sangsara.net

Tag: Television

  • Week 9.23

    It’s been a fairly busy week at work, and it might just be the beginning of a longer stretch of stressful problem solving and multitasking. But we are off to Japan in two weeks! It’ll be my first vacation since Covid began, the last being Taiwan in late 2019.

    I’ve forgotten how to do some of this stuff, from packing to making lists and generally getting in the right mind space to be comfortable going away. It’s also been an expensive week because I’ve had to buy a new suitcase (one of ours got broken last year when Kim had to travel), travel insurance, new power banks, new clothes for cold weather (no, the current cool and rainy spell we’re experiencing in Singapore, with hitherto impossible lows of 21°C, don’t really count), and pre-booked Shinkansen tickets which cost as much as domestic flights.

    Two decisions which are easier this time than they usually are: what headphones and camera to bring.

    The new AirPods Pro (2nd generation) are so much improved in noise canceling ability and sound quality than I have no reservations about using them as my only pair of headphones. Tokyo is a short flight of about seven hours, and their batteries should last the whole way with a short recharge in the case during meal service. Normally I’d pack a pair of over-ears, but I see no need here.

    Since we’re traveling light, I could say I’m just going to rely on my iPhone 14 Pro (I’ve actually done that once; don’t know what got into me), but the Ricoh GR III is small and convenient enough that it will cost me very little to try using it as a main camera. Can’t the iPhone compare at 28mm? It’s probably closer than it’s ever been this year, but the GR sensor-lens system should still have the edge in pure optical quality terms, and there’s no substitute for the shift in mindset and focus you get when walking with a camera in your hand.

    One tip we found on YouTube: there’s a new digital service from the Japanese government called Visit Japan Web where you can pre-declare your immigration and customs forms and save time filling in those arrival cards. You can do it all on your phone and get two QR codes to show at the airport. This should be the default everywhere.

    ===

    We saw Knock At The Cabin, M. Night Shyamalan’s new film, and enjoyed it. I shouldn’t mention the premise, as not knowing much is always part of the fun, but it cobbles together elements of other films and reworks a few tropes.

    While talking about it afterwards, I realized that Shyamalan has two superpowers: he knows how to steal good cinematic tricks and make them great (for awhile I mistakenly thought JJ Abrams did too), and a knack for creating turning points in his films where your perception of the world flips or your immersion intensifies. That can be something like suddenly believing in one of the two dueling narratives (e.g. Is X real? Is this the present and not the past?), or the kind of big twist he became famous for. Often these two things happen at the same time.

    I told Kim that I can’t think of one particular scene in The Sixth Sense without tearing up, and literally did so at that moment, which seemed to startle her. It’s the one with Toni Collette and Haley Joel Osment talking in the car, where the son says something that undeniably proves to his mother that he really does see dead people, which she absolutely did not believe up to that point.

    It doesn’t matter whether you as the viewer already believed or not; their performances are so extraordinary, the scene is so deftly written, that you can’t help but experience the world-reversing revelation through her eyes. It also comes with a manipulative emotional gut punch (a bit ham-fisted, but whatever), which is why it’s stamped in my memory so hard. And The Sixth Sense is great because it does this over and over. It’s a triumph in the way musicians’ first albums are — years of stored-up ideas and raw energy packed into one work.

    Anyway Knock At The Cabin had at least one of these moments for me, and Dave Bautista is a treasure. I’ve read reviews comparing him and The Rock as two former pro wrestlers turned actors, but it’s clear these days Bautista is the Actor. Strong 3.5 stars out of 5.

    ===

    • We finished seeing every episode of Seinfeld. I can’t think of a better show about awful people. I’ll always love it.
    • We started watching Succession at long last, and it’s also a show about awful people but I don’t enjoy it much at all. There’s no payoff; they’re just all pathetic human beings with rich people problems? Perhaps they suffer greatly in the following episodes and you’re supposed to get a kick out of that. I’ll try to make it through the first season.
    • Sharper on Apple TV+ is a good 4-star film billed as a neo-noir, whatever that is. In this case, sharper is a noun, one carefully explained on an opening text card so as not to give too much away. If you don’t already know what the word means, don’t even look it up, just see the film.
    • I did a speed run through a 12-episode anime called Darwin’s Game on Netflix because it’s leaving the service this month. I got through it in a couple of hours. Not recommended unless you love battle royale style stories where people play supernatural “death games” organized by some sadistic game master, a la Alice In Borderland and too many others.
    • I made only one thing with Midjourney this week, a series of Tokyo-ites posing for street fashion photos.

  • Week 8.23

    • I got a haircut, waheyyy
    • According to the Been Outside app I started using last week, I’ve been out of the house for a total of 34 hours. That seems like too much if you ask me.
    • Zane Lowe has an in-depth interview series on Apple Music that I’ve never watched before, until a clip with Damon Albarn started going viral (that term feels so old). In it, Damon demonstrates how almost the entire backing track of the Gorillaz’s single Clint Eastwood was lifted from a demo preset on his Omnichord plastic keyboard. You can see that moment and the whole interview here on YouTube. The show is not so easy to find in Apple Music’s app itself. It’s filed under “Radio”, and if you go to the Gorillaz artist page, it’s not shown with the other music videos, but through a separate tile for “The Zane Lowe Interview” which looks like it could be an audio podcast, but it’s actually video.
    • Anyway I’m usually not too excited about Gorillaz releases and I don’t think I’ve made it through one of their albums in years, but the interview made me curious about this latest one, Cracker Island, and it’s alright! Skinny Ape stood out on my last listen through.
    • This week also saw the release of the 20th anniversary edition of Jesse Malin’s The Fine Art of Self Destruction, which I’ve been waiting months for. On top of the original album, he’s recorded new versions of some songs, but sadly not all. I’d expected all-new interpretations of the whole suite, but well, maybe that didn’t make sense without a coherent theme to approach them with.
    • I’ve been on the waitlist for Artifact, the news app from the founders of Instagram, and in a nice surprise this week, they opened it up to everyone. It’s basically a successor to Flipboard, without the flipping, and with magic AI dust sprinkled on top of it to attract buyers? Too cynical? I don’t have a great way to surface personalized news at the moment since I’ve cut back on my Twitter use, so I’m hoping this fills the gap.
    • Back in the 90s when Event Horizon came out in theaters, I was too afraid to see it. It was billed as an extreme sci-fi horror film with demonic themes and mutilation, and I was probably like NOPE! I saw a screenshot of it a few months ago that made me want to download and see it, but I only got around to it now. Time has reduced it to (or maybe it always was) a campy, schlocky, gory fun afternoon watch that’s more a 90s CD-ROM FMV game than anything, but the design of the ill-fated spaceship’s interiors is seriously god-tier work. It evokes so much NOPE at a glance: Ancient Evil glyphs etched into walls, steel pillars with tight tiling like a prison bathhouse, and a rotating mechanical gateway to hell that is definitely not good news. 3.5/5 at best.
    • Whenever I see a movie, I try to log it on Letterboxd, which is like a Goodreads for films. Now I’m happy to have discovered Marathon, which is like a Letterboxd for television. It’s a good looking app and if a show has enough viewers, you can see their ratings not only for entire seasons but individual episodes. If nothing else, it’s a useful way to keep track of what you’ve seen, need to finish seeing, and how much time you’ve spent on shows. You can find me on all these services as “sangsara”, I think.
    • Setting up Marathon helped me remember we were halfway through For All Mankind on Apple TV+ and need to get back into it. We also started on the latest season of You on Netflix, which managed to be more terrible than ever and yet still left me interested enough to keep going at the end of episode 1.
    • Alright! We kept things short this week. Not a lot of Midjourneying done but I’ve got a couple to see you off.
    Sleeping in the clouds
    Boss Baby Boomer
    Inspired by Jewel Changi Airport

  • Week 7.23

    My mother-in-law stayed with us for the week and a new routine was soon established: every night after dinner, we’d watch an old film from the 40s and 50s. This worked out well because I’ve been hoarding a bunch of film noir classics which my wife would never otherwise agree to sit through.

    • The best was undoubtedly The Third Man (1949) adapted from the Graham Greene novel and directed by one Carol Reed. I obviously thought Reed was a woman who somehow got to make a huge film and give Orson Welles direction, but nope, turns out Carol is a man. This is a film I’ve actually tried to watch three or four times; maybe even finished, but I couldn’t remember much. The first time might have been in film class at university. What a strange and meandering film, with intriguing technical aspects and unexpected emotional depth. The very last scene is one for the ages. I gave it five stars on Letterboxd.
    • The next one was Lured (1947), starring Lucille Ball and George Sanders, directed by Douglas Siri. This was the second-best, and features a pretty strong heroine for the time. Her role in a police plot to catch a killer is to be the bait, but she actually gets hired as a proper undercover detective to do it and she has some great comeback lines. 4 stars.
    • What a disappointment Key Largo (1948) was, though! Bogart and Bacall in a famous film — perhaps my expectations were too high? It’s slow, unfolds in basically one location, and feels like a play poorly adapted into motion picture form (I recall seeing in the credits that it was). 2.5 stars.
    • Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956) brought the momentum back: a more complex film that plays with chronological jumps, multiple viewpoints, and intersecting roles in a heist that slowly makes more sense as the film goes on. Watched alongside others from the period, it stands out both for having more to say and trusting its audience to come along. 4 stars.
    • We ended on a slightly weak note with Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943), which is apparently called his first true masterpiece. Ehhhhh. I do give it points for walking right up to the edge of incest and staring into it — one reviewer on Letterboxd put it like this: “This bitch wanted to straight up fuck her uncle! Hitchcock was so ahead of his time, he literally invented Cersei × Jamie.” But otherwise, 3 stars from me.

    Coincidentally, I saw a tweet this week about the portrayal of sex in these old films, and how not being allowed to be explicit led directors and actors to create even more powerful suggestions of desire. I was also disappointed that this person was only on Twitter and not Mastodon. Can everyone hurry up and move already?

    ===

    I discovered a great little free app, like, totally free. Been Outside uses geofences to track how much time you spend away from home. For someone like me who usually loves staying home and working remotely, it provides a way to assess how much this lousy life forces me to compromise on my introverted, shut-in preferences.

    Speaking of, we binged (with fast forwarding) all 10 episodes of The Ultimatum: France on Netflix this weekend. For the unfamiliar, it’s a wretched reality TV show that takes couples where one party wants to get married, and makes them swap partners with each other to see if it changes their minds. Some end up back together stronger and agree to get married, others love the glimpse of another life and decide they don’t want to go back, and so on.

    I’ve seen some of the American version and expected the French participants to be more debased, more promiscuous, but they were… not?! The biggest scandal was one person kissing a stranger during a night out. I said “speaking of” 118 words ago because at some point during the show, Kim sighed, “this world is really horrible”, and I laughed.

    ===

    Our trip to Japan is less than a month away and many plans have yet to be made. We went out to a cafe for brunch today and sat side-by-side with our iPads and tried to do research together with a shared Safari Tab Group and a Freeform board. The latter has intermittent syncing hiccups that you never get with Miro, and makes working on it kinda scary, but it’s free and good enough and I’m looking forward to it being well supported and a key part of the Apple ecosystem! I want to believe!

    Some Ricoh GR III snaps, Negative Film and BW modes
    My one good Midjourney creation of the week

  • Week 5.23

    We got our fourth vaccine shots today. Based on historical results, I’m going to be ill tomorrow and she’ll be fine. It’s been about four hours and I’m already feeling a little lightheaded and tired.

    It feels like it’s been raining here almost continuously since late December — dark all the time, and practically every day we get storms that last most of the day or night. And so it feels unusually cool and damp indoors, and our dehumidifiers have been working overtime to get clothes dry and keep mold at bay.

    This Chinese/Lunar New Year period is often associated with blazing, cloudless skies, and sweating through one’s new red clothes while shuttling around to visit relatives, which makes this year an outlier. And it’s not just me saying it! Several taxi drivers have used this observation as a conversation starter these past few weeks.

    And every year, there’s an outsized “Hong Bao” lottery draw that generates long queues at betting outlets. I bought a single ticket for fun while in a convenience store one night, and in the process of getting the link above have discovered that I’m sadly not one of the three winners of the S$12M prize. Or a consolation prize, even.

    ===

    I generated some cityscape illustrations using a mix of anime and artwork keywords with Midjourney (no artist names), and got some surprisingly great compositions — good enough that I’m using one of them as my phone’s wallpaper now. And then just to mix things up, I asked it to put Godzilla in the cities, and that actually worked.

    ===

    TV
    We finished all 10 episodes of Echo 3 on Apple TV+, a quasi-action series involving a group of special forces types conducting some personal business in Columbia. It’s not a straightforward, fast-moving Jack Ryan sort of show, although it could have been. Its typographic title styles actually reminded me of 80s-era Golan–Globus films — a look and feel and attitude I wish Hollywood would unironically revive. But no, Echo 3 has arthouse ambitions and slows things down with gauzy dream images, flashbacks, and psychologically troubled characters. Which I can’t say I cared that much for! 3/5

    We’ve now been subscribed to HBO for a full week and only started using it yesterday. The Last of Us is good television after all, not leaning too much on the game beyond key pieces. My main complaint so far is that shots of the wider world look too much like how I remember the game: CGI rather than realism.

    Something odd is happening here in terms of anime licensing. SPY×FAMILY started out on Netflix, then new episodes appeared simultaneously on Amazon Prime Video. I thought this title sharing was a weird one-off, but now Chainsaw Man is no longer on Prime Video only; it’s also on Netflix. If only this disruption of exclusivity happened more so we didn’t have to subscribe to every service.

    Incidentally, I finished Chainsaw Man despite not really having any appetite for demon-hunting stories — this one is wild, weird, and really well done.

    Music
    Speaking of strange behavior, I discovered the #youngstar playlist on Apple Music at some point last year and enjoyed its focus: emerging J-Pop acts that have gained traction first on alternative channels like YouTube and TikTok. But when I checked it out today, I found an international version of the playlist, with English songs only.

    Checking in with Michael, I realized some localizing or geofencing was afoot because he still saw the Japanese version (with a US account, in Japan). Highly annoying that we aren’t given a choice which version we see; is it so difficult to just publish separate playlists like “#youngstar (Japan)”, “#youngstar (International)”? So we’ve done that, manually, for anyone else who wants them. You can send us the checks, Tim.

    The English-language #youngstar playlist still shows up on the J-Pop category page as a relevant item. I want to fix this, call me.

    Singling out one song off the Japanese playlist, I enjoyed XG’s Shooting Star and then found myself sucked into their YouTube channel for awhile. For a group that’s only put out about four full songs, they have a ton of content, from training sessions and mixtape-style demos to random behind-the-scenes videos like one where two members practice a rap segment for about seven minutes. The polish on the Shooting Star video reminds me of early Blackpink, and I think these girls are going to be huge (they have 1.1M YouTube subscribers now). It helps that they sing in English, Japanese, and Korean. How do you even source talent like that, and seven of them? Headhunters and recruiters in every other industry need to learn from the music business.

  • 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 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 44.22: No cat, no mood

    A cataclysmic catastrophe. Specifically, our new cat, who did not arrive on schedule. We were notified just the day before she was meant to come home that she’d developed a slight case of the sniffles. So she will stay a little longer where she is for observation and we’re hoping to get her next weekend instead. This means an additional week of fur-free living surrounded by our toxic plants, but made for quite a disappointing weekend.

    Also, slightly disappointing was episode three of The Peripheral, which sagged a little bit compared to the impressive introduction of the world and technologies in episodes one and two. It also looked as if the budget was significantly reduced for this episode, and several scenes had a small, green screen sound stage feel to them. I hope this is not indicative of the remaining episodes.

    Being impatient for the rest of it to be released, I intended to start reading the book again, but somehow picked up John Scalzi’s Kaiju Preservation Society instead. It’s a book that manages to meld a serious enough approach to its science and drama with a premise that just can’t be taken seriously. So far so pleased.

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    An update on my foray into publishing Darkroom presets: the company published a curated collection of creations from the community and featured a bunch of mine.

    Koji’s an original I shared this week. As the tweet above says, it’s inspired by characteristics of both Kodak and Fuji films, but not from comparing and copying any existing ones — just a vibe from the mental pictures I had of both brands at the time. I first made the Koji preset about four years ago, but it’s since been tweaked a hundred times probably and doesn’t resemble its original self anymore. Nevertheless, I find it an attractive analog look that suits both portraits and holiday snaps, leaning warm/red in the skin tones (Kodak?) while having subtly green-forward shadows and rolled-off highlights (Fuji?).

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    Oh, we also saw Ticket To Paradise, a new rom-com starring Julia Roberts and George Clooney that goes for the feel of more successful genre pictures from the 2000s, but somehow only manages to achieve the hollow, plastic soul of a Netflix algorithm joint or one of those Chinese-financed vehicles for an aging Hollywood star that also has a minor role for some Chinese tycoon’s niece.

    But here we have two Hollywood stars who have aged really well, no Chinese money in sight, and it’s still a weird dud. It wants the 2000s energy so bad that it’s also kinda tone deaf about race and white privilege, purporting to be set in Bali while not looking the part, and having its Indonesian cast members play exotic, superstitious, speak-a-no-English Easterners who openly make out with foreign women they just met, and in front of their families too.

    In one scene, though, Clooney gets to tell a mediocre story with all his indelible charisma and likability turned on — that easy voice, low with emotion, taking you into its confidence; a precision tool calibrated for both paternal warmth and Nespresso/Omega endorsement — and afterwards it doesn’t really matter how the movie ends, you’re just glad to see them both on screen again, even if they allowed a hack director to momentarily make them look like two sad has-beens fighting over who can harvest the most seaweed.