sangsara.net

Tag: Work

  • Week 14.24

    Week 14.24

    I’ve gone and given myself another sabbatical. I’m looking forward to getting ‘important’ things done, like reading till my Kobo dies so I can buy a new one with USB-C charging, finally playing the new Zelda, watching Tampopo for the first time, exploring our public libraries, drawing a couple more Misery Men, and listening to finance podcasts because I need to graduate from roboadvisors. This will also involve stepping into a sort of low power mode when it comes to spending: public transportation, teabags instead of Nespresso pods, no new TV or PS5, canceling YouTube Premium…

    Some people asked when I made the decision or started to think about time off, but I couldn’t realistically pin a date on the donkey. I started to look through recent updates and found that I mentioned needing more videogame time as recently as two weeks ago, but it was definitely on my mind before.

    Perhaps the seeds of this extended leisure were planted during the final weeks of my last funemployment break, as seen in this post where I suddenly found a bunch of new interests and projects just as my freedom time was running out. I’d forgotten so much about that period until I started to re-read old entries while writing this update; a sort of climbing back into a dream after visiting the bathroom at night. This is week #197, which means I’ve been at this for nearly four years, and I must say it’s been worth it.

    It’s safe to assume I’m looking forward to this break, but I’ll definitely miss many aspects of working with the team I’ve been part of for the past seven years — a side of my life I deliberately omit here, but consequently won’t have an extensive external memory of to revisit (apart from photos, chats, and remnants of the work we’ve done floating out in the world).

    On that note, a few of us attended a community-run service design meetup on Serangoon Road Thursday and were surprised by the large turnout. One lovely thing that happened: we met a young designer working at one of our earliest clients, in the experience team we had a hand in setting up. Hearing from her that the work I did is still being used and built upon, helping to drive customer experience at one of the best brands in its category, felt like a nice bookend to this phase of mUh cArEeR.

    I don’t know what I’ll do next, but have no plans to think about it for at least a few months.

    ===

    Media activity:

    • How are we supposed to build memories on digital copyright quicksand? I noticed that track 14 of Vultures 1 has disappeared from Apple Music, at least in Singapore. More than the fluctuating prices, algorithms influencing commerce influencing art, and the shitty business model for musicians, the impermanence and lack of ownership might be my least-favorite thing about the shift to streaming.
    • According to the song’s Genius page, the song was also removed from Spotify back in February owing to “clearance issues”. My relationship with music would definitely be different if I’d grown up with mixtapes that could suddenly have gaps of silence in them after you’d given them away.
    • We finished Season 2 of Below Deck Down Under, and as I’ve said before, these two Australian seasons show some of the best teamwork and leadership (although not without the drama that people watch this show for) out of all the Below Deck we’ve seen (easily over 100 episodes, oh my life…) and it’s simply down to Captain Jason and Chief Stew Aesha acting like adults, communicating openly, and not being lazy. We’ll probably head back to Season 8 of the main show after this and I’m dreading being back under the command of Captain Lee.
    • I tried to resume watching Three Body Problem on Netflix despite online comments that it gets too slow and boring. The fourth episode certainly was, and I almost gave up, writing in my notes that it was “such a shame an intriguing premise can be flatly shot, shoddily paced, and annoyingly acted into mere weekend background fodder.” And then I saw episode 5, which features a bonkers CGI-heavy set piece in the middle plus a lot more going on, and now I’m back in.
  • Week 4.24

    Week 4.24

    A little while ago, I learnt that an ex-colleague of mine has received a stage 4 cancer diagnosis, and he’s only a few years older than me. Despite the fact that more “young” people seem to be getting cancer, it was still a deep shock because Tony was always incredibly fit and dedicated to his health. He’s been writing openly about his thoughts and experience on his Medium account, which I read before meeting him for lunch with some other former colleagues this week. It was tough seeing him in poorer shape, but true to his personal brand, he seemed extremely pragmatic and matter-of-fact about it all.

    We worked on the same team for about a year back in 2018, but were only on one project together as peers, leading design activities and client workshops together over a few months. I count myself fortunate to have had that experience, and learnt a lot from his confidence and wealth of technical knowledge when it came to UX matters — which was not my area of focus. Even then it was clear he had a knack for facing reality, and a passion for making sure the younger generation had their eyes open to the inequities of working life. Not always a popular topic, but life sucks. He mentioned that whenever he finds the strength these days, he works on his own design education materials that prepare students for non-ideal situations, and I thought that made perfect sense for him.

    Many of the things we talked about over lunch echoed other conversations I’ve been having with other friends. Maybe it’s the return of tech layoffs in the news, but negative sentiments seem as high as they were during Covid, with the questioning of boundaries and priorities taking place again. Tony understandably tried to impress upon us that some things aren’t worth having as regrets, and that we should make better choices while we still can. When I asked him what else he does now on days that aren’t lost to medical interventions, the answer was surprisingly similar to how I spent most of my year off work: reading, writing, and drawing.

    Peishan shared this Guardian article about people with cancer who’ve found the clarity to spend their remaining time meaningfully, and I thought Mark Edmondson landed the point that some people have trouble getting: the work that gives you purpose today isn’t the only purpose you’ll have.

    People (usually millennials) also mention the difficulty they have switching off from work. On a daily basis, but also when they go on vacation — taking half the holiday to get into holiday mode is a terrible inefficiency. I recall it took me months to unwind from a state of nearly burning out and to stop worrying about my “sabbatical ROI”. We should be like newer hybrid vehicles that can shut their engines down when idling at traffic lights and spring back to life quickly when needed, but instead us older cars only know how to burn gas all the time. I want to be a disused school bus just rusting in a field, bright yellow and unbothered.

    ===

    • I visited the Prix Pictet photo exhibition that’s part of Singapore Art Week (maybe it’ll be the only event I attend from this year’s edition) and found it beautiful but gosh it was mostly depressing. The theme was “Human” but it may as well have been “Human Suffering” — from communities devastated by the effects of mining and metal poisoning, to the plight of illegal refugees trekking 66 miles through jungle in search of better opportunities, they seemed to comment that there’s not much joy in being human these days. I joked halfway through that I hoped there would be a series of mundane birthday party photos at the end. There wasn’t.
    • Kim spent most of her week preparing an elaborate, successful Indian dinner from the Dishoom cookbook, but that’s really a story for her own weeknotes if they ever happen. The takeaway for me has been that, after seeing how the proverbial samosa is made, the Indian takeaways we usually get are probably quite unhealthy and we need to cut down.
    • Nintendo is having a January sale on the Switch eShop and I considered getting the remake of an apparent classic time loop visual novel, YU-NO: A girl who chants love at the bound of this world, yes, that is its title. It’s apparently the spiritual forebear of games such as Steins;gate, but after watching a short gameplay video on YouTube, I decided that since life is too short, I really didn’t want to punish myself. An anime adaptation was made a few years ago, so I will simply watch that instead.
    • We are enjoying the new British police drama Criminal Record on Apple TV+. Peter Capaldi is really good in it, although all the police work and cornering of baddies with their secrets is carried out really incompetently.
    • Can you believe that The Smile dropped a new album a couple of days ago and I had to find out from YouTube instead of Apple Music? Seriously, I’m looking at my For You page and it’s not mentioned under New Releases. This music video, where the band plays a new song for an auditorium full of young children — most of them bewildered or bored out of their minds, but with a couple really into it — is such a simple and charming concept I can’t believe I can’t name another time it’s been done.

  • Week 28.23

    At least I’ve got Starbucks in my corner

    It seems my general mood and well-being hasn’t improved. In fact, I fear it may have gotten worse. There were some fires to put out but at some point you’re just on fire yourself and can’t tell if you’re helping or hurting. This is fine, the dog says. But after working over the weekend, I am pretty crispy and ready for a swim.

    Billie Eilish’s new song for the Barbie soundtrack is the vibe I was looking for: all sad, searching, and scared. I watched the Zane Lowe interview of how it came together and that just solidified it for me. I admit that I was beginning to worry her winning streak would soon end, but this is a really lovely song and I think she’s gonna be a great songwriter for a very long time. I also finally got around to Olivia Rodrigo’s Vampire, which I’d heard many good things about, and Jesus this girl sings like she has something to prove. The kids are still alright.

    Oh, at one point this week I had a senior moment, as in I found myself doing something I used to see senior leaders do in my early days in the creative industry: I sketched my ideas out on paper to explain what I wanted to younger people, because I can’t use the newfangled tools as well as they can. I did this twice! Wow, I said aloud, I should just retire soon and move to Thailand and wear beer brand singlets all day like they did.

    I had so little leisure time that I only managed to squeeze in a couple episodes of Love Village, and one more episode of The Bear. I’m getting close to finishing the book Going Zero by Anthony McCarten, which I’m ready to recommend as a fun adventure involving surveillance technology.

    For those who haven’t seen Love Village, it’s a Japanese “dating” reality show for old people. It’s Terrace House where everyone is over 40 and hasn’t been lucky in their relationships — it’s where they go to find their “final partners for life”, as we’re constantly reminded. The show is hosted by Japanese TV personality Becky (no stranger to love problems, it would seem) and comedian Atsushi Tamura (who is described by Netflix in another show he hosts as a “reformed playboy”). I like that they both skewer the participants when they do silly things and shed tears (!) when moved by their stories. It’s exceptionally plain and chill TV, which I like for nighttime viewing.

    I drew my first Misery Man in over a year; inspired, I guess. The caption on this one is “Keep the PMA! (Positive Mental Appearance)”.

    The term PMA actually stands for Positive Mental Attitude, and I learnt about it from the tragic story of Jesse Malin suffering a rare spinal stroke that’s left him paralyzed from the waist down since May.

    Longtime readers may know that I’m a fan of Malin’s music — when he announced a concert to celebrate the 20th anniversary of his debut album, I looked up plane tickets to New York. Not long after that, he was struck down by this rare condition and is now raising money to help pay for treatment. Please consider a donation or buying a “Keep the PMA” t-shirt to help.

  • Week 27.23

    I’ve thus far neglected to mention that I’ve become slightly obsessed with Korean instant noodles, which they specifically call ramyeon/ramyun, and have been buying and eating too many of them in recent weeks. I never went to ramyeon town before because I have a low tolerance for spicy food, but watching Jinny’s Kitchen might have set me off, and I’ve found that there are mild versions and that even the hot ones are sometimes worth suffering through.

    A few notes:

    • Nongshim’s Shin Ramyun is the original, the classic, the Nissin chikin ramen of Korea. The company’s English website says it’s always been a pork-based broth, but the export versions I’ve seen here in Singapore and Australia seem to be based on soy and mushrooms. There’s a new shrimp flavored version that was previously only available in China, but I have no interest in trying that.
    • I was able to find a pack of Shin Black imported from Korea, a premium version that adds beef to the pork base, and it’s certainly tastier and unexpectedly less spicy.
    • The Samyang company’s Buldak range of noodles are of course the notorious super spicy “fire chicken” ones you see in those YouTube challenge videos. I can’t eat more than a bite or two of the original (there’s also a 2x spicier one in red), but there are milder versions like jjajangmyeon and “carbonara”. Still, not for me.
    • I learnt in a video that people don’t think you should add eggs to Nongshim’s Neoguri spicy seafood noodles, which I have been doing, along with sliced cheese, kimchi, and sometimes a sausage. Oops.
    • Yeah I was not keen on this adding of sliced cheese to soup noodles, but now I don’t even think about it.
    • Of all the “Korean style” (basically red chilli and soy sauce?) noodles so far, I think my favorite might actually be Ottogi’s Jin series, which comes in Mild and Spicy versions. The Spicy one is about as spicy as regular Shin Ramyun (export), nowhere as crazy as Buldak.

    ===

    It’s not all sunshine and noodles; my increased consumption is partly due to a demanding work schedule filled with late nights and skipped meals. In general, I don’t believe these circumstances get the best out of anyone, but I’m told it’s the norm in China these days. I’d heard of 9-9-6 (working from 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week), but apparently people joke 0-0-7 is more accurate. If nothing else, you’ve now learnt a lame new way to say 24/7 today.

    I keep thinking it’ll get better soon, but it hasn’t yet. Around the same time, I tried asking ChatGPT to write some funny posts that could go viral on a new social network called Threads, but it only returned some reheated tweets. One of them hit the mark though: “Is being an adult just perpetually saying ‘after this week things will slow down’ until you die?”

    So, Threads!

    Facebook/Meta/Instagram’s Twitter clone was rumored for awhile but I guess I wasn’t expecting a global launch of this scale — normally they roll stuff out haphazardly? But I think we’re now at over 70 million sign ups in two days, for a separate app that you need to download! It seems they rushed this out to take advantage of Twitter’s shambolic state, and even then, everything has been running smoothly.

    They made the choice to go algorithmic feed only, and to populate yours at the start with suggested content. Maybe it’s because I’ve been using adblocking tools for the past few years (who am I kidding), but my recommendations have been terrible.

    It’s been giving me Singaporeans influencers, sports, beauty and fashion, and positive lifecoachy shit. I’ve since found and followed many of my sort of people, and muted over a hundred accounts I do not want. That should be enough data for it to start improving, so I’ll just have to wait until they do something with it.

    But of course, we don’t have to be on Threads. And maybe we shouldn’t, given Facebook’s reputation and past actions. Much has been made of how Elon has managed to make Mark look like the good guy here; a sizeble feat. I’m still getting a lot of specific tech and financial content on Twitter, and I enjoy the quality on Mastodon, which comes from strictly following only accounts that don’t annoy me given the lack of an algorithmic feed.

    I suspect the majority of people on Threads so far aren’t posting, just lurking and figuring out what it’s for. I’ve been followed by a few people but I don’t follow back if they have zero posts or want to have private accounts. Meanwhile, successful IG content creators are either using it exactly like they do on IG (posting memes, photos, and videos) or writing inane things to try and get engagement.

    I don’t want any of these things on a text-centric platform. It’ll take awhile to settle, and maybe it’ll just become a lame sort of normie place like Facebook.

    ===

    I’ve also been utterly captivated by George Harrison’s My Sweet Lord out of nowhere, and have probably listened to it a hundred times and sung it to myself a hundred times more this week.

    It must have come up on my Apple Music at some point and resonated in the midst of my terrible week — the intentional, sutra chanting-like repetition is brilliant, hypnotic, soothing. How can you not be crazy for a song that goes from Hallelujah to Hare Krishna and back again? That declares such pure desire to know an unknowable god, that acknowledges how life is simultaneously too long and too short, that love is all you need?

    So I made a playlist collecting all the different versions and covers I’ve been listening to: My Sweet Lords. It has 23 tracks so far, and I hope you like it and join me in this obsession.

    ===

    We started watching season 2 of The Bear and it’s truly excellent so far, as was season 1. Episode 6 is something else. It’s the television equivalent of Uncut Gems and Kendrick Lamar’s We Cry Together on the Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers album: extremely chaotic and uncomfortable, and not something you’ll rush to re-experience soon.

    We also saw Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part 1 and it feels a little off. Still a good time, but some of the writing feels stilted and theatrical, and overall it doesn’t feel consistent with the others (okay, one can argue MI:2 felt nothing like the rest too, but that was when we were cycling through different directors; Christopher McQuarrie has no excuse). The challenge the team faces here is like nothing they’ve been up against before, but that veil of otherworldliness is distracting, and I didn’t get to appreciate it as much during the film. 4/5, I think.

    ===

    But we can’t end the week without some AI experiments, so I went back to my GPT-4 poetrybot and gave it my thoughts on the themes in My Sweet Lord, and it returned a pretty good poem, albeit several stanzas too long and not quite right in places. A bit of snipping and human co-creation later, we have this:

    Life is long,
    Life is brief,
    In joy, a song,
    In pain, grief.

    Love is low,
    Love is high,
    In knowing, grows,
    In doubting, dies.

    God in the small,
    In the leaf, the bird’s call,
    In the rise, the fall,
    In all the all.

    Seek the divine,
    In the day, the night,
    In the yours, the mine,
    In the dark, the light.

  • Week 15.23

    • As the last AI-written post mentioned, the post-vacation photo deluge is real. Looking through them again to make a shortlist for showing family and maybe printing out on Instax, I’ve rediscovered some good shots I could share… but do I want to? And where? And why? Our current task is just to build a shared album with some of the better ones between the two of us. That, and remembering that this is the fun and meaningful part of taking photographs; the journey, not the neat photo library.
    • The price of Instax Mini film has risen since my last purchase (inflation?) going from maybe 75 cents a shot to 91 cents, and that’s if you buy a hundred at a time. It makes the price of Instax Wide (larger prints) seem reasonable at about $1.40 a shot, and I’m trying to tell myself not to buy an Instax Wide printer or camera.
    • It was a busy work week, and I had to make an overnight trip to Malaysia for a meeting — my first time back in the country in nearly two decades, if I’m remembering correctly. This is something that shocks other Singaporeans, like when I say I’ve never been to Bangkok. But dudes, if I’m going on a holiday, I’m getting away from this oppressive heat and humidity! What isn’t shocking is how Malaysians will take every opportunity to make fun of Singapore’s food.
    • The trip involved flying 1.5 hours in a propeller plane operated by Firefly, out of the two alternative airports: Seletar and Subang. The planes are small, with just 4 seats across each row, and the propellers are louder than jet engines. Definitely take your AirPods Pro. But small airports mean less hassle — you can arrive an hour or less before your flight — and more convenient access to parts of Kuala Lumpur than if you fly into KL International.
    • In a case of wishful thinking, I brought my Switch along anticipating an evening alone in the hotel room to get some gaming in. In reality, it was late by the time I checked in and needed dinner, and maybe I played Lumines for 15 minutes the next morning.
    • We had a small dinner over the weekend for a couple of us with April birthdays, and James mentioned playing a new game out on Switch that I’d somehow missed: Dredge. It looks like a delightful Lovecraftian fishing/adventure game, and one I will definitely get when I’m ready. At the moment I’ve just started on Super Mario 3D World and am loving its compact little puzzle worlds. If the rumors are true and a follow up to the Switch is coming this Christmas, I have limited time to clear my games backlog. Maybe another sabbatical is in order?
    • I finally finished watching the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners anime on Netflix and while I enjoyed aspects of the clearly expensive production, like some of the character designs, I can’t recommend it. Mostly because it’s a cynical, derivative dystopian downer with lots of gory body modification (personal turn-off) to make it gritty?
    • We finally started watching Beef on Netflix which has been getting a ton of praise for tackling, like, every issue? Asian-American identity, class divides, mental health, imposter syndrome, work-life balance, and so on. It’s good! Wild, but good.
    • Ryan Adams put out yet another cover album, as in a cover of an entire album, this time for Oasis’s What’s The Story Morning Glory? and while it should be a home run given how well he pulled off that cover of Wonderwall years ago, the whole thing is a bit disappointing. Changing key melodies for worse ones for no good reason, inconsistent production from song to song, and kinda turning a fun album into a drag.
    • I’ve decided, like several people I follow, that I will probably not be paying for a Hipstamatic subscription after my free trial ends. The social network suffers from technical and UX issues, from as small as how slow the gratuitous card flipping animation makes it to browse your feed, to the broken friend-finding functionality — to say nothing of how low quality many of the photos being shared are, for which some blame must be laid at the feet of the garish filters which were supposed to be the whole point. I fear there isn’t really a revival of interest in many of these early era looks, just a desire on Hipstamatic’s part that one happens. That said, I love some of the classic ones, like the “Model 100” (the original John S + Ina’s 1969 lens + film combo from Hipstamatic circa 2009), but too many of them make good photos worse. And you can actually use some of the best ones with the free plan — which is what I’ll continue to do.

  • Week 40.22

    We had a funeral ceremony at work to say goodbye to the brand we all joined, which has now been subsumed into a larger new corporate brand. Everyone who could physically make it turned up and we ate pizzas, drank beers, and told stories about the last five years. We didn’t exactly put the fun in funeral but it was a thoughtful and appropriately introspective end.

    I brought my new and underused Ricoh GR III along to document the moment. If I’d purchased the IIIx I originally wanted instead, I’m not sure it would have worked as well. 28mm and 24mp is a pretty good setup for capturing everything and then being able to crop in to interesting parts if needed. The only thing better would have been a 48mp Leica Q2.

    Why didn’t I just use my iPhone and its new 48mp sensor? Firstly, I wanted to be intentional about it, and having a dedicated tool in hand prompts you to keep looking out for pictures. So I did end up taking more photos than anyone. Secondly, the vibes are not comparable. Comparing them with colleagues’s photos, the ones from iPhones are clear, sharp, and clinical. The Ricoh alternately underexposes, blows out highlights, focuses on the wrong thing, and occasionally white balances like daylight film when you’re indoors. These “choices” and limitations are beautiful, as is the rich detail from its large APS-C sensor; no neural network is filling in the blanks here. iPhones document things the way they happened; dumber cameras still somehow capture the way we’ll actually remember them. Or I’m just old and like things to look old too.

    Edit: It seems vintage digital cameras are making a full-on comeback. I should never have thrown away those IXUSes and FinePixes.

    Ricoh on the left, iPhone on the right

    As I type this, we are watching Apple Music’s “live” stream of Billie Eilish performing at the O2 Arena. It’s been billed on the Browse page as a live performance (not inaccurate), but since it starts at 10am SGT (3am in the UK), this was clearly not going to be live in real time. So it turns out this is a pre-recorded concert film from the end of her tour, just now making its premiere on the service. It’s a good one though!

    I mentioned before that we’ve been thinking of getting a cat. I also posted a photo of a ragdoll that a friend owns, whose home we’d visited as a sort of allergy test. I never really knew about cat breeds before this, but ragdolls seem lovely and are reportedly as chill and affectionate as they come. Things are escalating quickly: we submitted an inquiry to a breeder about the possibility of adopting one of their “retiring” adults, and this week had a call with them about the details.

    But they don’t have any suitable retirees at the moment, only a kitten with a congenital physical anomaly — still in good health for the moment — which may develop into a problem requiring more care later in life. As people with no recent cat-owning experience, it’s not a decision we can make lightly.

  • Week 26.22

    • If last week was long and exhausting then the trend is only accelerating. This week involved a lot of extroversion, conversations, and digging deep for social energy. But there’s change here: talking too much used to wipe me out. Now it can feel worthwhile. Sometimes I even wander into the “need to shut up and listen” zone. Part of this is getting old — people might let you, but it doesn’t mean you should.
    • I spent some time with a visiting colleague of sorts, and got to talking about how I spent the last year (rest, goofing off, learning random things), and takeaways from this entire period of work and personal growth since joining the company. It’s no wonder I’m tired; I barely recognize who I used to be five years ago. Things that were hard then are easier now, which reminds me of this “NLP” phrase that used to be in the Pzizz sleep app: let things that are easy… be easy. Is it cringe motivational shit? I think a lot of people could learn from it.
    • Last week I tried to buy a Ricoh GR IIIx and my order got canceled because of supply issues. This week I took my Ricoh first-gen GR out for a bit and decided I’d rather stick to a 28mm field of view and crop if needed, so I’ve ordered a regular ol’ GR III instead. Thanks to Shopee’s June 25th sale, I managed to get a better price than what I found in Funan’s camera stores. Let’s see if it manages to be delivered.
    • Painfully aware I haven’t played any games recently. The creator of Downwell made a new mobile action game for Netflix, called Poinpy. I’ve only spent 10 minutes on it. It’s much friendlier and cartoony looking, but you can still definitely draw parallels with Downwell.
    • If you’re a child of the 80s and 90s, you may remember playing Westwood Studios’ point-and-click game adaptation of Blade Runner, which was hailed as a groundbreaking experience. I hadn’t even watched the film at that age, so the game was just weird to me, but it still looked like nothing else owing to its voxel rendering and motion captured actors. It’s now been remastered and released on the Nintendo Switch for just $10 USD, so I’m planning to give it another go.
    • After seeing some Twitter chatter about Philip Seymour Hoffman’s brief but remarkable impersonation of Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible 3, we watched it again from my iTunes library and… it’s not the movie I recall. Something about its oversaturated colors and tight framing makes the film feel much older than it is, and nowhere as thrilling as I think it was in the theaters. Ah well. At least now I have this line stuck in my head ready to be repeated all day.
    • Netflix has a new (bad) reality TV show called Snowflake Mountain where a bunch of spoiled young people living off their parents get told they’re going to be on a show set on a luxurious resort, but then they get dropped into a wilderness survival experience. It’s so bad we watched all 8 episodes in one go on Saturday. It’s enjoyable mainly because some of them do grow up and become more mature, but I wonder what the producers would have done if all of them remained insufferable and selfish. That said, the brainwashing playbook is well established! Throw them into adversity to break their spirits, add a little kindness and positive reinforcement to bring them back in, then keep them on their toes throughout.
    • There’s a fair bit of hip-hop in my library, but Logic’s work is a blind spot. His new album Vinyl Days came up in Apple Music’s New Releases list and I’ve been enjoying its classic production throughout the week.

  • Week 24.22: Anime, AI, and agendas

    A few months back, I watched Mamoru Hosoda’s Belle after anticipating it for quite awhile — on paper it sounded like a revisiting and refinement of themes he’d be building for years, in particular Summer Wars, which I’d always considered one of my favorite films of all time. It turned out to be a strange disappointment, all over the place and lacking heart, both literally a cohesive center, and convincing emotional resonance. A bit later on, I read a review saying that many of his earlier works actually shone as a result of his writing partner at the time, Satoko Okudera. These days, she seems to be mostly working in Japanese television and other films I sadly will likely never see.

    After it came up in a work-related conversation this week, about good depictions of metaverse concepts in film and media, I decided to give Summer Wars a rewatch to see if it still holds up. I’ve been doing it in installments over my lunch breaks and still haven’t finished, but I can confidently say that it does. It has heart in unashamed abundance. I cried because it has sequences that are joyous and beautiful, because it observes life and family from ten thousand feet, because it feels like a once-in-a-career miracle that people made this then went their separate ways. I also learnt that young people today don’t know how to unzip multi-part archives, but that’s another story.

    Back on the anime bullshit, I finally got around to watching Netflix’s A Whisker Away after several years. It’s about a girl who gains the ability to turn into a cat, which she uses to get close to her crush. It spends almost no time explaining the spirit world and mechanics behind this, because it would rather focus on how people are all suffering deep down and can’t be vulnerable or open in our society, and those are the parts that end up saving this somewhat uneven but well-meaning film that doesn’t manage to end very elegantly.

    A couple of weeks ago, I watched Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop, also on Netflix internationally and not to be confused with Bubble, a high-budget but fully unnecessary and shallow anime film. Naw, Soda Pop is something else, happy to outline and color in its small scaled human story. Pros: it has a refreshing look that’s bright and sketchy, is set mainly in a suburban mall, has a storyline concerned with music and poetry, and a small but well-meaning heart. Cons: the ending is a bit cringe. On the whole, I enjoyed it and want to see it again.

    Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop: look at those clouds!

    An AI image generation tool called Dall-E Mini hit my timeline this week, and I haven’t been able to get enough of it. I don’t know if it has anything to do with the proper Dall-E 2 at all, which produces vastly more detailed and beautiful results, but hey this is the one we plebs get, and so it’s the one I’ll play with.

    You can bring some really wrong ideas to life with this, which I’ve seen and admittedly also tried, things involving deceased personalities in historically unlikely scenarios, for example. Mostly I’ve just cracked myself up trying to create frames from movies that never happened, and things that are mundane yet just enough surreal. I now desire more power, so if anyone has an invite to Midjourney or any of the other proper tools out there, let me know.

    I’ll save a few for posterity here, but my Instagram Stories have been full of them this week.

    Kim got back from a multi-week business trip. We were worried it would feel too long but talking regularly via FaceTime was surprisingly good at helping with that. The first few weeks did drag on, but ever since I’ve been back in the rhythms of a day job, time just started moving faster. I said to someone that I now experience and visualize time in the form of calendaring software again: a carpet of items stretching forward endlessly, aka Agenda View. The weekends pop up unexpectedly; all I’m aware of is what’s due to happen later today, tomorrow, and beyond. Looking at time and life itself this way is extremely restrictive for the soul, while it perfectly serves the needs of productivity like blinkers do on a race horse. Part of this is a problem with me, but perhaps the rest is a design challenge. There has to be a better way.

    This week I’ve been singing along to the late, great Adam Schlesinger’s Mexican Wine by Fountains of Wayne.