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.
Lots of reading this week, but not the traditional sort. I decided it was time to cross Emio: The Smiling Man off my Nintendo Switch backlog — that would be the murder mystery sorta-visual novel published by Nintendo (developed by Mages) last year. It’s the third installment in the ‘Famicom Detective Club’ series that laid dormant for decades (the clue’s in the name; they were made for the original Famicom aka the Japanese NES) until remakes of the first two games were released in 2021.
I played the first remake back in Week 31 of 2021, and apparently felt it was “a crock of shit”. When Emio came out, I wrote more about the series in Week 36.24, and watched a YouTube playthrough of the second game rather than pay good money to torture myself some more.
Thankfully, Emio is much better than those two. Perhaps because it’s a new game with a more sophisticated and complex story than was possible in the 80s. But I suspect it’s also because I’m now familiar enough with, and more forgiving of, the series’ game design ideas that I’d called “archaic and frustrating”. In any case, it has the most lavish animation production values I’ve ever seen in a visual novel, and the detective vibes are a lot of fun. I was let down by the mystery’s resolution, but the journey was definitely worth the time.
Japanese workplace sexism in Emio The Smiling Man
Rather than dive into Zelda Tears of the Kingdom (can you tell I’m afraid of the commitment?), I decided to continue down the VN path by starting on TSUKIHIME A piece of blue glass moon, a decision I will probably soon regret. This is a remake of a supposed masterpiece by the developer Type-Moon, and involves some 30–50 hours of reading, which is about 3x longer than Emio. It is, however, much less interactive and more like reading a novel with visuals and sound to set the mood. I’m only a little while in, but finding it a pleasant ‘multimedia’ midpoint between watching a show and reading a book. Luckily, I played Type-Moon’s Witch on the Holy Nightback in March, and because TSUKIHIME takes place later on in the same universe, it feels like a continuation.
There was a real book, though! What You Are Looking For Is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama is a charming collection of five little stories centered around a community library, where people stuck in different ruts meet a librarian who has a knack for recommending books that set them off and thriving in new directions. I wrote in my Goodreads review that on top of being above average as translated Japanese books go — most of them come across sounding dumber and more boring than I’d hope they are in the original texts — but the extremely healing nature of these stories warranted a five-star rating from me.
It looks like I’ll be going to Bangkok again next month, but this time the heat will be even more unbearable (a RealFeel of 40–45ºC?), so please pray for me. In preparation, I’ve purchased a white t-shirt for the first time in several years.
Over the weekend, we dragged ourselves out to see the City of Others exhibition at the National Gallery despite not being fully in the mood. I thought it would be healthy/helpful to just wander through it anyway, even if not fully attentive, and I did find some things unexpectedly inspiring. I may start a new project soon on the back of one idea!
While looking at some artifacts behind glass, I remembered that I’d installed Adobe’s new iOS camera app, Project Indigo, which was apparently developed by some of computational photography’s living legends, and promises “SLR quality” images by combining up to 32 frames at a time. It includes an AI-powered feature that removes reflections by inferring what the subject is, and generating detail to fill the less-visible areas. I tried it out on a couple of artworks and got a warning that my phone was overheating — I guess I’m upgrading to an iPhone 17 Pro this year! Anyway, see how it did for yourself.
For a free app, Project Indigo is a great deal. I’m sure it’ll eventually be shut down and folded into a paid Adobe offering, but for now, everyone should try it out for a bit. It takes very clean and likely superior photos to the default camera, and does super-resolution oversampling to give you more zoom reach than the iPhone’s lenses will. But the outputs still have that hyperreal HDR look that comes with computational photography, and for the moment that’s something I’m a little tired of. A little grain goes a long way in making a phone photo feel more like a real moment.
After the gallery visit, we had lunch at a Cafe&Meal Muji where I was shocked to see the latest inflation-adjusted menu; a massive downgrade from when I used to visit frequently during office lunch hours. The “4-Deli” meal of two hot and two cold dishes alongside rice and soup used to cost maybe $17.80 pre-Covid, then crept up to $20.80 in the years after. Today, it’s been entirely removed from the menu, and $20.80 only gets you a “3-Deli”: one hot and two cold dishes. To try and obfuscate the loss in value, they’re now throwing in a half-boiled egg (which can’t cost more than 30 cents).
I probably should have expected it, because for breakfast that same day we stopped by a Toast Box for some kaya toast, which I honestly haven’t done in years, and the breakfast set (coffee, two eggs, a sandwich) is now S$7.60, or about 50% more than in the pre-Covid era. You can of course get this sort of thing cheaper elsewhere, but these prices are still wild.
In Craig Mod’s nearly three-hour book tour interview on Rich Roll’s podcast, which I’m listening to in small doses, he mentions the ¥300 breakfast set, a Japanese coffee house staple, and how apologetic businesses have been about having to raise prices by even ¥20 or ¥50. That’s what the kaya toast set is to Singapore, and I wonder if Japan is going to see a ¥500 or ¥700 breakfast set before too long.
Speaking of Japan, the Blue Bottle chain arrived in Singapore back in April. While I know they’re American, I’d only ever had their coffee while in Japan. Now that two months have passed, I thought the hype would have died down enough to try and visit the branch here in Raffles City’s tiny LUMINE department store. It was still packed, but I got an iced NOLA-style coffee to go for S$8 — lightly sweetened and flavored with chicory, it was pretty good tbh! But you can see Nestlé’s dirty fingerprints all over the brand now. It feels like the stores only exist to justify selling merch through other channels. Do a search for “Blue Bottle NOLA” and instead of a store menu or info page about their drink offerings, you’ll get tons of spinoff products like NOLA Nespresso capsules, brew-at-home kits, tumblers, instant coffee mix, foamers, and so on. Even Starbucks, synonymous with the mercenary scaling of coffee, looks kinda restrained in comparison.
