Lots of reading this week, but not the traditional sort. I decided it was time to cross Emio: The Smiling Man off my Nintendo Switch backlog — that would be the murder mystery sorta-visual novel published by Nintendo (developed by Mages) last year. It’s the third installment in the ‘Famicom Detective Club’ series that laid dormant for decades (the clue’s in the name; they were made for the original Famicom aka the Japanese NES) until remakes of the first two games were released in 2021.
I played the first remake back in Week 31 of 2021, and apparently felt it was “a crock of shit”. When Emio came out, I wrote more about the series in Week 36.24, and watched a YouTube playthrough of the second game rather than pay good money to torture myself some more.
Thankfully, Emio is much better than those two. Perhaps because it’s a new game with a more sophisticated and complex story than was possible in the 80s. But I suspect it’s also because I’m now familiar enough with, and more forgiving of, the series’ game design ideas that I’d called “archaic and frustrating”. In any case, it has the most lavish animation production values I’ve ever seen in a visual novel, and the detective vibes are a lot of fun. I was let down by the mystery’s resolution, but the journey was definitely worth the time.
Japanese workplace sexism in Emio The Smiling Man
Rather than dive into Zelda Tears of the Kingdom (can you tell I’m afraid of the commitment?), I decided to continue down the VN path by starting on TSUKIHIME A piece of blue glass moon, a decision I will probably soon regret. This is a remake of a supposed masterpiece by the developer Type-Moon, and involves some 30–50 hours of reading, which is about 3x longer than Emio. It is, however, much less interactive and more like reading a novel with visuals and sound to set the mood. I’m only a little while in, but finding it a pleasant ‘multimedia’ midpoint between watching a show and reading a book. Luckily, I played Type-Moon’s Witch on the Holy Nightback in March, and because TSUKIHIME takes place later on in the same universe, it feels like a continuation.
There was a real book, though! What You Are Looking For Is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama is a charming collection of five little stories centered around a community library, where people stuck in different ruts meet a librarian who has a knack for recommending books that set them off and thriving in new directions. I wrote in my Goodreads review that on top of being above average as translated Japanese books go — most of them come across sounding dumber and more boring than I’d hope they are in the original texts — but the extremely healing nature of these stories warranted a five-star rating from me.
It looks like I’ll be going to Bangkok again next month, but this time the heat will be even more unbearable (a RealFeel of 40–45ºC?), so please pray for me. In preparation, I’ve purchased a white t-shirt for the first time in several years.
Over the weekend, we dragged ourselves out to see the City of Others exhibition at the National Gallery despite not being fully in the mood. I thought it would be healthy/helpful to just wander through it anyway, even if not fully attentive, and I did find some things unexpectedly inspiring. I may start a new project soon on the back of one idea!
While looking at some artifacts behind glass, I remembered that I’d installed Adobe’s new iOS camera app, Project Indigo, which was apparently developed by some of computational photography’s living legends, and promises “SLR quality” images by combining up to 32 frames at a time. It includes an AI-powered feature that removes reflections by inferring what the subject is, and generating detail to fill the less-visible areas. I tried it out on a couple of artworks and got a warning that my phone was overheating — I guess I’m upgrading to an iPhone 17 Pro this year! Anyway, see how it did for yourself.
For a free app, Project Indigo is a great deal. I’m sure it’ll eventually be shut down and folded into a paid Adobe offering, but for now, everyone should try it out for a bit. It takes very clean and likely superior photos to the default camera, and does super-resolution oversampling to give you more zoom reach than the iPhone’s lenses will. But the outputs still have that hyperreal HDR look that comes with computational photography, and for the moment that’s something I’m a little tired of. A little grain goes a long way in making a phone photo feel more like a real moment.
After the gallery visit, we had lunch at a Cafe&Meal Muji where I was shocked to see the latest inflation-adjusted menu; a massive downgrade from when I used to visit frequently during office lunch hours. The “4-Deli” meal of two hot and two cold dishes alongside rice and soup used to cost maybe $17.80 pre-Covid, then crept up to $20.80 in the years after. Today, it’s been entirely removed from the menu, and $20.80 only gets you a “3-Deli”: one hot and two cold dishes. To try and obfuscate the loss in value, they’re now throwing in a half-boiled egg (which can’t cost more than 30 cents).
I probably should have expected it, because for breakfast that same day we stopped by a Toast Box for some kaya toast, which I honestly haven’t done in years, and the breakfast set (coffee, two eggs, a sandwich) is now S$7.60, or about 50% more than in the pre-Covid era. You can of course get this sort of thing cheaper elsewhere, but these prices are still wild.
In Craig Mod’s nearly three-hour book tour interview on Rich Roll’s podcast, which I’m listening to in small doses, he mentions the ¥300 breakfast set, a Japanese coffee house staple, and how apologetic businesses have been about having to raise prices by even ¥20 or ¥50. That’s what the kaya toast set is to Singapore, and I wonder if Japan is going to see a ¥500 or ¥700 breakfast set before too long.
Speaking of Japan, the Blue Bottle chain arrived in Singapore back in April. While I know they’re American, I’d only ever had their coffee while in Japan. Now that two months have passed, I thought the hype would have died down enough to try and visit the branch here in Raffles City’s tiny LUMINE department store. It was still packed, but I got an iced NOLA-style coffee to go for S$8 — lightly sweetened and flavored with chicory, it was pretty good tbh! But you can see Nestlé’s dirty fingerprints all over the brand now. It feels like the stores only exist to justify selling merch through other channels. Do a search for “Blue Bottle NOLA” and instead of a store menu or info page about their drink offerings, you’ll get tons of spinoff products like NOLA Nespresso capsules, brew-at-home kits, tumblers, instant coffee mix, foamers, and so on. Even Starbucks, synonymous with the mercenary scaling of coffee, looks kinda restrained in comparison.
A massive 7.7 quake hit Myanmar and Thailand on Friday, causing several hundred deaths so far. It was chilling to pull up the news and see reports of buildings swaying in Bangkok and having to be shut down for safety inspections, buildings that I had just been in a week ago. Thankfully, everyone we know is unhurt, but I’ve heard accounts of the traffic becoming even more unworkable (someone spent over 5 hours getting to the airport), and with some having to walk miles home instead.
It was my Apple Watch that alerted me to this earthquake, via a notification from the environment ministry’s MyENV app, which usually likes to tell me about quakes in places so far away I don’t see what possible need there could be for an alert. I was in the middle of watching Jason Statham’s film, A Working Man (2025), in an almost empty theater with Peishan, and was about to swipe it away when I saw that it was actually kind of nearby. And then afterwards, the feeds were full of videos showing swimming pools at the tops of condominiums raining their contents down onto the streets below. Who decided we should start putting pools up there, anyway?
The movie is terrible, by the way, and makes the mistake of trying to NOT be the predictable vengeance-by-numbers Statham vehicle that the trailer makes it out to be. It looks like our man Jason is just your regular ex-military deadly killer who’s decided to take on an unassuming identity and retire to a life of normalcy as a construction worker when one of his new friends falls afoul of the mob and needs rescuing. This is a setup rooted in at least a little realism, which is needed for the audience to suspend disbelief when the righteous murdering starts. However, this film is co-written by Sylvester Stallone, who is now at a stage in life where he writes really ridiculous scenes, silly and clichéd to the point of surrealism, as evidenced in the last installments of his Rambo and Expendables franchises.
The latest season of Reacher, a series on freaking Amazon Prime Video, is more believable and enjoyable in almost every way, which is a hell of a red flag for whoever produced A Working Man. When reading any of Lee Child’s novels, Reacher comes across as a stoic avatar of justice, almost featureless in terms of personality. But as played on TV by Alan Ritchson, he’s endearingly a bit of an awkward and pedantic weirdo, as you would expect someone with his physicality to be after moving through a world that he doesn’t comfortably fit into. I like that change.
We also watched the critically acclaimed show Adolescence on Netflix, and it’s an absolute marvel of filmmaking and acting. I’ve never seen a British TV production with this level of craft; it just leaves you wondering how they pulled it off — how they had the energy, even. Each episode is an hour-long performance that often involves moving between multiple locations, with the actors having to ramp up the emotions from anger to fear and the sorrow in between, and they did this how many times? For the final episode, they apparently used Take #16. It’s unfathomable talent. Stephen Graham and his co—stars deserve awards for this.
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This week will also be remembered for the wave of Studio Ghibli-styled images that washed up on social media after the release of ChatGPT’s new image generation capabilities in their 4o model. People turned personal photos, memes, and historic images alike into ripoffs of Miyazaki’s instantly recognizable style, and I have to say I enjoyed many of them whilst simultaneously feeling uneasy about what this means.
The new model seems to be a milestone that’s arriving a little sooner than I expected. It can render text with good enough quality and aesthetic precision. It can process a multi-step prompt such as “create a print ad for the product in this picture”, and it will write some pretty workable ad copy, re-imagine the object you’ve given it, and merge them into a single image that looks right at a glance. There may be minor imperfections, or it may fail to nail a critical detail depending on your object. But the fact that it can be completely right some of the time is startling. I’d say it’s most of the way to fucking the creative industry over, but who knows if the last mile will take a quarter, a year, or a decade to close.
While discussing the possible outcomes of this development with some people, specifically whether this would retard the growth and success of any new visual ideas — take for example the iconic look of Studio Ghibli, or Peanuts and Snoopy — why/how could any new artist launch and evolve their style if it can be snatched away from them early on and proliferated across the web in ways they haven’t even thought of yet — I wondered aloud if the only way forward left for them will be to use AI to scale their work, to generate more variations of it themselves, and to speed it to its logical conclusion (or demise) before anyone else does.
At this point, I remembered an abandoned “art project” of mine (if it could be called that) from a few years ago, and got very excited about enlisting ChatGPT’s help with it.
In late 2019, just before COVID hit, I had the idea to draw a series of cute animal characters and make some products. They would be called the Fluffy Hearts Club, and the story was that they were all research animals who were having horrible tests done on them, but who banded together and escaped from the lab. So they’d all have little scars and visible reminders of humanity’s awfulness on their bodies, but they’d be extremely happy and positive in their freedom eras.
I drew the first one with great difficulty, a rabbit with a scar on his chest, printed him on something like 50 tote bags, and gave them away to friends that Christmas. I started to draw the next one, a cat, along with some other angles of the rabbit, but eventually shelved it… owing to COVID or lack of skill, I don’t know. As you can see they are pretty rough.
But when I realized that I could use ChatGPT to “learn” this style and concept to help me finish the rest of it, I got excited enough to plonk down $30 and upgrade my account to Plus. Ethics check: Would I have paid a human artist to do this for me? Unlikely. I’m not made of money, and it’s just a silly side project. Should I have? I can’t see how; I want to explore this on my own without another human in the mix.
I’ve spent a little time on it so far, and it’s grasped the core idea and even brainstormed other animals and their visual signatures with me — it felt eerily like collaborating with a person, as we discussed possibilities and complimented each other along the way. It has trouble following instructions about very minute details, which it explained as a shortcoming of the way its models were trained (it leans towards cartoon conventions, which one of my notes contradicts), which one can take as proof that this is all built on the back of awful copyright violations.
But with its help, I’ve managed to produce more versions of the rabbit and even imagined the cat in various art styles, so I’d say this has been a half success. I might use it as a foundation for tracing/drawing new ones myself, or as inspiration for different scenarios.
I only wish I was using this renewed subscription to explore how to stay relevant in my own job domain rather than in the lane of starving artists. Yuk yuk.
Speaking of the design field, I went back to the same college I visited last November to help give feedback on the work from a class of students doing a design thinking course taught by my former boss and mentor, and was again struck by how much of what we do and prescribe as designers, the responsible way to move in the world, is naive and vulnerable to the at-odd incentives of everyone in the AI business. They’ll throw a synthetic persona at a problem for $10 in compute before they spend a dollar on asking a real person what they need to lead a better life.
And that brings me to Careless People, the Facebook tell-all book by Sarah Wynn-Williams that I’ve just finished reading. The one that Zuckerberg and his lawyers tried to quash before it was published. I thought I knew enough about Facebook’s bad behavior, but I was still stunned by some of her anecdotes.
I haven’t made many rules about what kind of work I’ll do, and when I used to smoke, I believed that I could consult on work for tobacco companies because to do otherwise would be hypocrisy (I’m wiser now), but “never work for Facebook” was a promise I made maybe a decade ago. I simply do not understand or respect anyone who chooses to, and this book should be required reading for those who think they might.
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I listened to Alessia Cara’s new album Love & Hyperbole a couple of times, hoping that something would finally click, because I did want to like it. But I was left without much of an impression. I’m probably coming off R&B in general because listening to SZA’s deluxe edition of SOS on the plane home last week was quite excruciating.
But then I put on Jessie Reyez’s new album PAID IN MEMORIES and I loved the one playthrough I’ve heard. Maybe it’s the millennial in me but there are some samples for old people in here, including the Smashing Pumpkins’ 1979. She makes it work, and the melodies are strong.
I found solutions to a couple of longstanding bugs and problems relating to date metadata saving on iPhone photos and battery drain on my Kobo, but published them as two separate posts so as not to clutter this update with nerdy troubleshooting.
Had a good couple of days in Bangkok. As others prepared me to expect, the shopping centers are a cut above anything in Singapore in terms of scale, brand availability, and features. And there are so many of them, from giant complexes full of small kiosks that feel like the old days of Sim Lim Square, where you have to stay alert or be taken for a ride (MBK Center), to luxe architectural marvels I can’t figure out the sustainable economics for.
Like in Tokyo, it was again nice to see so many bookstores thriving, sometimes two in a single mall, which is so not the case in Singapore.
I had some time to kill on my first afternoon so I went to the cineplex at Siam Paragon and saw Mickey 17 in a widescreen format called ScreenX that I’d never heard of before. It was also showing in 4DX (with chair motion and blasts of wind, etc.), and the other theaters supported IMAX and different 3D options. They sold popcorn in 8 flavors.
In this new issue of Notebook, they also look at the immersive content available on Apple Vision Pro and comment on these early explorations as being typical of a new form of cinema trying to find its place in the world. As novel as it was to watch Mickey 17 with ScreenX’s additional peripheral content, it obviously doesn’t compare at all to Vision Pro’s immersion, and probably isn’t necessary compared to watching the regular version of a 2D film. So I can’t blame our cinemas for not investing in these new formats to win people back.
Also at Siam Paragon, there was a large Nintendo store run by an authorized retailer that kinda gives real Nintendo stores a run for their money. Because they’re not bound by arbitrary brand rules, they can sell third-party products alongside the games and official merchandise, which has the effect of giving a fuller picture of the ecosystem and better celebrating Nintendo’s cultural impact.
Japanese culture has a large presence in Bangkok. I saw many brands and retailers that we don’t have here, like Loft, Matsumoto Kiyoshi, Hinoya Curry, and their Books Kinokuniya stores are massive and stocked with tons of manga and anime-related products. There were dedicated Gundam plastic model (Gunpla) stores, a Bandai Namco gachapon store, and even a major Jujutsu Kaisen exhibition in one mall with tickets costing about S$22 (I decided against it).
I ended up eating curry rice from Coco Ichibanya and Maji Curry instead of Thai food on a couple of occasions. Cocoichi is better there than it is here (not saying much), but isn’t quite the same as in Japan. Maji Curry, however, should be commended for their consistency. It’s just as good everywhere I’ve had it. That said, they offered me a choice between chicken and beef-based curry sauces, and that was definitely new.
The ICONSIAM mall was recommended by many people, but perhaps I was just all malled out by that point because I wasn’t feeling it. The Apple Store there is pretty cool, with very high ceilings and lots of natural light, but it had the effect of making the minimal product displays feel lacking. The Apple Store at CentralwOrld is much more interesting, with its circular design, spiral staircase, and two-story layout.
It might also be that minimalism is a rare creature in the Bangkok mall landscape. It can be seriously overstimulating, with hundreds of colorful decorative elements dangling from every surface, or crowded aisles like in the basement of ICONSIAM, which is a bewildering recreation of a chaotic street market, complete with roast crocodile meat on sale, and then you walk 50 meters and pop out next to a sleek Rimowa flagship store.
The traffic in Bangkok is a major drawback, pushing visitors to choose calling for a Grab motorbike instead of a car. That’s not a dice roll I’m ready for, so I spent several hours editing photos in the backseats of cars. For example, a 14km trip to the Museum of Contemporary Art took over an hour in the middle of the afternoon, instead of the 15–20 minutes you’d expect from looking at the map.
MOCA Bangkok
MOCA, by the way, has the most breast-obsessed permanent collection I’ve ever seen anywhere in the world. Well over 50% of the work on display features topless women, and I regret not taking more photographic evidence to prove it to you. But here are some paintings I saw plus the current special exhibition, Mammals, which was said to feature 1:4 scale models of animals, except the artist couldn’t resist adding human mammaries to each one for comparison.
The National Museum was thankfully a lot tamer, featuring Buddhist statues and unearthed ceramics that tell the story of Thailand’s history over the past few thousand years. These insane carved ivory tusks, though, I thought were worth sharing. They’re fairly recent, made in the 20th century by artisans from Myanmar.
Man, that Severance finale, eh? Woof.
Wait, I mentioned the shopping scene in Bangkok, but what did I actually come back with? A pair of jeans (that I could have bought back home, really), a Snoopy “Scenery Box” blind box that I first saw in Japan and have regretted not buying, and a MagSafe PopSocket from the current Peanuts Cherry Blossom series that is being featured in select countries’ Apple Stores right now.
I got busy with a little work for the first time in ages, helping Rob out with an interesting web project he’s taken on. Well, I say I’ve helped, but only he would know, and he’s too nice to tell me if I didn’t. It was a good experience in that I now know it’s not impossible to get going again quickly from zero; come to think of it, I did pretty much get thrown straight into it after my last sabbatical too. But I also know that sitting alone in my home office with nobody to collaborate with is not a lot of fun anymore.
Regular readers may recall that Michael (who, along with Yiwen, I sadly failed to meet up with in Tokyo despite having many weeks to do so) once told me that he’s probably never seen a cockroach in Japan. Well, they must follow me around or something, because I saw a dead one on the floor of the apartment building’s garbage sorting room just a few days into our trip. Now, after a few days back, I found a dead one at home. Measures have been taken, but my mental state is brittle glass. I got a quote for professional help (pest control, not psychiatry), and they want about S$900/year for peace of mind. I’m wavering. Maybe.
I thought I was done with travel for a while, but it looks like I’ll be going to Bangkok soon for (*small voice*) the first time in my life. Nobody can believe it when I say that because all Singaporeans are expected to love Thailand and to go shopping there several times a year or something. It suggests that I should be ashamed, like the time I went into a MOS Burger and declined chilli sauce with my fries, and the aunty (see, I am a local) asked incredulously, “No chilli? Are you a Singaporean?” Well ackshually! “I can’t tolerate proper spicy food, and I don’t see the point in flying to another hot and humid city!” — are reasons why I haven’t so far, but now I will, and I might love it. It’s just for a few days, and I’m under no obligation to deep-dive the city and make the most of it. There should be plenty of time for other visits if all goes well.
A couple of months ago, it was suggested that a couple of us friends should institute a regular dinner ritual because it’s too easy to withdraw and neglect relationships as you get old. I agree with this, and we’ve been doing it, but I still don’t know what fundamentally changes this with age. The easy explanation is more time being taken up by marriages and children and work and caregiving, coinciding with a decrease in overall social and physical energy. But there must be more to it. I used to think it was wild that my parents stopped going out to the movies, only visited the same few familiar restaurants and malls, and appeared to have a shrinking circle of concern. But now I’m here too. I used to know what was happening around town through some unconscious osmosis, but Orchard Road is an alien place whenever I pass through now. Perhaps it’s a decline in curiosity and, subsequently, neuroplasticity. We need to institute some rituals around that.
Media activity
Still reading The Satanic Verses. It’s disorienting, like swimming in viscous psychedelics. I said to my book club that it sometimes feels like watching Quantum Leap the way you, the reader, keep surfacing into new stories and identities and viewpoints — you break above the water, gasping just long enough to get your bearings on some new threads, and then you’re pulled under again. What an incredible achievement.
Not related at all, but man is Conclave an amazing film! Such a shame it didn’t pick up more Oscars. I enjoyed it so much I was hoping it would go longer than it did.
I put Jennie’s debut album on during a long train journey and while it was better than Lisa’s album (agree with that 5.2/10 Pitchfork review, btw), it was still kind of like an imitation of interesting pop music. I didn’t get the sense that Jennie is anyone, and that these were just some beats she’d curated from producers’ submissions.
Queued up directly after Ruby was BANKS’s new album, Off With Her Head, and I honestly FELT that transition. “Okay, this is getting good” soon turned into “oh, this is actually another album”. I know they’re not really in the same category (except for both having features from Doechii), but BANKS’s work sounded so much sharper, from the control of her voice to the quality of the production. So the Blackpink solo effort ranking still stands at Rose > Jennie > Lisa > Jisoo for me (with a wide gulf right in the middle).
I made it home safely on an ANA flight. To be honest, I expected a lot from the Japanese carrier but their seats were noticeably narrower than SIA’s, and the food was also disappointing compared to other economy class meals in recent memory. The only area they clearly beat Singapore Air in was probably cabin crew service. They were either as genuinely earnest and eager to please as they looked, or at least well drilled in rigid protocols. For instance, I noticed them bowing deeply to no one in particular each time they passed through the curtains to enter and leave a cabin section. The ‘Singapore Girl’ is only a part-time persona, but omotenashi is a lifelong affliction.
In my last couple of days in Tokyo, I embarked on a Doctor X viewing marathon and managed to complete season 5. I downloaded seasons 6 and 7 offline on my iPad and hoped to watch them back home, only to discover later that those later seasons don’t have English subs at all. I guess they never got international distribution and so no one bothered. It turns out that this is actually one of the biggest shows on Japanese TV, with some episodes having up to 25% national viewership!
So after binge-watching nearly 30 episodes of people collapsing from brain tumors and hidden afflictions, I became convinced that 1) I was probably very sick and should get a health exam soon, and 2) I couldn’t leave Japan without a Doctor X souvenir of some sort. That led to a hectic visit to the TV Asahi store at Tokyo Station on my last afternoon (is the Character Street ever not crowded?), where I picked up a ballpoint pen emblazoned with her catchphrase, and an extremely overpriced little figurine of the series mascot, an orange cat named Ben Casey.
Coming back to the heat and humidity has not turned out to be as unpleasant as I feared. Actually, it’s been a slight relief — after a month in the dry winter’s air, and lacking the natural instincts to moisturize thoroughly and regularly, I’ve developed pretty dry skin in some places. It got bad enough that the pad of my right thumb became rough enough to get in the way of using my iPhone’s screen. And now, after just a few days back in the soupy Singaporean air, everything’s returning to normal.
Media Activity
It was good to be reunited with my Vision Pro. I’d considered bringing it, but didn’t think it would be essential given the presence of a smart TV in the apartment, and not a whole lot of free time to be sitting around watching movies or anything. In the end, I think that was the right call, but coming back to it has felt great. I’ve only seen one of the two new Apple Immersive Video features that came out, the “Deep Water Solo” episode of Adventure, and although some have said the rodeo documentary is better, it was still extremely cool and nerve-wracking to watch.
A bunch of other new apps and experiences came out in the last month, and I tried Synth Riders for the first time because there’s a new Kendrick Lamar stage featuring the song HUMBLE. It’s an Apple Arcade rhythm game not too dissimilar to Beat Saber, where you hit targets and trace lines rushing towards you with your hands. I’m not great at it and at this age, my hand-eye coordination will probably never master its intricacies, but it’s certainly a thrilling game. I agree with critics who say that AVP gaming needs physical controllers, because the lack of haptic feedback does hold the game back from total immersion.
We caught up with Severance on Apple TV+, and this show deserves all the attention it’s been getting for episode 7. Visually and conceptually, there’s nothing else out now that comes close to its artistry. Supporting the creation of prestige TV of this quality is reason enough to keep buying iPhones, imo.
Over on Netflix, where the shows look like ungraded LOG files with scenes lit at random, we found their new limited series Zero Day a pretty satisfying watch. I expected Robert De Niro to fully phone it in, but hey, it’s okay! The set-up is a good one, and very much like a 90s Michael Douglas thriller, but I also loved that it reminded me of Neal Stephenson’s Interface, in which an American president has his integrity compromised in a really interesting way.
I’ve started on two games on the Nintendo Switch. Bunny Garden is like if you took the hostess club minigames out of the Yakuza/Like a Dragon series and made them into a standalone title. So it’s just making conversation choices and optimizing a job loop to make more money to buy more gifts and level up your relationships.
The other “game” is Witch on the Holy Night, by the developer Type-Moon. The original is a legendary classic that came out in 2012, but this 2022 remastered version has updated graphics and is probably the most kinetic and impressive visual novel I’ve ever seen. There is so much beautiful, animated art accompanying the text, and with so little repetition, that it feels like an impossible achievement: a triple-A visual novel. It’s just too bad there’s no gameplay here, no choices to make at all. It’s an animated book with an audio track.
In terms of traditional books, I finished reading Pierce Brown’s Red Rising, a YA book that feels very much cut from the same cloth as The Hunger Games. I started off not liking it much (possibly for that reason), but it has some unique twists and tensions, and I found myself enjoying it more and more. By the end, I was ready to read more of the series, of which six books are currently out. Well, I’ll get to them someday.
After literal decades of putting it off for fear of the staggering challenge, I’m now reading Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, and loving it. It’s been years since I’ve read one of his books, and I’d forgotten how playful, funny, ingenious, and inventive his writing is. It’ll probably keep me busy for the next month at least.
I made myself a spot in the apartment to sit and rot the hours away. This was achieved by moving the comfiest chair over to the dining table and plugging in my iPad Pro and Magic Keyboard into power. From here, I can also watch the TV. The plan was to spend all of Monday sitting here and finally getting some rest from going out every day and walking over 10,000 steps, which has driven my Apple Health metrics up by 2x for the past two weeks.
I think my body has been surprised/broken by this sudden surge in activity. It doesn’t help that the bed here isn’t the best, so the morning backaches haven’t been fun.
But I ended up going out on Monday after all, because a day spent home is a day I’m not eating curry. I noticed a line for Alba Curry while in Akihabara last week, and made my way to a nearby branch of theirs for my third plate of curry rice in as many days. They’re a Kanazawa-style curry joint, but as far as I know, that doesn’t necessitate the use of baseball references? They have a one-with-everything menu item like Go Go Curry’s “Grand Slam”, except theirs is called the “Home Run”. It comes with a single pork katsu, a fried egg, two sausages, and a fried prawn. The fried egg with a runny yolk was a nice touch, but sadly, the rest of it was average. The curry was a little stodgy and lacked the punch of flavor I was looking for.
I had better luck with Hinoya Curry, a favorite of recent years that I’ve never had the chance to eat more than once a trip. Unlike the others, it actually has a little heat while managing a fair amount of fruit-like sweetness. I ordered a plate with only a raw egg, vegetables, and two sausages because I didn’t understand the ordering system and thought it would include a pork cutlet. No matter, it was very good as it was, and now I have an excuse for one more visit before I leave.
On Tuesday, I made my way out to MOMAT: the Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, a place whose existence I was only alerted to when Michael blogged about his visit last year. It was a particularly bright and sunny morning, which made for a nice visit given its proximity to the Imperial Palace’s moat and picturesque grounds. The museum has a massive collection of over 13,000 works, but only displays about 200 at a time with bi-annual rotations. I like this approach much better than the one taken by Singapore’s National Gallery.
In any case, this moment in time seems to be a sort of dead zone for the big museums. Many are preparing for new exhibitions that only begin in March, which is a shame but not a blow because what’s on now is still just barely manageable with the time I have.
On the way back, I stopped by Kitte Marunouchi and spotted the Qoobo for sale at the “Good Design Store Tokyo by Nohara”. I first saw this adorable, tail-wagging robot/cushion online many years ago and immediately wanted one, but was resigned to it being an only-in-Japan product. It’s now available internationally if you look hard enough, albeit with a significant markup. After doing the girl math, buying it here was too good a deal to pass up (about S$150), so I guess I’ve found the souvenir gadget I’ve been looking for.
Last week, I complained about us tourists overcrowding the city, but it’s everyone; Tokyo is simply up to its observation decks with people. At several points while out and about, I’ve wanted to stop in somewhere for a coffee break but had to hit up multiple cafes to find a free table. Even after 2 p.m., when you’d expect the office crowd to be back at their desks, many seem parked in cafes to work remotely. I saw people doing video calls and some looked set up there for the long haul with stationery, chargers, and other accessories strewn about to make personal workspaces.
In the vicinity of MOMAT, I discovered the JCII (Japan Camera Industry Institute) Camera Museum, a small basement space packed with photographic history: hundreds of vintage cameras including the iconic Leica I Model A, which turns 100 this year. Ironically, the museum prohibits any photography of the space or its exhibits. For a mere ¥300 entry fee, I got an hour’s entertainment poring over weird and rare designs — on the whole, the majority of industry players are copycats and follow innovative leaders, quite like how smartphone hardware and software today have converged on similar designs. Virtually every camera I’ve ever owned, or at least some cousin of it, was in this priceless collection.
My body has really had enough after all. Three weeks of walking and stair-climbing amidst the coughing masses, drastic temperature changes, and drier air than it’s used to has led to me being mildly ill now. That has regrettably meant calling off some plans, but my new goal for the rest of my time here is to recuperate at home while eating 7-Eleven food and bingeing Doctor-X: Surgeon Michiko Daimon on Netflix. I mentioned this admittedly cheesy but comforting TV show back in 2023, and at that time, a few seasons were still available for watching in Singapore. Today, the show isn’t on any local service, but being geographically in Japan means I can pick up where I left off on Netflix, in the middle of Season 3 (of 7).
Rereading that old post, it seems that I experience the same renewed excitement for gaming, that I mentioned last week, every time I come here. I still think this atmosphere hinges on the large presence and floor space given to physical game retail, but this may not last much longer with digital sales on the rise everywhere. Of course, one can also attribute this cultural presence to the relative outsize of the game economy here (including mobile games).
One of the games I saw in a box in a store was Shinjuku Soumei, a visual novel I’d seen on the Nintendo eShop before but wasn’t enticed by. I decided to buy and at least start on it while here, and I’ve just finished “playing” it through while resting at home (it’s not very interactive at all, just a click-and-read VN).
I mentioned PARANORMASIGHT last week, and while I won’t start playing it until I’m safely home, I did go out to visit one of the Sumida landmarks featured in this creepy supernatural game: Kinshibori Park. It’s not much to look at but there’s a statue of a famous kappa in one corner, one of the “Seven Wonders of Honjo” which the game seems to be based on.
By the way, I’m half certain we saw the actress who plays Doctor-X on the streets of Ryogoku a couple of weeks ago. There wasn’t anyone else around, so I couldn’t see from others’ reactions if it really was her. It sure looked like her to me, though, so I’m sticking with that story.
Just had my first ever “soup curry” in Shimokitazawa, which unbeknownst to me is also considered a curry town (like Jimbocho in last week’s update), albeit focused more on authentic “spice curry”, as opposed to the sweeter Japanese adaptations of British-adapted curries. It came with a whole chicken leg and an impressive 20 kinds of vegetables, costing about ¥2000. Thoroughly delicious and a healthy meal (I told myself), although we did have to wait over an hour in a virtual queue for it.
Taking a photo would have gotten you thrown out before
To pass the time, we stopped into Bear Pond Espresso for one of their famous Dirtys and a cup of their proprietary Flower Child blend. The coffee is still as good as it ever was, but the vibe has changed now that the famously surly owner isn’t behind the counter. The last time we came and saw him, his mood had brightened up tremendously; he was taking off early to walk his dog in the sun, and even stopped to tell us its name. Perhaps he’s now retired. Good for him.
Afterwards, an obligatory stop into Village Vanguard, a “bookshop” whose closest kin is probably Don Quijote (or as it’s known in Singapore, Don Don Donki), that self-described shopping jungle where haphazard aisle placement is intentional and designed to get you lost and overwhelmed in a good way. VV has books, media merch, stickers, physical music, gacha, plushies, clothing, you name it. If I could actually read Japanese, I’d never be able to leave.
Back to food for a minute. We booked a “katsu omakase” meal before coming out here, featuring multiple cuts of perfectly cooked Japanese pork, and separately had an impromptu sushi omakase in Roppongi, where we got in just after lunch hour and had the whole counter to ourselves.
We also tried some Mister Donut, which is known in Singapore for always selling out, but here in addition to the perpetual lines and wide selection of sweet bakes, it’s also a place you can sit down and have… fried rice!?
I haven’t stepped into either a McDonald’s or Burger King (and probably won’t), but for posterity’s sake, I will record that the former is currently selling a line of “New York-Style” burgers with , which sounds like bullshit to me because one of them has a prawn cutlet. The King is more on brand with a monstrous Yeti burger that has four quarter-pound patties dripping with creamy “white cheese”.
Most museums are closed on Mondays or Tuesdays, but you can’t always rely on their websites for accurate updates. We found that out the hard way on Tuesday, which was also a national holiday, when we traveled nearly an hour to Nerima Art Museum only to discover it was closed — their site said otherwise.
But we made up for that fail on Wednesday and Thursday with visits to the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT), and the Mori Art Museum, respectively.
MOT is hosting the extremely popular, TikTok-viral Ryuichi Sakamoto tribute: Seeing Sound, Hearing Time. We must have stood in line for 45 minutes to get in, but it was certainly worth it. The final room was probably the highlight, where you see an ethereal “hologram” of him playing on a real piano with keys synced to a MIDI performance he recorded. Spectral visualizations of each note rise from the piano as he plays, and it’s like watching his ghost play Guitar Hero in reverse. There’s also an outdoor portion that you might already have seen online: a dense “fog sculpture” you can wander through. Walking through it is disorienting and like being in a video game scene. You can barely see past your outstretched hand, and other people fade into view through the white mist. There’s a feeling that someone might come recklessly running and knock you over. All around us, Japanese people kept saying “Yabai!” out loud.
Thursday was opening day for Machine Love at Mori Art, and by going early in the morning, we caught the artist Beeple (famous for selling a $69M NFT at Christie’s) unveiling a new “software update” to his work HUMAN ONE, tailored to Tokyo and this exhibition in particular. In it, the eternally trudging humanoid AI robot was transported from a post-apocalyptic world to a new rainbow-colored cartoon world filled with derivative Asian imagery like pandas and pagodas. It was like a parody of Takeshi Murakami’s work, but he also attended the following day, so I guess he’s cool with it.
Then on Sunday, I visited the National Art Center in Roppongi, which is interesting for the fact that it’s more of a hosting ground for smaller organizations that want to hold exhibitions, and not a museum with its own collection. I saw a couple of calligraphy shows (admittedly hard for me to appreciate), a show featuring young and new artists, and the results of a couple more annual open competitions. I spend just $10 for an entire afternoon’s worth of interesting ideas, and am now thoroughly saturated with imagery.
I made the mistake of going to Akihabara over the weekend, after Kim had gone home (I’m staying on for a little bit), leaving me free to eat all the curry rice I want and spend hours in electronic stores. It was more crowded than I can ever remember seeing, and not in any positive way; people were lugging large suitcases around and blocking narrow aisles with them, among other inconsiderate acts. I left exhausted and feeling somewhat ill (the number of coughing and sneezing people around didn’t help). The place is a victim of its own reputation, I guess, and now tourists have ruined the place for everyone. Like Chernobyl, it might be 50 years before one can safely visit again.
Two weeks ago, I asked why no one has created an all-in-one vinyl/CD/cassette player yet. Yesterday, I saw one at Yodobashi Camera. Granted, it probably sounds terrible, and the ¥18,500 (S$163) price doesn’t inspire much confidence either. If someone makes a better version of this, though, I’d be up for it.
One thing I still love doing is browsing the video game sections at these large retailers. Although some of the physical games are region-free and contain English translations, I’m not really there to buy anything — my backlog is deep enough to last for years. The fun is in seeing games really thrive in the real world, with cartridges alongside plushies, keychains, and other accessories. There are sadly no such equivalents back home. Inevitably, I’ll see Japanese-specific box art and pick something new up to look up online, or be reminded of a title I’d heard of but forgot to wishlist, and by the end of it, become more inspired to head home and play more games. After a couple of such experiences, my wishlist is now deeper, and I’ve bought a few new digital titles as well.
Incidentally, Perplexity released a new “Deep Research” mode which has nothing to do with OpenAI’s Deep Research product, and I asked it to find me Nintendo Switch games set in Eastern Tokyo that I might play while living here, for greater immersion. Amazingly, it succeeded. It was able to find one game, PARANORMASIGHT, that was developed with the help of the Sumida city council and tourism board (why they agreed, I do not know, because the game involves at least one of the parks being haunted). It’s also available for iOS. Impressively, Perplexity was also able to extrapolate that the region is known for sumo wrestling, and identified games involving sumo that might be of interest. All in all, not a bad feature to have! Free users get five questions a day, paid users get hundreds more.
I realized almost too late that I had neglected to shoot more panoramic photos this trip, which are really great to view on Vision Pro and have the effect of transporting you back to places you want to remember. I’m trying to make up for that now.
We spent Monday strolling around Jimbocho, an area permeated by three of my favorite smells: books, coffee, and curry. I don’t know how many of the district’s 140~ bookstores we managed to see, but it’s something else. So nice to see the reading and collecting of printed material still alive, although you have to wonder where these used books and magazines (e.g. an issue of GQ with Jerry Seinfeld from when he was just getting famous) came from — the personal libraries of dead or dying hoarders?
There were also more stores selling CDs and vinyls, and I saw new models of portable players for sale at an electronics store. There are DiscMan-like devices that output Bluetooth to your headphones and speakers (alas, no AirPlay), and even a cassette player with Bluetooth. They look pretty cheap and plasticky though; nothing you’d put in a nice spot on a shelf to form a modern hi-fi unit.
We had lunch at the original Maji Curry restaurant in Jimbocho, and I’m pleased to report that the outlet in Singapore is pretty much the real deal. The fondue cheese sauce here is better, but that’s really nitpicking. Well done to the franchisee/team for bringing it over authentically, unlike Coco Ichibanya’s!
I’ve been on the lookout for cool gachapon miniature items to hang on my bag. So far, I’ve gotten Ricoh GR1 cameras (two of the same silver model), a MiniDisc, a wooden bird call, an Evangelion VHS episode tape with Rei Ayanami on the cover, a Nissin Cup Noodle, and a Johnsonville sausage pack (that I lost when the chain broke off somewhere). It’s quite a millennial weeb collection.
We intended to start each day early to make the most of the limited sunlight. We also underestimated our laziness/tiredness and how hard it would be to get out of bed on a cold day.
On Tuesday, we were forced up at sunrise for a sake brewery tour that was booked weeks ago. We met our guide at Shinjuku station before 9 a.m. — just imagine the crowds — and discovered it was a private tour for just the two of us. It was a nice day of “countryside” day drinking and not-at-all forced conversation with our guide, a 24-year veteran of Japan (originally from Britain via Zimbabwe).
We’ve just visited the Advertising Museum Tokyo, near the Dentsu headquarters and almost certainly funded/run by them. Outside, there’s a free-use space with chairs and tables, and while many seats are occupied by people working on laptops, there are more than a few salarymen sleeping with their heads down. It’s a tough life. Joni Mitchell’s Carey is playing from some speaker nearby.
At my beloved Go Go Curry for lunch now, and it’s the best of the three Japanese curries we’ve had so far (Maji is close behind; CoCo had a poor showing at the Asakusa-eki branch, but I’m confident they’ll deliver next time). But the price of the “Grand Slam” plate with everything on it has shockingly gone up to ¥1700. It was originally ¥1000, and when we came after Covid, it was maybe ¥1200. Inflation is hitting hard here.
Go Go Curry’s Singapore menu
Come to think of it, when Go Go Curry opened in Singapore in 2009, the cost of the equivalent menu item was S$18.50, or about ¥2000. It’s taken Japan 15 years to catch up to that price.
Leica launched a new iPhone accessory: the Leica LUX Grip. It’s a new design for the camera grip made by Fjorden, which was acquired by Leica recently and which has been responsible for the LUX app. It attaches to the iPhone via MagSafe and adds a two-stage shutter button, a control dial, and two programmable function buttons. It honestly looks pretty good, and if the LUX app improves its photo processing to get rid of the iPhone’s Smart HDR look, it will make a pretty nice “camera”.
It’s available now in Singapore for S$450, and when I stopped in at a Leica store here in Tokyo and asked if they had one to look at, the salesman actually laughed, saying no dates for a Japanese launch have yet been announced. What the heck?
I was super excited to see the new Ricoh GR Space in Shibuya, as I used to love their old RING CUBE museum/gallery in Ginza that closed down in 2020. The staff were super friendly and (I found this odd) thanked me sincerely when they learnt that I’ve been a supporter of the series from the GRD days. I was hoping to buy a little finger strap like the one that came with the GR III Diary Edition, but they don’t sell those piecemeal. Oh well. It was well worth the visit.
Still on the lookout for nice souvenirs and Japan-exclusive gadgets, but it seems those days are long gone and generally the global electronics market is extremely flat now with online shopping and Chinese e-commerce platforms like AliExpress. But! While at Beams (clothing retailer), I discovered this Bluetooth speaker that is the exact shape and size as a cassette tape for $50. Despite not expecting it to sound any better than my iPhone’s built-in speakers, I bought it on sight. An hour later, I found a non-Beams branded version at Hands for about $10 less. That’s… fine, I guess.
There are great PSA ads here warning against perverts who take upskirt photos and molest people on trains. I’ve been collecting a few (ads, not perverts).
sangsara.net 