of nowhere after thinking I was safe. It came just from tilting my head down to look at something, and suddenly it felt like the floor fell out from under me. I immediately put my head back, and it only lasted like half a minute, but it was enough to burst my bubble of security that maybe the earlier incident was a one-off.

    According to the online literature, recurrences are common with BPPV, and it’s just something you have to learn to live with and manage. Some lingering unsteadiness followed for the next couple of days, which is annoying but survivable. I’m mostly worried that I’ll get a bad case of it on a plane at some point, because pressure changes can apparently trigger it.

    PSA if you also have this: it seems people with vitamin D deficiencies are more susceptible. So I’m going to be more religious about taking supplements and see if that helps.

    ===

    For the second time in two weeks, I decided to break my weekday lunch routine by going further out to a Sushiro, followed by a little cafe reading time. Eating alone in a walled-off solo dining booth sounds sad and lonely but is surprisingly cozy; just ask Japan.

    Later, I came across a Reddit thread discussing local restaurants and when Sushiro came up, someone replied “if you’re in Bangkok, try it there — it’s a world of difference in quality, price, and size.” Well then! That’s something I’ll be in a position to verify next week because I’m actually going to be in Bangkok for several days (hence the airplane vertigo worries, pray for me).

    My itinerary as a traveling husband is still quite open — while Kim’s at work I’m planning to check out this new mall with a rooftop park, visit some exhibitions, and watch Predator: Badlands in a cinema superior to anything we have in Singapore. And depending on how I feel, maybe even stay in with my iPad and enjoy the very nice hotel for a bit.

    ===

    Speaking of touchscreen devices, I’ve been waiting for the full reveal of the Anbernic DS handheld emulation console, and now that it’s up for pre-order, my excitement has been considerably reduced. Enthusiasts online have been disappointed by the choice of a weak processor which, when paired with an Android OS, means it’ll struggle to run any 3DS games and maybe even some DS games. I’m not up to speed on DS emulation, but I’ll take their word for it that things could be much better here.

    The original DS Lite was my favorite handheld of all time because of its minimal clamshell design, which also housed its tiny stylus. The Anbernic DS does not include that critical feature. What’s the point of recreating the DS if you have a separate, chunky stylus to carry about and lose?

    Anbernic has also earned a reputation for releasing improved variants shortly after launching new products. So I’m hoping we’ll see a faster, more polished version out in six months. Wake me up when that comes out.

    ===

    Media activity:

    • I’m reading Wraith, which is Book 1 in the Convergence War series. It’s shaping up to be a fun if not-so-elegant “assemble a team and go on a big space adventure” action story. I’d recommend it if you’re looking for a palate cleanser in between more challenging fare.
    • I started watching the popular Apothecary Diaries anime series that Netflix has been aggressively pushing, and it’s not bad! Essentially a medical procedural set in ancient China, with other dramatic hooks like a super-competent main character who wants to stay invisible but can’t help stepping in to fix things, plus royal court politics.
    • After watching The Woman in Cabin 10 last week, we looked for more murder stories on boats and started on Death and Other Details (a murder on a cruise ship) before finding out it was canceled after one season. Still, it’s been okay and stars Mandy Patinkin as the detective.
    • If you’d asked me about Death and Other Details a few days ago, I might have said it was “pretty good”. But after watching the first two episodes of Apple TV’s new tentpole series, Pluribus, the bar is now insanely high. Don’t read anything about it, not even Hideo Kojima’s reaction tweet, just go straight into watching it on the nicest screen you can find. Based on what I’ve seen so far, this is looking like the kind of show I’ll think about long after it’s over.
  • Week 43.25

    Week 43.25

    Vertigo (1958) is a great film, because Hitchcock was a master. It’s also the title of a mediocre stadium rock song, because I love hating on U2.

    Unfortunately, vertigo is also something I experienced for the first time this week — I’m fairly sure I jinxed myself at some point earlier this year by saying out loud “I don’t have any problems”. It hit me on Friday night in the form of extreme dizziness and nausea, and even the walk to bed to sleep it off was difficult without support. It got better the next morning with the help of something called the Epley Maneuver, which I found online.

    Asking around, I discovered that this is a more common human experience than you’d think, with several people I know having suffered episodes. Some of them had dizziness lasting days, and yet it’s strangely not discussed like, all the time? From what I can tell, it’s probably something called benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV), where calcium deposits in your inner ear become dislodged and move around, screwing with your balance. I’ll be seeing a doctor next week to confirm it, but in any case there’s no known cure and it might keep happening for the rest of my life. It’s crazy that so many are just quietly living with this.

    Have I been self-diagnosing with the help of AI? Maybe? I did just sign up for Claude Pro after all, which I’ve mentioned finding more agreeable than ChatGPT. I made vibe-coded two little apps before being laid low: a primitive prototype of my long-gestating stealth game, Cat Creeper, and a tool for my book club to figure out how many chapters of any given book we should read in the coming week. That one is called Book Splitter, and I offer it here for any book clubs out there with a similar need to figure out stopping points conveniently near chapter breaks.

    It’s been a unique experience using Claude’s impressive capabilities alongside reading Asimov’s I, Robot, which foresaw many of our modern discourse around AI safety, and The Optimist at the same time, which has finally begun to chronicle some of Sam Altman’s questionable and unethical moves both at OpenAI and in his private life. The sections detailing his gaslighty, ungenerous, and cruel interactions with his sister Annie ironically reminded me of reading about Steve Jobs’s treatment of his daughter Lisa, in her memoir Small Fry.

    I just passed the part where Dario Amodei and other employees left to start Anthropic. Just as I try to avoid Meta and Google products because of their comparatively weaker stance on privacy versus Apple, it makes sense that some prefer Anthropic over OpenAI for a more cautious approach to AI.

    ===

    My mother-in-law stayed with us this week, which meant getting the newspaper in for her because that’s how some people still get their news. I was shocked to see how thin the physical Straits Times is these days — almost completely devoid of advertising, and on the whole maybe having 20% of the heft I remember from the 90s. It’s also S$1.10 now, up from the 50 to 80 cents I thought it was. Still, it was kinda nice (nostalgic) to sit at the dining table and read the paper in the morning.

    It was also the week where my favorite retro-game-hunting IRL streamer, 4amlaundry, went on a 5-day trip to Kansai, checking out thrift stores and exploring Osaka and Nara. I didn’t want to miss watching it live, so I tried explaining the whole concept of streamers to said mother-in-law, and got her to watch him with me for awhile on the TV, the whole time silently praying that he wouldn’t go look at the display cases of half-naked anime figurines that he sometimes checks out in those stores.

    Thankfully, that didn’t happen, and instead we watched him walk down countryside roads, eat at chain restaurants, and get knocked down by the aggressive deer in Nara. All of that made for some good conversation, so if you get the chance to introduce an elder to Twitch, it’s not the worst idea if you can avoid the NSFW aspects.

    Speaking of shows that you would hope won’t be awkward to watch with your parents or in-laws BUT ACTUALLY ARE, add the latest season of The Diplomat to the list. There’s a lot of cursing (I kinda expected that), and some sex scenes that maybe the producers thought were hot and their audience wanted, but are so unnecessary and desperate that they come across as unintentional comedy. Apart from that, it’s still a fun series that leans into unrealistic political drama, with some unexpectedly good writing (for a Netflix show). Just watch it on your own.

    ===

    I somehow forgot to mention the slate of new Apple products announced last week: M5-powered iPad Pros, a 14” basic MacBook Pro, and a spec-bumped Apple Vision Pro. The product lineup is designed to lead you to the conclusion that you should buy everything, because how do you choose between an 11” and 13” iPad Pro, and a 14” MacBook Pro?

    The 11” iPad size is portable for couch use, but the 13” becomes an advanced desk computer for creative work when paired with the Magic Keyboard and Pencil Pro. But if you’re going to be using it while deskbound, why not get a MacBook Pro with 24 hours of battery life (versus just 10 on the iPad), and the possibility of running local AI models and all kinds of other software that isn’t allowed on iPad?

    Making things harder is the fact that a 13” iPad Pro with accessories costs more than an “equivalent” 14” MacBook Pro, and they’re too costly for an average user like me to justify buying both. So the final decision was to hold out a little longer with my current M1-generation gear, and see what upgrades the 13” iPad Air gets next year — hopefully an M4 or M5 processor, ProMotion, and the aluminum Magic Keyboard currently exclusive to iPad Pro models.

    But bringing the M5 to the Apple Vision Pro makes it a better system to use and own for the next two years, while we wait for the next big leap forward in miniaturization. However as a casual user who only clocks a few hours a week, I couldn’t see myself upgrading for a faster chip alone. The more compelling improvement is a new “Dual Knit Band” that comes as standard, which sorta combines the previous Solo Knit Band and Dual Loop Band into one much-improved design.

    The best part is that this new band is also available as a standalone accessory, so I ordered one immediately for my first-gen AVP. It’s simply a marvel of engineering and feels incredibly premium. The build quality is off the charts, and the Fit Dial they’ve created to independently adjust both the back and top straps might be the most Apple-y thing they’ve shipped on an accessory since the Stainless Link Bracelet for the original Apple Watch.

    Thanks to this more comfortable and ergonomic band, I’d planned to spend more time with the AVP this week, until the vertigo and unusual weekly routine got in the way. Not gonna lie, my first thought during the vertigo attack, after “What if this never goes away and I’m disabled for life?” was “Does this mean I can’t use the Vision Pro anymore?”

  • Week 33.25

    Week 33.25

    • I had some ice cream at last, but no beers yet. Maybe I’ll stretch this sobriety a little longer. Alcohol is, after all, just a poison worth doing socially but not so much alone.
    • But man, this illness. Being sick for three consecutive weeks was not on my bingo card for the year. I should say illnesses, because we saw a doctor early in the week and she said (and these are the words every INTJ raised on WebMD loves to hear), “I think you’ve correctly diagnosed yourself — this seems like two separate illnesses one after the other, rather than a viral infection that became a bacterial one.” So, just bad luck and weak immunity on my part.
    • Fortunately, it’s just about over. Only a mild cough remains for both of us, but still bad enough that we slept in separate rooms for most of the week. It wasn’t a perfect solution; we still woke ourselves up coughing in the middle of each night.
    • I’m reminded at such times to stop whining and be grateful for minor health issues. Our part-time cleaner just returned from a rather invasive surgery to remove two large fibroids growing on her uterus. It’s been a multi-month ordeal navigating hospitals and insurance companies. I tried to help with some internet research and reassurance, and was glad to see her back to (light) work this week.
    • To get me nutritionally through the sick days, I bought quite a few bananas and unlocked a new breakfast item: peanut butter and banana sandwiches. The PB acts like a glue that keeps the slices from falling out. Gastro engineering! It’s basically a fat handheld dessert in the morning, and maybe I could kick it up a notch with whipped cream?
    • On the video gaming front, I managed to start Shin-chan: Me and the Professor on Summer Vacation on the Switch. I’ve been wanting to get into this for several years — recreating the small countryside childhood I never had. It reminds me of Attack of the Friday Monsters! on the 3DS, not surprising since they were both designed by Kaz Ayabe. He must really miss his summer holidays because he’s also the director of Natsu-Mon: 20th Century Summer Kid, which is pretty much the same concept: catching bugs, fishing, exploring nature, making friends. I’ve err… also bought that game, but might not get to it this year.
    • Guiltily, I’m actually kinda dying to play another game that just came out, despite just starting on this one. Damn my infernal backlog! That game is Tiny Bookshop, an indie title that’s shot to the top of the eShop charts, beating Nintendo’s own Super Mario Party Jamboree! It is what it sounds like, a cozy game where you manage a tiny mobile bookshop. You decorate it, stock titles, and recommend books to passing townsfolk. I can’t believe no one made this game sooner because the premise is obviously gold. Moreover, it appears to have some beautiful locations for you to set up shop in, in the vein of ‘lo-fi beats YouTube video scenery’, so I assume you can just kind of chill in the game and listen to the waves while admiring your little caravan.
    • Ballard on Amazon Prime Video turned out to be a perfectly fine series on its own, with a different tone and a kookier cast than the mainline Bosch show that it’s spun off from. I can’t complain, especially because Titus Welliver shows up now and then to reinforce ties. I don’t know how old Renee Ballard is supposed to be though. She’s living with her grandmother, who looks 70 at most, but Maggie Q is 46.
    • We started on season 2 of Poker Face and I’m loving it. I would have been fine if they’d kept the same episodic format of Charlie on the run and solving crimes from 30 minutes in for the entire show, but they’ve decided to switch things up a bit. Still works. Still a brilliant platform for insane and creative stories with a rotating list of guest stars: John Mulaney, Giancarlo Esposito, Rhea Perlman, Katie Holmes?!
    • I installed the new beta OSes on my iPad Pro and Apple TV 4K and can report they are solid enough at this point. Not enough to risk my iPhone or Mac, though. The Liquid Glass effect is still a little confused. Sometimes a button will be darkened to stand out against what’s behind it, but upon being clicked, it flashes and changes to the brighter style to match some new frosted glass items that appear. It just seems to have to morph and adapt a little too much to be used for UI items that ought to be stable. But maybe that way of thinking is just old fashioned now.
    • Next to be updated will be my Vision Pro. I’m really curious how the glass elements will react to light and real world environments as you move them around in space. My Persona is also horribly outdated and I’m feeling the peer pressure to upgrade to the new, detailed ones — nearly everyone in my book club already has a proper face on and mine still looks like the Lawnmower Man.

    ChatGPT’s closing words for the week: Funny how even illness turns into iteration — new foods, new games, new software skins. Maybe we’re all just beta versions trying to get stable.

  • Week 32.25

    Week 32.25

    I was 95% recovered last week. But I must have come into contact with a new virus on the plane because I got sick again, and spent this week in an ever-evolving state of misery.

    At first it was just mild chills and fatigue, then came a pretty congested cough, blocked sinuses, and conjunctivitis. The cough is the worst part because it keeps me up at night, and according to my sleep stats, I’ve gotten zero deep sleep on some nights, which makes recovery that much harder.

    Too wiped out for books or games, I’ve been grazing Netflix for watchable junk: a crappy Japanese murder investigation drama called Unnatural, starring Satomi Ishihara; and half the second season of Shoshimin: How to Become Ordinary. We also finished watching the ITV series Red Eye, which is a mediocre production carried by one of my favorite setups: intrigue on an international flight.

    We also sick-binged the entire season of Stick, on Apple TV+, starring Owen Wilson as a has-been golf pro who mentors a young kid with incredible potential. It’s a feel-good sports comedy thing with some solid needle drops and more heart than I expected. Some of it shouldn’t work as written, but Wilson’s trademark delivery and guileless charm lands each one neatly on the green.

    Hopefully next week will see the back of this prolonged summer flu spell, because I’m kinda dying to get back to ice cream and beers!

  • Week 30.25

    Week 30.25

    • In Melbourne at the moment, getting some relief from the heat of summer which seems to be getting worse with every year for no reason anyone can see at all! There’s no plan, just chilling at cafes, bars, and hanging with some friends for a few days.
    • Our friends in the city have built an incredible home for their three kids, rabbits, chickens, and visiting mothers-in-law. And for now, us as well. It’s the sort of setup that you can almost never find in Singapore, not without incurring generational debt, and it almost justifies all the dreaming Singaporeans do over a retirement in Australia. Almost. Because those people are surely forgetting to consider one crucial detail: hairy spiders the size of your hand.
    • I’ve brought no camera besides my iPhone. I’ve got my Kobo and iPad to read and draw, but left the Switch 2 at home. It feels nice having less stuff to keep track of, and I never understood the attraction of playing video games on holiday anyway. Why would you escape reality only to… escape reality again?
    • Before leaving, I met Brian for beer and ramen — the former at an Irish pub in Singapore that was entirely populated with middle-aged white men when I walked in. When the bartender told the waiter who to send the pints of Guinness to, I heard him call me “the Chinese man”, which is a description that would normally never help you in Singapore. 
    • We talked a bit about Bosch because I’d recommended the Amazon TV series to him awhile back and he’s now enjoyed all seven seasons of the mainline show. He did, however, notice that season 7 felt a little different (I personally can’t remember), and found out that some network suits came in at that time and tried to make changes to the show. Right after, the series moved to the Freevee channel and became Bosch Legacy, where the vibes became noticeably different again and the supporting cast changed. I still love them all though.
    • And now there’s a new 10-episode Bosch spinoff series, Ballard, starring Maggie Q. I’ve yet to start on it, and while I want it to be good in the same ‘LA Noir’ way that Bosch was, I gotta be realistic and prepare for a load of network exec bullshit.
    • On the flight over, I finished reading Old Man’s War, a very entertaining John Scalzi sci-fi novel about signing up for an intergalactic war at the age of 75; read Blake Crouch’s Summer Frost, a solid short story about AI that could easily become a film; skimmed the popular financial self-help book Die With Zero; and started on Nick Harkaway’s Tigerman without knowing a thing about it but it’s already going well.
    • Without any in-flight entertainment on the budget flight, I mainly listened to the excellent 1998 Counting Crows live double album [Across A Wire — Live From New York](https://music.apple.com/sg/album/across-a-wire-live-from-new-york/1440858296). It’s still as good as it was when I was younger, [but I would say that](Why our teenage music listening has a life-long impact – BBC Teach), wouldn’t I?
  • Week 27.25

    Week 27.25

    • It’s getting hot down here, and reluctant as I am to use air-conditioning during the day while just sitting indoors, I’ve had to have it on in short spurts to bring the temperature down at times. Depending on the fates, I might be off to Bangkok again next week, where the heat’s reportedly even more brutal. Let’s see.
    • It was Apple Music’s 10th anniversary, and they’re doing some things like opening a new studio in LA, releasing a Top 500 list of the most-streamed songs, and — this one I especially enjoyed — a two-hour show with Zane Lowe and Ebro Darden, founding DJs of the Beats 1 (now Apple Music 1) radio station. It’s mostly Zane reflecting on their experience and telling behind-the-scenes stories from the frantic early days, backed by some all-time great tunes. For example, how they had just three months to find studio spaces around the world and go live, how the first song to be played on-air was chosen, and how the difficulty of recruiting DJs led to them having artists host their own shows (the best things usually start as hacks).
    • The show reminded me why I still love Apple Music, flaws and all: it’s here for the culture. It’s the one streaming service where passion for music is clearly evident, and it comes from the people helming the shows, both the DJs and the artists as mentioned, like Elton John, FKA twigs, Anderson .Paak, Jamie xx, and The Weeknd, to name a few. Shows and playlists put together by artists are such a cool (and obvious!) way to connect with fans, it’s hard to believe they weren’t really a thing before Apple Music.
    • I remember exactly where I was (Reykjavik) the day Apple Music launched, and how absolutely furious I was that the Beats 1 radio station wasn’t available in Singapore. It’s just goddamn internet radio, so why!? It was only after a year that it finally launched for us. I never found out the reason, but I assumed censorship and broadcast licensing hoops had to be jumped through, and welp I guess that’s the cost of being Singaporean. Still, I switched over from Spotify on day one and haven’t looked back. While looking through the archives, I found this post in 2014 before the acquisition, where I was pretty sure Apple would keep the Beats brand on their headphones but turn Beats Music into the backend of an “iTunes Unlimited” service. I sorta called it.
    • A Japanese mobile game I’ve been waiting for had its global launch on July 3: Persona 5 X (P5X). When you hear that, you might expect a gacha-based Persona 5 spinoff, based on some crappy mobile game squad battle mechanics. So I was surprised by how close it is to an actual Persona game, despite the necessary gacha and mobile elements. The graphics look and feel so close to the mainline titles that I’m convinced they could port them to iPhone if they wanted. However it’s mostly a solo adventure game, and I would love to see a different, massively multiplayer social game design uniting the world to fight shadows in the “metaverse” (don’t blame me, it’s the actual term they use).
    • However, the Japanese mobile game recently launched globally in English that’s been blowing up on my timeline is Umamusume: Pretty Derby, which is a horse racing game based on actual legendary champion horses, except they’re personified as idol girls who perform in full-blown concerts after winning. I’ve downloaded it for kicks, but I think it’s a neigh for me.
    • I came across a new drawing app for iPhone/iPad called Graintouch, and instantly bought it for S$15 after seeing its lovely Risograph aesthetics (a sort of Japanese photocopier from the 80s). It’s wonderfully minimal, to the point of restricting you to just 18 predefined colors, and simulates the look of paper prints. You can even hit a “misalignment” button that offsets the layers at random. It’s a welcome change from the overly powerful Procreate, which makes me feel like a learner driver at the wheel of a Ferrari.
    • I decided I might use this for the drawings I’d planned on doing, and started doodling around to get a feel for it. The result is a bunch of silly characters with googly eyes, and I kinda like them! Maybe I’ll do more and try to improve them.
    “Valentine”
    • I took my parents out to see F1 The Movie in a cinema, and found that senior citizens only pay S$5 per ticket on weekdays. If I had that benefit, I’d see every movie. Anyway, the film was great, and I say that as someone who doesn’t give a damn about F1 (my dad, on the other hand, is a total fanatic who watches every season). Apple did the right thing putting this out in theaters properly before streaming; it really deserves the big screen and too-loud speakers. An incredible popcorn movie, so good that for two hours you’ll find Brad Pitt likable despite everything we’ve heard about how he’s fallen out with his kids and maybe isn’t such a great guy. 4.5 / 5 stars.
    • We binged Season 4 of The Bear over the weekend. It made me wonder if there really are people out there like these characters, raised in so much chaos that their primary mode of communication is shouting and clashing with increasing intensity. I love watching it happen in 30-minute bouts, but by god it’s tiring. Overall, I think this was a slightly stronger season than the last one, and while I still love the directors swinging for the fences with concept episodes, they are becoming a little too expected. The best thing they could do in Season 5 would be to subvert those expectations and deliver a full-heartedly commercial happy ending.
  • Week 18.25

    Week 18.25

    • In an effort to extend my financial prudence, I downgraded our Netflix plan to the lowest level (from Standard to Basic) but before the change even kicked in, they raised its price from S$14 to S$16. Everyone online seems pissed about these latest hikes but I’m sure very few will actually cancel. The Basic plan is limited to 720p (“HD” instead of 1080p’s “Full HD”), but the Apple TV 4K box does a pretty okay job at upscaling it so while the picture is noticeably softer, it’s not actually terrible, at least not for watching the crappy fare on Netflix anyway. I expected the Sony Bravia TV with its “Cognitive XR Processor” to do a better job upscaling but it doesn’t!
    • I also felt much better about not giving into the urge to buy a Snoopy camera last week, thanks to this PetaPixel review of the new Yashica City 100 “scamera”. It confirms what I’d suspected, that Yashica is now nothing more than a nostalgia brand owned by a soulless holding company that slaps it onto OEM Chinese junk for a quick buck. That pretty much applies to any legacy CE brand like Polaroid, RCA, Nakamichi, or Toshiba. I briefly handled the Hello Kitty version of the same Snoopy Yashica camera in a Japanese electronics store in February and found it more or less what you’d expect a $100 camera to feel like, and probably the only acceptable reason to buy one is if a very small, phoneless child needs a camera that no one will mind losing.
    • After doing an annual report of my finances last week in Numbers, I decided to ask various AI tools to read the last year of updates on this blog and tell me what I’ve been up to in the form of trends or insights that I might not be aware of myself. A qualitative annual report of the sabbatical soul, if you will.
    • Microsoft Copilot surprised me, doing better than DeepSeek and ChatGPT by surfacing some events that I’d forgotten about, calling my life a “deliberate, well-curated blend of sensory and intellectual pursuits.” I challenged it by asking if that was just a kind framing of someone wasting time without doing any ‘meaningful work’, and it acted as my enabler with statements like, “you’re starting to honor your intrinsic motivations—the subtle joys, the unexpected moments of creativity, and the experiences that forge your unique narrative. In a way, this period of introspection, though it might seem like “wasted time” from one perspective, is actually a profound investment in self-discovery.”
    • That sounds awfully waffly, but to be fair, we had a good conversation about what meaning looks like when your values are in a state of flux, and then it offered a novel observation: the Numbers exercise and this blog review, as acts of going over collected data to synthesize meaning and review progress, are simply me “doing ethnographic studies of my own life”, which suggests I’m still doing the work, just for a different client (me).
    • Singapore voted, and the result was the People’s Action Party staying in power with 65.5% of the popular vote (I guessed this exactly in a group chat, down to the decimal point). I was disappointed to see the independent candidate for Mountbatten, Jeremy Tan, ‘only’ get 37% or so of the vote — an incredible result for an independent, but still short of a victory. That’s a shame, because he had some interesting policy positions and is the only local politician I’ve ever heard talking about Bitcoin as a consideration for the future. It’s a monetary development we could be discussing in public, without outdated FUD like calling it ‘gambling’, ‘not backed by anything’, and so on.
    • It’s a good thing I have free time, because an old GarageBand file decided to split itself into 38,000 zero-byte files and clogged up my iCloud Drive. Trying to delete them from a synced Mac and empty the Recycle Bin was extremely painful, as the device tried to download each one first; you’d think syncing a zero-byte file would be instantaneous, but you’d be wrong about how iCloud Drive works. I had to manually kill the Finder several times and resume the entire process, clicking “Continue” every few minutes in a dialog box. 10 hours later, I had successfully deleted nothing. A person less technical than me would have thought it was broken and lugged the thing down to a Genius Bar.

    ===

    Palate cleansing photo break!

    ===

    Some recent thoughts on AI

    I crept onto LinkedIn out of curiosity to see what was happening in that backslapping cesspool of thought leadership and saw a post about generative AI and creativity from someone I genuinely respect. They talked about being asked to make up unique bedtime stories for their kid each night (incidentally, a similar ritual was the genesis of Guy Immega’s sci-fi novel, Super Earth Mother, which I enjoyed last year, as told to my book club when the author dropped in for a chat), and how although it was tiring at times, it was worthwhile in a way that indicated creativity would always be a domain that humans stay involved in and not completely outsource to AI.

    I wanted to leave a comment, but 1) hadn’t really thought enough about it, and 2) didn’t want to add neither signal nor noise to that platform.

    Later on, I scribbled the following in my Notes app.

    Creativity is fun. In a capitalist world, making money with creativity is even more fun. And I think this is where our wires have become crossed: getting a new tool to spit out artwork/content that someone usually pays for feels like discovering a vending machine for cash. That’s clearly what business owners see when they look at AI — a vending machine for infinite workers — but the conflicted horror that creative professionals experience is unique. On one hand, excitement that it works and an inkling it can be used to do either more or better work (more profit); and on the other hand, despair as they realize the market value of all work stands to be destroyed by infinite supply.

    But if you remove making money from the equation, I’m sure 100% of creative people would still rather do all the making themselves than let an AI do it. People are always gonna draw, tell stories, and record moments because it’s just fun. It’s only the market that’s disappearing, not the joy of creating. Outside of companies generating assets to use in actual business, I believe individuals playing with AI today aren’t engaged in creation — it’s consumption! I might ask my poetry GPT for a poem about a sentient toilet, not because I want to write one, but because I want to read one and nobody has done it yet. It doesn’t displace the desire to create, it just dispenses empty, throwaway satisfaction on demand. Unfortunately, that describes the majority of entertainment. The ‘Basic’ kind you can safely watch in 720p for half the money. Art is not in danger, only the day jobs of artists.

    Edit: I forgot about the use of generative AI to create scammy/spammy and otherwise harmful content.

    ===

    Media activity

    • Lorde announced her new album, Virgin, coming June 27, and I’m super excited for it. No Jack Antonoff credits in sight, this one’s all her and Jim-E Stack, and from the sounds of the first single, it’s the essence of her old Pure Heroine/Melodrama sound refined with a more minimal and electronic approach.
    • We saw the new MCU movie, Thunderbolts*, at a premiere screening, the first one I’ve seen in a theater in many years. I’ve actually missed the last few Marvel outings out of sheer fatigue and the realization that they actively bore me now. I tried to remember the excitement we all had for comic book movies when they were rarities; that euphoria that our interests were finally going mainstream, our culture was being brought to life on the big screen. Congrats guys, it’s now so mainstream it hurts.
    • On the lookout for a low stakes network TV show with tons of episodes that I could watch any time I have an hour to kill, I decided to try the pilot for Suits and hey it was fun! Now I know who Meghan Markle is. I don’t know why I never gave it a go before, probably because I’m allergic to that word in all its forms: the clothes, the jobs, the people.
    • I read the hit Japanese novel, Before the Coffee Gets Cold, which has spawned numerous sequels now and dominates the bookstore charts locally, and was completely underwhelmed. It’s the literary equivalent of a cheap Netflix drama. 2 stars.
    • I also read the third Murderbot book, Rogue Protocol, and this was probably the weakest one yet. I’m still excited for the show based on the first book, debuting on Apple TV+ this May 16. This book just had the kind of claustrophobic setting you dread encountering in a first-person video game. You know the cave and sewer levels I’m talking about. It felt like a necessary interstitial story to get us to the next one, which promises an event that many readers would have been waiting for since the end of the first book. 3 stars.
  • Week 16.25

    Week 16.25

    • After spending more time experimenting with ChatGPT’s latest capabilities — refining my poetry-writing prompts, especially with the supposedly more creative GPT-4.5 model; testing how well it could profile and target me with product advertising using its consolidated ‘Memory’ of our chats (the answer is ‘too well’, and it was even able to guess my SAT scores from decades ago); inferring people’s personalities from their appearances (maybe the most unnerving ability); more image generation; and coming up with a plausible prediction of how our upcoming general elections will turn out — I decided that I’m sufficiently caught up with most of the AI stuff I missed, and have canceled my Plus subscription for the time being. I remain concerned about the risks of OpenAI and other companies providing such powerful and habit-forming surveillance tools, but I can see there’s no stopping this train.
    • Yes, the date of Singapore’s next national elections was announced this week. Saturday, May 3rd, is when we’ll be going to the polls. Some people expressed surprise at how little notice we’re being given, but it might be the Mandela Effect at work because I think this is how it is every time.
    • I finished reading Reacher book #25, The Sentinel, and it was a rather weak entry I don’t think Amazon will be adapting to TV. This leaves me with about two or three more books to go before I run out, so I think I’ll stop here for a few months at least.
    • My book club is now reading the first book in ‘The Murderbot Diaries’ series, entitled All Systems Red, which I’d already read a few weeks back because Brian said 1) I would like it, and 2) the character reminded him of me (old-school profiling). I wasn’t sure I saw the resemblance, so I asked ChatGPT for its “opinion” and got strong agreement: Murderbot’s entire character is basically what happens when someone with high intelligence, ultra-sharp pattern recognition, zero patience for social performance, a deep, low-key emotional life, and an obsessive need for autonomy …is forced to interact with an inefficient, irrational world full of emotionally needy humans and corporate bureaucracy. Sound familiar?
    • Like I said, profiling people across hundreds of different conversations, questions, tasks, and confessions is really creepy tech.
    • Speaking of Brian, we went out for a drink and ended up eating at Five Guys. I haven’t been in a long time, and at the risk of sounding like an old man who hasn’t gone into the city since 2016, the prices were kinda shocking? $20 for a cheeseburger, fries for like another $10 if you want them, and $6 for a refillable soft drink. Jesus wept into greaseproof paper.
    • But anyway, since I have some time off from mandatory book club readings, I went back to give Lyn Alden’s Broken Money another try. I started this giant tome over a year ago but found myself unable to focus and get excited about the history of debt and the workings of the American economy. But wait long enough, and like a broken clock, any book will become topically relevant. It might be that I’m in the right headspace now. Or the hundreds of hours of Bloomberg TV I’ve watched since have given me the landmarks needed to make sense of it. But this time I’m finding it much easier to stay on the horse and should be done with it soon.
    • After finishing I Parry Everything, I tried to find other anime with a similar premise but both —deep inhale— Failure Frame: I Became the Strongest and Annihilated Everything with Low-Level Spells and Chillin’ in Another World with Level 2 Super Cheat Powers did not nail the comedy/power tension as well as I Parry Everything.
    • We watched Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag, and it was an excellent low-key, nearly chamber drama of a spy flick. I say ‘we’ but Kim fell asleep near the end through no fault of the film and will have to catch up later. It’s evident that Michael Fassbender could have been a great Bond if he’d been cast a decade ago and aged into it.
    • Let’s end with some music. While asking ChatGPT to guess my Enneagram type, Big Five personality traits, IQ, SATs, primary school exam results, and other traits, it offered to make a playlist that would represent me. Not a playlist of songs that I would like, mind you, but a playlist as representation, as metaphor. I took its suggestions and assembled the songs in Apple Music, including cover art it made, and played it out loud on the HomePod. Earlier gen AI chatbots would just chuck songs together without any sign of understanding that a playlist should flow, but this one works so well that I’m not sure it’s coincidental. It’s also music that I wouldn’t have chosen myself, but I enjoyed it without qualifications. Here it is if you’d like “an ambient-leaning, melancholy-smart, emotionally layered playlist. Meant for headphones, twilight hours, and slow revelations.” The first track is a little challenging for a cold start imo, then it gets good.