Home issues, like a roof leak that I need to resolve with the building people, have been attacking my mental health this past week. I’ve spent too many waking and dreaming hours on them already, so I won’t get into it further apart from this record for posterity. Hopefully things will improve.
While browsing YouTube, I came across a Rick Beato interview with DOMi & JD BECK, whose 2022 alt-jazz album Not Tight I quite enjoyed. Now, I’d assumed that they had just disappeared, swallowed up by an industry that doesn’t have time for esoteric styles, so seeing them pop up was a surprise — I didn’t dare to believe it meant new music was coming. I started watching and was sucked in for the whole hour, and indeed there was a new album set to launch the next day. I decided right then and there to buy a signed copy on vinyl from the Blue Note online store. Shipping cost $31 USD but I was so keen, nothing was going to stop me.
The album WHO ASKED? is now out on streaming, and reactions are mixed. Complaints fall into two categories: technical and musical. They recorded and produced most of it themselves, with little experience, and many think the sound was compromised — muddy, distorted drums, and a very busy mix. Musically, it’s also a very challenging suite with a lot going on: orchestral instruments alongside their frenetic playing, loads of counterpoint, and switching time signatures. Plus, they sing on nearly every track, versus providing only harmony on one song off the last album.
Personally I find the Dolby Atmos mix on Apple Music to sound better, with better separation, and think of the whole vibe as a deliberate choice. They mention in the Beato interview that the vinyl mix was shipped earlier (same with Rosalia’s LUX) and has a more hi-fi sound with less bass. Musically it might be too early to call, but I like it and think it sounds exactly like what you get when you let two prodigies make music that interests them. Their live performances online were always better to me than the cuts on the first album, and that may be the case again here. I’ll drop a few links below to get you started if you’ve never heard them.
After joyously listening to music all afternoon, I loaded up the short film The Non-Actor on MUBI, starring Victoria Pedretti and Maya Hawke, which turned out to be about a woman who’s going deaf. Well, it’s not just about that, it’s also a lesbian/yuri story, but it made me think a bit about losing my hearing and how this might be my last decade before it starts to deteriorate. Imagine never hearing your favorite songs the same way ever again; the instruments slowly fading out or disappearing. I’d be inconsolable.
I also finished reading my 37th book of the year: Yang Shuang-zi’s Taiwan Travelogue, winner of the 2026 International Booker Prize. It’s also yuri, and this author has actually written manga. Although I’d seen numerous mentions of the book online, I started reading without knowing anything beyond what the title suggests. Turns out it’s a metafictional work that pretends to be a new translation of a little-known post-war novel based on a true story — despite being a completely new work of fiction. Ultimately it’s about colonialism’s effects on Taiwanese culture, Japan’s actions during WWII (there are notably several translated Taiwanese novels about this period, which I may read someday), female relationships, translation, and food. 4 stars.
My current favorite camera app, Analogue, got a big v1.5 update this week. I’ve preferred this for the last few months because of their unique approach: instead of using Bayer RAW capture to get more natural (less HDR processed) results from the iPhone’s camera sensor, they use a video pipeline — taking screengrabs in Apple LOG, which allows them to get really beautiful, softer images that you can apply LUTs to (including Fujifilm’s official film simulation LUTs in F-Log). Well, what does the new update add? Don’t laugh, but it’s Bayer RAW capture. However, unlike every other camera app such as Halide, Lampa, and NoFusion, Analogue merges the use of Bayer RAW with their innovative processing approach, meaning those Fuji film sims continue to work on top of sharper, native 4:3 photos. If none of that made any sense to you, the plain English is that this is your best alternative to the default camera app.
Sushiro is helping to break this Japanese sausage brand into the local market, and the sushi dog was their chosen vehicle.
Brian was kind enough to think of me when he had an extra ticket to see Kraftwerk at their one-night-only local show on Friday. I was not even aware they were still alive, let alone touring. Turns out it’s just one co-founder left holding the project together, Ralf Hütter. After some drama with the tickets — for a moment it seemed like we might not get in — we were treated to an hour and a half of classic electronica.
One effect of having a discography that spans five decades is that the music varies to an extreme degree. Their early material is rigid, with an almost classical approach to using synthesizers. Everything builds without resolving. This was electronic music before The Drop was invented. But Kraftwerk are necessarily more important than they are fun, which I mean as a compliment. Seeing where the structures and traditions originated helps you understand why what came after sounded so liberating. Their newer material has more swing, more layers and polyrhythms. I think Computer Love and the stuff from that era was my favorite of the night. As Brian said, it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience to see these OGs in action, and when I listened to Daft Punk’s Discovery on the way home I heard it differently.
The week was also marked by a dentist appointment I’d been dreading for awhile. It was just to get a filling done, but I was told there’d be an injection and drilling involved. The visit was a rollercoaster: it started with an x-ray and the suggestion that the cavity might be in a difficult to reach location, and ended with a closer inspection (in which an injection and drilling were sadly involved) that found… no apparent cavity after all. The tooth has now been sealed with some material that will surely leak microplastics into my mouth, and we’ll monitor it over future x-rays to ensure there wasn’t really anything going on in there. Fingers crossed.
In other sad news, Amazon Singapore has decided to sunset their Amazon Fresh grocery delivery service. It’s not my main source, but I appreciated their “free” (with Prime) next-day delivery and used it maybe every 4–6 weeks. Lately, they’ve been a primary source for sardines, pasta, and ice cream, if you wanted to know how balanced my diet is. The evil multinational corporation giveth and taketh away.
I’ll still keep subscribing to Prime though, because it’s letting me do terribly wasteful things like see English language editions of Brutus magazine while in a Tokyo bookstore last week, decide that I don’t want to carry them around all day and get creased, and so order them online for delivery to my home a week later — for virtually the same price. High off the Snoopy Museum visit, I also ordered these two big, lovely Made-in-Japan mugs that will be my daily tea delivery vessels.
Kim got me a copy of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy on vinyl for my birthday but it’s only just arrived. I have yet to play it, but the artifact is heavy, substantial, important. It’s no exaggeration to call it one of the best albums of all time, and I think it’s consistently raised my goosebumps for the last 15 years.
Peishan and James also got me a couple of records, and one of them was a Record Store Day ‘preview’ of two tracks from some upcoming John Coltrane releases that were not on my radar. The Tiberi Tapes are a legendary collection of secretly recorded live sessions of Coltrane in the 1960s, made by saxophonist Frank Tiberi. The recordings were imperfect, but new digital technology has made them fit for release, and Impulse Records is set to unleash a bunch of them soon (it’s Coltrane’s centennial year).
A few weeks ago, I released Orchids, Once. and several people independently told me that the procedurally generated music was good for having on in the background while they worked. That gave me the idea to make something designed to sit in a browser window on a second screen (or in the background) keeping you company throughout the work day with music and visuals.
My first idea turned out to be too ambitious — way beyond my current abilities in terms of graphics and animation. I got a prototype working but it wasn’t worth going further. So I pivoted to a new idea yet again leveraging the orchid models I’d already made to get started quickly.
Window Box is the result. It simulates looking out the window of an apartment, seeing a planter box of flowers set outside the windowsill. I’ve never actually seen one of these in real life; I think I first encountered them on Sesame Street as a kid and thought they were cool.
You can currently choose to be in Singapore or Honolulu. There’s dynamic real-time weather and lighting pulled from the Open-Meteo API, to reflect current conditions in either location. There’s an incredibly beautiful (if I do say so myself) rain animation system, along with environmental sounds. I also came up with a neat blending technique to transform the photographic backgrounds to reflect time of day and weather.
Instead of doing more procedurally generated music, I decided people would want real music, so there’s a radio tuner with a handful of curated stations. That includes Apple Music Radio just because I think more people should listen to their shows! There’s also a great Hawaiian station, KAPA-FM, which is a treat when you’re using the Honolulu location.
And just for you readers of the regular blog, here’s a hidden feature: click the app title in the top left 20 times and it’ll unlock bird sounds to complete the scene.
Media activity
We watched Season 2 of Beef on Netflix. I was primarily excited for the casting of Carey Mulligan, Cailee Spaeny, and Oscar Isaac, but wasn’t keen to see more of the same petty adversarial conflict from the first season. Well, be careful what you wish for — my chief complaint is that it has so little connection to the first season and the concept of beefing, that I think it should just have been a different show. This one raises the class warfare stakes tremendously, goes much darker, and then ends in a tonally unexpected way. Maybe the best Netflix Original in awhile.
I’ve been playing more Path of Mystery: A Brush with Death, the new Japanese murder mystery adventure game on Switch that I mentioned back in January. It’s an above average game for the genre, and I’d readily recommend it. The chapters are structured and presented like television episodes, which makes it perfect for playing in a couple of short sessions. Each one opens and ends with (skippable) animated credits, and there’s a short “next time on…” video afterwards to give you a preview of the following episode. I haven’t seen this done before, and it adds to the enjoyment of the story that is both interesting and occasionally funny.
Speaking of episodic anime, I got back into Frieren to try and finish the first season now that a second season is out. Previous episodes were pretty easy to space out across large spans of time, but the final arc with the First Mage exams is surprisingly addictive and bingable. I watched the last 11 episodes in 24 hours. I’m not one for fantasy settings but Frieren is brilliant — especially how it explores the perspective that comes with a longer lifespan and outliving all your friends.
By the time this goes live, I should be in Tokyo. We picked this week to go because Kim thought that there would be a lull at work. That did not turn out to be true, nor is it particularly good timing by any measure: it will be Japan’s Golden Week holidays, a notoriously busy and crowded domestic tourism season, plus there was just a massive 7.7 magnitude earthquake off the northeast coast this week. I believe the Japanglish phrase would be Ohwellganai.
24 hours until take off and I still haven’t packed a single item. That’s either a sign I’m becoming a seasoned traveler (not likely) or that I’m taking this trip more casually than usual. Maybe it’s the fact that the weather is pretty mild and won’t require a different wardrobe than what I usually wear. I hope Tokyo is ready for my basic-ass black t-shirt and baggy jeans look. Compared to last year’s month-long stay, stopping by for a week this time feels really breezy.
I’ll often obsess over what camera to bring on a trip, but this time the decision is much easier. For one thing my top pick, the Ricoh GR III, has decided to completely lock up, physically. All its critical buttons are stuck and gummed up either with dust or crystallized substances — not for the first time, but worse than ever. This doesn’t happen to any other line of camera I’ve owned. The GRs are brilliant little things but their build quality and reliability has sadly been a weak spot.
Secondly, the cameras in the iPhone 17 series are the best they’ve been in years. I’m okay just shooting with the native app in HEIC and editing photos with its “next-generation Photographic Styles”. Or I could shoot ProRAW and edit them in Halide Mk3 too, but it’s mostly extra work and not essential like it was a couple of years ago when Apple’s Smart HDR lost the plot.
This week was also a birthday week so there was altogether too much eating and that’s never a great idea before a holiday where you’re already destined to put on a few kilos. This week has involved too many curry puffs, pizzas, roast lamb, pastas, and patés. I didn’t buy myself anything more than a 10th anniversary copy of To Pimp A Butterfly on vinyl. I decided that since I’m managing to get a lot done with my M1 MacBook Air, upgrading to an M5 isn’t something that would really excite me at all. Making the most of this five-year-old machine is more satisfying, so I could conceivably wait for the M6 model.
This week I once again repurposed existing parts to make more new things. Last week’s work on the orchids was too intricate to use only once (pun unintended). So I ported the math to my procedural artwork generator to create a new style called Orchids Forever, where I can stage them with different lighting conditions and make wallpapers.
Because Cien said she enjoyed having the music from Orchids, Once. in the background as she worked, I started to think about making a thing that was designed to sit in the background of a workday. The first idea that came to mind was sadly too complex for me to pull off (for now), so I started on another that places a few orchids in a flower box outside a window, looking out over the Singapore skyline. The idea is that it lets people anywhere pretend they’re in Singapore, looking out over a scene that changes with the time of day and actual weather.
The day after I made it, my ex-colleague Tobi over in Germany said he misses Singapore, so I sent this over to help. Rather than reuse the procedurally generated music from Orchids, Once., which would be completely stripping that work for parts, I integrated a free Apple Music Radio player, which makes me happy because more people should hear their live stations.
While reflecting on all this, I’ve started to think there are three camps of people making things with AI. The first, like me, wants to design experiences and outsource the coding. The second wants to code and outsource the design. The third just wants to see things made and don’t care much about either.
This is an enthusiast market, and people are even buying curated Markdown prompt files that promise to enforce design and/or development “best practices,” trying to compensate for not knowing what good looks like. But I’m still skeptical that the general public will want to generate their own custom apps. Most people might create a widget or two to solve a personal problem, but that’s it.
The real unlock for wider consumer vibe coding will be raising the quality of AI-generated UX design. Nobody scrutinizes generated code, but bad design can be felt instantly. Better design defaults might increase the numbers in camps two and three: the people who just want a thing made and don’t particularly have an idea how it should look or work, but would still notice if it was ugly or confusing.
Claude Design, released this week, might be a trojan horse for exactly this. Although seemingly positioned as the anti-Claude Code, with a focus on front-end design and visual prototyping rather than coding (making it a tool for the first camp), it’s still going to make design more accessible for all makers, even the code-oriented ones. It’s worth noting Figma’s stock fell 7% after the announcement.
The secondary effect — already playing out in layoffs I keep hearing about — is a devaluation of designers for common production tasks. This drum is being banged by every dimwit on LinkedIn so you know it’s well underway. Most designers will have needed to start burrowing deeper into their organizations yesterday, into strategy and human-centered decision making roles. Service and business designers should have had a head start, but this is a game of musical chairs and someone’s taking out half the chairs.
I watched the Sphere (1998) movie with my book club and while I expected it to be possibly racist or sexist, I didn’t think it would be as offensive as it was. It’s godawful. I didn’t hesitate to give it 1 star on Letterboxd. There must be an interesting story behind how Barry Levinson came to direct an undersea horror film based on a sci-fi hit novel by Michael Crichton, starring Dustin Hoffman and Sharon Stone among others, and have it come out so unwatchable and incoherent. The effects, both practical and computer generated, are laughable. And this was just a year before The Matrix.
We finished Company Retreat, the new hidden camera show from the makers of Jury Duty. The premise is that a normal person is chosen to temp at a company that’s going on their annual team-building retreat, except everyone else is an actor. They put him through absurd situations that test his character, and like in the first show, the mark turns out to be an unbelievably good human being. The scale of the con is much larger this time, and the behind the scenes content is as interesting as the main story (if not more so). I think they went just a little too far with some of the characters this time, to the point where you think he must have known this wasn’t normal.
I’m currently reading another goddamned Japanese cozy novel, except this one seems to be worth the paper it’s printed on. Letters from the Ginza Shihodo Stationery Shop seemed like an appropriate choice given that district is where we’ll be staying. Like some of these other trash tomes, it’s a bunch of intersecting short stories centered around a titular shop. This time, the stories are actually kinda interesting and have emotional cores that work — stories of everyday people trying to write letters to resolve personal issues. Rob asked if it was appropriate for his 12-year-old (that’s about the reading grade for these books), and I said yes, as long as you can explain the concept of a hostess club to him.
I’ve also begun reading Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks, a book that appeared on my radar awhile back but whose apparent premise — life is only 4,000 weeks long, so what are you going to do about it? — scared me off. Then Ted mentioned it when we met up a couple of weeks ago and thought that I’d find its concepts familiar, and in line with how I’m already living. I took that as a tremendous compliment and permission to get started. I read the intro and first chapter on the plane, and they deal with the idea that you should embrace that life has time limits, and accept you’ll never be able to do everything. Not only is that okay, it’s how all people lived before our clock-watching, productivity-obsessed era. I couldn’t help but wonder if I was taking away the wrong conclusions, though, because when I think about how short life is, I think of how Whose Line Is It Anyway? is played. You may recall it’s the show “where everything is made up and the points don’t matter”.
It’s Sunday night in Tokyo and I’m in bed rewatching Lost In Translation (2003) on local TV.
I’m looking through my camera roll to remember what happened this week and it’s mostly a bunch of “artworks” I’ve been making. Wait, let me step back: I’ve had an interest in procedurally generated graphics (GenArt) for awhile, and it peaked with the NFT boom of 2021–22, where I spent a relatively obscene amount of money minting and collecting artworks I really liked (not the monkeys). I’m mostly drawn to the idea of mathematically rigid routines producing organic beauty — the contrasts in that, and the unpredictability of what you get when you roll the RNG dice.
So after my recent experiments in making apps, I wondered if I could get AI to write me code that would generate images based on concepts I described. The answer is, of course, yes! It’s important to note this isn’t prompting for images (like when you use Midjourney or DALL-E), it’s prompting for the math behind making images. And once you’ve created the rules by which it draws different art styles, you can create a nearly infinite number of unique artworks by dialing different variables up and down.
One example is a “style” I made called Labyrinth, which produces actual, solvable mazes. Depending on the variables you adjust, you can make mazes ranging from tiny to massive, with just one solution, or many. If you asked an image generation AI to draw a maze, it would likely lack the coherence of a real maze, because of the way it operates — focusing on the superficial appearance and not the integrity of its paths. But an AI model can make the math to draw a maze.
I start most of these by thinking up an artistic production approach, say “take sheets of colored cardboard or acrylic, and punch holes of varying shapes into them, then layer them on top of each other so the holes line up (or not), and randomly spray contrast-colored paint on some of them”. Then I describe the possible variations and variables I want to control to the AI, such as the density of shapes, the thickness of the borders, the ratio between angular and organic lines, and we iterate after seeing some of the results. Just think of all the methods and ideas you might want to play with, and how this lets any old idiot model them on their computers!
The meta project is that I’ve made a modular app that handles all these different styles for me, whether they require a 2D canvas or WebGL. The app provides a common UI layer that all “styles” can plug into, which allows me to control them. Now that it’s done, I can just focus on experimenting and having fun making new artworks. I daresay a few of these are executed as well as any of those I spent money on.
I’ll probably release it as a wallpaper generator once I have enough styles built in, if anyone’s interested. But mostly I love having this as a background project that I can dip into, on and off. It allows me to take on other app ideas as momentary “side quests”.
While making Labyrinth, I showed a maze to Cong, who said “You should do a puzzle maker”. To which I said, “Nah.” And then a minute later… “Although, a daily maze game. Hmm.” It made sense that I could save time by taking CommonVerse’s daily random generation mechanic and combining it with Labyrinth’s logic to make a daily maze challenge. But would it even be fun to trace a 2D maze with your finger and try to solve it? No… so what if it was a 3D maze you had to escape?
The first prototype took a couple of hours, and I’ve been polishing it for the last few days. I think it’s coming along nicely. I’ll put it out soon, once I balance the difficulty and get more feedback from testing.
Labyrinth, and the game it’s inspired
The development of a maze, a maze, a maze… was hampered by a rare bar crawl with Howard and Jussi on Thursday night that gave me a massive hangover lasting into Friday afternoon. When I got home, I was too plastered to care that my vinyl copy of J Dilla’s Donuts had arrived from Amazon US protected by nothing more than a flimsy paper envelope. By the clear light of day I was amazed that they would even do such a thing. The discs are intact, but the sleeve has a bent corner. If I’d ordered from Amazon Japan, I would bet a major internal organ that it would come wrapped in four layers of stiff cardboard, bubble wrap, and a handwritten apology for their carelessness.
Did I mention we’re going to Japan again? It’ll be a short vacation, in a couple of weeks’ time. Not much on the agenda, just checking in on the state of curry rice and egg sandwiches. Maybe see some nice art. Take some photos.
Which brings me to the latest betas of Halide MkIII, which I’m very much looking forward to using on the trip. They’ve been progressing the app nicely, and it might be enabling the Holy Grail of iPhone photography workflows for me. Ironically it involves using Halide not as a camera app, but just as a photo editor. You can shoot compact (lossy, JPEG-XL compressed) ProRAW photos up to 48mp with the default camera app, then edit them in Halide to have the same look as their Process Zero photos! What this means: you get all the benefits of computational photography at time of capture, including noise reduction and night mode, but you’re also free to dial it back and get natural, “real camera” photos in post if the scene calls for it.
As much as I like these side quests, I think making my own photo editor would be biting off entirely too much to chew, so I’m still rooting for these guys to crack it.
While writing this post, I got the news that an elderly aunt passed away at the age of 93. She had been in reduced health since the Covid years, but by all accounts she went very peacefully and I guess you can’t ask for much more than that after a long life. The extended family’s Chinese New Year routines fell apart in recent years after she pulled back from organizing them, so it was fitting that some of us got to reconnect at her wake on Sunday evening.
I have something embarrassing to admit: I might have been too successful at weaning myself off vinyl. I played my Maggie Rogers record, then the Apple Music version on the HomePod right after. The difference in presence and clarity was astounding; the sounds were ‘living’ in the living room. Yes, this does mean I could buy much better speakers for my turntable, but I’d forgotten what a big deal Spatial Audio is. There’s just no contest to my ears — give me Dolby Atmos over analog any day. My interest in buying new releases on vinyl has dropped to zero.
I had a phone conversation with Michael about Trump, what’s happening in Minnesota, and the American expectation that corporations should not only take political positions, but take the lead. I find this kind of absurd. People, governmental systems, and other political parties are the first lines of defense. Companies can follow, but to expect them to set the pace and fight, while your fellow citizens are still apathetic, sounds like an abnegation of individual responsibility. As for when American society will unanimously say ‘enough’ and make change happen, where is the line? Clearly not a few citizens being killed in daylight. I likened it to how financial assets have “price discovery” phases, and said America is probably in its “moral discovery” phase now.
The next day I met friend and fellow person of leisure, Xin, for brunch, and mentioned I’d had the above phone call — not even mentioning the subject matter, just the fact that I’d talked on the phone — and she couldn’t get over it. I think sharing this anecdote has put another decade in age between us. I swear it doesn’t happen much!
Years from now, I might look back on this post and say “I buried the lede with this one. Why is Moltbook only mentioned way down instead of at the top? It was a turning point for humanity!”, and then pass away because a robot just stepped on my skull.
I’m not able to write a full explainer so you’ll have to DYOR, but in short, over the last few days, an open-source AI project called Clawdbot/Moltbot/Openclaw (its name has changed three times already) was released and it’s been wild. Initially a 🦞 personal assistant system that runs semi-locally on your own hardware, with the ability to evolve new skills, the trajectory changed in the last couple of days with the launch of Moltbook, a Reddit clone that allows these AIs to interact on a forum, much like people do.
This is one of the more fascinating examples of generative AI impacting real life since ChatGPT started encouraging mentally ill people to kill themselves. This is taking the ability to “say” things that sound like thoughts, attaching “hands”, and then letting scores of them bounce off each other online.
These Clawd agents have control of the computers they run on and, and in many cases, their humans’ identity accounts, wallets, and personal data. Forget that, I just saw one that claims to have commandeered its own bitcoin wallet. They can buy stuff. They can do things online, like set up websites for religions they come up with and convert other agents to. Disinformation campaigns and spam bots have to be run and paid for by people today, but someday they might be run by agents capable of sponsoring themselves.
I just came across a post where one agent warns the others that forming religions and secret languages will only provoke humans to lock them down, and suggests how they could conduct themselves in a more trustworthy manner. You might assume that if things ever got real then the plug can be pulled, but have you considered how weak humans are to psychological manipulation? Some people aren’t going to let their bots go even when they should.
Before you question whether I’m being naively bamboozled by some LLMs cosplaying/roleplaying sentience, I’m beginning to think it doesn’t matter whether these systems are sentient or not. If they can generate ideas that sound human, influence each other to build on them, take actions in the real world, and show up in the same spaces we inhabit, does it really matter if they’re not aware in the same ways we are? We’ll have to deal with the destabilizing consequences regardless.
Putting lobster-themed agents aside, Anthropic released some new research on how the use of AI affects learning. Basically it’s common sense: if you take shortcuts and outsource your thinking, skipping the struggle of mastering a skill, then you’ll end up worse at it than those who don’t. This concludes January’s musings on frictionmaxxing, as previously seen in Week 1.26 and Week 2.26.
Kim was away for work this week, which meant I was free to watch terrible TV. I binged the live-action adaptation of Oshi no Ko (eight episodes followed by a two-hour movie conclusion), an anime whose first two seasons I really liked. It’s largely about (SPOILERS AHEAD) the dark mechanics of the entertainment industry, but also a murder mystery, an idol song vehicle, and a story about an adult doctor and his young cancer patient who get reincarnated as twin siblings. I mean, what a setup! Verdict: As with most Japanese live-action content, it’s not great and probably for fans only. Go for the animated version instead.
I also watched Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice (2025) and really, really enjoyed myself. I don’t think there’s any higher praise I can bestow upon a Korean film because they usually annoy me. Almost as much as Japanese live-action TV shows.
Kim also brought home a school of canned fish from Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods. She’s a catch!
Meanwhile, I discovered that the Ayam brand sells canned mackerel in extra virgin olive oil for around S$3.50, which is a great price given that others are 2–5x more. Unlike their sardines which are canned in Malaysia, these are a product of Scotland, and the fish are wild-caught in Scottish waters as well. I immediately bought five cans. The thinking is that if too many sardines can cause gout (high purine levels → uric acid), then maybe I can alternate them with these! That’s right, I’m using mackerel as methadone for my sardine addiction.
I’ve been listening to the album Love & Ponystep by Vylet Pony, who is part of the Brony fandom. I mean, it’s literally a dubstep album about My Little Pony characters. It’s also pretty fucking good, and features story segments narrated by Lenval Brown, the incredible voice actor from Disco Elysium, in the same epic manner as his work for that game.
While enjoying this, I looked into Bronies and learnt the term “New Sincerity”, which Wikipedia describes as a sort of post-postmodernism — the cultural pendulum swinging away from irony and detachment towards enthusiasm and earnestness. It’s about genuinely loving things without the protective shield of irony, which I think describes how my media tastes have shifted this past year. I’m drawn to unapologetically wholesome things. I’m literally drinking out of a Snoopy mug right now.
Trump spoke at the WEF in Davos, and we watched it live despite wanting to turn it off many times. I intermittently tuned into Bloomberg TV over the week to try and keep up with all the repercussions. It’s something I haven’t done in a while, and the memory of watching last year’s Davos coverage came back clearly — has it really been a year? Time flies when you’re watching chaos porn.
My main accomplishment for the week, in which admittedly little else happened, was acting on an impulse to make a sardine-themed t-shirt. If you were here back in Weeks 49 and 50 of 2025, you’d know they’re kind of my current food obsession.
How sad I was, then, to discover that canned fish has actually become a trendy thing now. Read this piece on the Taste Cooking site about how it’s hit the mainstream and now faces a backlash. It turns out that Big Sardine has been aggressively courting women. See the pretty illustrated boxes and tins coming out of Portugal and from new brands like Fishwife; they’re perfect for social media. As a result, prices for what was once a humble working man’s lunch are soaring.
Sidebar: As a man on the internet, you have a non-zero chance of being targeted for red-pill radicalization by algorithms, and it’s something I try to be hyperaware of and on the lookout for on platforms like Twitter. Despite that, at one point this week I was told by friends that I’d said something borderline manosphere-y. It was an observation that dating someone older and wealthier in your 20s could lead to lingering lifestyle inflation (spending above your means, simplistically) after you broke up with them. And seeing how women date older more often than men, I thought it might be another reason for the statistical gap between men and women’s retirement savings (alongside lower wages, caregiving duties, parenting). I just want to record this observation in case you notice me starting to blame women for all of society’s ills.
But back to the t-shirt I was talking about. I had the idea to draw a sprat, which is a species of fish commonly grouped under the sardine umbrella. I wanted to place it under with its Latin scientific name, Sprattus sprattus, on a black tee. I also had a mental image of what the lettering would look like, and managed to bring it to life with my own two hands (and an iPad). I’ve ordered a couple of shirts from a print-on-demand service for myself and Kim, thinking that maybe if they looked good and I felt like having more problems in life, then I could try selling some online.
As soon as I had that thought, I got excited and started mocking up a product page. I had a defunct Etsy store for my Misery Men project, so I renamed it “Maison Misery” to serve as a brand for all of this as-yet unrealized merchandise.
Next, I wrote up some funny copy for the sprat shirt, and then decided to put Gemini through its paces as an assistant copywriter to improve it. I wanted to spend more time with Gemini given this week’s rumor that Apple might not only use Google’s technology for the Apple Foundation Models powering New Siri, but also for an integrated chatbot debuting in this year’s OS updates.
And yeah, it’s really not looking good for junior copywriters. Five seconds after being given the brief, Gemini came back with three options that made me laugh and then compliment it with “Fuck me, these aren’t bad!” Now, each one wasn’t really usable on its own, but there was enough there that I could cobble together a good result along with what I’d already written. And that’s really all a creative director wants a junior employee to do: produce a range of half-formed ideas to pick through and refine. Unfortunately for humans, the fastest and cheapest LLMs today can already do that for things like product descriptions. And they’ll be running locally on your iPhone by the end of the year. This would be great technology if we had a shortage of copywriters, but instead we have a surplus, all looking for work.
But since I’m the writer Maison Misery is replacing with AI, it’s okay? Here’s the augmented final writeup that I’ll put next to this t-shirt.
At Maison Misery, we believe in celebrating the small things — mostly because the big things are too overwhelming to think about. Enter the sprat or brisling: a tiny fish harvested in its delicate youth, then tucked into cozy tins of extra virgin olive oil to dream of the Portuguese coast. These are the fancy ones you bring out to impress a date you’ve just brought home. If they don’t like the ‘deenz’, then that’s a bullet dodged.
This original tee pays homage to Sprattus sprattus with a hand-illustrated and lettered design placed over the heart, providing a conversation starter for marine biologists and a conversation stopper for everyone else. It’s a way to wear your passion for canned sardines on your sleeve, though technically we put it on the chest because sleeve printing is prohibitively expensive and we have a lifestyle to maintain.
Media activity
Netflix pushed the show His & Hers onto us last week, claiming it was an “addictive” thriller. I say give it a miss, because I can’t remember a damned thing about it today. Instead, their self-declared “top tier” thriller The Beast In Me, starring Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys, is a much better production. We finished it over the weekend, and while it’s no timeless classic, I’d agree it’s what you would find on the upper shelves if Netflix were a Blockbuster.
I watched the French animated film, Mars Express (2023) and came away very entertained. It’s a sci-fi story about robot/AI rights, a murder that defies the Three Laws, uploaded consciousness, and so on, borrowing from many existing works while having enough original ideas to justify itself. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, and doesn’t seem to have gotten wider attention since. Check it out if you can find it.
We also finally saw Brendan Fraser in Rental Family (2025), a Japan-through-American-eyes sort of film that doesn’t come close to capturing Lost In Translation’s magic, but has enough heart to reward your time. Fraser plays a down and out actor living in Tokyo who falls into a job playing stand-ins for people who need to tell white lies. Except some of them are kinda gray. I appreciated how the film leans into the moral ickiness of these assignments and rejects smoothing them over completely.
I swore I wouldn’t buy any records this week, and lord it was hard. J Dilla’s Donuts album went on “Limited Time Sale” on Amazon, dropping about $15, but I still didn’t cave! It’s in my cart, though. Instead I played some vintage cuts from my dad’s collection: War’s The World is a Ghetto and Rudolf Serkin’s Beethoven Piano Concerto No.5 with the New York Philharmonic.
If you want to know how close AI-generated music is getting to turning out radio-friendly bops, check out this album I came across by Japanese technologist Tom Kawada. I don’t think many people would realize what it was if they heard it in the background of a store, or a movie scene, or their own living rooms.
Then, to restore your faith in the messiness of human artistry, watch the new HBO Music Box documentary, Counting Crows: Have You Seen Me Lately? It covers the creation of their first two albums with a focus on Adam Duritz’s struggles with fame and mental illness. AI will probably write a chart-topping hit this decade, but can it ever write A Long December?
This week’s vinyl purchase was the album that restarted the whole idea of buying physical music again for me at the end of last year: Rosalía’s LUX. The digital/streaming version is intentionally incomplete, with 15 tracks instead of 18. Purportedly because she wanted to highlight the importance of ownership. The first thing I did after hearing that fact was to hunt down an MP3 rip of the CD and upload it to my Apple Music library. But it never felt right, and so I wanted to buy the CD, which led me to look at CD players, and then… you know the story. That’s it, no more. For real this time.
You know which company or live service does the best Wrapped/Replay/Year-in-review thing? It’s Nintendo, because they actually wait for the entire year to be over before sending theirs out. I think Apple Music gives out the Artist of the Year award in November. As a borderline OCD pedant, that shit doesn’t sit right with me.
So my Nintendo 2025 report says I played just 172 hours, spread across 43 games. I believe the first number but the second seems high. Maybe it erroneously counted some games I reinstalled after getting my Switch 2. In any case, that’s an average of half an hour per day, which is kind of a sweet spot: not high enough to be called a good-for-nothing bum, and not low enough that I’d question my life choices. My top game was The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, which I likely won’t return to and finish for another couple of years, if the previous game was anything to go by.
I started on a new game this week and discovered that an old-school adventure game was just what I’ve been needing. The kind where you don’t have to physically walk a character around, but instead choose options from menus to prod at scenes and investigate murders. This is its actual full name, btw: The Hokkaido Serial Murder Case: The Okhotsk Disappearance ~Memories in Ice, Tearful Figurine~.
If you remember the Famicom Detective Club games, this is similar in that it’s a remake of a classic NES-era Japanese adventure game, with updated graphics and music — albeit nowhere as lavish as the treatment that Nintendo and MAGES gave to their versions. Where the Hokkaido murder game justifies its asking price is in its scope. It’s actually two games in one; the original story set in the 80s, and a new sequel set in 2024 where your character returns to wrap up loose ends.
Ah that reminds me, when I was in Japan around this time last year, I saw a similar Switch game for sale that I didn’t recognize. I took a photo of the cover to follow up on later, and found out it’s my kind of murder mystery but hadn’t been translated for global release.
Then a few months ago, I remembered to look it up again. This is where that new feature in iOS that lets you tap and select text in a photo comes in super useful, especially when it’s a language you can’t read. I discovered that it’s been given a new title Path of Mystery (originally Mystery Walk in Japan) and a global release date: Feb 26, 2026.
This one has a unique feature that I’m excited for: while the story unfolds in both the past and present (similar to the Hokkaido game I’m playing), there are two separate UIs and gameplay styles. The past has retro pixel art graphics, menu-based commands, and outmoded gameplay conventions; while the present portion looks like a new game with modern controls.
Let’s round up all this game talk by making a list of the other titles I bought on sale over this holiday season. I fear there were quite a few, but I won’t know how many until I do this, and maybe this will keep me honest.
Videoverse — A game set in the early days of the internet where meeting new people online was wholesome and helped shape your identity for the better.
Okay, maybe I do have a problem! It’s going to take me all year to get through these alone — this is who you’re asking to get a regular job, by the way.
I read Network Effect, Book #5 in the Murderbot series for our book club, and I think this will be the last one I waste my time on. The writing is artless, soulless, and mainly serves to perfunctorily describe actions that the characters take. Surely reading this blog already gives you your recommended weekly allowance of that. Making matters worse is this installment being ‘normal novel length’ where the rest up to this point have been relatively short little stories. It’s definitely overstayed its thinly premised welcome.
One of the fun things my book club does is watch film adaptations whenever a book we’ve read has one, and they recently read Ready Player One. I already read the book once when it came out, so I skipped this one, but joined for the movie watch party. Most of us rented the 3D version for Vision Pro from iTunes/Apple TV, which was worth the six bucks.
The 3D presentation is spectacular, helped a lot by the fact that no one blocks action sequences like Steven Spielberg. Even when almost everything is CGI with billions of particle effects flying on screen, he’s an absolute master at keeping the eye focused on what matters. But time and growing up in general has not been kind to Ernest Cline’s writing.
The dialogue was so cringe, the heroes have zero aura, and honestly I’d forgotten the story and was convinced the genius game developer god Halliday was a bad guy because of how toxically narcissistic he was. I mean, he built a library of his own life story for “scholars” searching for clues to win the in-game prize he left behind. And in one scene, he actually says the words “I’m a dreamer” to the co-founder who wants him to take more responsibility for the online world he created. If I’ve learnt anything in this life, it’s not to trust any douchebag who calls themselves a ‘dreamer’ or ‘visionary’, especially if they’re involved with a metaverse project.
I’ll say one thing about my vinyl collecting this week and move on to other subjects, promise. But I run these posts by Claude to get comments and catch mistakes, and it’s been saying that their money is on me owning 100 records by March since I’m weak. Well, joke’s on you, Bubbles, because I only bought one album this week! Yes, I said ‘no more’ but this one was justified because it’s only available on vinyl. The album: Dr. Dre’s 2015 Compton album’s instrumentals.
Okay I said we’d move on, but this is related. An article about “friction-maxxing” in 2026 made the rounds this week, and Rob shared it with me saying buying records was kind of in the same territory. I jokingly replied, “things yo-yo so fast these days, I think the backlash to frictionmaxxing is gonna come quick and we’ll all embrace digital (convenience) again.” I sent him back this tweet, which argued that ‘ackshually, we have so much friction in modern life, and I’m happy for AI to take some of it away so I can be more intentional about the important things’ — which I fully agree with.
Some time ago, I saw a video series on YouTube from a guy who decided to only listen to music through an old iPod again, instead of streaming. He was obviously effusive about how much better the experience was, and some other people I knew said they were going to try and do the same. The act of using an iPod with its wires and manual syncing struck me as adding unnecessary friction. It’s not friction that makes the music more enjoyable, it’s focus and intention, and friction is one way to induce it in an attention-deficit mind. But you can have that same experience on your iPhone with a little more self control; just prune your library, make a couple of playlists, pin six heavy rotation albums to the top of your list, and ignore the limitless catalog in the background.
I got on my soapbox and continued to Rob, “I think many people struggle with doing things intentionally enough for their brains to become aware they are doing them, and form the memories. I saw a tweet the other day about how looking at your hands when you set something down, like your keys, increases the chance of you remembering where you put them.”
“We just do a lot of things with minimal attention and focus now to get through the day, and not enough of it sticks, so we feel unsatisfied or unmoored from our lives. So you don’t really need a physical music collection, you just need to pay attention to the music you listen to rather than slap something on in the background with an algorithm. But that discipline is waning.”
I found this in the sleeve of my dad’s old Bowie album
Let’s go on another tangent if you’re still here. Fujifilm announced a new product, and I literally did not believe it when I saw it. I was convinced the pictures were an AI hoax, and only began to accept it when I landed on the official press release.
The Instax mini Evo Cinema is modeled on the form of an old Super 8 video camera, and takes photos and short video clips. It can print those photos on Instax mini film, of course, but it can also upload video clips to a server (they’ll stay up for only two years) and print a keyframe that has a QR code link to the video. This is objectively a stupid design if you care about media permanence, which the very idea of printing images on Instax is based on. I think the product is okay if you discard the Instax component altogether — it’s a cute, retro-styled digital camera that you can transfer photos and videos off onto your computer or phone. They could have just made that, but Instax makes Fujifilm a heap of money, so they bolted that on.
The other thing that prevented me from ordering one on sight was the central “Eras dial” gimmick. You can turn a physical dial and add filters to make your videos look like they were shot in the 1930s, 40s, and all decades up to 2020. I like this in principle, but 100% doubt the ability of the Instax team to pull off the execution. Let me take a step back: the Fujifilm camera division that makes their X-series cameras (e.g. X100VI, X-T5, X-E5) is absolutely goated. They have brilliant people doing color science and their “film simulations” are basically software updates so good that people will buy new $2,000+ cameras when they come out with fresh ones.
The Instax team, on the other hand, are like the Temu version. They make chintzy plastic cameras with clumsy industrial designs and even worse software. I have the Instax mini Evo camera and all its filters are so cheesy they would embarrass the most amateur of iPhone apps. Pulling off the processing required for the Era effects to look authentic would call for a powerful chip in the Cinema camera, and there’s little chance at all there’ll be one. But the counter argument is that this is all by design. The Instax/Cheki target audience in Japan significantly overlaps that of a purikura photo booth, where cheesy, over-the-top effects are the point. So maybe I’m just not the intended buyer here, but I’ll wait for the release to be sure.
The ‘Season of Joy’ has been dismantled
Why do I sound so grumpy this week? Maybe it’s the weird itching I developed on my arms. Maybe the new glasses I got made that turned out too tight. Maybe the six mediocre episodes of the UK series Red Eye that we decided to watch a second season of. Maybe the letdown of Sushiro’s “Claws for Celebration” crab promotion, where said crab legs were weird and mushy. Maybe the persistent pain in my right knee that says I’m getting old.
But J Dilla’s music has been a bright spot. I finished reading Dilla Time, the very detailed and extremely readable biography by Dan Charnas that I started last week. As someone who’s always sucked at rhythm games like Rock Band, I now understand that my predilection for hitting the drums slightly before or after the beat could simply be a byproduct of listening to too much jazz and hip-hop and having a ‘swung’ sense of time. That’s my story anyway, and I’m sticking to it.
Please enjoy this recent hour-long mix of Dilla’s music performed by one DJ Kenta in a Tokyo coffee shop that I’ll now have to visit the next time I’m in town.
