sangsara.net

Tag: Travel

  • Week 7.24

    Week 7.24

    We landed in Auckland, New Zealand Monday morning and immediately flew down to Wellington, and we’ve been driving our way back north for the past few days. I’m currently writing this while sitting beside a Buddha’s head in a poolside garden, in a small new hotel outside of Rotorua.

    Four hours ago, I was parasailing above Lake Taupō in my usual urban uniform of jeans and a t-shirt — if you know me, you’ll know that I don’t sign up for even remotely dangerous things, especially over large bodies of water; in the cringey words of Below Deck repeat charter guest, Dean Slover, I said “homie don’t play that!” But Kim convinced me to, and we survived. They played Maroon 5 songs on the boat going out, and so by the time we were lifted some 50 meters in the air to float in blissful silence high above the town, I was having a good time. Lake Taupō is a volcanic caldera that’s nearly the same size as Singapore, but because it’s all flat you can just about see from one end to the other from up there. New Zealand challenges the city dweller’s sense of scale like all good nature vacations.

    Since leaving Wellington, the road trip portion of the trip so far has been mostly measured in burgers, fish and chips, and winery stops, specifically in the Martinborough and Hawke’s Bay areas where the tastings have been revealing of each company’s nature: some overly commercial and strictly scripted, versus others more informal, just going on vibes the only way they know. I think the difference shows up in the wine, with wineries in the latter category being more playful with flavor, more likely to put better stuff in a low-priced lineup. But I would say that, as someone who’s now had a crash course in holding up his glass against the light to observe the color.

    I’m now lying in bed on Sunday evening having just finished the last leg of our driving tour, which took us to the famous Whangamata Beach bordering the Bay of Plenty, and Hunua Falls, where we did another little nature walk and met a nice dog and helped its owners get a photo together with their iPad. Old people really carry full-sized iPads around on hikes to use as large-screened cameras. Mind blown.

    A couple of observations on this road trip. So much roadkill! Easily a hundred little bundles of fur spotted spread across tarmac just today alone. Some decayed and washed away, little more than stains. Some still fresh, bloating, bleeding. We avoided making contact with all but a couple. A ritual evolved, mainly to stay alert but also out of pity for these bunnies or squirrels(?): upon spotting one, I would put my palms together and say “rest in peace”, and Kim would follow with “in all your pieces”.

    FM radio is still not a great experience; it’s a wonder how people survived on it for so long. Fortunately I had a lot of downloaded music on my iPhone, which also navigated us with offline maps. CarPlay is excellent, and Apple Maps was good enough for nearly every leg of the journey. We listened to Lorde’s albums, of course, as well as the Sunkissed Summer playlist she compiled on Apple Music, and other New Zealand legends like Bic Runga and Crowded House. At one point I put on some J Dilla but learnt that rhythmic music you can sort of nod and zone out to is NOT what a driver wants over long winding roads.

    As I mentioned last week, this itinerary was drawn up with ChatGPT and my custom GPT, AI-tinerary, but we had to fact-check everything and plot the route on a map before making bookings. It’s held up well so far, with a couple of impromptu detours and chance discoveries along the way. For one, we did not realize that while passing through Napier for one night that we’d be there for the Art Deco-obsessed city’s annual Art Deco Festival, the first one they’ve been able to hold since 2020. Vintage cars were out in force, there was a Warbirds air show, and a free concert on the beach. It was packed, every restaurant was booked out. We ended up eating dinner out of a food truck by the sea. I asked ChatGPT “what’s happening in Napier tonight?” and it confidently replied, “I couldn’t find any events tonight.” At the risk of sounding like a broken record, these tools truly are starting points and aids right now, and you must resist the idea that they are final answers.

    I’ll post the final version of our itinerary next week when we’re done, in case it helps anyone looking to do the same.

    All photos were taken by either a Ricoh GR III or iPhone 15 Pro Max. The extra 120mm equivalent reach of the iPhone came in very handy, but there’s no beating the image quality of the GR when it comes to landscapes. The light was so good that some photos taken with the Standard color profile, straight to JPEG, were surprisingly “finished” out of the camera. This year’s iPhone still wants to make everything bright and sharp, which fails to capture atmosphere and preserve highlights. I edited photos daily as quickly and lazily as possible, using RNI Films for most of it — at some point they added the ability to save edits on top of original files (non-destructively), which is a key consideration I look for in photo apps. I’ve also started using RAW Power again late in the trip, which is making me want to go back and redo some edits. Maybe on the flight home.

  • Week 6.24

    Week 6.24

    It was Chinese New Year week and it’s not been the same for several years, partly because of Covid and because many key relations have simply gotten old. My uncles and aunties, for decades only known to me by honorary titles describing their places in the family hierarchy, are getting ill, weak, and unwilling to leave their homes or receive visitors. Several years ago I started to ask what their actual names were, because I grew up literally calling them names that translated to second son of third uncle, or eldest paternal uncle; I’ve often wondered why Chinese culture has mechanisms that foster emotional distance between children and adults, a tradition that feels increasingly out of touch with today’s world. But that’s how it goes.

    I remember the typical CNY reunion dinner for many years as something to get through with gritted teeth and withheld snarky jokes, and if you’d told me then that I would look back now on those as the good times, I would have despaired. Now they appear as charmingly awkward and well-meaning attempts to bond, by people I might never get to wish a happy new year to again. I always thought the idea of an annual reunion made more sense against the backdrop of a vast country like China, but now that it’s hard to connect for all sorts of reasons even across our tiny one, I see the real terrain is time and memory, and so many relationships die starving in those fields. That’s how it goes too.

    ===

    One of our friends lost his dad this week. He was by all accounts the kind of guy you call a ‘real character’. He went from a corporate career to a becoming writer in retirement, putting out three books in the last decade or so. Because we didn’t have any reunion dinner commitments at the usual time, we were able to attend his funeral wake and share in some lovely stories from the family. They managed the joke that this terrible timing right in the middle of festivities was the last prank he’d play on them. I learnt he had a regular blog, which he kept going even after suffering health setbacks — that’s dedication. Every week I wonder what I’m going to say here and always think the streak’s about to end.

    Even the funeral was remarkable for the fact that he planned it all himself, leaving behind detailed instructions on what he wanted, to the point of getting his own headshot taken and sealed in an envelope which his family only opened after he was gone, so they wouldn’t have to fuss over this stuff at the worst time — that’s love. It got me thinking that everyone should prepare their own playlists and slideshows too. I might get started on it this year. Don’t be surprised if you come to my funeral and hear that Chinese AI dub of Van Morrison on repeat.

    ===

    Other activity:

    • I’ve started on a new book and only read two short chapters but I already know this is something special. It’s People Collide by Isle McElroy.
    • We are back watching Below Deck and I’m still sure that this is one of the best management trainings you can get for your time. Every single season is full of unnecessary crew drama because people don’t communicate expectations, don’t provide clear feedback, and allow emotional reactions to escalate. I get that it’s not easy, and I’m not sure I do it so well myself, but the lines between action and consequence are so clear here; they’re literally edited together for entertainment. Another lesson: everyone is flawed. The people you root for because they’re usually sensible? Sometimes they fuck up! Working relationships are rarely black and white.
    • Kanye West finally released Vultures two months its initial release date, with a new cover and possibly a different tracklist. I haven’t heard it yet. But once again, Apple Music has not recommended me music I’m interested in, although I’m quasi-certain it will be featured somewhere in the app in the next few days. Right now the Singapore ‘Browse’ page is full of Chinese New Year related music that I definitely do not care about.
    • After working too hard and not getting enough rest, Kim’s sort of fallen ill now, with me feeling a milder version of it. The timing could not be worse: we’re off on holiday soon, the kind where sneezing and aching and feeling weak might derail a complex itinerary.
    • Speaking of which, I used ChatGPT to help plan this vacation, and I’ve taken those instructions and made a custom GPT called AI-tinerary which might help you if you’re going someplace new and want to create a multi-day schedule of things to do. It can work off your individual interests and transport modes, as well as answer other travel-related questions you may have. At some point I’ll be able to make it plot your route on a map (if you ask it now, it’ll generate some wacky DALL•E map drawing that you should absolutely NOT follow).
    • You should know by next weekend whether these AI-generated plans worked out, or if we tried to stay in towns that don’t actually exist.
  • Week 1.24

    Week 1.24

    Happy new year to observers of the Gregorian calendar. We watched the clock tick over on the banks of the Ping River in Chiang Mai, where an insane amount of fireworks were let off for easily 10 minutes. Only the noise cancellation of my AirPods Pro saved my hearing.

    I spent the next morning eating a massive buffet breakfast at the hotel (if I’m being honest, that’s one of my favorite kinds of breakfast setup, something I’ll probably mention again when I get around to making my second Breakfast zine — check out the first one here), where they had both the local signature curry noodle dish, khao soi, and an automated tangerine juicer that makes a fresh glass from at least six whole fruit with the push of a button.

    I never get to drink both OJ and coffee in the same morning unless on holiday, but the Thais have got it figured out. When we went out later to the Old Town area to visit a cafe, I tried a coffee recipe that’s apparently all the rage there now: an iced orange juice and Americano mashup which shouldn’t work but does.

    When it was finally time for lunch, I had a Japanese-style curry rice at a place called “Dirty Curry” inside of a stylish little hotel called Hotel Noir that we might consider next time. The curry played hard to get, taking its sweet time to arrive but was pretty great. Even my iPhone camera ate, because the photo came out looking incredible without any help.

    Returning to reality on Tuesday night, we avoided thinking about work by starting to make plans for our next trip (in February, and before you say anything, this is the closest together I’ve ever had two holidays, and the idea of two holidays a year is already a historical anomaly for me). We had the flights booked awhile back but nothing more, so now we’re really running late with the hotels and other tickets.

    Sitting in front of the TV that night, we watched in disbelief as live images of JAL flight 516 almost crash landing at Haneda airport came in. Everyone’s been mentioning how Japan has not had much luck with 2024 so far; as if the New Year’s Day earthquake on the west coast wasn’t enough, the week’s headlines have mentioned a slashing incident on a train in Akihabara and another rail-related attempted murder just yesterday.

    I returned to work after two weeks away and was amazed at the diversity of human experience when a colleague mentioned how they had gotten bored of having time to themselves over the Christmas break. It boggles the leisurely creative mind. I had free time for a year and would take a hundred more if possible.

    But you know who else has had some time off recently and a lot to show for it? Why, the canceled and almost-forgotten singer-songwriter Ryan Adams who just dropped FIVE albums at once on streaming services! Longtime readers will know that I’ve been a huge fan of his work, for over two decades now if I do the math, and the data will probably show that I subconsciously listened to him a lot less over the last four years after he was accused of sexual misconduct and emotional abuse and retreated from view, occasionally dropping albums of half-hearted new material and experimental covers with little promotion.

    I haven’t really sorted out my stance on situations like this. Another blogger, Christopher Bradley, makes a case for reevaluating Adams here. He hasn’t committed any crimes — apparently the FBI looked into allegations of sexting with a minor and cleared him — apart from being a poor partner and maybe an awful human being in some aspects of his life. But who among us hasn’t? I still listen to Michael Jackson anyway, and anybody who says they can keep still when Billie Jean comes on is a damn liar.

    Anyway, two of Adams’s new albums are esoteric 80s punk rock-ish joints, one of them is a live version of his Prisoners album, and the last two are more his usual speed. I’ve read that Star Sign is the better one, so if you only check one out, I guess that should be it. I plan to work through all of them in the next few days, but on a first pass, Star Sign is quite alright. Because I don’t think any mature musician ever recaptures the energy and raw brilliance of their first few albums — a fact that’s probably best not to think about as a young artist — we tend to grade most on a curve over the years. Just keep the tunes catchy and the words not utterly trite, and we’ll still show up. Unless they get really shitty, like U2.

  • Week 52.23

    Week 52.23

    Greetings from beautiful Chiang Mai on this last day of the year. It’s my first time here, and I’m sure it won’t be my last. If anything, I’m kicking myself for not coming sooner — it’s currently a very cool and walkable 25°C at 11am, and temperatures go below 20°C in the evenings; Microsoft Copilot with Bing tells me it’s the safest city in SE Asia (wha?); and the food and coffee have been top notch so far.

    We’ve also been to a cool cocktail bar with live jazz in a basement speakeasy-like space, and another “live house” with a mix of bands playing each night. Coming from Singapore where jazz clubs are a rarity, and almost exclusively the domain of old people, it’s been surprising to see many young people in attendance, although I can’t be sure they enjoy the bands. They seem to pay more attention and clap louder for the pop cover bands.

    One amazing performer I heard was Joshua Lebofsky, originally from Canada, who sang and played a straight hour of jazz standards and pop interpretations on piano at The A Ter (theater). They were fantastically musical and soulful variations, and I was glad to be able to tell him so afterwards; sadly he hasn’t got a social media presence, but there’s an album from 2006 on Apple Music: Play A Little Prayer.

    If we lived here, I would be a regular patron at these places for sure (especially at prices roughly half those back home). The non-existence of a vibrant jazz scene is such a shame for Singapore, because we have quite a few talented jazz players who end up being session musicians for mandopop performers most of the time, probably due to the economics of the music scene. I guess these are the third-order consequences of necessarily narrow education policies in our early years.

    We also went on a walking street food tour and a cooking class at a small organic farm and school (where I was snapped in a farmer’s hat looking glum at having been dragged along, but ultimately it was a good time and the food was, like all of it, quite excellent). An intriguing culinary detail here is how Hainanese immigrants created their own localized chicken rice combining the steamed chicken with deep fried chicken cutlets and an entirely different chilli that’s dark and savory, with fermented soybeans and fish sauce?

    Here are some photos, all from my iPhone 15 Pro Max. I made a new Darkroom preset to handle the light and scenery here, and I think it’s a versatile look I’ll probably be using for a long while. I’ll probably share it here next year after some fine tuning!

    Anyway, Chiang Mai. Come by, it’s lovely enough to consider buying an apartment in, but I’ve only been here a couple of days.

    ===

    On the 45-minute minibus ride back from the farm last night, I managed to throw together my end-of-year playlist with some not-too-shabby transitions (I recommend turning crossfading on; 3 seconds). This is partly a diary of associated memories and partly what I’ll remember as the year’s best songs. This process usually takes much longer but everything came together on a stomach full of coconut curries and fresh herbs and spices they had us pound in a mortar ourselves.

    Here’s Listening Remembering 2023 on Apple Music.

  • Week 32.23

    Week 32.23

    Vacation update

    I survived the island. Their warnings of limited internet access were exaggerated, and it turned out that we did have wi-fi in our villa, albeit quite slow; I did not feel completely disconnected, but I managed to avoid being “online”. I did not, however, get a chance to play Hello Kitty Adventure Island, nor finish the book I was reading until I got back to Singapore. That will have to be remedied in the coming week.

    We mostly spent our time sitting by the pool, or the beach, or eating, or walking around and exploring the “private island”, which is incidentally a marvel of self-sufficient sustainability. All water used in showers and bathrooms is collected rainwater and natural well water. Wastewater is processed and filtered on-site and used on plants. Food waste is composted and broken down by black soldier flies bred for this purpose, not shipped back to the mainland and incinerated.

    I managed to get a tan, and now I’m sporting a ‘just healthy enough to look like a living human’ shade. I also need to shed my lizard skin this weekend and head out to a wedding, so there was a shopping trip as soon as we got back to pick up a decent shirt. Putting on a suit stresses me out more than wearing shorts and sandals on the beach, tbh. There’s a Goldilocks zone of comfort somewhere in between and it looks exactly like a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, which is where I plan to stay for life, thanks very much.

    Island photography and phones

    Speaking of being indoors and online, I took a bunch of panoramas on this trip with the express intent of viewing them on the Apple Vision Pro when it comes out next year. Enjoy this one, and a vertical video of some gentle waves if you need to take a little mental break.

    The majority of other photos were taken with the Halide app as is now my usual practice, and in comparison to photos of, say, the sunsets taken with the camera app on my iPhone, they came out much more natural and aesthetically pleasing. It still boggles my mind that Apple shipped the Photonic Engine on the iPhone 14 Pro the way they did because it looks so overprocessed by default.

    I can’t wait to see if the 15 Pro will resolve this, and if I’m honest I’m also keen to replace the ailing battery on my 14 Pro — online anecdotes suggest many of us are suffering from accelerated battery aging this year. I’ve watched mine fall from 88% to 86% maximum capacity over the last two weeks. Some people believe the combination of using a case + MagSafe charging is the cause, because of the heat generated. I don’t know what’s going on, but I don’t want to avoid useful features or stop doing normal phone things just because of this.

    Blue skies

    I finally got into Bluesky this week, and I don’t dislike it! Threads is unfortunately a place where I’m visible to everyone who knows me on Facebook/Instagram, which is to a large degree my real-life social graph. And what I liked about Twitter was that it was an online place for my online identity and my online people. I’m hopeful that Bluesky can be more of a Twitter replacement, and its relatively smaller size could be a strength, as long as the people I want to follow are on there. At this point, I’m rarely even checking Mastodon.

    Follow me at @sangsara.bsky.social if you’re on there.

    Crypto/web3 interlude

    Coinbase launched their new Ethereum L2 chain, called Base, and its stated purpose is to be a more user-friendly blockchain that could go mainstream and be used by the next billion people (ambitious). They say (and I like this positioning) that “online” was the first revolution, and “onchain” will be the next.

    I’ve been playing with it within their Coinbase Wallet app, and enjoying their “Onchain Summer” campaign which focuses on minting a bunch of free/very cheap NFTs. It’s a good demo of how low gas fees are on Base compared to regular ol’ Ethereum; most transactions cost just pennies. There’s still a lot of work to be done to make this more understandable, and arguably the entire user experience of creating and funding a new wallet needs to be rethought.

    The main launch event was Cozomo de’ Medici (who I thought everyone agreed was Snoop Dogg but now may not be?) partnering with the Friends with Benefits (FWB) DAO and the Korean animator DeeKay to launch a pair of Open Edition artworks depicting a cryptocurrency future. Importantly, people could buy them with a credit card, instead of fumbling with wiring money to Coinbase and then buying ethereum and then sending it to their self-custodied wallets on the Base chain.

    Did I lose you in crypto-jargon land? Don’t worry, I can’t keep up either. Think of Open Editions like an all-you-can-eat buffet, but with a closing time. The intent is to encourage access over the usual scarcity and price speculation. In this case, the NFTs were only available to be minted for 24 hours, and apparently some 70,000 were snapped up at a cost of 0.01 eth each (around $20 USD, I think). That’s still a cool $1.4M made!

    Sounds of summer

    We enjoyed this summer vibes playlist compiled by XG (Apple Music) while lazing in the pool this week. I still can’t get their housey new song, TGIF, out of my head.

    Speaking of Apple Music, I noticed a new personalized radio option appeared on my “For You” tab this week, called Discovery Station. 9to5Mac.com reports that this feature has been in testing for awhile, with people spotting it on and off over the past year (how do I get into these betas?!) — in any case I’m glad to see new features and am hoping for more improvements around the launch of iOS 17.

  • Week 31.23

    Week 31.23

    I fell ill with a fever that spiked Monday night, and then strangely subsided the next day, replaced by wrenching back pain and body aches after a night of hallucinatory dreams that felt perfectly sensible at the time. Then on Wednesday just as I thought I was getting better, I was struck by the worst bout of diarrhea I’ve had in recent memory. It lasted practically all day, even after I’d eaten nothing but white bread and water, even after there was nothing left to expel.

    What made things worse is one of our neighbors recently sold their flat and the new owners are doing renovations right now, with the few days of heavy demolition coinciding perfectly with my time in bed.

    The doctor I spoke to prescribed me some dubious medication: one of them, meant to be taken an hour before food, is normally prescribed to people with stomach ulcers or gastric reflux problems. I mean, it reduces the production of stomach acid, which surely helps, but I went online and one of the things it’s clearly not prescribed for is diarrhea. It even says that if you are experiencing diarrhea, you need to inform your doctor before they prescribe this. I stopped taking it after the first dose. Maybe I’m too much of a WebMD believer and should just trust real doctors but it was prescribed so casually along with four other things that I can’t trust it’s necessary.

    So I got on the so-called BRAT diet, which stands for Bananas, Rice, Applesauce, and Toast — basically all you can eat is bland stuff. I’m surviving on bread and bananas and a little peanut butter at the moment.

    Oh, I learnt the above neat trick on Twitter in the process. If you wrap the stems on a bunch of bananas with plastic, it prevents them from going black and rotting. They release some sort of gas while ripening (?!) and by blocking the rest of the bananas from it, they last much longer.

    Photo from @BrianLeeWow on Twitter

    Another thing I learnt from on the internet this week was the existence of an obscure Sanrio character turned internet darling, confusingly named “Big Challenges”. He’s an optimistic crocodile that was created in 1978 and then dropped off the map until fans petitioned in 2020 for his return. And now he’s made an appearance as an NPC in the new Apple Arcade game, Hello Kitty Island Adventure, which may have been named in reference to a 2006 South Park meme? (Disclaimer: the featured image on this post is not from the game; I made it with AI.)

    As for the game itself, it’s getting great reviews, and seems to be very much Animal Crossing but with Sanrio characters. So perhaps I’ll be spending some time with it next week while on my own island getaway.

    What island getaway? Well, by the time you read this scheduled post, I will (hopefully) be on a small secluded holiday island with nearly no internet connectivity, no television, and no air conditioning. To be honest, I’m a little worried we’ll get there after two boat rides and an hour’s drive only to be put into cages and executed on camera for the dark web. Barring that nightmare outcome (inspired by a book I read recently), it promises to be three days of unplugged relaxation: reading, floating in a private pool, looking out at the ocean, maybe gaming a little, and sweating my ass off.

    But first I’ll have to get over the anxiety I feel when I think of not being online and connected to everything. I mean, things are moving so fast these days, I could back next week to find the stock market’s crashed, or every country’s locked in a room-temperature superconductor arms race, or some new AI has decided I should do twice as much work for less money.

    On one of those topics, it’s now 6pm on Saturday and I’ve spent the last hour watching a YouTube livestream by the National Taiwan University’s science department, as they test their LK-99 sample for superconductive properties. That’s another thing that started this week (or last?), some Korean scientists released a paper on their attempts to fabricate a superconductor over the last 20 years, in the most confusing way possible with multiple releases, internal fighting, and not much clarity on whether this thing is real. But it’s gotten every backyard chemist online into trying to replicate their process, which is apparently not hard. It’s something the human race could have accidentally discovered a hundred years ago, which makes my skin tingle! Imagine an alternate universe where we’ve had this technology all that time.

    The stream started strong, but then I was appalled at their inability to present this in a camera-ready way. The lab is a mess, and they didn’t have their workspace prepped to work with the sample; it was being moved around with pieces of paper on a crowded desk, and at one point it looked like they were going to drop it on the floor. Watching it, I finally understand why all the videos and photos posted online so far by other enthusiasts have been so blurry and lo-fi. Scientists are not YouTubers!

    So far, it’s been a washout. The tiny sample they derived, in part because of a failure to neatly separate it from the quartz tube without resorting to the use of a hammer, has not responded to a magnet. They’re doing something called a SQUID test now, but I don’t think it’s looking good. Might have something to do with their decision to use different temperatures and baking times than cited in the original paper. In any case, other labs around the world seem to have been able to replicate LK-99 to some extent, so I’m hoping we’ll “be so back” by this time next week.

    Okay that’s enough from me. Here’s some music I liked this week.

    XG released the next song from their upcoming mini-album (I can’t wait), and it’s called TGIF, and it stands for “Thank God I’m Fly”. I love it.

    I discovered the Japanese ambient artist Haruka Nakamura, who came out of a hiatus to work with The North Face to create four albums of background music for their Harajuku “Sphere” store. One for each season. What a gig.

    Light Years
    Those Days, Light Years II
    From Dusk to the Sun, Light Years III
    Sun.Light, Light Years IV

    Utada Hikaru put out a new single called Gold — Mata Au Hi Made which I’ve only heard once but found sadly unengaging. I’ll have to get back to it later.

  • Week 26.23

    There was a massive thunderstorm Wednesday morning, and we woke up to water leaking across our living room floor, dangerously close to some power sockets, which would have totally ruined the not-on-fire vibe I’m going for in this apartment. It seemed that some fault on the rooftop was letting water into an unused cable housing that runs through the entire building. Once upon a time, this “pipe” used to carry terrestrial TV signals from the antenna above, and it’s definitely not supposed to have water in it.

    The storm continued all morning, and I was mopping up water and wringing towels every 10 minutes while trying to be on work calls and contacting the authorities and arranging for our own contractor to do something about it. Although the town council sent someone down within a few hours, he turned out to be not so useful, firstly by not understanding the size of the problem (it was already sunny and dry by then), and then by trying to tell me there wasn’t really a problem on the roof. There was no other possible ingress point for the water.

    Because the next day was a public holiday, I was pretty anxious to get it resolved ASAP as staying up 24/7 to be a squeegee operator was not acceptable. By the end of the day, thanks to some prompt private sector assistance — albeit at my own cost — I had the issue resolved (and I was right about the source).

    The leak added unnecessary stress to an already difficult week, exacerbated by the tough transition back to work after my holiday. As if on cue, I came across this piece in the New Yorker on “The Case Against Travel” which I won’t try to summarize. It ends with a sobering observation that holidays are a salve for the grind of working life, and that first-world people just live looking forward to the next trip and the next, each time believing in some life-changing outcome of travel that never actually materializes. This reliance is something I never believed applied to me before, because I’m quite alright not traveling for long stretches — dear god, I just want more time left to my own devices — yet, startlingly, the absence of any further planned trips and the abyss now facing me feels… depressing?

    It’s definitely about being tired. I also read this article (a book plug) about the “cost of traditional masculinity”, mainly centered on the role of providing, which powers economic growth but maybe not happiness. What would the world look like if every socially enforced achievement target was replaced with an appreciation for “enough”? Human progress would be hindered, I can hear you say, but the human-driven damage would be too, and that seems worth it.

    I took a couch break one afternoon and read this other article in the New Yorker about quack surgery for a certain masculine insecurity, which was very, very disturbing. It’s about as graphic a piece of writing as I can ever recall reading. I am still trying to forget some details! Ah, modern life is closing one’s eyes to tragedy.

    ===

    Other bits:

    • We went out for dinner Friday at a Sri Lankan restaurant called Kotuwa in Little India. I don’t remember half of what I ate, but it was very enjoyable. Since Peishan and James were there to enforce vegetable eating, I was able to try the cashew curry — literally a little bowl of boiled cashews in a sweet gravy, which worked.
    • We finished Silo on Apple TV+ and enjoyed the season overall. I’m told the books are light and not very good, so it seems this was an adaptation that took a good central idea and nailed the execution. I’m pretty sure a second season will be coming.
    • I chanced upon an Apple Music page of DJ mixes made to celebrate two Tokyo clubs that closed last year, and I’ve been enjoying a few of them. I don’t think I’ve been inside a club in years, but I remember the feeling of often being disappointed in the music and thinking, “I’m gonna get home and listen to XYZ instead”. But I think I would have loved hearing some of these mixes irl.
    • I started using Vibes, the latest app in the (Not Boring) series by Andy Works. These functional apps (calculator, weather, etc.) borrow video game aesthetics and interactions to offer an appealing alternative to Apple’s flat design, and they’re winning — they won an Apple Design Award last year, and the standard Weather.app has grown increasingly rich and playful of late. Anyway, Vibes generates a real-time videogamey soundtrack for your life, based on your sleep and movement patterns, helping you to rest and focus throughout the day. I usually use Brain.fm or lo-fi music for this, but Vibes is simple: just hit Play and it’ll do what it thinks you need.
    • After watching some Bob Ross on Twitch one night, I fooled around on the iPad and drew a landscape in ProCreate. It’s nothing great, but then I tossed it into Midjourney and said ‘do this like Bob Ross’ and oh my lord. It makes me both want to improve and to never draw again — like, what’s the point?

  • Week 25.23

    • The week in Melbourne went largely as planned. I managed to read about half of Daniel Suarez’s Critical Mass, the sequel to Delta-v, and played some Persona 5 Royal in my downtime.
    • Because the Airbnb had a basic Android-powered smart TV and spotty wifi, I only managed to watch one thing of note: the first Extraction film on Netflix, because my dad was talking about it. It came out a couple of years ago but is getting a bump in the charts now that a sequel’s just been released, imaginatively titled Extraction 2. It has a lot of impressive shots that look like single-takes, and I’d definitely recommend it if you’re in the market for a dumb action flick.
    • We did go out as well, of course, and I enjoyed the ACMI’s Goddess exhibition on women in cinema, and their entirely redesigned (since I last saw it in 2018) permanent exhibition on the history of the moving image, from shadow puppets to video games.
    • The National Gallery Victoria (NGV) had two large exhibitions on: Pierre Bonnard and Rembrandt, and puzzlingly did not offer a combined ticket plan. The cost to see both was around $60 AUD, so we decided to just see the Bonnard one and take our time. It was quite worth it, but I do regret not having bottomed out the whole place with the Rembrandt. The next day we spontaneously dropped in at the NGV’s Ian Potter outpost in the CBD, which is completely free, and dedicated to Australian artists. All in all, a good time.
    • Food-wise, many of the essentials were hit. Croissants at Lune; lunch at Rice Paper Scissors; coffee, pastries, and seafood at the South Melbourne Market; kebabs; wine in the Yarra Valley; cocktails at Union Electric; Korean BBQ at Bornga; some relatively good pho; pretty great pizzas.
    • I’m also glad we managed to stop by The Paperback Bookshop, a cozy little place that manages to hang on — it seems to be thriving, actually. We bought a few books. The last time I came by, I bought some that I ended up reading the ePub versions of, just because I’ve grown out of the paper habit. But I’ll happily keep buying physical books because you can pass them along and every year I trust digital media to stay accessible less and less.
    • This was of course the week that a dumb DIY carbon fiber submarine went missing on its journey to visit the wreck of the Titanic, and it captured public interest to the point that I ended up having a conversation about it with a friendly cafe owner when I was the last customer around (reading Critical Mass). She’d only heard bits and pieces on the news, whereas I, extremely online and living in social feeds, had many factoids and theories to offer, which fanned her disbelief and led her to say the billionaires had “more money than brains”. Later on I saw this very appropriate tweet and thought “it me”, but in my defense I did not bring up the topic first!
    • I didn’t take many photos, but most of what I did get was captured in Halide (12mp HEIC) and processed in VSCO. Then I deleted the originals. Yolo.