sangsara.net

Tag: Travel

  • Week 52.25

    Week 52.25

    Merry Christmas! For my main gift, I received a turntable, something that I’ve been very conflicted about wanting for awhile. Apart from the fatal hipster embarrassment, I know that the urge to repurchase all my favorite albums on vinyl is a road to financial ruin.

    Back in February, I was on the lookout for a CD player to bring home from Tokyo, but decided against it because digital streaming is identical, if not superior in the case of lossless and Spatial Audio, and I couldn’t see many instances where I would bother to get up and pop a CD on instead of just call out a request to my HomePod. And HomePods don’t accept Bluetooth or line-in audio, so I’d have to use my Sony soundbar or buy a third speaker for the living room. Too much hassle!

    But vinyl, goddamnit, just barely dodges the killing blow of that logical argument by having a different value proposition. One, the physical LPs are more collectible, more beautiful, more mentally stimulating in a world that wants to turn itself into ephemeral bits. People say that intentionally putting on a record for close listening deepens your connection with the music over just tapping a link. Two, the audio characteristics of an all-analog reproduction chain are surely different from digital. So if you can, why not have both options for home enjoyment? Three, it’s just kinda cool?

    So I asked Santa for an Audio-Technica LP70X, which has the option of Bluetooth output. I briefly considered buying one of those Marshall speakers to pair it with, but the idea was so cringe I couldn’t face it. Besides, that would nullify point No. 2 — why bother if you’re going to digitize it? So I hooked it up to an unused B&O Beolit 12 speaker (which has unceremoniously served as a stand for our bedroom HomePod mini for years) via RCA cable instead. Voila, money saved that can be used for buying records!

    But first, guardrails were needed. I decided that I would only buy absolute masterpiece, timeless, desert island discs. No new pop/rock stuff that wouldn’t benefit much from the analog format. And that my collection would 95% focus on jazz. The exceptions are things like LUX and J Dilla’s Donuts, maybe.

    After some laborious rewiring, we got it set up on Saturday and played some records that Kim bought as souvenirs many years ago. Radiohead’s OK Computer was one of them, and while I suspect much of it is down to the different speakers’ sound profiles, the analog version is bassier and warmer. When the HomePod plays a lossless digital version of the same song, it has an incredible immersive quality, so clear and bright that the band could be in the same room. A film camera versus iPhone’s computational photography. Room for both.

    Anyhow, it’s been wayyyy too addictive browsing records on Amazon — and the ones that ship from Japan are usually much cheaper than the US versions. Here’s what’s on the way but please recommend me your faves!

    1. Miles Davis – Kind of Blue
    2. Vince Guaraldi Trio – A Charlie Brown Christmas
    3. John Coltrane – A Love Supreme: The Complete Masters
    4. John Coltrane – Blue Train
    5. Chet Baker – Chet Baker Sings
    6. Ornette Coleman – The Shape of Jazz to Come
    7. Bill Evans Trio – Sunday at the Village Vanguard
    8. Bill Evans Trio – Waltz for Debby
    9. Sonny Rollins – Saxophone Colossus

    ===

    While we’re out here talking about physical artifacts and meaningful rituals, I want to point out that this final post of the year is also the 287th weekly update on this blog. About five and a half years of regular writing — all because I started one week with no idea how long I would keep going, just the hope that it would help me to write more often than a couple of times a year. Today, this weekly blogging of things that captured my attention has become my most meaningful routine, and produces a living artifact that I find quite valuable.

    Writing is thinking, and so putting time aside to articulate your feelings and actions, and reflect on the patterns within them, might be the best way to understand and recalibrate your own life. You don’t have to blog in public; journaling works too. Several times a year, I find myself reading an old post that I’d completely forgotten about, and recognize that something happening with me in the present began with something further back.

    Mark Curtis, one of the co-founders of Fjord where I once worked, has just started a Substack called Full Moon with a partner, and in their latest post suggest that everyone should start a habit of “externalizing their thinking”, because a personal archive of written thoughts and ideas has new applications with today’s LLMs. Having such a corpus can be an asset, and not just for training a soulless version of yourself who goes to work for the corpos while you stay home and watch vids. One thing generative AIs do well is find patterns across large amounts of data, and so with journal entries they provide a means of browsing your own brain over time.

    No stranger to this idea, I assigned Claude to read all 51 posts of the year so far, looking out for trends and threads that I might not have seen while posting in real time. What came back had a hint of that AI voice, but contained a helpful synthesis of several threads. Let me explain in my own words rather than simply paste the results.

    There were several recurring themes and obsessions, for instance deaths and funerals earlier on in the year, and it linked those to some musings on age and mortality when I started to feel old around my birthday, and when I recently said I should watch my purine intake for fear of developing gout.

    It suggested that I was doing something meaningful by making plans to meet up with people during this sabbatical, and that keeping in touch with ex-colleagues and helping grade college students’ presentations was part of staying connected to design culture and “keeping the ladder down”. There were also many words dedicated to creative experiments; chasing after the beauty in imperfections, from film grain to mistranslations; and of course, AI concerns.

    From that overarching theme, I ended up musing about the vulnerability of the junior designer pipeline, the commercial pressure to abandon not only proven methods but our values, and the dissonance caused by being a regular user of AI tools while knowing they come at some unknown but surely high cost.

    It also provided some insights into how I spent my time, calling it an attempt at presence over productivity. I certainly didn’t do any work I didn’t care about! I recall saying in Week 26.25, as I revisited my CliftonStrengths profile, that my natural inclination is to hate keeping busy and productive for the sake of it. I recently wrote something down in my notebook that sums up that energy: “I take tremendous joy in being able to do quite a few things extremely well and yet choosing to do none of them.” Perhaps underachieving is my passion.

    More acts of presence: I went overseas for about two months out of the year and chose a slow “daily life” approach over hitting up a flurry of tourist attractions. I deleted a bunch of games off my backlog — if it doesn’t spark joy, I decided, then I don’t have to finish it. I fell into a Japanese curry “research” rabbit hole in the first half, and now it’s sardines. I managed to make more time for reading, and am now starting on my 52nd book of the year, which is quite a nice achievement even if some entries were short stories and novellas.

    The last book I read was so good that I’m making it recommended reading for everyone who comes by here.* Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in his own words is a free ebook by the Steve Jobs Archive, collecting in chronological order various speeches, emails, and interviews he gave. It’s not so much about Apple the company as it is about his views, spirit, and character that famously evolved between his ouster from that company and his triumphant return.

    I read it on the plane back from China, and maybe I was coming off an emotionally taxing time, but I had to stop reading several times because my eyes were tearing up. Don’t discount the beautifully cosmic coincidence of an adopted boy landing in the right family at just the right time in Silicon Valley. The result was that the whole world now enjoys thoughtful personal computers anyone can use. In another universe where the Mac never existed, there’d probably be no Windows either, and likely no smartphones as we know them.

    If you’ve ever heard him speak, you’ll hear his voice in all of these snippets. He had a way of keeping the forest in view, and often framed smaller moments (and even human life) against a vast span of time: what we’re doing here as a species, how it matters when we make things for each other, and thereby why we must carefully choose where we spend our time.

    *I’ll take this year-end opportunity to say thanks for reading, whether this is your first visit or you’ve been here all along. I get messages sometimes, and it’s always gratifying to hear something was a useful tip or interesting to someone else. Happy new year!

    ===

    I almost forgot. My seventh BLixTape playlist is done! Add it on Apple Music.

  • Week 51.25

    Week 51.25

    I shot these photos on an iPhone 17 Pro Max and emulated three classic Chinese B&W film stocks with AgBr: Lucky SHD 100, Friendship 100 Pan Film, and Shanghai GP3 100. The idea was to get the look of road trip snapshots from the 1990s that a traveler then might have taken.

    11 greatly biased observations from a first trip to China

    • The Great Firewall does indeed block the majority of household internet names in the west. Imagine testing if you’re online, what would you type in the address bar of your browser? Google? Nope. Any Facebook property? All social networks and chat platforms don’t work, with the exception of iMessage. However, this only applies to hotel WiFi networks and those provided by local ISPs. If you’re roaming on a cell network while using a foreign provider’s SIM, things work as expected (albeit routed through Chinese servers). I decided not to bother with VPNs and just trusted in HTTPS 😬
    • Powerbank rental machines are ubiquitous, even in places where you should never leave a box full of lithium-ion batteries, like out on the street in direct sunlight. You pay a few cents per hour (via QR code), and because they’ve landed on a common battery design between the many operating brands, it seems you can return one anywhere else after you’re done charging your devices. It’s great not having to carry your own around, but even given a high degree of civic integrity, I think getting adoption in a country where everyone already has their own (like Singapore today) would be tough.
    (more…)
  • Week 46.25

    Week 46.25

    The knives are falling at my feet and I’m supposed to catch them by the handles. I don’t succeed. This is a free “immersive Predator experience” at a Bangkok cinema complete with atmospheric sets, film props, and physical challenges to prove you’re predator not prey. I fail the blade catch but nail the laser rifle and poison plant maze. The whole setup probably cost more than most Singaporean theaters make in a week, which is why we’ll never see anything like it back home. Small markets can’t justify this kind of spectacle when nobody goes to movies anymore.

    The market size thing keeps coming up. Sushiro here is cheaper with bigger portions — the mackerel and tuna noticeably better than Singapore’s. But a local friend sent me to Katsu Midori instead, which claims to be Japan’s “number-one” conveyor belt sushi brand. The quality and generosity made me understand why Singaporeans fantasize about moving to Thailand. It’s not only the cost arbitrage; it’s having enough customers to support real competition and excellence at every tier.

    I saw Predator: Badlands before the knife-catching humiliation. It’s not like any other Predator film — a young Yautja (Predator) is the protagonist, Elle Fanning tags along being delightful, and if you’ve been watching Alien: Earth you’ll catch a Weyland-Yutani reference. It’s almost too much fun for this franchise but I had a good time.

    Then Now You See Me, Now You Don’t: schlocky heist nonsense with too many characters and Magic Castle consultants providing magician’s jargon nobody asked for. The absolute best trick here is Rosamund Pike’s South African accent. Watching her joyfully inhabiting the villain squares the ticket price.

    Then Bugonia. Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone, remaking the Korean Save the Green Planet! Don’t look anything up, just watch it. I’ve avoided their recent work but Stone is so good here I felt like I was seeing her for the first time — not the competent actress I knew but someone operating on a completely different level. The film makes pretentious orchestral choices that annoyed me until the final sequence paired music and image so perfectly I forgave everything. That experience of an artist asking for your trust and then paying it back in spades is something special.

    Which brings me to ROSALÍA.

    I’ve never paid attention to Spanish-language music beyond casual exposure. Ricky Martin and Shakira. Didn’t even know how Latin American and European Spanish differed until this week. But her new album LUX kept appearing in my feeds and so I listened. Then I listened to MOTOMAMI. Both of them, over and over.

    With this, I think she’s up there with Lorde, Billie Eilish, FKA twigs, Kendrick Lamar, Janelle Monáe — artists creating boundary-pushing work that questions everything while being unapologetically emotional. Maybe necessarily spiritual. LUX’s multilayered beauty and complexity feels like an impossible accomplishment. You don’t need to be a musician or watch her Zane Lowe interview to know it took years to create. You can hear it.

    Then I found an angry essay calling her a colonizer. It claims she (and her fellow Spaniards) stole flamenco from Romani people, conveniently rebranded herself as Latina to enter the Latin Grammy awards, and now that ICE is deporting brown people, the evil ROSALÍA is finally revealing her true face: a White European plumbing the Christian-orchestral tradition with an album where she poses as a fair and chaste nun on the cover.

    I found it very tiring, and wondered if policing cultural appropriation is just another form of gatekeeping. Because it turns out the Latin Grammys are open to all Spanish-language artists — more about language and tradition than ethnicity. But my real issue is this idea that curious minds have no right to explore and remix the world they encounter. It’s like saying Yo-Yo Ma shouldn’t play Bach because he’s Chinese-American, rather than celebrating how his contributions have enriched the canon. ROSALÍA’s reverence for these traditions is obvious in the music itself. I don’t need a sworn affidavit listing her inspirations to hear it.

    When you discover something this good — something you should have found years ago — you don’t want to be told it’s problematic. You want to understand why it works, why it moves you, why someone else’s cultural exploration can become universal art. That’s what great artists do. They don’t stay in their lane. They take what they love from everywhere and make something new that can belong to everyone.

  • 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 31.25

    Week 31.25

    Checking in now from the first row of a Boeing Dreamliner — a plane that has probably been in the news recently for the wrong reasons. But if you’re reading this post, it means we made it back safely.

    There was a moment early in the week where we were telling our Melbourne-based friends about last year’s trip to New Zealand and for some reason we both blanked on some key details and took awhile to align on what exactly happened. Maybe we were just tired, but then I had another theory: what if planning that trip with the help of AI meant the details didn’t form strong memories? Normally, planning a trip forces you to do research and make choices, with the resulting success or failure of your trip all on you. Those actions burn the memories in. But when ChatGPT spoon-feeds you an itinerary, maybe the details just float in and out of your mind. I wonder if this will really rot our lazy brains like no technology has before.

    We dropped in on a French Impressionism exhibit at the National Gallery Victoria, and I should say “yet another”, because every time we come by there seems to be something either French or impressionistic on. It was fine, but the $50+ ticket prices are surprising in contrast to exhibition prices in Singapore. I was also really hoping to see something new at ACMI, but sadly their new ‘Game Worlds’ videogame exhibition won’t open till September. Maybe I’ll have to come back.

    And then I fell ill and had to take it easy for a couple of days! If I had to guess, I probably picked up a flu bug from the airport or on the flight out. Still, I spent a large chunk of the week in bed or otherwise resting while Kim ran shopping errands for her mom and so on.

    As I got steadily better, we went out a bit for a nice dinner, lunch at a winery, and a visit to this bookstore, The Paperback, in the CBD that I always buy something from. This time I got a collection of Louise Glück’s poems that I’ve been wanting for awhile. Just taking it slow and enjoying a change of scenery. Normally getting sick on holiday would be a disaster, but having no expectations or plans means no disappointments either.

    I also went to my first Costco and had their famous hotdog, which was just $1.99 AUD with a soda. The financial engineering is strong at this company because it was a good and sizable pork sausage that I would have bought at thrice the price. We bought some other things there not worth mentioning except for a physical copy of Donkey Kong Bananza for the Switch 2 that’s S$20 cheaper in Australia than in Singapore. We really are getting ripped off out here; even buying it off the US eShop is S$5 cheaper than the local physical price.

    Another thing I discovered was how nice it can be to watch a fire and sit in front of a fireplace for a few hours. This is something that I maybe understood before but forgot. Continually tending to a fire — rearranging logs, blowing on embers, adding more fuel — it’s like a mindfulness retreat no one has yet packaged up for Singaporeans without winter experience. I cleared my inbox one evening while doing that and warming my feet by the flames.

  • 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 29.25

    Week 29.25

    • It was a low-key week after those few days in Bangkok. There’s more travel lined up soon, so I figure it’s no bad thing to enjoy the quiet while I can. We had someone come by to look at a house issue that’s been worrying me, but the prognosis was that it’s not a big problem for now, and they’ll do some proactive repairs in the meantime. So I have to admit life’s pretty good.
    • When I first went to Bangkok back in March, I found the retail scene vibrant and thriving in a way that you don’t see in Singapore anymore, and this week there was a long and well-researched piece on CNA about how shopping in other SEA countries has made Singapore seem dull in comparison. It’s a rough situation because we’re short on both land and entrepreneurial spirit, which means a vicious circle of high rents and safe concepts. People like to blame greedy landlords, but I suspect they’re the same ones counting on retiring with their REIT and bank dividends. You can’t have one without the other.
    • Doing my part for the restaurant scene, I ate out thrice this week and two were unhealthy affairs. A Singaporean sort of pub (al fresco) with Guinness and Thai food, and a Chinese hot pot restaurant picked for its amusing name, HIPPOT, that turned out to be one of those meals that goes down easy but feels awful after. Too much grease and heat. Note to self: make better choices!
    • The only thing I bought on the Amazon Prime Day sale was a book I’ve been wanting for a while, but the shipping cost is usually almost as much as the book itself. Thanks to the questionable economics of Amazon, shipping was free this time. The book is A Handheld History by Lost in Cult, and it covers the corner of gaming hardware that I have the most affection for: portable systems like the Game Boy and PSP. I suppose the smartphone is inadvertently part of that lineage; a stepchild or distant cousin. I don’t know when I’ll sit down to read it — paper books are just… inconvenient — but I look forward to that rainy afternoon.
    • I just finished reading The Butcher’s Boy by Thomas Perry, a 1982 thriller about a hitman. The anniversary edition’s foreword was written by Michael Connelly, author of the Bosch series, which got me in the right mood. If you liked the recent Day of the Jackal TV series, this will likely do it for you. The killer is the sort that doesn’t look especially athletic or dangerous, in fact he has the kind of face people don’t remember, but he’s great at what he does and when he gets into a jam, you root for him to get out. There are three more in the series [Goodreads], so those are going on my list.
    • Evan mentioned to me the existence of an Amiibo emulator a few weeks back, and when I saw one show up on Reddit it nudged me into ordering a unit off AliXpress. It’s a small electronic device that you can program to mimic the NFC chips on various Nintendo Amiibo figures, which unlock benefits in certain games when held next to your Switch/Switch 2 console. As I am very much against the idea of making people waste money buying large amounts of unnecessary plastic crap to unlock software features built into the games they already own, I have no moral qualms about using one of these.
    • This doesn’t have Amiibo support, but I played and finished Caravan SandWitch this week on the Switch. Weird name that doesn’t tell you much, I know, but hey it’s French. It’s a chill little indie game about exploring a planet (inspired by the landscapes of Provence) in search of your missing sister, with strong anticapitalist vibes, and was mentioned in a recent NYT article about videogames with a Studio Ghibli-like aesthetic. I enjoyed it enough as a short adventure, but the English translation lets it down in some areas. It runs well enough on the Switch 2, but I think the frame rate will be choppy on a regular Switch. 3.5/5.0
    • Pulpy paperbacks and cozy games are good and all, but a great media diet needs something of substance, and thankfully MUBI delivered. They’re featuring a two-film collection by the director Shinji Somai on their front page, and I was floored by both of them. They’re linked by a shared theme of childhood summers marked by transformative upheavals — broken families, deaths, newfound freedoms — but also the building of friendships, independence, and memories that become strengths in adulthood.
    • Moving (1993) features an incredible performance by Tomoko Tabata who was probably 12 at the time; the kind of work that’s almost too good, too early — fortunately she’s still working in film and TV today. There are lines in this that hit so hard, and incredibly audacious and magical sequences that are as good as anything I’ve seen put on film.
    • Notably, the three titular child actors in The Friends (1994) never acted in anything again. Scrambled by emotion after the ending, I hastily wrote on Letterboxd: “A film doesn’t have any business being this good! I cried till my Face ID struggled. There are frames in this so beautiful they should be hung in the Louvre.” Both films are a 5/5 for me. Perhaps for the way they perfectly capture the haziness of childhood memories, the nostalgic look and air of that era, and the open-ended way that school holidays felt as you experienced them. Stuff we didn’t think would matter becomes what we remember most.
  • Week 28.25

    Week 28.25

    • Despite a brief setback, we ended up going to Bangkok for a few days as planned.
    • After spending hours in traffic the last time, I stayed within a smaller radius this time and walked a bit more. There wasn’t any agenda, really; Kim had some things to do and I wanted a change of scenery.
    • There was a jam coming in from the airport, of course, but we were thankfully in a very comfortable ride provided by the hotel. Ours was one of many cars squeezing down the narrow side lanes on the freeway — those buffer zones you don’t normally think cars should (or could) be using. Other cars in the ‘proper lanes’ skooch over to make way for this to happen, and it struck me as a neat metaphor for designing permissive, flexible systems with a normal mode but hiding ample bandwidth to accommodate emergencies.
    • Amidst more news of layoffs and economic rockiness, I think using AI in design (or most things, maybe) should be the side lane to ‘proper lanes’ of humans doing work, but we’re trying to do the opposite. Someone showed me a new customer research platform called GetWhy, where AI personalities conduct interviews over video calls with people, and synthesize some manner of insights automatically. They call it “human depth at survey speed”, which I knew AI would eventually enable: a merging of qualitative methods with quantitative scale. I saw it coming a couple of years ago but didn’t have the strength to look at it directly and figure out the pros and cons. At a gut level, I think it’s a shame that companies will now be able to insert another artificial layer between the people working on services and the people they’re supposed to be serving (or, more cynically, extracting profit from).
    • Anyway back to Bangkok. I saw three films to pass free time in the afternoons. Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning for a second time; Jurassic World Rebirth, which was so terrible and completely lacking in the magic of the original film, the lasting fumes of which this franchise is still somehow able to sustain itself on; and James Gunn’s Superman, which I accidentally saw in Thai, without subtitles. I decided to sit through the whole thing and get by on just the visual language of it, and I think the experiment went okay! I probably couldn’t watch Tenet (2020) this way, though. 3/5 stars with the above qualification.
    • On Brian’s suggestion, I visited the Thailand Creative & Design Center (TCDC) which is a government office in a historic postal service building, mostly notable for its extensive resource library. You have to be a member to enter, although day passes are available for about S$4. It was a good way to pass a couple of hours, and I flipped through some interesting books that are now on my Amazon wishlist.
    • One of them was For the Love of Peanuts, by Elizabeth Anne Hartman, which covers the Peanuts Global Artist Collective — a project where seven artists reimagined Schulz’s characters through public art and exhibitions. There’s more information and photos through the link above. I was coincidentally thinking about learning to draw Snoopy recently, the “correct” way, and seeing this book was such a jolt to my narrow way of thinking — it had simply never occurred to me that I was free to recreate Snoopy however I wanted. Lots of new synapses to build here.
    • At the last minute, I decided not to bring my Switch 2 and it was fine. I always imagine hours of downtime on vacation where I might actually want to play a game, but it never happens. I did use my iPad Pro and am going through a sort of second wave of love for it. I recently got a third-party Smart Folio-type case, for just $12 off Amazon, which makes it much thinner and lighter than Apple’s Magic Keyboard case. The original Smart Cover (launched with iPad 2) is/was such a brilliant and minimal design, giving the device a perfect midpoint between versatility and portability, and having it again with this case is great for traveling.
    • It’s worth mentioning that each night back at the hotel I’d get into a trashy reality tv cable channel dedicated to “courtroom cases”. The quote marks are because I don’t know if you’d call these actual legal courts (but with the US, who knows?), but the two series I saw were awful and entertaining. Paternity Court sees couples come in and argue about their children, usually born on the side with another man or woman, culminating in the results of a DNA test revealing whether the man really is their father. Divorce Court is better, because you get other sorts of relationship issues being worked out, and the judges are sassier and give out strong advice. The name is a misnomer; some of these couples aren’t even married or looking for a divorce, they’re just airing their shit on TV. You can watch full episodes on their YouTube channel.
    • On the flight home, I caught Doctor-X: The Movie Final (2024), the supposed concluding chapter to the long-running Japanese medical drama that’s so bad I fell in love with it. Back in February, I spent an absurdly cost-inefficient chunk of my Tokyo trip watching Seasons 4 and 5 on local Netflix. Seasons 6 and 7 don’t have English subs, so I don’t know when I’ll get to see them — unlike Superman, this is too important to risk rawdogging in a foreign language.
      The movie… well, they went for higher stakes: explosions, AI, helicopters, the works. But that also meant less of the dumb fun and weird humor that makes the regular show a cult favorite. Or maybe not so cult at all — maybe it’s unironically loved in Japan. I kinda hope so.