sangsara.net

Tag: Videogames

  • Week 36.26

    Week 36.26

    • Drinking a lot of wine last Saturday night at what I thought was the end of my illness was not a smart move — my immune system probably felt like frontline troops betrayed by friendly fire, and by Sunday night I began feeling the stirrings of a new illness.
    • The return of the seasonal haze — caused by intentional forest fires in Indonesia — certainly hasn’t helped my throat and nasal membranes. It’s looking to get worse in the coming weeks, but one pretty side effect is a rather cinematic bloom over the city lights at night.
    Look at the daytime haze, and this is “moderate”
    • I thus spent most of the week laid up in various poses, moving between states of aching, coughing, and mucusation. So there’s really not much more to report this week, but let me wring this diaristic serviette dry anyway; let me lean heavy on the word press’s crank with my phlegmatic body.
    • One of my sad meals was a can of baked beans in tomato sauce, eaten cold out of the can. But instead of the usual Heinz, I decided to try regional brand Ayam’s slightly cheaper rendition, and learnt that the version I’m used to (less sweet, with vinegar) is called an “English recipe” in their world. The verdict: pretty good and I dare say indistinguishable from Heinz’s without a direct comparison. Caveat: I was sick.
    • This new bean acquisition was part of a larger canned food stockpiling effort that I embarked on after reading some doomsaying posts such as this one from The Guardian. Coincidentally, I learnt shortly afterwards that James had also started doing the same. That made me wonder what vegetarians stockpile, because my pantry is mainly filled with sardines, tuna, chicken, and pork products. I got my answer on Saturday when I saw him for Peishan’s birthday celebration: lots of bean-like stuff such as lentils and chickpeas. In any case, we’re not prepping on any meaningful scale — the goal would be to avoid being caught out by a sudden food shortage, for maybe a week at best. After that, the attractiveness of survival in that world probably drops off quite steeply.
    • Oh, I also found and enjoyed this video on the history of everyone’s favorite canned meat, Spam. As a lifelong aficionado of the ‘spiced ham’, I already knew many of these facts, but did not know that its main ingredient, pork shoulder, was considered a cheap off-cut back when the product was being developed.
    • I finished reading all 1,600 virtual pages of Reamde within a week, and it was an absolute blast. A very bingeable book, and one that I realize underlines a trend in my recent media habits. A couple of months ago, I was reading and playing a lot of detective and murder mysteries. Right now it seems I’m on a techno-thriller and espionage kick.
    • After finishing Tiny Bookshop last week, I started playing Jack Move, an indie cyberpunk RPG with very nice modern pixel art graphics. It’s currently on sale at a tremendous discount for the Nintendo Switch, so take a look.
    • I also bought 007 First Light for the PS5 (20% off sale) but haven’t gotten around to starting on it yet. My hopes are high not just because of the developers’ pedigree (IO Interactive, of the Hitman games), but because in making a game about James Bond as a junior agent, focused on spectacular action set pieces, they seem to have also made a game that looks like Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible movies.
    • The best spy thing of all has been Seasons 1 and 2 of The Agency, which I just finished over the weekend. Michael Fassbender is in top form throughout as a ‘magically’ charismatic manipulator in the CIA, slipping between accents and allegiances as he tries to navigate an ever-expanding web of complications. I also loved Saura Lightfoot-Leon’s turn as Daniela Morata/Acosta, a rookie agent sent on a dangerous undercover mission — a setup I alluded to as a ‘less stupid Lioness’ a few weeks ago. I liked that the show spends time looking at the psychology of the people who sign up for this job, all carrying some marvelous, self-destructive defect that makes them head towards things others run away from.
    • You know who else had a secret identity and was persecuted when he went public? That’s right, I’m talking about the original sleeper agent. We went to see the new production of his story, Jesus Christ Superstar, on its last day at the Marina Bay Sands. Tickets were bought impulsively and spontaneously by Kim, and we had a good time despite some of that rock music being quite dated now in not the best way. It was also consistently over 95dB during the fuller songs, so we used our AirPods Pro in Transparency mode to provide hearing protection while maintaining audio quality. They are super handy, and I’ll never attend a show without them.
    • As of September 1, Apple entered a new era. It’s hard to believe that Tim Cook’s been CEO for 15 years already, and I wonder if that’s because his term was marked by many smaller ripples adding up, rather than big waves that shook the world and demanded attention. I look forward to seeing how things turn out with Ternus. As for the upcoming product event next week, I’m still doubtful I could commit to a first-generation folding iPhone without a telephoto lens. After getting used to having 200mm of reach on my iPhone 17 Pro Max, giving it up for a larger screen doesn’t sound like a great trade. Let’s see if they offer any novel use cases beyond “watch bigger videos”.
    • But I saw a tweet saying Tim was asked what his legacy would be, and he answered neatly that a legacy is what others decide about you, not something you choose for yourself. Which got me thinking: I probably used to believe it was important to make good things and leave them behind to have had a worthwhile life. While I still think that’s a noble pursuit, history will happily separate you from your output if pushed. At best, people will now say ‘Annie Hall is a great movie’ or ‘Thriller is a solid album.’ The product doesn’t rescue the person’s reputation, it just stands on its own merits. It’s probably more important to try and be a good person than to write the great Singaporean novel.
    Look Ma, no memorizing and switching apps and searching and clicking and switching back!
    • In any case, iOS 27 is going to be a huge upgrade for anyone with an eligible phone. I’ve been using Siri AI to answer my everyday questions during the beta period, and I’ll say again it’s good enough to replace whatever service you’re using now, e.g. Perplexity, ChatGPT. The fact that it’s more private than those other services should be reason enough. And last night when I came across an Instagram reel recommending a handful of albums (I get these quite often now), I just paused it and asked Siri to “Add this album to my Apple Music library”, and it did. These are tasks some of us maybe naively expected to be able to ask of our devices years ago, but soon learned to stop trying when they failed to understand, or suggested that they could ‘show us some web results’ instead. Well, now we get to unlearn all that and figure out where the new limits are.
  • Week 35.26

    Week 35.26

    • The week started in a healthy fashion: Kim took a day off and we went out to play a game of not-tennis, aka padel. It is not a cheap pastime, and that’s taking the discounted rate we got from going at noon into account. It was not in the least bit overcast and I don’t think I’ll be risking heatstroke like that again. Indoors, maybe; the less strenuous variety (pickleball), maybe. Honestly, the more I think about padel, the more upset I get. It’s clearly a lazy attempt at making tennis slightly easier, and the added walls feel like an afterthought to create differentiation for the sake of it. If you want a more accessible tennis where your strategic game isn’t held up by your poor physique, go straight to pickleball; embrace the unsexiness. If you want to hit a tennis ball hard and run around, just play actual tennis.
    • Suitably sweaty already, we then went to the Botanic Gardens for an afternoon walk and lunch at the outdoor restaurant, Park Side. I had a gussied-up luncheon meat sandwich and liked the look of the menu fine — it is after all an affiliated brand of P.S. Cafe, which I frequent a lot — but Xin disliked her own experience there enough to reach out and tell me it was underwhelming. Well, I for one was whelmed. Lmk what you think.
    • A couple of days later, I fell sick with a mild flu. Was it the sun exposure, or the mall crowds we braved that evening on the way to see The End of Oak Street? I put the odds at 50-50. The movie was a lot of fun to see in the theater, and stylistically called to mind Spielberg’s best work of the 1980s.
    • Laid up at home the next few days, I got a lot of couch business done. Nintendo Switch visual novel Iwakura Aria? All endings completed. It boasts some unique artwork, and the writing isn’t too bad apart from some elements clearly contrived to add shock value. I’d rate it a cautious recommendation: if you’re into Mages’s work and are happy with a quasi-horror story, go ahead. I went in knowing nothing!
    • It was a big week in game teasers: I mean GTA VI, obvs, which I’ll probably have to buy when it comes out. It’s like being alive when the Beatles released Abbey Road and deciding you weren’t going to listen to it. This game is going to be the entire culture for at least a fortnight in November. I was also excited to see The Witcher 3 Remastered get announced, especially since I’ll be getting it as a free upgrade for the Switch 2. This is a game I bought with the highest of delusions — a massive 300-hour fantasy RPG is not my jam at all — and ended up quitting because of how ass it looked on the original Switch. Now that it’s receiving a lush graphical upgrade, I’ll finally get to be disappointed by the realization that I don’t actually want to ride around fighting monsters on horseback.
    • I also spent more time on Tiny Bookshop after hearing from Cien that she’d finished the game. For one thing, I didn’t even know it had an ending. I took it for an infinite business simulation with a fairly repetitive gameplay loop, made palatable by the fact that you were recommending real book titles for customers to buy out of your mobile caravan store. I thought I’d seen enough of what it had to offer after 10 hours, but I was wrong. (Spoiler warning) I’m now nearing the end, which ironically involves clearing a bunch of tasks so that you can… take over a not-so-tiny bookshop? What’s left for the sequel, sell out to Barnes & Noble and stock board games and blind boxes?
    • Playing that game always puts me in the mood to read more, and so I decided to start on a lengthy Neal Stephenson one, the kind that I don’t dare attempt until after I’ve completed my Goodreads annual challenge. I think Goodreads needs to make it about the number of pages you read, not books. Reamde, for instance, is about 1,600 pages on my Kobo, versus 300–400 for most other novels. So if someone committed to 12 books a year, then choosing Reamde effectively ups it to 15.
    • Anyway, I’m about 38% through it now and having some of the most fun I’ve had reading a book since… the last Neal Stephenson, maybe. I’m literally laughing out loud and shaking my head at his ability to imbue standard paragraphs with comic timing. Its globetrotting adventure core involves MMORPGs, ransomware, Chinese gold farming, and Russian mobs. Although the 2010-ish setting is quaintly anachronistic — with mentions of characters using WAP, Flickr, Facebook, and encountering problems that could be solved with cryptocurrencies and generative AI — it holds up perfectly and I never want it to end. In that regard, its length is a feature rather than a bug.
    • I’ve been listening to the new CZARFACE album featuring Tom Hardy aka Frankie Pulitzer and while he’s not a bad rapper at all (many people say he’s great but I don’t know how much is because it’s Tom Hardy doing something unexpected), I think he’s outclassed here next to the likes of Inspectah Deck; his flow is never as crisp and satisfying, and by flattening his accent to a neutral delivery, it lacks the character of, say, a Staten Island native. The beats are fire, though.
  • Week 34.26

    Week 34.26

    • I pushed through and finished the 460-something pages of The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, which at some points felt like it was going to earn a 3-star rating, but I had to give it 4 at the end on account of its ambition and scope. It felt like I’d emerged from a long and arduous time war myself, so I’d say it succeeds. I’ve probably burnt myself out on too many stories of the same sort now, so the next book will have to be quite different.
    • I met Stacy for lunch and we caught up in person for the first time in how long? There’s a 21-year gap between her last mention on this blog, from around the time I got back from university, till earlier this January when she pointed me in the direction of a record sale downtown. So yeah, pretty long and the conversation definitely made us feel old. Besides filling in the blanks on what’s happened in all these years, we talked about the benefits of long sabbaticals and the weird things older people are using AI tools for. I honestly had not foreseen some of these use cases (ask me if you want to know). Meta is enabling some very sad and cyberpunk behaviors by putting generative video models in Facebook and WhatsApp.
    • Over the weekend Kim and I visited an “exhibition” on the impact of AI on design, with James and Peishan — more accurately, it purported to explore ‘the life and death of the human soul in design’. I’ll just say it was very poor as an exhibition: imagine a long academic essay printed in small type, set in center-aligned paragraphs, pasted up on the wall in a tight U-shaped corner of a bookstore. Packed with people trying earnestly to read it, the line didn’t move an inch in five minutes. The text was on sale as an S$18 booklet — clearly the intended format — meaning the wall space was completely wasted. It should have been used to provide a visually compelling (and more readable) snapshot of key points. A truly awful experience for something under the heading of design.
    • Reflecting on this, I’ve come to recognize that the role of design under capitalism is chiefly to provide products and services with competitive differentiation and positioning. The widespread support of human-centered approaches lately has less to do with altruism and more with a fortunate (and temporary) alignment with commercial goals. It’s become obvious that in the pursuit of optimization and convenience, in the name of improving user experience, digital product designers have been directed to unleash some absolutely demonic socio-technological forces. Design itself is not inherently a human-centered pursuit or practice — it can be used to center any number of priorities or doctrines. The human soul (i.e. the desires and values that we as customers/citizens/individuals put out into the world and conversely seek out in others) must continuously find a healthy host that capital will agree to feed and clothe, and now under AI, Design looks like a used-up orphan days away from being on the streets. I think it’s more interesting to ask where else the human soul can find refuge — what unlikely organisms might become new hosts for the creative impulse — rather than mourning the death of design.
    • I had tamales, I think for the first time. We met for dinner to celebrate three August birthdays last night, at Mami’s Tamales in the Keong Saik area. Going in, I expected them to be made with a stretchy, sticky consistency not unlike the Teochew soong kueh (which I hate), but it’s really just a polenta skin that’s kinda like firm mashed potatoes. They put avocados on everything there, and their guacamole was excellent: aromatic and creamy. I would go back.
    • I saw Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026) in a theater and it was much better than the ratings had led me to believe. Yes, it’s more Marvel slop and I’m so over it, but I’ll always have the softest of spots for Spidey. Tom Holland gets my vote for the best person to ever play the role. Of all the films, this one felt the most connected to Insomniac’s videogames, partly because it lifts many signature fight moves and cinematic web-swinging camera moves from those games. It’s made me plan to finally play Spider-Man 2 on the PS5 in the coming weeks.
    • I saw Amores Perros (2000) on MUBI and got the shock of my life when I realized the young love interest Susana was played by the same woman who plays Maximo’s mom in the Apple TV series Acapulco (Vanessa Bauche). Goddamn, 2000 really was a long time ago.
    • Music discovery of the week: Puma Blue’s album Croak Dream. I haven’t heard his back-catalog yet, but this London-based musician (real name Jacob Allen) was supposedly a bedroom R&B artist who’s now veered into trip-hop territory with this new album. It’s glorious stuff. The title track evokes OK Computer-era Radiohead, but that’s really a compliment and not an accusation.
  • Week 32.26

    Week 32.26

    • The dentist frowned at the stains. “These have come back very quickly since your last cleaning”, she said. Well, I do drink a lot of black tea, like maybe three or four big mugs a day, I explained. “That will do it. If you see the inside of your mug getting stained, that’s happening to your teeth as well.” I don’t know why I never thought of that before. So now I have to either switch to green tea or alternate between mouthfuls of English Breakfast and plain water, because somehow even my Oral-B electric toothbrush isn’t scrubbing these out.
    • The contractor frowned at the stains. “We can try to do another round of waterproofing on the roof, but if the water seepage continues after that, you’ll either need to do PU injections in your ceiling or call in a structural engineer.” This temporary solution offered a glimmer of hope, but I’m not looking forward to having our ceilings hacked and drilled and molested if there truly is a structural issue.
    • Look, I’m in no way (in no way!) equating my troubles with those faced by the prisoners at Auschwitz, but as I read Viktor E. Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning this week, I found some comfort in his words — essentially perspectives from an explorer who traveled farther into human suffering than any of us will ever know in our lives, like a psychological astronaut… psychonaut? I cannot imagine going that deep into darkness and reemerging intact. But the human mind (or at least some) is incredibly resilient and/or adept at self-preservation. He writes of their return to society after the war:

    But for every one of the liberated prisoners, the day comes when, looking back on his camp experiences, he can no longer understand how he endured it all. As the day of his liberation eventually came, when everything seemed to him like a beautiful dream, so also the day comes when all his camp experiences seem to him nothing but a nightmare.

    • I finished reading Gabrielle Zevin’s Young Jane Young. The only other book I’ve read of hers was Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, which I loved whole-heartedly, and I’m glad to report that this one was also a minor masterpiece. The subject matter (a political sex scandal) didn’t appeal much to me at all, but her characters, and their dialogue and humanity, were wonderfully handled. Movie trailer voice: “It’s a story about family, friendship, and second chances.” 5 stars, and it goes on my shelf.
    The famous design process squiggle diagram
    • On Thursday I met some young entrepreneurs exploring product and service spaces that they might be able to play in, especially now that the availability of generative AI tools can amplify their talents. I came away impressed by how much drive they have, and was also reminded of how vital the quote-unquote design process can still be in an age where building happens in parallel with ideation. There’s so much value in “slowing down to speed up” in the early stages, as my friend Ted likes to say, and you can save not only time, but now tokens too, with more upfront research and problem selection before committing to code.
    • Kim and I had a choice between an ‘omakase’ yakitori dinner and a visit to Barrel: Story of Hibiki, which seems to be a Suntory-operated or at least Suntory-blessed restaurant that makes use of their Hibiki Harmony Japanese whisky in several recipes. I like yakitori fine, but associate it more with, I dunno, prices that aren’t S$280 a person before drinks?? So Barrel it was, and it was pretty great. Their simple vanilla ice-cream topped with a Hibiki-infused honey and Maldon salt might just be the best soft-serve I’ve ever had.
    • I passed a few hours playing Lumines Remastered, which has now been launched on mobile with controls that are quite usable. Friends will know that I consider Lumines to be one of my favorite game franchises, almost the equal of Tetris in its ingenuity, replayability, and ability to induce a blissful flow state. I’ve bought every one of these games multiple times, on every platform I can (Java featurephones, Symbian smartphones, iOS, Xbox 360, PSP, PS Vita, PS4/PS5, Switch). For S$9.98 (the first few levels are free), I can recommend the new iOS port if you’ve never played it before or don’t have access to a game console.
    • It was also Singapore’s 61st National Day over the weekend. This time, there were three songs instead of the usual one. I didn’t like any of them, and one in particular tried to strike an optimistic note but its titular refrain, “You’ll be okay”, works like a counterproductive doubt-caster. Like saying don’t think of an elephant. Were we not going to be okay? Why are you saying that?
    • It was a big week in proper music: my DOMi & JD BECK record arrived, and they announced two amazing things. 1) They’re coming to Singapore on Dec 1, and 2) there’s an instrumental version of the album coming soon. Those were both of my wishes to Jazz Santa. Thanks, JS, you’re the best.
    • ROLE MODEL also released his new album, Chuck Timely & The Hourglass, which is transparently about being a pretty fuckboi who’s now nearing 30 and still single while all his friends are getting married, and I love it. The sound is fantastic, a sort of alt-Americana piano rock from the good old days of Springsteen, Petty, and Fleetwood Mac.
    • Also, a new album from The Mountain Goats! Days is classic stuff, with better production values than ever, and a Weezer-like song about touring with the band Candlebox that has what it takes to be a hit single.
    • But the highest highlight for me has been Tricky’s new album, which I put off listening to for a few weeks. I said to myself I needed to hear it “in the right conditions” but really I think I was afraid it would suck. I ended up putting it on while on the train. It does not suck. It does not suck so hard! It’s as good as anything he put out after the first two albums of his career. Pitchfork points out that when Maxinquaye dropped in 1995, few would’ve bet on Tricky still making records three decades later — yet here he is, having outlasted Portishead (Third came out in 2008) and Massive Attack (16 years without an album), turning out what they call “a record of pointed modern blues that suggests an artist still driven to create.”
  • Week 30.26

    Week 30.26

    • Kim has fallen ill and is taking me down to Maybe-Covid town with her. Before it turns really bad, I figure I should bang out a short update. I eventually broke my Duolingo streak, my Finch streak, and some days I feel like ‘this might be the week I break my weeknote streak’, because it’s bound to happen someday. But when? Not today, at least. Let’s go:
    • On Thursday I managed to meet up with Brian for a couple of beers and a curry after running a minor errand in town. He’s finally moving on from our former employer, to an interesting insights role that should keep him both busy and amused, which is a minor miracle in this economy.
    • We also got out to dinner with a bunch of Kim’s friends on Friday before the illness took hold (who hired this dramatic tone and can we send him home?). The hosts had a Nintendo Switch with Overcooked loaded up for their kids. After watching her two children play with total focus, another mom who could really use some wine-alone-time said excitedly, “I think a Switch will be appearing in our home shortly!” I was perplexed that the child-distracting benefits of a videogame console had not previously occurred to her, and regretted not being more of a pain to my parents all those years I wanted a SNES or Mega Drive at home.
    • So here we are instead, spending adult money to chase a childhood feeling. I bought Assassin’s Creed: Shadows on the Switch 2 a couple of weeks ago because it was on sale, despite knowing that it would be technically more impressive and performant on the PS5. Well, I needn’t have bothered worrying about frame rates because the game itself is dogshit. It was during a mission where I was meant to kill a few people, and discovered a bug where one of them was loitering outside the challenge’s boundaries (literally beyond an invisible wall I could not cross), that I decided to write off the USD$35 I’d spent and delete this piece of Ubisoft garbage.
    • I finished reading Book 3 of Solvej Balle’s On The Calculation of Volume series, and I haven’t decided if I’ll continue — there is one more book out in English, and there are a total of seven planned. I thought the first book was fine, but these last two have leaned more boring and uninteresting. What kept me reading was an (unintended?) parallel with unemployment that I noticed: being stuck in a day that repeats endlessly is what a sabbatical or retirement feels like at first. Work is the engine that keeps your days moving whether you like it or not. Remove it, and you’re living outside the time everyone else shares. Tara, the protagonist, can’t rely on anyone to understand her experience or keep her company, so she fills her days with idle curiosity — studying history, watching the sky and her backyard, letting time slip by until she loses track of it.
    • [Spoilers follow] Perhaps I’ll read the next book just to confirm my suspicion that this story arc intentionally mirrors the different stages of a post-work journey. At the end of Book 2, Tara suddenly meets another trapped person, which kicks off a period of relief, elation, and connection in Book 3. And then they meet more trapped people, forming a sort of retiree community that tries to navigate their way through this. Some want to return to how things were before, which I suppose is a desire to reintegrate with society and regain relevance, while others don’t believe it’s possible anymore. Some want to simply find a way to live, and some feel a responsibility to use their unique position to improve the world. Given that Balle has lived as a sort of writer-recluse in her small Danish village while putting these books together over many years, I don’t think I’m far off the mark.
    • I want to recommend the app that I used to create this week’s featured image above: tone. I found it through the Japanese developer’s Twitter, which was legible because of how that platform now automatically translates tweets in other languages to English. It is actually a very useful feature that will nevertheless probably be proven at some point in the future to have caused even greater deterioration of society and mental health. Anyway, it changes photos in various ways to look like they were reproduced with vintage printing techniques, not through a simple filter, but a multi-stage process you can actually inspect. Not the first to attempt this, but a really nice implementation of the concept. It’s free, with an optional in-app purchase to unlock more colors.
    • A ton of new music dropped in the past couple of weeks but I’ve been listening to the Takehiro Honda Trio’s This Is Honda (Jazz), and Radiohead’s The King of Limbs, which I’ve somehow hitherto ignored. Oh Charli XCX’s new album Music, Fashion, Film has some great sounding moments (and some painfully shallow lyrics), and its second track, SS26, is a pop masterpiece. It also says something about the times we live in, and my general intelligence, that I wondered for a minute if the album’s cover featuring John Cale, Marc Jacobs, and Martin Scorsese was AI slop.

  • Week 26.26

    Week 26.26

    • Whew, I’m still buzzing from the fact I managed to place my order for a new M5 MacBook Air just before Apple raised prices (thanks to AI firms driving up the cost of RAM). When Tim Cook gave the WSJ a heads up, I thought we had maybe a month, but decided to bite the bullet sooner rather than later. I don’t have the cost breakdown to know exactly what I paid for my upgrades, but I think that decision saved me over S$500.
    • It was Amazon Prime Day and I got some accessories: a Belkin USB hub, and a 1TB Sandisk external SSD for the same price I paid to get a better 2TB Samsung one just two years ago. This chip crunch is the worst.
    • The computer arrived yesterday and restoring my old system to it via Time Machine on an external SSD was surprisingly quick and painless. Under an hour, I’d say. One of the first things I did was to install Geekbench and compare it to my old M1 model. It’s true: the M5 is twice as fast. Old habits like picking up my phone to reply because opening Messages.app on the Mac took too long will need to be unlearnt. I also installed ollama and did some local AI inference using a Gemma model, just ‘cause.
    Farewell to my old sticker collection
    • One of the things I never relied on my old M1 MacBook Air to do was play games. I was a PC gamer until I switched to a Mac, at which point I became a console gamer out of sheer necessity. They fare a bit better today thanks to technologies like Apple Silicon and Metal, but it’s not something I’ve paid attention to. This week I decided to fire up Steam for the first time in years and discovered 1) games on sale go even lower in price than they do on consoles, and 2) I can play games on my Mac and view them on a giant screen in Vision Pro. HMMMM! I picked up Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition for just S$4, and will find some time later next week to play it for the first time since the days of my Xbox 360.
    • I finally got access to the new Siri AI on my iPad Pro running the iPadOS 27 developer beta. I did a few tests, like recreating the 2024 WWDC scenario by asking it when Kim would be returning from her business trip — it aced it, finding her hotel stay in our shared calendar, and although there were no flight details, it correctly assumed that she would be returning the same day she checked out.
    • One of the things I was excited to use Siri AI for was as a general purpose research/answers service, like, you know, a little app called Perplexity that allegedly planted rumors in the press that Apple wanted to buy them. I redeemed a free year of Perplexity Pro at some point and have become accustomed to using it several times a day. But that’s yet another USD$20/mo AI subscription I’d be glad to be rid of. It reminds me of when Steve declined to buy Dropbox and told them they were ‘a feature, not a product’.
    • So did Apple succeed in making Siri AI work just as well by licensing Google’s homework instead of buying Perplexity’s wrapper? Signs point to yes. I tried to trip it up by asking who the man appearing in the new Utada Hikaru music video was, just a day after it landed on YouTube. I fully expected it to fail, since the question involved very current information that probably wasn’t in its indexes or training data (remember, Apple says Siri doesn’t rely on Google’s search or world knowledge). But it answered correctly! It cited info from a fan site, and was even able to answer a follow-up question about his (Hiroto Kohmoto) career highlights.
    • On the weekend, we took a few nephews and nieces to see Toy Story 5 in a theater, and I’m happy to report that some of that Pixar magic is still alive. Well, another way to put it might be that Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo, Wall-E) is still alive and working at Pixar. As you may already know from the trailers, this installment has old-fashioned toys going up against today’s attention and confidence-destroying tech, in the form of gaming on tablets, socializing on the internet, and even generative AI. The tech toys start out looking like villains, but the film seems to contend they’re here to stay and can support an existing, healthy imagination (should your child be blessed enough to have one).
    • An old idea came back to me as a possible new vibe coding project, and I’ve started working on the prototype. It’s a generative art concept, and maybe I’m overthinking it and there’s a simpler way than how I’m approaching it, but at present it’s doing my head in. This one might take a while.
    New shareable bookshelf images, for 1–12 books.
    • I also decided to revisit my Shelf Expression project and changed up the approach so that all assets like book covers are fetched and cached just once on build, rather than loading them from internet sources each time a visitor arrives. This dramatically sped up the experience, to the point where I can’t recall why I did it the other way to begin with. I also made a collage tool so users can create shareable images of their shelves, support for custom covers, better AI summarization, and other stuff. So my Bookshelf page (and yours, if you use it) should be much nicer now.
    • What am I reading? I finished Ted Chiang’s Exhalation and am now on R.F. Kuang’s Katabasis. I loved Chiang’s first collections of sf short stories so much that I kept Exhalation on my list for years, too afraid to read it and have nothing left to look forward to. But there’s the risk of suddenly dying and never getting to do all the things you were saving up — so I read it, and it was worth the wait. Katabasis, like Babel, is a book that draws on Kuang’s time at elite universities. Cambridge, Oxford, and now Yale. They say you should write what you know, but it’s beginning to feel like trauma dumping rather than a deliberate choice to set her stories in academia.
  • Week 24.26

    Week 24.26

    It was WWDC week. Apple made good on their promise of a smarter, generative AI-powered Siri two years after first describing the concept. Enough has been said about that slipped deadline, but the verdict on social media this time is that they’ve actually delivered. I was tempted by all the reports of how stable the first developer beta is, and installed it on my M1 iPad Pro. I hope I don’t regret it, but so far so good.

    It’s no surprise that the first beta is in good shape, because this year’s OS updates are looking to repeat the feat of Mac OS X Snow Leopard, where effort was expended on optimizing performance and fixing longstanding issues rather than adding new features. There’s a list of nearly 300 improvements, and I’m looking forward to many of them, especially the faster loading of items in Apple Music. There are also very welcome refinements to the controversial new unified design language system colloquially known as Liquid Glass. Steve Lemay, may this life bless you and yours with happiness and good health.

    There was so much to discuss and dissect this week that Michael and I spent over four hours across two FaceTime calls. Okay, some of that time was spent talking about his new collaborative crossword puzzle game, Crossmate. I’ve played a couple of games and it’s a lot of fun, like how we used to play the NYT crosswords at the office on a big screen. It’ll be on TestFlight soon for wider testing and I’m excited to see how people like it.

    But the next generation of Apple Intelligence was the headliner and the thing most people will hear about. While I expected most of the things announced, there were a few I didn’t. The new Spatial Reframing capability, for one, is a brilliant use of image generation to enhance an existing photo beyond the removal of objects — one that treads very close to contradicting Apple’s earlier stand that photos should be documents of things that did happen. This new take technically does ‘respect’ a real moment in time, with the exception of the camera’s position in space. I wonder if this is as far as they’ll go, or if the line will continue to be redrawn over time (turning a photo into a video, for example).

    I also did not expect Apple’s AI to offer text generation from scratch, helping you to fill a blank page, much like what ChatGPT or any other consumer chatbot has done since the beginning. I thought their initial approach of only proofreading or editing existing text was the right one, but it’s clear that market forces are guiding their hand and features like this and photorealistic generation in Image Playground are simply table stakes now.

    After the presentation, I thought it was super obvious that the new Siri AI will make ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, etc. unnecessary for many casual users of AI, and many commentators on Twitter have also since shared this opinion. For people using chat interfaces to look up quick answers, do a spot of online research, brainstorm ideas, and generate text documents and images, there’ll be no quicker or more cost-effective way than to ask Siri on one of their Apple devices. On an iPhone, just swipe down from the Dynamic Island and the prompt field appears. Or hold down the power button and speak.

    It appears that the combination of on-device and cloud models will handle a normal amount of requests for no charge, and subscribers to iCloud+ storage will get more generous limits. Why would anyone pay USD$20 a month for third-party AI unless they also needed it for coding? And that’s before you even add in the advantages of having all your personal context available for Siri to work with, privately. I’ve long held off on connecting my email, Dropbox, and other services to ChatGPT and Claude, even if it would make them more useful. Once you open the gates for data to flow out, there’s no getting it back in. Apple is the only company I’d trust with all of it, precisely because their approach doesn’t require me to trust them.

    • Remember how I complained a few weeks ago that Amazon Fresh was ceasing local operations? One positive side effect of that emerged this week, in the form of a push notification arriving around 9:30 AM saying that some alcohol products were on 60% clearance sale. I jumped on that with a quickness, and received 20 bottles of wine later the same afternoon. If we lived in Australia, we’d be paying those prices on an everyday basis, but we don’t. I should have gotten twice as much.
    • Japanese konbini inspire all sorts of media, and I’ve read the books Convenience Store Woman and The Convenience Store by the Sea (which is now a live-action series). They’re… okay. This week I played the game InKonbini on Switch 2, which simulates a week of running a countryside store in 1993. I’ve had this indie game on my radar for a couple of years, but initially resigned myself to never playing it because they’d only planned to release for PC/Windows. It’s now on every major platform, and a very chill and cozy game, albeit short enough to finish in a couple of days. I spent a lot of my time straightening out the shelves and making sure every can, bottle, and sandwich faced outwards.
    • John Scalzi’s “Old Man’s War” series of books continues to be a very fun sci-fi adventure. I’ve finished Book 4: Zoe’s Tale, and it pulls off a rare Rashomon move across two installments. It essentially retells the entire story of Book 3, but from another character’s (Zoe’s) perspective, while somehow managing to be additive rather than repetitive. That’s quite a feat.
    • If you’d asked me what films I’m looking forward to this year, Disclosure Day would have topped the list. I’ll watch Nolan’s The Odyssey but I’m not in any hurry. We saw DD this weekend and I had a good time throughout. Nobody puts a scene together like Spielberg; everything is dynamically shot and immersive. But I was left afterwards with the feeling of too many plot holes, and too much exposition of the film’s values through monologues rather than action. Wait, I forgot that I would have also put The Drama on that list, and I’d been dying to know what the awful “secret” alluded to in the trailer was. We also saw that this weekend and had a lot of fun, even if it didn’t fully live up to my high expectations either. Both films get 3.5 stars.
    • I watched Empire Records (1995) for the first time, because Netflix said it was leaving their catalog soon. This was a film I’d always sort of believed I’d seen, but it turns out that I just knew the soundtrack really well and seen a couple of scenes. What a glorious document of its time. Immaculate vibes, and probably more entertaining today than it was at the time because of how much there is to appreciate — not just the lighting, set design, and music, but the whole nostalgic idea that a giant, two-storey record store could be the cultural center of a community, and that people would fight to protect it. Killing them was a tragic error.
    • While talking about it, Cien said the film dates itself by virtue of its message that selling out is bad and uncool, which I didn’t quite understand. Isn’t selling out still uncool!? And then Michael said the same thing on an unrelated topic — that selling out was something only us senior millennials and Gen Xers shunned. Everyone after sees it as a sign you’ve made it. I think they meant this on an individual level, which is jarring enough. But the film is about independent spaces being consumed by soulless chains, and I worry even that’s an alien idea to younger generations raised on influencer culture and brand collaborations. I haven’t been the same since.
  • Week 23.26

    Week 23.26

    • Summer is suddenly upon us. Like an overbaked Instagram filter stacked on top of an already eye-searing Photoshop edit, the heat in Singapore has been turned up to unglamorous levels. It is impossible not to be sweaty; we are at SWEATCON 1; omnisweat, eversweat, permasweat; we have always been in sweat in Eurasia. It was 31.5ºC and 79% humidity in my living room one afternoon, according to my HomePod. Somebody on Reddit worked out how much it costs to run the AC, in a bid to justify their own use. They say it might last till October.
    • It’s WWDC next week and I’m looking forward to seeing what Apple’s AI story has evolved into. I don’t envy their position — if I were in charge of a billion devices owned by all sorts of users, I wouldn’t want to put an AI assistant across all their data either. I doubt it’s possible to get 100% accuracy at scale understanding people’s appointments and emails in all their permutations, to say nothing of more complex use cases. The result is someone somewhere will lose something important and learn that their phone can’t be trusted. Is that worth it? Should everything AI have a permanent “(beta)” tag?
    • Even when it comes to writing code with AI, you have to be willing to accept bugs or only build simple, generic things. I think letting AI generate small pieces of functional code for people has some promise. Google and the ‘Nothing’ company are doing vibe-coded widgets on Android, so it would be nice if Apple copied that feature along with the long-rumored Shortcuts upgrade (the idea being that a more capable Siri would use Shortcuts and App Intents to control the system under the hood).
    • I was minding my own business this week when an idea for a website suddenly hit and I started to see if I could make it. Within four hours, I had a working version and decided to just publish it and walk away. Big mistake to think that, of course. I spent the next two days fixing bugs, expanding its data sources, and adding more features. What is it? It’s called Chinese Era and it creates random pairings of classical Chinese art and poetry. Some combinations are fittingly beautiful, others make you work to find a connection. I think that challenge makes the poetry even more powerful. I’m very happy with it, because it has the feel of a museum visit, albeit one curated purely by chance. I have no idea where the idea came from — did I see some Chinese artwork recently or read a Chinese poem? Not that I can remember.
    • How does it work? I read some translated Tang Dynasty poetry from Project Gutenberg many years ago, so I knew books were out there in the public domain for the taking. I didn’t know if I could access the necessary paintings, but it turns out institutions like The Smithsonian happily provide their collections via APIs. There’s also a free radio livestream of traditional Chinese music that I was able to incorporate for more atmosphere. Appropriately, the app was created with an open-source Chinese AI model: DeepSeek V4 Flash.
    • In terms of media activity, it’s been a week of tying up loose ends. I finished a bunch of shows that have been lying about half-watched for months: Lioness S1 on Amazon (S3 starts in August), Drops of God S2 on Apple TV, and the anime Tengoku Daimakyo (Heavenly Delusion) on Disney+. I even attempted to finish Carole & Tuesday, a Netflix show I remember watching back in 2019 (!) on my iPhone 11 Pro Max hooked up to my hotel room’s TV in Manila. But it’s just not very good.
      • Later edit: I spoke too soon. C&T has some really prescient stuff going on, with a police squad called MICE (Mars ICE) violently deporting illegal immigrants, and the central plot is about AI artists replacing human musicians? This was in 2019!
    • Keeping with the theme of unfinished business, I started Yakuza Kiwami 2 on the PS5, a game I bought during my first sabbatical in 2021 and never got around to playing before I went back to work. I hope this time I finish it before the next paycheck lands.
    • Speaking of unemployment, Peishan had an afternoon off and we went to the IKEA restaurant I wrote about last week so she could see the situation for herself. This time it was like a full-on retirement village. People sat there in their groups for hours, chatting over bottomless cups of tea and the remnants of their salmon and meatball lunches. Apart from worrying about whether this is actually sustainable, I found it shameful that a Swedish furniture company might be subsidizing a better community center for our seniors than the government’s organizations. More imagination is needed.
    • I read (re-read?) There is No Antimemetics Division, in its proper final form — the first version of the book I read last year was self-published, and it was completely rewritten for release by Penguin Random House. The old version can hardly be found now, which is very fitting for a story about disappearing memories and unknowable artifacts. The new version reads very well, and it’s much clearer what’s happening at all times. However, I rated the original 5 stars on Goodreads and this one felt like 4 stars. It’s undoubtedly a better version for mainstream release, but I enjoyed the original because its concepts were so vaguely sketched, its images so hazy, its atmosphere so oddly suspended between science, fantasy, and eldritch horror.