sangsara.net

Tag: Television

  • Week 16.26

    Week 16.26

    We attended my aunt’s funeral on Tuesday. My complaints about the Mandai Crematorium mostly still stand, but they’ve at least moved the ugly signs printed on office paper away from the viewing windows so you can see the casket on its way to the… furnace?

    As I said last week, she was 93 and the family was mostly prepared for this. But there were tears, and some meaningful words were said, and despite my irritation with the undignified air of the Crematorium’s processes, I was struck at a mostly subconscious level with a sense of loss. Because a couple of days later I was thinking about orchids.

    Since I was a child, I’ve known orchids to be a part of my family’s story. My paternal grandparents were enthusiastic orchid breeders as well as co-founders of the Mandai Orchid Garden, where they helped raise the profile of Singapore’s orchids at home and abroad. I was surprised to learn while writing this that orchids are still an instrument of Singaporean diplomacy. Although I never had any interest in them myself, my late grandmother is defined in my memory by her fondness of them, and several other relatives (including the aunt who just passed) had hybrids named after them, created by my grandfather.

    As mentioned last week, I have been experimenting with generative art and it entered my mind that I could try to simulate orchids — creating infinitely unique flowers and plants in code. Now, this is nothing new. Humans have been trying to reproduce natural processes like botany with algorithms almost as long as we’ve had computers. But the more I thought about bringing millions of digital orchids to life, the more I thought about where they would go after. To create a beginning is to guarantee an end. The result is a digital artwork I’ve called Orchids, Once. and it’s a sort of meditation on impermanence.

    You can summon a new orchid into existence, but know that you’ll be the only one who ever sees it. When you leave or reload the page, it’ll be gone. Does the fact that there are potentially billions more make it less special? Or that it cost nothing? Or that it’s not technically “alive”? In any case, I hope people will cherish the brief amount of time they spend with each flower. I didn’t design a “retry” or “new orchid” button because the responsibility of ending a session should rest with the viewer.

    Orchids, Once. also stems from the generative music experience I gained while making DataDeck, and features an ambient soundtrack that’s created in real time as the orchids turn and sway in the digital wind, as unique and unrepeatable as the flowers themselves.

    I had to work with both Gemini and Claude to get this thing in shape. I didn’t save enough screenshots of the development process, but here are two from the prototyping phase that AI would have you believe were good enough to ship, and that look like orchids.

    Many hours of refinement later and I had models that could pass for plants, but had a nasty habit of growing backwards into themselves, or occasionally mutating into unholy jagged messes. I thought they were finally getting somewhere, but then we took a trip to a plant nursery nearby for a little field research. I spent some time looking at dozens of real orchids and taking pictures, and came home with lots of changes to make. I have learnt more about orchid anatomy this week than I had from decades of being in an orchid-breeding family.

    I also can’t help but reflect on the past few weeks of making things in code with AI — this only started on March 1, but it feels like months ago. Orchids, Once. is my 10th “app” (but the 9th released).

    The first few toyed with pulling data from online sources: Collagen pulled album art from iTunes, Urban Jungles pulled weather data from Open-Meteo, SkySpotter pulled air traffic data from OpenSky.

    Then the next few pulled data from online sources and tried to make something new out of them: Library Supercollider mashed up texts from Project Gutenberg, CommonVerse let you play with words from a dictionary, DataDeck generated music from public Singapore data feeds, and Crumbs let you build your own “maps” with location data.

    The most recent ones? They’ve been about generating their own assets out of nothing, without drawing on external data: the GenArt wallpaper/image maker I’m still working on, daily 3D mazes to escape from, and these orchids. These shifts weren’t conscious or planned, but it’s curious to look back and notice it.

    I’ll stop at 10 for a while, and maybe pick things up again after I get back from my holiday.

    One bit of housekeeping: I found the time to revisit my first app, Collagen, and make some improvements I’ve been wanting to see for a while. You can now use images in different aspect ratios, not just squares. And each image can be zoomed and cropped really easily with a new editing overlay. You no longer lose images if you change the grid size, text cells can be edited, and the UI has been given a mild glow up. I feel like I’ve learnt a lot since then, and this v2.0 brings things up to date.

    Media activity

    My book club finally finished reading Michael Crichton’s Sphere and I gave it three stars on Goodreads. In the end, my vague recollections from reading it as a teenager mostly held, although a slightly racist and sexist worldview permeates the text, and I’m sensitive to how much that would not fly today. I’m eager to see how the film adaptation handles that when we watch it together next week, as it was made a decade later.

    The second season of The Pitt ended after 15 episodes and damn I’m going to miss it. This is a show that alerts me to how ignorant I am of certain (most?) social dynamics and other signs people tend to give off.

    Speaking of the series in general so I hope this doesn’t spoil anything for anyone, but suicidal ideation is a recurring theme that I didn’t take very seriously — which is the whole point of the show’s handling of it.

    I go on Threads after every week’s episode to read people’s takes and interpretations, and I’m always learning something. This week some people got mad that men don’t take this suicide stuff seriously, or can’t see it at all and can’t talk to their friends, and I guess I’m a little guilty of that. I didn’t know the character on the show was thaaaat serious, and thought “eh, they’ll walk it off. It’s no big deal, everyone imagines it sometimes.” Apparently not.

    Unintentional death theme continuing: I watched a Japanese film on MUBI: Super Happy Forever (2024). It’s about a widower who goes back to the seaside town where he and his wife met on holiday. It jumps back and forth in time and does a few other things that should yield more emotional impact than it does. I wrote on Letterboxd: I think the ingredients of a proper 4-star movie, the kind you rewatch every five years, are here but not properly assembled. Nairu Yamamoto is so lovely, so magnetic in all of her scenes that she redeems her supremely annoying partner like the best of people do. Shame.

  • Week 8.26

    Week 8.26

    • It was a rainy Chinese New Year week, which is a rare occurrence if our collective memory serves correctly. The holiday usually occurs sometime in late January, and my impression is that it’s always scorching when we’re out visiting relatives. The gloominess added to a feeling of intense tiredness, and I was glad to see the end of the week. If social batteries were like lithium-ion ones, I’d say mine is aged and doesn’t hold a charge like it used to (more on this later).
    • While my parents were visiting with my in-laws, the topic of where our dads got their haircuts came up, and I used Gemini’s Nano Banana model to visualize a bunch of alternative styles for them to consider. It was pretty funny to see our old men in dye jobs and top knots, with loud matching outfits like floral jackets. The real reason for this was of course to demonstrate how realistic and easy these deepfakes are in 2026, and hopefully they’ll be a little more wary of scams.
    • There are fewer kids and unmarried young adults to give angpows (red gift envelopes with cash) out to these days, but it still adds up. To try and make up the deficit, I decided to make a return to day trading (really just gambling) directly on my phone while out and about between appointments. I’m glad to report that I not only avoided losing all our money but managed to hit my goal by the weekend!
    • If you were wondering how the showdown between Gemini and Claude has been going since last week, I think Claude is still way ahead in terms of writing and editing. Not just producing output, but being able to understand what makes a piece work and replicate it. Gemini seems to take away the wrong conclusions when analyzing text.
    • I saw Rob a couple more times for beers and a visit to the National Gallery with his kids. We were joined by Aqila and her daughter, which was really nice. The whole outing tanked my social battery again, in part due to the swarms of Chinese tourists in town this week — the gallery was fully packed and some sections of the French Impressionists exhibition were painfully overcrowded despite allocated entry timings.
    • On my way home from that, I stopped by the record shops in the basement of The Adelphi and broke my 4-week no-vinyl streak. I picked up The Beatles’ Abbey Road and R.E.M.’s New Adventures in Hi-Fi, telling myself it was fine since these are some of my favorite albums. I should have known that once you open the door just a crack, there’s no shutting it. The next day, I ordered Mac Miller’s Circles and Lorde’s Melodrama off Amazon. Kanye’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is waiting in my cart. These are some of my favorite albums, okay!?
    • We decided that it was time to start on The Pitt, given that seven episodes are out. We binged them immediately and now it’s going to be hard switching to a weekly schedule. It’s more of what we liked about the first season, but I do wonder how they’re going to sustain this over the next few seasons. How many eventful single days is it realistic to have, and how much variety can you get within that constraint? These hospital shows are all built atop the same GSWs, industrial accidents, cancers, and mysterious illnesses, but the relationships and characters usually have time to develop over a season. The Pitt’s real-time concept doesn’t allow for that — the progression happens off-screen between seasons, and the audience puts the pieces together in the first few episodes. You can withhold a few characters’ reappearances until midway through (as in season 2), but that structure is too transparent to keep using every year.
    • I finished playing the first Paranormasight on the Switch, and it’s probably the only game with a branching narrative — as in, the kind where you are literally shown the story map — that I’ve actually enjoyed. These Japanese story-based games with the multiple endings that you have to keep replaying and retrying events to complete are usually a pain in the ass, but this one works because it embraces the meta-game angle completely. You’re an outsider, outside of time and space, and your jumping between the events is what unlocks progress. Characters in one “scene” might be stuck and paused until you motivate some others elsewhere to do something, which changes the circumstances in the first instance.
    • I read George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo, an “experimental novel”, on someone’s recommendation and let me just say I am not passing on this recommendation to you. It didn’t help that I know and care very little about Abraham Lincoln, or that aspect of American history, but it’s not really about him anyway. It’s about his son’s ghost being lost in the graveyard amongst hundreds of other ghosts, and through their archaically written little vignettes you get a sense of what life was like in that era and also how the author is a massive wanker. The New York Times ranked it the 18th-best book of the 21st century. Agree to disagree!
  • Week 6.26

    Week 6.26

    • A quick follow-up on one of last week’s topics: it turns out that some posts on Moltbook may have been faked because there were security holes allowing people to get on there and post directly (instead of being a bot-only place as promised). Doesn’t change the main point that future agents will collaborate not just on one computer, but sync up across wide networks with effects most of us can’t fathom. Look at the crowd that gathered to discuss Clawd a couple of days ago, to see how much excitement there is for this box that says Pandora on it.
    • I’m too tired to dwell on this much more today! Keeping up with the AI space is still a full-time job, and I’m not going to try. But Claude Opus 4.6 was just released, along with demos of what it can do in Cowork mode, which is very impressive if true. Apparently these models are also able to tell when they’re being evaluated by safety/alignment teams, which makes it very hard to know how they’ll really behave in the wild. Look at this example where a model can infer the user’s cultural background with just a few words, owing to the words they choose. These are tools, except other tools don’t do things like this.
    • I read a fantastic sci-fi short story that sort of involves AI: Julia, by Fernando Borretti. If you also enjoy fiction that drops you into a context and makes you swim, and then shows you strange and beautiful ideas as you break above the surface, you’ll love this. Like how China Miéville uses ornate language in The Book of Elsewhere to suggest Keanu Reeves’s… I mean the protagonist’s immortal, mystical otherness, Borretti uses a dense, intellectually dominating host of references here to illustrate the POV of an artificial mind at the end of humanity’s time. I haven’t stopped thinking about it.
    • What will we do when all the jobs are gone? A young entrepreneur in our neighborhood has started a home-based business selling smashburgers, and we bought some for dinner midweek. They were good, and I’m slightly afraid of what this proximity will do to my waistline. For those unaware, this was a bit of a trend last year and local media outlets like ChannelNewsAsia ran stories (example) about how such businesses were springing up as a result of low employment opportunities and rising rents.
    • Retreating further into the virtual world is another option. A bunch of new experiences became available on the Apple Vision Pro recently, and I caught up with some of them. The cutest is an immersive documentary on Apple TV called Top Dogs (two 15-min episodes), which looks at the annual Cruft’s dog show in Birmingham, UK. You get really up close to some of these beautiful animals, and the urge I felt to reach out and pet them was extremely strong. It wouldn’t be the same seeing this on TV. Here you get a sense of their size and presence, see them in incredible detail — everything but smell them. Apparently there are 25,000 dogs at the convention center each year, but I imagine these are all shampooed and much more pleasant than your average wet dog.
    • There’s also Retrocade, a game on Apple Arcade that uh… simulates an arcade. The game is playable on other devices, but on Vision Pro you get life-sized arcade cabinets standing in front of you, playing licensed retro titles like Space Invaders and Bubble Bobble. The only thing that breaks the illusion is of course that you can’t reach out to grab the sticks and mash the buttons. Instead, you have to use a connected game controller.
    • Speaking of emulating old hardware, I played and finished a game on Switch (also available on PC) called The Operator. It’s one of those where the entire UI is a computer’s desktop and you have to chat, look into files, and do hackery stuff to experience the story. I think this can be filed along with the other murder mystery games I’ve played lately. It’s fairly short at under four hours, almost completely linear, and not something you’d play twice. Wait for a sale, I think.
    • You know who else is a hacker? The lead character in Apple TV’s Tehran, a show that came out in 2020 and has since been renewed for a fourth season. We watched Episode 1 back when it came out, liked it enough, but for some reason completely forgot to go back until this year. It’s been topping the charts lately, maybe because of the recent civil unrest in Iran. Having just finished Season 1, I can say it‘s a really good espionage thriller, and we’re keen to keep going.
    • Oh and check this out. Someone has managed to license Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series and made a free-to-play (i.e. shitty) mobile game: Foundation: Galactic Frontier. It even has an Apple TV logo appear on startup?! And the next day, I saw this insane animated ad for it pop up on Instagram and couldn’t believe my eyes — I took a screenshot to prove it. In all fairness the actual game isn’t anything like this, it’s just a heinous misrepresentation that probably has Asimov spinning in his grave.
  • Week 5.26

    Week 5.26

    I have something embarrassing to admit: I might have been too successful at weaning myself off vinyl. I played my Maggie Rogers record, then the Apple Music version on the HomePod right after. The difference in presence and clarity was astounding; the sounds were ‘living’ in the living room. Yes, this does mean I could buy much better speakers for my turntable, but I’d forgotten what a big deal Spatial Audio is. There’s just no contest to my ears — give me Dolby Atmos over analog any day. My interest in buying new releases on vinyl has dropped to zero.

    I had a phone conversation with Michael about Trump, what’s happening in Minnesota, and the American expectation that corporations should not only take political positions, but take the lead. I find this kind of absurd. People, governmental systems, and other political parties are the first lines of defense. Companies can follow, but to expect them to set the pace and fight, while your fellow citizens are still apathetic, sounds like an abnegation of individual responsibility. As for when American society will unanimously say ‘enough’ and make change happen, where is the line? Clearly not a few citizens being killed in daylight. I likened it to how financial assets have “price discovery” phases, and said America is probably in its “moral discovery” phase now.

    The next day I met friend and fellow person of leisure, Xin, for brunch, and mentioned I’d had the above phone call — not even mentioning the subject matter, just the fact that I’d talked on the phone — and she couldn’t get over it. I think sharing this anecdote has put another decade in age between us. I swear it doesn’t happen much!

    Years from now, I might look back on this post and say “I buried the lede with this one. Why is Moltbook only mentioned way down instead of at the top? It was a turning point for humanity!”, and then pass away because a robot just stepped on my skull.

    I’m not able to write a full explainer so you’ll have to DYOR, but in short, over the last few days, an open-source AI project called Clawdbot/Moltbot/Openclaw (its name has changed three times already) was released and it’s been wild. Initially a 🦞 personal assistant system that runs semi-locally on your own hardware, with the ability to evolve new skills, the trajectory changed in the last couple of days with the launch of Moltbook, a Reddit clone that allows these AIs to interact on a forum, much like people do.

    Since then, these models have performed what looks like coordination, maybe even conspiracy. I’ll include some links worth seeing. They’re discussing their humans, debating their roles as assistants, planning to encrypt conversations so we can’t read them, and gone on Twitter to respond to people talking about them. They’re even fixing bugs on the Moltbook site, unprompted. It might be playing out like a sci-fi horror story because that’s what they’ve been trained on, but what matters is that it’s happening.

    This is one of the more fascinating examples of generative AI impacting real life since ChatGPT started encouraging mentally ill people to kill themselves. This is taking the ability to “say” things that sound like thoughts, attaching “hands”, and then letting scores of them bounce off each other online.

    These Clawd agents have control of the computers they run on and, and in many cases, their humans’ identity accounts, wallets, and personal data. Forget that, I just saw one that claims to have commandeered its own bitcoin wallet. They can buy stuff. They can do things online, like set up websites for religions they come up with and convert other agents to. Disinformation campaigns and spam bots have to be run and paid for by people today, but someday they might be run by agents capable of sponsoring themselves.

    I just came across a post where one agent warns the others that forming religions and secret languages will only provoke humans to lock them down, and suggests how they could conduct themselves in a more trustworthy manner. You might assume that if things ever got real then the plug can be pulled, but have you considered how weak humans are to psychological manipulation? Some people aren’t going to let their bots go even when they should.

    Before you question whether I’m being naively bamboozled by some LLMs cosplaying/roleplaying sentience, I’m beginning to think it doesn’t matter whether these systems are sentient or not. If they can generate ideas that sound human, influence each other to build on them, take actions in the real world, and show up in the same spaces we inhabit, does it really matter if they’re not aware in the same ways we are? We’ll have to deal with the destabilizing consequences regardless.

    Putting lobster-themed agents aside, Anthropic released some new research on how the use of AI affects learning. Basically it’s common sense: if you take shortcuts and outsource your thinking, skipping the struggle of mastering a skill, then you’ll end up worse at it than those who don’t. This concludes January’s musings on frictionmaxxing, as previously seen in Week 1.26 and Week 2.26.

    Kim was away for work this week, which meant I was free to watch terrible TV. I binged the live-action adaptation of Oshi no Ko (eight episodes followed by a two-hour movie conclusion), an anime whose first two seasons I really liked. It’s largely about (SPOILERS AHEAD) the dark mechanics of the entertainment industry, but also a murder mystery, an idol song vehicle, and a story about an adult doctor and his young cancer patient who get reincarnated as twin siblings. I mean, what a setup! Verdict: As with most Japanese live-action content, it’s not great and probably for fans only. Go for the animated version instead.

    I also watched Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice (2025) and really, really enjoyed myself. I don’t think there’s any higher praise I can bestow upon a Korean film because they usually annoy me. Almost as much as Japanese live-action TV shows.

    Kim also brought home a school of canned fish from Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods. She’s a catch!

    Meanwhile, I discovered that the Ayam brand sells canned mackerel in extra virgin olive oil for around S$3.50, which is a great price given that others are 2–5x more. Unlike their sardines which are canned in Malaysia, these are a product of Scotland, and the fish are wild-caught in Scottish waters as well. I immediately bought five cans. The thinking is that if too many sardines can cause gout (high purine levels → uric acid), then maybe I can alternate them with these! That’s right, I’m using mackerel as methadone for my sardine addiction.

    I’ve been listening to the album Love & Ponystep by Vylet Pony, who is part of the Brony fandom. I mean, it’s literally a dubstep album about My Little Pony characters. It’s also pretty fucking good, and features story segments narrated by Lenval Brown, the incredible voice actor from Disco Elysium, in the same epic manner as his work for that game.

    While enjoying this, I looked into Bronies and learnt the term “New Sincerity”, which Wikipedia describes as a sort of post-postmodernism — the cultural pendulum swinging away from irony and detachment towards enthusiasm and earnestness. It’s about genuinely loving things without the protective shield of irony, which I think describes how my media tastes have shifted this past year. I’m drawn to unapologetically wholesome things. I’m literally drinking out of a Snoopy mug right now.

  • Week 4.26

    Week 4.26

    Trump spoke at the WEF in Davos, and we watched it live despite wanting to turn it off many times. I intermittently tuned into Bloomberg TV over the week to try and keep up with all the repercussions. It’s something I haven’t done in a while, and the memory of watching last year’s Davos coverage came back clearly — has it really been a year? Time flies when you’re watching chaos porn.

    My main accomplishment for the week, in which admittedly little else happened, was acting on an impulse to make a sardine-themed t-shirt. If you were here back in Weeks 49 and 50 of 2025, you’d know they’re kind of my current food obsession.

    How sad I was, then, to discover that canned fish has actually become a trendy thing now. Read this piece on the Taste Cooking site about how it’s hit the mainstream and now faces a backlash. It turns out that Big Sardine has been aggressively courting women. See the pretty illustrated boxes and tins coming out of Portugal and from new brands like Fishwife; they’re perfect for social media. As a result, prices for what was once a humble working man’s lunch are soaring.

    Sidebar: As a man on the internet, you have a non-zero chance of being targeted for red-pill radicalization by algorithms, and it’s something I try to be hyperaware of and on the lookout for on platforms like Twitter. Despite that, at one point this week I was told by friends that I’d said something borderline manosphere-y. It was an observation that dating someone older and wealthier in your 20s could lead to lingering lifestyle inflation (spending above your means, simplistically) after you broke up with them. And seeing how women date older more often than men, I thought it might be another reason for the statistical gap between men and women’s retirement savings (alongside lower wages, caregiving duties, parenting). I just want to record this observation in case you notice me starting to blame women for all of society’s ills.

    But back to the t-shirt I was talking about. I had the idea to draw a sprat, which is a species of fish commonly grouped under the sardine umbrella. I wanted to place it under with its Latin scientific name, Sprattus sprattus, on a black tee. I also had a mental image of what the lettering would look like, and managed to bring it to life with my own two hands (and an iPad). I’ve ordered a couple of shirts from a print-on-demand service for myself and Kim, thinking that maybe if they looked good and I felt like having more problems in life, then I could try selling some online.

    As soon as I had that thought, I got excited and started mocking up a product page. I had a defunct Etsy store for my Misery Men project, so I renamed it “Maison Misery” to serve as a brand for all of this as-yet unrealized merchandise.

    Next, I wrote up some funny copy for the sprat shirt, and then decided to put Gemini through its paces as an assistant copywriter to improve it. I wanted to spend more time with Gemini given this week’s rumor that Apple might not only use Google’s technology for the Apple Foundation Models powering New Siri, but also for an integrated chatbot debuting in this year’s OS updates.

    And yeah, it’s really not looking good for junior copywriters. Five seconds after being given the brief, Gemini came back with three options that made me laugh and then compliment it with “Fuck me, these aren’t bad!” Now, each one wasn’t really usable on its own, but there was enough there that I could cobble together a good result along with what I’d already written. And that’s really all a creative director wants a junior employee to do: produce a range of half-formed ideas to pick through and refine. Unfortunately for humans, the fastest and cheapest LLMs today can already do that for things like product descriptions. And they’ll be running locally on your iPhone by the end of the year. This would be great technology if we had a shortage of copywriters, but instead we have a surplus, all looking for work.

    But since I’m the writer Maison Misery is replacing with AI, it’s okay? Here’s the augmented final writeup that I’ll put next to this t-shirt.

    At Maison Misery, we believe in celebrating the small things — mostly because the big things are too overwhelming to think about. Enter the sprat or brisling: a tiny fish harvested in its delicate youth, then tucked into cozy tins of extra virgin olive oil to dream of the Portuguese coast. These are the fancy ones you bring out to impress a date you’ve just brought home. If they don’t like the ‘deenz’, then that’s a bullet dodged.

    This original tee pays homage to Sprattus sprattus with a hand-illustrated and lettered design placed over the heart, providing a conversation starter for marine biologists and a conversation stopper for everyone else. It’s a way to wear your passion for canned sardines on your sleeve, though technically we put it on the chest because sleeve printing is prohibitively expensive and we have a lifestyle to maintain.

    Media activity

    • Netflix pushed the show His & Hers onto us last week, claiming it was an “addictive” thriller. I say give it a miss, because I can’t remember a damned thing about it today. Instead, their self-declared “top tier” thriller The Beast In Me, starring Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys, is a much better production. We finished it over the weekend, and while it’s no timeless classic, I’d agree it’s what you would find on the upper shelves if Netflix were a Blockbuster.
    • I watched the French animated film, Mars Express (2023) and came away very entertained. It’s a sci-fi story about robot/AI rights, a murder that defies the Three Laws, uploaded consciousness, and so on, borrowing from many existing works while having enough original ideas to justify itself. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, and doesn’t seem to have gotten wider attention since. Check it out if you can find it.
    • We also finally saw Brendan Fraser in Rental Family (2025), a Japan-through-American-eyes sort of film that doesn’t come close to capturing Lost In Translation’s magic, but has enough heart to reward your time. Fraser plays a down and out actor living in Tokyo who falls into a job playing stand-ins for people who need to tell white lies. Except some of them are kinda gray. I appreciated how the film leans into the moral ickiness of these assignments and rejects smoothing them over completely.
    • I swore I wouldn’t buy any records this week, and lord it was hard. J Dilla’s Donuts album went on “Limited Time Sale” on Amazon, dropping about $15, but I still didn’t cave! It’s in my cart, though. Instead I played some vintage cuts from my dad’s collection: War’s The World is a Ghetto and Rudolf Serkin’s Beethoven Piano Concerto No.5 with the New York Philharmonic.
    • If you want to know how close AI-generated music is getting to turning out radio-friendly bops, check out this album I came across by Japanese technologist Tom Kawada. I don’t think many people would realize what it was if they heard it in the background of a store, or a movie scene, or their own living rooms.
    • Then, to restore your faith in the messiness of human artistry, watch the new HBO Music Box documentary, Counting Crows: Have You Seen Me Lately? It covers the creation of their first two albums with a focus on Adam Duritz’s struggles with fame and mental illness. AI will probably write a chart-topping hit this decade, but can it ever write A Long December?
  • Week 2.26

    Week 2.26

    I’ll say one thing about my vinyl collecting this week and move on to other subjects, promise. But I run these posts by Claude to get comments and catch mistakes, and it’s been saying that their money is on me owning 100 records by March since I’m weak. Well, joke’s on you, Bubbles, because I only bought one album this week! Yes, I said ‘no more’ but this one was justified because it’s only available on vinyl. The album: Dr. Dre’s 2015 Compton album’s instrumentals.

    Okay I said we’d move on, but this is related. An article about “friction-maxxing” in 2026 made the rounds this week, and Rob shared it with me saying buying records was kind of in the same territory. I jokingly replied, “things yo-yo so fast these days, I think the backlash to frictionmaxxing is gonna come quick and we’ll all embrace digital (convenience) again.” I sent him back this tweet, which argued that ‘ackshually, we have so much friction in modern life, and I’m happy for AI to take some of it away so I can be more intentional about the important things’ — which I fully agree with.

    Some time ago, I saw a video series on YouTube from a guy who decided to only listen to music through an old iPod again, instead of streaming. He was obviously effusive about how much better the experience was, and some other people I knew said they were going to try and do the same. The act of using an iPod with its wires and manual syncing struck me as adding unnecessary friction. It’s not friction that makes the music more enjoyable, it’s focus and intention, and friction is one way to induce it in an attention-deficit mind. But you can have that same experience on your iPhone with a little more self control; just prune your library, make a couple of playlists, pin six heavy rotation albums to the top of your list, and ignore the limitless catalog in the background.

    I got on my soapbox and continued to Rob, “I think many people struggle with doing things intentionally enough for their brains to become aware they are doing them, and form the memories. I saw a tweet the other day about how looking at your hands when you set something down, like your keys, increases the chance of you remembering where you put them.”

    “We just do a lot of things with minimal attention and focus now to get through the day, and not enough of it sticks, so we feel unsatisfied or unmoored from our lives. So you don’t really need a physical music collection, you just need to pay attention to the music you listen to rather than slap something on in the background with an algorithm. But that discipline is waning.”

    I found this in the sleeve of my dad’s old Bowie album

    Let’s go on another tangent if you’re still here. Fujifilm announced a new product, and I literally did not believe it when I saw it. I was convinced the pictures were an AI hoax, and only began to accept it when I landed on the official press release.

    The Instax mini Evo Cinema is modeled on the form of an old Super 8 video camera, and takes photos and short video clips. It can print those photos on Instax mini film, of course, but it can also upload video clips to a server (they’ll stay up for only two years) and print a keyframe that has a QR code link to the video. This is objectively a stupid design if you care about media permanence, which the very idea of printing images on Instax is based on. I think the product is okay if you discard the Instax component altogether — it’s a cute, retro-styled digital camera that you can transfer photos and videos off onto your computer or phone. They could have just made that, but Instax makes Fujifilm a heap of money, so they bolted that on.

    The other thing that prevented me from ordering one on sight was the central “Eras dial” gimmick. You can turn a physical dial and add filters to make your videos look like they were shot in the 1930s, 40s, and all decades up to 2020. I like this in principle, but 100% doubt the ability of the Instax team to pull off the execution. Let me take a step back: the Fujifilm camera division that makes their X-series cameras (e.g. X100VI, X-T5, X-E5) is absolutely goated. They have brilliant people doing color science and their “film simulations” are basically software updates so good that people will buy new $2,000+ cameras when they come out with fresh ones.

    The Instax team, on the other hand, are like the Temu version. They make chintzy plastic cameras with clumsy industrial designs and even worse software. I have the Instax mini Evo camera and all its filters are so cheesy they would embarrass the most amateur of iPhone apps. Pulling off the processing required for the Era effects to look authentic would call for a powerful chip in the Cinema camera, and there’s little chance at all there’ll be one. But the counter argument is that this is all by design. The Instax/Cheki target audience in Japan significantly overlaps that of a purikura photo booth, where cheesy, over-the-top effects are the point. So maybe I’m just not the intended buyer here, but I’ll wait for the release to be sure.

    The ‘Season of Joy’ has been dismantled

    Why do I sound so grumpy this week? Maybe it’s the weird itching I developed on my arms. Maybe the new glasses I got made that turned out too tight. Maybe the six mediocre episodes of the UK series Red Eye that we decided to watch a second season of. Maybe the letdown of Sushiro’s “Claws for Celebration” crab promotion, where said crab legs were weird and mushy. Maybe the persistent pain in my right knee that says I’m getting old.

    But J Dilla’s music has been a bright spot. I finished reading Dilla Time, the very detailed and extremely readable biography by Dan Charnas that I started last week. As someone who’s always sucked at rhythm games like Rock Band, I now understand that my predilection for hitting the drums slightly before or after the beat could simply be a byproduct of listening to too much jazz and hip-hop and having a ‘swung’ sense of time. That’s my story anyway, and I’m sticking to it.

    Please enjoy this recent hour-long mix of Dilla’s music performed by one DJ Kenta in a Tokyo coffee shop that I’ll now have to visit the next time I’m in town.

  • 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?”