No new vibe-coded apps this week. What I’ve done instead is gone back to some of my older projects and given them a degree of polish I wasn’t able to before when using low-cost AI like DeepSeek Flash. What a difference a frontier model makes!
I did a ton of work on RetroVista, tweaking sounds and improving the authenticity of its classic game console graphics. I also added incidental animations (astral events, animals walking by, planes/trains/watermobiles) to make each of the seven scene types more lively. It looks really great now, if I do say so myself. Most of all, I’m super jazzed about the fact that the City scene now generates jazzy musical themes.
While working on RetroVista, I discovered a way for web apps to play audio without having to unmute your iPhone, a change that also allows them to play in the background while your phone is locked — just like a real music player! That technique has now been added to DataDeck, which was designed as a music player to begin with. That app has also been given a tune-up under the hood, with loads of bug fixes and performance improvements.
Orchids, Once. also received attention: the same audio behavior as above, and a major upgrade to the plant rendering system. The original code had major bugs that led to the GPU not rendering some intended effects at all, such as leaf textures. Flowers used to be assembled from parts floating in mid-air, so you’d see gaps and clipping. Not anymore. Now each piece grows out of the last and moves out of the others’ way. The graphical fidelity is at an all-time high. As an ‘art project’, I had previously considered the experience complete and never expected to make any changes, but I’m now really pleased about being able to bring it closer to perfection. Is this the same illness that afflicted George Lucas when he added CGI rocks to A New Hope??
But maybe the biggest glow-up was given to Shelf Expression, the software that powers my Bookshelf page on this site. On the frontend, new shelves have been installed, animations have been refined, books show physical wear & tear, and you can place decorations to liven things up. On the backend, it’s almost entirely new. I won’t bore you with the details, but the original was little more than a tool that helped spit out some HTML code you then had to paste into a file in order to update the page. The new setup is like a mini CMS in its own right! You can log in and update the bookshelf from anywhere with just your phone. The ‘Share Studio’ that creates social media-ready images and collages to show off your favorite books is now a powerful app in its own right.
Books can be perfect, lightly worn (L), or well-loved (R)Social post images created in the Share Studio
The best part is it’s easier than ever for non-technical users to configure; it can even detect and install new updates from GitHub with a tap. Now it behaves more like a live service rather than an ad hoc webpage. I cleaned up the GitHub repository and the source code is now up for anyone to grab and set up bookshelf sites of their own in minutes. If they don’t want to run the full app on a server (Vercel and Netlify are supported), they can simply export a static site that’s ready to be hosted anywhere.
And finally, my first app Collagen got a Liquid Glass UI and an infusion of new collage-editing code from Shelf Expression’s Share Studio, making it more reliable and nicer to use than ever.
On the home front, I’ve had my sleep disturbed by an incessant dripping sound from inside our bedroom AC unit. I had a guy come by to fix it by unclogging the drainage pipe, but he somehow didn’t finish the job and the sound returned a few hours after he left. Isn’t that the worst? Now I have to wait till next week for him to try again.
We watched the latest season of Netflix’s The Diplomat, a show that I’d be happy to see continue indefinitely, along with Slow Horses. I think what I like about it is that something is always happening, and someone is always talking. The dialogue is good, and things move fast. That’s not to say I can’t appreciate slow-burn atmosphere, but too many prestige shows nowadays are just stretching a feature film’s worth of plot across eight hours by having characters walk slowly between locations, stare intensely at computer screens, and then realize things the audience figured out three episodes ago. I’m looking at you, Silo and Neagley.
I finished reading Electric Dreams, a collection of 10 short stories by Philip K. Dick that were adapted into a TV anthology series by Amazon Prime. Except it’s not on Amazon Prime in Singapore for some reason. The stories are prescient for having been written in the 1950s; many of their darkly humorous extrapolations still ring true today. In one Cold War story, people are urged to upgrade to the latest life-saving shelters each year, and the people who won’t or can’t afford to keep up are social pariahs. More notably, almost all involve a heavy serving of paranoid atmosphere — either fucked-up things are really happening to the protagonists, or maybe it’s all in the mind of someone having a psychotic break. That dissociated POV, earned through his own mental struggles, was maybe PKD’s real gift to the world.
I’ve heard before that people were able to buy electronics with their SG60/CDC vouchers (essentially our local government stimulus checks) by spending them at NTUC hypermarts, but I’d never been to one before this week’s visit to Vivocity. I’m pleased to share that I picked up two Nintendo Switch 2 games for free: Splatoon Raiders and Nintendo Switch Sports Resort. If you have vouchers expiring this December, it’s worth checking out; they’ve got household appliances and a small toy selection too.
We were at Vivocity to try the first Singapore outpost of the cheap and cheerful Japanese yakitori izakaya, Torikizoku. It was sadly not very good. The executional faults aren’t worth getting into but I’ll sum it up by saying it’s so important to hire people who can identify the factors that make something what it is, and tell you how to replicate or translate it. Singaporeans go to Japan probably more than any other country save for Malaysia, and if they’re coming to eat here, it’s to access an experience they already know. I’m not saying localization is always bad, but you don’t see Apple opening a new store and asking “Hey what if we doubled the prices here and ran it like a Turkish souk where everyone has to haggle? And played really loud dance music?”
Music video of the week: The Rolling Stones’ Mr. Charm starring Alexander Skarsgård, who’s looking more like his dad than ever (ameliorative).
Local haze levels continued to climb and reached a ‘Very Unhealthy’ state in the middle of the week. My haze app, SecondHand, continued to see active use and added about 10,000 visits. I’ve heard that some people at the National Environment Agency (NEA) are aware of it and like it, which warms the smoky, congested cockles of my heart. For the record, Sunday brought some relief, with PM2.5 falling to near normal in some parts of the country.
It’s frankly been like an echo of those COVID days — staying home with the windows shut; that feeling of hunkering down under attack. And just like with COVID, restaurants are experiencing difficulties, so says the Straits Times. I’ve taken to walking on the treadmill as often as I can, usually for an hour while watching some insubstantial drama program I normally wouldn’t sit still for. This week, that’s been NHK’s Eat, Sleep, then Wait for Happiness on Amazon Prime.
But the real time suck has been provided by a return to vibe coding after a three-month hiatus. This has been thanks to Hark, which fulfills the promise of OpenClaw but without requiring the nerdery and foolhardiness of letting an AI take over your own computer. Hark’s computer runs in the cloud, and it’s intelligent enough to manage its own files and applications and capabilities — dare I say it? — so much so that it’s like handling a remote employee over chat. It sends me updates and artifacts, I give it problem-solving suggestions and creative input, and it comes back with the work. I spent so much time earlier this year with the self-imposed challenge of trying to squeeze water out of the rocks that are low-cost Flash-style models, that I completely missed experiencing what the very best frontier models can do. In retrospect, that was a little dumb, but the upside is I’m filled with so much wonder right now.
I’ve mainly been working on the procedural art generator tool that I mentioned back in April. Then, I described it as a never-ending background project for me to dip in and out of, due to each ‘style’ being modular, which has made it easy to jump back in this week. Using modern technology, I overhauled the rendering engines and revisited every individual style, as well as the app’s own UI and foundations (images above). It’s hard to explain how much better it is now, how much closer it is to what I wanted. It even has freaking Apple-style Liquid Glass effects on the toolbar! In a web app! I don’t know if I’ll ever release it or just keep messing around forever making wallpapers for my own amusement.
But I do have something to release today, something that came out of building one of those styles. Similar to how making a maze artwork generator led to making a maze game (a maze, a maze, a maze)in the April post above, I was making a pixel art landscape engine for the wallpaper tool and realized it would make a very nice desktop toy — in the vein of my earlier Window Box project.
It’s called RetroVista! Leave it open in a spare window or second screen while you work, and its lush natural scenes and chiptune sounds might relax you, if you’re a millennial who grew up playing games that have somehow, seemingly overnight, become retro and vintage. You can read more about it in this separate post.
Speaking of old videogames, Street Fighter (2026) is out and we went to see it with Peishan and James. Watching every movie adaptation of games from my childhood, even if I know they’re going to be terrible, is a weak spot I probably share with many my age. One time, I went to see Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li (2009) with Peishan, and followed that up with Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins (2021), and now she thinks we have a bad movie watching tradition. But it’s not. It’s a specific ‘bad movies cashing in on nostalgia’ watching tradition.
To get in the mood for it, I fired up the Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection on Nintendo Switch the day before. I got my ass handed to me by the CPU in like, the second-round match of SF2 Turbo Edition. When did the game get so hard? When did a Dragon Uppercut become impossible to pull off when you need it?
The good news is that the new Street Fighter film understood the assignment. It’s aimed squarely at people who are now dealing with mortgages, perimenopause, reading glasses, and other mid-life crises. They’ve set it in the 90s, packed it with 90s chart-toppers like 4 Non Blondes’ What’s Up?, and exposition is handled with MTV-style video clips passed through faux-VHS filters. For two hours, it puts you in superposition between being a kid on Saturday morning and an adult watching their dream come true. The live action is broken up by anime sequences that are good enough they should be their own feature film. It’s flawed and stupid as hell, but I loved it. A very strong 3.5 stars.
My previous app Window Box was designed to be a second screen companion, showing views of the real world while you work. RetroVista brings you to more perfect places: the kind of pixel-art landscapes you might have grown up with, fully animated and sounding like a lost cartridge from 1989.
Hit “Start”, watch the console boot up, and find yourself down by the coast, or in the mountains, or a desert, a forest, the arctic, a city, or an alien planet. Each scene is procedurally generated, so no two are alike. Waves crash, clouds drift, birds flock, and trees sway. You can even enable Live Time and Weather and it’ll match the conditions where you are.
Alongside the vintage graphics, the sound is authentic too. Each console’s audio chip is synthesized in software, so pick the NES and you get its bright pulse waves, the Game Boy and its thin, warm beeps, or the Super Nintendo and its lush instruments. The Master System, Commodore 64, PICO-8, and a 1-bit mode are in there too.
Scenes produce rain, wind, surf, and thunder sound effects along with gentle, procedurally generated music that’s never the same twice. The tunes weave in and out of silence, slowly evolving, so you can leave them playing for hours.
Completing the experience are a realistic CRT filter, a handy clock, and a shuffle mode that brings you a new world every so often. Add it to your phone’s Home Screen as a progressive web app and it’ll even work offline.
Made for your second screen, and your inner child.
NEW in v3.0!
RetroVista Express: Hop on a train and tour the world in Orient Express style. This new mode takes you through the countryside and special versions of all previous scenes with parallax scrolling and a special dining car mode (in place of opening the window).
Tap mode: Activate this in all other worlds and interact with the scenery and inhabitants! You can even knock thrice on the window to call your special friend.
An absolute avalanche of other improvements and expansions on existing functionality. Oh, and a new logo and start screen.
NEW in v2.0!
RetroVista pays homage to Window Box by ripping it off — you can now shut the window and appreciate the local flora of each scene. Outdoor sounds get muffled, the rain stays out and runs down the glass, all that good stuff is here. “W” acts as the shortcut key.
The Game Boy Advance joins its older siblings, with a new backlit LCD filter effect too.
Tokyo has been added as a new city, with loads of detail. Our previous City scene has been renamed New York, and looks more the part with smokestacks and water towers.
Plus: occasional gusts of wind blow debris around in all scenes, many smaller improvements, and a very special surprise for those who love curling up by the window.
Changelog:
3.0.0 – Express train and Tap mode. The biggest update yet. Details in the post above.
2.1.0 – Tokyo: Trees now line the streets and occasionally bloom as cherry blossoms.
2.0.5–8 – Tokyo: atmospheric sounds, new event animations, fix for window audio bleed.
2.0.1–4 – Added window frames for Forest/Mountains and Arctic, tweaks to sfx.
2.0.0 – Window Box, Tokyo, and GBA. Massive update, details above.
1.5.0 – City jazz!
Every City scene now plays chiptune jazz: swung rhythm, 7th chords over ii-V-I changes, a walking bass and soft brushes on the noise channel
1.4.10 – Foggy worlds no longer play a low buzzing drone
1.4.9 – Power savings
The screen draws at 20 frames a second instead of 30, which saves power and keeps rain and snow in step with the rest of the animation
Sound runs at a lower sample rate (22.05 kHz) with no audible difference, for about half the audio processing cost
The screen skips redrawing when nothing has changed
1.4.8 – Audio behavior
The speaker button in the top-left corner now stops and starts sound instead of muting it.
Music and sound keep playing when you leave the app or lock the phone
1.4.7 – Raindrop sfx and visitor animation fixes
1.4.6 – Master System improvements
Master System now plays by the real console’s screen limits: 32 of its 64 colors on screen, in two palettes of 16, with each 8×8 tile using one palette
1.4.5 – Further C64 optimizations
1.4.4 – C64 multicolor mode and colors
C64 now plays by the real machine’s multicolor bitmap limits: pixels twice as wide as tall, one background color for the whole screen, and only three more colors in each 4×8 cell
1.4.3 – NES hardware rules, sound behavior
NES emulation improved across all scenes to obey the real console’s color limits
iPhone and iPad: sound now plays with the silent switch on (it pauses other audio, like a music app)
1.4.2 – Version numbering
The splash footer shows the version number
1.4.1 – Cricket adjustment
Crickets go quiet in the rain, sing at one pitch per world (a second cricket joins now and then), softer, and in spells with long quiet stretches between
1.4 – Visitor and city sounds
City: trains clack along the rail and sound their horn as they cross, ferries give one long low blast and tugs two short toots, and planes swell overhead, only while they’re on screen
City: a car horn down the street now and then (rarer at night) and, very rarely, a far-off siren
Visitors everywhere get voices, timed to what they do on screen: the elk bugles when it stops, ducks quack, the hawk cries, the barn owl screeches, owls hoot from the trees, the heron croaks as it takes off, boars grunt while they root, gulls cry, dolphins splash back in, the coyote howls, tumbleweeds swish, the saucer warbles and zips off, the whale blows with each spout and sings, the arctic fox yips before it pounces
1.3.2 – NES colors
NES: shades the palette lacks, like a night sky’s navy, are dithered from two colors instead of snapping to the nearest one, so Arctic and Mountains nights no longer go flat teal
1.3.1 – City storms
The city keeps running in storms: ferries, tugs and trains carry on, and planes come in low under the cloud with their lights on
1.3 – Visitors
Visitors: incidental animations in every scene, by day, by night and in the rain (storms stay empty)
City: ferries, tugs, planes and trains on a waterfront rail
Mountains: elk, ducks, hawks and barn owls
Arctic: Arctic foxes, polar bears and whales
Coast: sailboats, dolphins, gulls, crabs and turtle hatchlings
Forest: deer with fawns, rabbits, boars with piglets, herons and owls
Desert: tumbleweeds, camel caravans, vultures, roadrunners, a howling coyote and fennec foxes
Alien: saucers, sky jellyfish, slimes, six-legged grazers and crystal spores
Visitors respect depth: nearer land hides them, and they’re scaled for their distance
Butterflies and fireflies in the forest
Night sky: shooting stars, satellites, the odd comet and meteor shower, peeking through on cloudy nights
City skies are dimmed by light pollution
Crescent moons are lit from below, with their horns up
Animations step at a low frame rate, like the rest of the art
Fixes: forest walkers no longer wade the stream, streams dim at night, desert mesas no longer hover, sailboats no longer clip the distant island
1.2 – Music and resolution
Three resolution modes: Authentic (default), Chunky and Hi-Res
Occasional drums, with kits that suit each world
Musical phrases now come home to the root chord
Rain and storms are rare in the desert
1.1 – Coast waves
The waterline moves: waves run up the beach, drain back and leave a wet sheen
The haze (from Indonesia, it should be pointed out) has been steadily worsening, and its combined threat to the local F1 race and Singapore’s global reputation on social media is probably keeping the Singapore Tourism Board on antidepressants. What’s worse, instead of clearing up in a couple of weeks as usual, experts say this time it might hang around until December because of El Niño.
Hark Pro, yet another AI agent that promises to manage your life for you, went live this week. They’ve got what would have been called a rockstar design team in the old days — led by Abidur Chowdhury, famously stolen from Apple after he featured in the iPhone Air’s launch video; and including Andrew Kim who used to run the popular site/blog, minimallyminimal. I signed up for their waitlist a few months ago, and was rewarded with free credits for the first month.
The confluence of both those things led to me launching my first new web app in a couple of months: SecondHand (blog post / app). It’s an air quality app that measures the haze in cigarettes, with some fun graphics and animations. I got the project started in Hark, made some edits with Muse Spark in OpenCode, and then returned to Hark for more enhancements. It’s pretty capable for coding projects, and extremely convenient because it can publish directly to my GitHub, put up pull requests for me to audit, and publish to the live site — all through a chat thread on my phone.
The app has done very well by my lowly standards, with over 18,000 visits in the last four days. Someone put it on Reddit, and people have told me it was forwarded to them by other friends, and I’ve even heard from someone I haven’t spoken to in years all because someone showed it to them at work (and they recognized my domain). The initial version was poorly optimized and consumed some 25GB of my Vercel bandwidth in an afternoon, but thankfully I noticed and managed to rush out some fixes. It’s now lean, mean, and ready to be seen by more people without breaking my account.
You know what else deserves to be seen? Digger (2026), the new movie by Cruise/Iñárritu that’s (imo) unjustly bombing at the box office. The film has some vocal defenders, though, including Guillermo del Toro, Anne Hathaway, and Mandy Patinkin. It currently has a 51% Rotten Tomatoes score, but is one of the most ambitious, astounding, and aggressively pointed films I’ve seen all year. Even The Odyssey feels like a distant memory now; merely an expected epic, whereas Digger is a shapeshifting subversion of modern life, culture, and their relationships with capitalism. Tom Cruise does his best work here, and I think it’ll be recognized as a masterpiece in the years to come. Five stars. You must avoid all spoilers and watch it soon.
Kim was down with a cold/flu all week, maybe brought on by the haze which has anecdotally given quite a few people sore throats. I’ve miraculously managed to avoid catching it so far. Possibly due to the following:
In the middle of her illness, I went for my annual scheduled medical and also got the latest Northern hemisphere flu jab, roughly a year since my last one. I asked the nurse if it was better to get the Southern one that comes out in the spring/summer or this one, and was told you can get both! Each one is apparently like a patch update to the last, including new strains and deprecating old ones. All this time I thought you just chose one and it covered you for a whole year. But perhaps this is unique to equatorial travel hubs like Singapore, where we’re exposed to North/South variants all year round.
Friend and ex-colleague Bert was also back in town for his annual visit, the reunion around which we’ve taken to calling Bertopia. This year’s festival was attended by Jaz, Jussi, and Ted (Christian and Jean had a date with air pollution at the F1). For the first time in my life, I decided I’d go non-alcoholic all night at a bar — on the assumption that drinking would weaken my immune system. It was… not entirely unpleasant! On top of saving money, you skip all the physiological punishment of dehydration and fatigue the next morning. I mean, intellectually you know this, but actually experiencing a hangover-free Saturday is something else.
Last week I reported the Beats 360 headphones were too small for me, so of course that ended in me buying a pair of Bose QuietComforts. 10 years ago, I wore their predecessors on a flight from Hong Kong to New York and they were roomy and absolutely painless. What will I use them for?
The 9th edition of my BLixTape playlists is finished, signaling an increase in the amount of music I’ve been listening to lately. The last few have taken six months each to come together, but this one tracks the songs I’ve liked between July to the present moment — about three months, or half the usual time. I’m quite pleased with some of the juxtapositions and transitions, for example: Bill Callahan’s Computer, an examination of his own distasteful technology use, leads into Ninajirachi’s Fuck My Computer, which is about how she loves it so much she wants to… well, it’s there in the title. Another one-two combo is the Walter Murphy Band’s A Fifth of Beethoven from 1976 going into MEOVV’s present-day K-pop DDI RO RI hit.
October 2026 — It’s that hazy time of year again here in Singapore, and lots of air quality apps have been popping up thanks to this being The Year of Vibe Coding. But I hadn’t yet seen one that puts these esoteric numbers into terms we can all understand: like smoking. It’s also fitting, given how this is second-hand smoke from a country that loves its cigarettes. So here’s my contribution to the pool.
SecondHand takes the live 24-hour PM2.5 reading for your part of the island and converts it using Berkeley Earth’s rule of thumb (22 µg/m³ over a day is roughly one cigarette). Then it puts that number in your hand! Stay indoors my friends, and keep those air purifiers humming.
Changelog:
Added a map view (hold down to pop it up)
Added a haze-free state for better days
Significant optimizations to size and performance
Copy changes for clarity
PSI and 24hr PM2.5 figures now scale with the simulation slider
Max cigarettes upped from 12 to 20, with room smoke effects
I published Subconscious Samples and wrote up the app page myself instead of starting from an AI draft like I often do. The thinking is that since the agent already knows the app intimately, I just need to give it a concept and it’ll do an okay job of filling in the essential info, which I can then edit. Ironically, I don’t think many people can tell the difference between the two, and I worry that maybe I’ve internalized more of AI writing’s stylistic hallmarks than I’d like.
Speaking of slop, McDonald’s Singapore has a couple of new menu items to celebrate our upcoming National Day in August. One of them is a collaboration with my favorite curry puff brand, Old Chang Kee. The burger has a fried egg, a deep-fried chicken cutlet, and a thick curry paste with diced potatoes that’s reminiscent of OCK’s signature Curry’O filling. It’s as messy to eat as it sounds, and the top bun gets soggy and falls apart as you’re eating it. What makes Old Chang Kee work for me is the texture and mouthfeel of their crusty pastry, so the soft bun is a weak substitute. To make matters worse, I had the double version with twice the oily fried chicken, and felt like absolute crap afterwards. Speaking with Jose and Henry, who also ate this on the same day, I got tripartite agreement that this creation results in more regret than reward, and none of us will be having it again.
Michael’s collaborative crossword game, Crossmate, is finally out on the App Store! It’s free, open source, and I highly recommend it. You can import puzzle files, or use NYT’s puzzles if you have a subscription, then invite up to two other friends to play with you. It’s just like working in a live Google Doc, but funner. I’m not especially good at crosswords, but I’ve completed quite a few with him and others during the beta testing period and had a great time with it.
I read what was probably my first Philip K. Dick novel, as far as I can recall, Time Out of Joint, and came away slightly disappointed. Something about its style reminded me of other books from the same era, where you can almost smell the fumes from whatever they were huffing. The core ideas are good, and have been replicated in other works (including a particularly big Jim Carrey hit), but somehow the sum is less than its parts. In contrast with Rendezvous with Rama, a sci-fi classic I recently reread that explores big ideas with prosaic, forgettable writing, Time Out of Joint somehow comes away looking worse because Dick’s writing is too opinionated and rooted in his time, neither of which serves to elevate the story or its ideas.
I finished watching the Three Colors trilogy on MUBI with White (1994) and Red (1994). I believe White is often called the ‘weird’ or ‘different’ one out of the three, as it’s tonally and structurally quite a farce. For that reason, I enjoyed it but probably have to rate it lower relative to the emotional power of its siblings. What’s also impressive is how the director began with the legendary Juliette Binoche, and then went on to cast leading women of escalating beauty in Julie Delpy and Irene Jacob. Next up is The Double Life of Véronique (1991) which also stars Jacob, who I’d never heard of before this.
Despite believing that I don’t watch or enjoy horror, I think Widow’s Bay empowered me to believe that maybe I can do horror lite, so I bought a ticket to go see Backrooms (2026) on a weekday afternoon. I could have waited for a home release, but I wanted to test myself with a big screen. I have vivid memories of seeing Drag Me to Hell (2009) in a theater that was way too loud, and being so terrified by the sensory overload (despite it being quite an outlandishly funny film) that I felt like I was going to have a heart attack.
Thankfully, Backrooms was more fun than fatal, and I had a good time. I’ve seen the short film that this expands on, but the final result still feels a little thin. Rather than doing more expansive world building around the infinite labyrinth (ha ha) and its place in our world, it keeps the scope small, presumably for future sequels. This screening was the “Everything Must Go Edition”, with an extra 15-min segment tacked on after the credits. This strategy seems new — a way to further milk a film near the end of its theatrical run, either gaining repeat viewings from fans or convincing stragglers like me.
It was perhaps due to this ‘training’ that I not only endured, but enjoyed, a particular sequence in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey (2026) when we saw it in IMAX over the weekend with Peishan and James. I said before that I wasn’t particularly in a hurry to see this, and that I was anticipating Disclosure Day (2026) much more. In retrospect, it’s almost a crime to draw any comparison between the two. The Spielberg film seems made with decades of Hollywood muscle memory, and probably under healthy conditions that allowed everyone to have a life at the same time. Nolan’s film comes across more like a monumental undertaking, a transfer of life force from human bodies onto 70mm celluloid through back-breaking effort.
Afterwards, in trying to rank my favorite Nolan films, I decided that Interstellar (2014) is still my favorite, but this might come in second, followed by Inception and Tenet. The Batman films are dead last. When someone brought up how they were flawed, but Heath Ledger’s turn as the Joker was great, I said that I never understood the big deal about that performance: “For me it’s like if Freddie Prinze Jr. died after turning in a passable Zorro remake”.
Subconscious Samples is a generative art tool that turns patterns in your photos into new, abstract compositions.
The human brain notices and retains a lot of visual information — not just traumatic images from childhood or the great moments of your life (insert dead wife montage here), but all sorts of patterns you’re not even aware of. These interact with each other in the unknowable cauldron of your subconscious, and are synthesized into forms that affect your actual life: the doodles you draw as your teacher or managing director drones on and on, the paintings you buy because they just speak to you, the brilliant shower idea that saves your bacon the night before a deadline.
Creative people draw on these inputs with varying degrees of control — connect the dots too well and it earns a name, plagiarism — but what about machines? We’ve been trying to give them artistic instructions for a long time. Harold Cohen spent decades building AARON, a program that drew and painted according to rules he wrote but couldn’t fully predict the output of. Vera Molnár was plotting geometric abstractions on a computer in the 1960s, before “generative art” was even a term.
Well, generative AI is the greatest plagiarizer ever invented, and yes it was employed in the coding of this tool. But Subconscious Samples is not powered by any AI model; it uses only the images you supply, and gives a fair amount of visibility into how it produces new imagery from inspiration. In that sense, you get to direct and watch the process happen inside its transparent brain.
Step 1: Deconstruction
Feed it some pictures, and then supervise a process in which short sections of lines and contours are traced. Fill the waiting palette with as many ’tiles’ of these samples as you want, add up to three manually selected ‘cutout’ areas (think scissors and a magazine), and then it’s off to the races.
Step 2: Reconstruction
After you hit “Generate”, the system takes those lines and rearranges them into abstract compositions. Mostly random, but often with loose rules. For example, the Mona Lisa might be reduced to a handful of curvy lines, which then get drawn as a spaghetti monster in 3D space. Is the pastafarian blob the equal of Da Vinci’s masterpiece? Obviously not. But could you say it came from it? Hmm, maybe? In a manner of speaking?
If the human brain is a supercomputer, then this program isn’t even an abacus. It’s possibly a pile of stones in a circle, drawn in sand. You could produce some interesting pictures with it, you might even use them as desktop wallpapers for a short time. But it’s no artist. Like AARON and those greater predecessors, it only exists to make you think about where our art comes from.
Related: I made a series of 39 artworks called Subconscious Heirlooms in the summer of 2022, the hand-drawn precursor to this idea. You can read about them on this page about my NFT projects.
I’m not usually the clumsiest person in this household but I got my turn this week when I slipped on the stairs (wet feet) and fell/slid down to the bottom, on my bottom. Fortunately nothing seems broken, and the bruises aren’t visible, but it hurts! I narrowly avoided landing on my tailbone and took most of the impact on my left side, shoulders, and hands. My first thought was, “if I was in my 70s, this would be real bad.”
Ex-colleague Jianjia was in town for a short stopover and we met up for a coffee on Tuesday. She’s about to make a big move across the world, so it will probably be many years before we meet again. Although we last saw each other two years ago, meeting her this time reminded me of the people we were back in 2017, and how much has changed. I think we’re both calmer, a little more jaded, but less to prove.
Afterwards I decided to bite the bullet and go watch Supergirl (2026) at a nearby GV theater. I’ve seen talk online about how it’s bombing and people are unfairly blaming Milly Alcock for it, and it’s another example of misogyny among comic book nerds or Hollywood or whatever. I can tell you that the movie has problems and none of them are her; she’s fantastic to watch and brings most of the life to be found in this dreck. I mentioned last week that Craig Gillespie directed this, but I don’t see enough people blaming him. It’s a film that not only fails to carry the baton that Superman (2025) passes it, but fails to achieve anything of value cinematically. It’s a pastiche of boring plot points and cliches. Its needle drops and beat ‘em up fight scenes lack emotional impact. Jason Momoa doing an impression of Jack Black is probably the second best thing about this film. 2.5 stars.
After that I came home and fired up the MUBI app like a thirsty man crawling towards a desert oasis. I decided it was finally time to watch the first of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Trois Couleurs series: Three Colors: Blue (1993). No point saving all the good films for someday that never comes, because you never know when you’ll fall down the stairs and break your neck. Maybe it was the contrast whiplash, but what a glorious experience it was. In its first five minutes, it does more than Supergirl manages with a hundred and eight. 5 stars!
Not having learnt my lesson, I agreed to watch The Devil Wears Prada 2 (2026) with Kim on Saturday. It was okay, but a far cry from the fun of the first film, too focused on making current moment social commentary but then (unintentionally?) winds up being a downer because it can’t find a silver lining to this shit cloud we’re in. The only way to stop a billionaire is… begging another billionaire. There is a moment near the end that echoes the first film’s resolution where Andy reminds herself Miranda’s life isn’t worth what it costs, but any anti-work sentiment is swept aside and nullified almost as soon as it lands. Miranda’s victorious closing line, “I love working. I really do. Don’t you?” is one hell of a message for the establishment to lob at the general public; a naked admonishment from those boomers who complain “nobody wants to work anymore” without bothering to ask why that is. 3 stars.
You know what else was gross? The actions of ex-Apple design team leads which were revealed in a suit filed against them and their current employers OpenAI/io. I’ll leave you to look them up on your own, but I didn’t think it was possible for me to have even less respect for that group than after Jony Ive appeared in his partnership announcement video with Sam Altman. Ive isn’t named in the suit, but whether he knew what his closest lieutenants were doing or just has terrible judgment about who to partner with, it doesn’t look great. What is the point of all that money which lets you do anything you want, if what you choose to do is unethical and stains the only name you have? Absolute loser behavior.
Selection from Subconscious Heirlooms (2022)
I suppose my latest coding project also has something to do with “copying”, if just barely. It’s called Subconscious Samples, and borrows conceptually from the Subconscious Heirlooms series of drawings I made a couple of years ago. The idea is that your mind is always noticing and storing lots of visual patterns and ideas without you knowing it, and when you draw ‘mindlessly’ in a state of flow/play, some of them will emerge. This new software attempts to replicate the process, with a more transparent brain. You add some images, extract contours and shapes, and then it’ll compose new abstract forms out of them, in 2D or 3D space. I’m almost done with it but am still undecided if anyone but me will enjoy having a go.
App UI: a vaporwave take on classic Mac OS stylingSome 2D outputs from Subconscious Samples
The Rolling Stones’ new album Foreign Tongues is out, and I’ve been listening to it over the week. There are some good songs here, and it’s astounding how good they still sound. One of the comments on the music video (below) starring Anya Taylor-Joy and Charles Melton notes that she was born when the Stones were already 34 years into their careers, and that was 30 years ago. I’m in the middle of the hour-long Zane Lowe interview they’ve done, and hope to be even half as lucid as Mick Jagger is if/when I get to 82.
I may have lost a sticker collection when I upgraded my laptop a couple of weeks ago, but I’ve already got some new ones going from my last visit to the B-Side Label store and Village Vanguard in Shimokitazawa. The “How To Enjoy?” #StayHome one is actually from a series of three, with the girl reading a book and playing videogames in the others. What can I say? They spoke to me.
