• Reflecting on this, I’ve come to recognize that the role of design under capitalism is chiefly to provide products and services with competitive differentiation and positioning. The widespread support of human-centered approaches lately has less to do with altruism and more with a fortunate (and temporary) alignment with commercial goals. It’s become obvious that in the pursuit of optimization and convenience, in the name of improving user experience, digital product designers have been directed to unleash some absolutely demonic socio-technological forces. Design itself is not inherently a human-centered pursuit or practice — it can be used to center any number of priorities or doctrines. The human soul (i.e. the desires and values that we as customers/citizens/individuals put out into the world and conversely seek out in others) must continuously find a healthy host that capital will agree to feed and clothe, and now under AI, Design looks like a used-up orphan days away from being on the streets. I think it’s more interesting to ask where else the human soul can find refuge — what unlikely organisms might become new hosts for the creative impulse — rather than mourning the death of design.
• I had tamales, I think for the first time. We met for dinner to celebrate three August birthdays last night, at Mami’s Tamales in the Keong Saik area. Going in, I expected them to be made with a stretchy, sticky consistency not unlike the Teochew soong kueh (which I hate), but it’s really just a polenta skin that’s kinda like firm mashed potatoes. They put avocados on everything there, and their guacamole was excellent: aromatic and creamy. I would go back.
• I saw Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026) in a theater and it was much better than the ratings had led me to believe. Yes, it’s more Marvel slop and I’m so over it, but I’ll always have the softest of spots for Spidey. Tom Holland gets my vote for the best person to ever play the role. Of all the films, this one felt the most connected to Insomniac’s videogames, partly because it lifts many signature fight moves and cinematic web-swinging camera moves from those games. It’s made me plan to finally play Spider-Man 2 on the PS5 in the coming weeks.
• I saw Amores Perros (2000) on MUBI and got the shock of my life when I realized the young love interest Susana was played by the same woman who plays Maximo’s mom in the Apple TV series Acapulco (Vanessa Bauche). Goddamn, 2000 really was a long time ago.
• Music discovery of the week: Puma Blue’s album Croak Dream. I haven’t heard his back-catalog yet, but this London-based musician (real name Jacob Allen) was supposedly a bedroom R&B artist who’s now veered into trip-hop territory with this new album. It’s glorious stuff. The title track evokes OK Computer-era Radiohead, but that’s really a compliment and not an accusation.

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

• I finished reading Gabrielle Zevin’s Young Jane Young. The only other book I’ve read of hers was Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, which I loved whole-heartedly, and I’m glad to report that this one was also a minor masterpiece. The subject matter (a political sex scandal) didn’t appeal much to me at all, but her characters, and their dialogue and humanity, were wonderfully handled. Movie trailer voice: “It’s a story about family, friendship, and second chances.” 5 stars, and it goes on my shelf.

• On Thursday I met some young entrepreneurs exploring product and service spaces that they might be able to play in, especially now that the availability of generative AI tools can amplify their talents. I came away impressed by how much drive they have, and was also reminded of how vital the quote-unquote design process can still be in an age where building happens in parallel with ideation. There’s so much value in “slowing down to speed up” in the early stages, as my friend Ted likes to say, and you can save not only time, but now tokens too, with more upfront research and problem selection before committing to code.

• Kim and I had a choice between an ‘omakase’ yakitori dinner and a visit to Barrel: Story of Hibiki, which seems to be a Suntory-operated or at least Suntory-blessed restaurant that makes use of their Hibiki Harmony Japanese whisky in several recipes. I like yakitori fine, but associate it more with, I dunno, prices that aren’t S$280 a person before drinks?? So Barrel it was, and it was pretty great. Their simple vanilla ice-cream topped with a Hibiki-infused honey and Maldon salt might just be the best soft-serve I’ve ever had.
• I passed a few hours playing Lumines Remastered, which has now been launched on mobile with controls that are quite usable. Friends will know that I consider Lumines to be one of my favorite game franchises, almost the equal of Tetris in its ingenuity, replayability, and ability to induce a blissful flow state. I’ve bought every one of these games multiple times, on every platform I can (Java featurephones, Symbian smartphones, iOS, Xbox 360, PSP, PS Vita, PS4/PS5, Switch). For S$9.98 (the first few levels are free), I can recommend the new iOS port if you’ve never played it before or don’t have access to a game console.
• It was also Singapore’s 61st National Day over the weekend. This time, there were three songs instead of the usual one. I didn’t like any of them, and one in particular tried to strike an optimistic note but its titular refrain, “You’ll be okay”, works like a counterproductive doubt-caster. Like saying don’t think of an elephant. Were we not going to be okay? Why are you saying that?
• It was a big week in proper music: my DOMi & JD BECK record arrived, and they announced two amazing things. 1) They’re coming to Singapore on Dec 1, and 2) there’s an instrumental version of the album coming soon. Those were both of my wishes to Jazz Santa. Thanks, JS, you’re the best.
• ROLE MODEL also released his new album, Chuck Timely & The Hourglass, which is transparently about being a pretty fuckboi who’s now nearing 30 and still single while all his friends are getting married, and I love it. The sound is fantastic, a sort of alt-Americana piano rock from the good old days of Springsteen, Petty, and Fleetwood Mac.
• Also, a new album from The Mountain Goats! Days is classic stuff, with better production values than ever, and a Weezer-like song about touring with the band Candlebox that has what it takes to be a hit single.
• But the highest highlight for me has been Tricky’s new album, which I put off listening to for a few weeks. I said to myself I needed to hear it “in the right conditions” but really I think I was afraid it would suck. I ended up putting it on while on the train. It does not suck. It does not suck so hard! It’s as good as anything he put out after the first two albums of his career. Pitchfork points out that when Maxinquaye dropped in 1995, few would’ve bet on Tricky still making records three decades later — yet here he is, having outlasted Portishead (Third came out in 2008) and Massive Attack (16 years without an album), turning out what they call “a record of pointed modern blues that suggests an artist still driven to create.”

• 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.

• Speaking of slop, McDonald’s Singapore has a couple of new menu items to celebrate our upcoming National Day in August. One of them is a collaboration with my favorite curry puff brand, Old Chang Kee. The burger has a fried egg, a deep-fried chicken cutlet, and a thick curry paste with diced potatoes that’s reminiscent of OCK’s signature Curry’O filling. It’s as messy to eat as it sounds, and the top bun gets soggy and falls apart as you’re eating it. What makes Old Chang Kee work for me is the texture and mouthfeel of their crusty pastry, so the soft bun is a weak substitute. To make matters worse, I had the double version with twice the oily fried chicken, and felt like absolute crap afterwards. Speaking with Jose and Henry, who also ate this on the same day, I got tripartite agreement that this creation results in more regret than reward, and none of us will be having it again.
• Michael’s collaborative crossword game, Crossmate, is finally out on the App Store! It’s free, open source, and I highly recommend it. You can import puzzle files, or use NYT’s puzzles if you have a subscription, then invite up to two other friends to play with you. It’s just like working in a live Google Doc, but funner. I’m not especially good at crosswords, but I’ve completed quite a few with him and others during the beta testing period and had a great time with it.
• I read what was probably my first Philip K. Dick novel, as far as I can recall, Time Out of Joint, and came away slightly disappointed. Something about its style reminded me of other books from the same era, where you can almost smell the fumes from whatever they were huffing. The core ideas are good, and have been replicated in other works (including a particularly big Jim Carrey hit), but somehow the sum is less than its parts. In contrast with Rendezvous with Rama, a sci-fi classic I recently reread that explores big ideas with prosaic, forgettable writing, Time Out of Joint somehow comes away looking worse because Dick’s writing is too opinionated and rooted in his time, neither of which serves to elevate the story or its ideas.
• I finished watching the Three Colors trilogy on MUBI with White (1994) and Red (1994). I believe White is often called the ‘weird’ or ‘different’ one out of the three, as it’s tonally and structurally quite a farce. For that reason, I enjoyed it but probably have to rate it lower relative to the emotional power of its siblings. What’s also impressive is how the director began with the legendary Juliette Binoche, and then went on to cast leading women of escalating beauty in Julie Delpy and Irene Jacob. Next up is The Double Life of Véronique (1991) which also stars Jacob, who I’d never heard of before this.
• Despite believing that I don’t watch or enjoy horror, I think Widow’s Bay empowered me to believe that maybe I can do horror lite, so I bought a ticket to go see Backrooms (2026) on a weekday afternoon. I could have waited for a home release, but I wanted to test myself with a big screen. I have vivid memories of seeing Drag Me to Hell (2009) in a theater that was way too loud, and being so terrified by the sensory overload (despite it being quite an outlandishly funny film) that I felt like I was going to have a heart attack.
• Thankfully, Backrooms was more fun than fatal, and I had a good time. I’ve seen the short film that this expands on, but the final result still feels a little thin. Rather than doing more expansive world building around the infinite labyrinth (ha ha) and its place in our world, it keeps the scope small, presumably for future sequels. This screening was the “Everything Must Go Edition”, with an extra 15-min segment tacked on after the credits. This strategy seems new — a way to further milk a film near the end of its theatrical run, either gaining repeat viewings from fans or convincing stragglers like me.
• It was perhaps due to this ‘training’ that I not only endured, but enjoyed, a particular sequence in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey (2026) when we saw it in IMAX over the weekend with Peishan and James. I said before that I wasn’t particularly in a hurry to see this, and that I was anticipating Disclosure Day (2026) much more. In retrospect, it’s almost a crime to draw any comparison between the two. The Spielberg film seems made with decades of Hollywood muscle memory, and probably under healthy conditions that allowed everyone to have a life at the same time. Nolan’s film comes across more like a monumental undertaking, a transfer of life force from human bodies onto 70mm celluloid through back-breaking effort.
• Afterwards, in trying to rank my favorite Nolan films, I decided that Interstellar (2014) is still my favorite, but this might come in second, followed by Inception and Tenet. The Batman films are dead last. When someone brought up how they were flawed, but Heath Ledger’s turn as the Joker was great, I said that I never understood the big deal about that performance: “For me it’s like if Freddie Prinze Jr. died after turning in a passable Zorro remake”.

Subconscious Samples is a generative art tool that turns patterns in your photos into new, abstract compositions.

The human brain notices and retains a lot of visual information — not just traumatic images from childhood or the great moments of your life (insert dead wife montage here), but all sorts of patterns you’re not even aware of. These interact with each other in the unknowable cauldron of your subconscious, and are synthesized into forms that affect your actual life: the doodles you draw as your teacher or managing director drones on and on, the paintings you buy because they just speak to you, the brilliant shower idea that saves your bacon the night before a deadline.

Creative people draw on these inputs with varying degrees of control — connect the dots too well and it earns a name, plagiarism — but what about machines? We’ve been trying to give them artistic instructions for a long time. Harold Cohen spent decades building AARON, a program that drew and painted according to rules he wrote but couldn’t fully predict the output of. Vera Molnár was plotting geometric abstractions on a computer in the 1960s, before “generative art” was even a term.

Well, generative AI is the greatest plagiarizer ever invented, and yes it was employed in the coding of this tool. But Subconscious Samples is not powered by any AI model; it uses only the images you supply, and gives a fair amount of visibility into how it produces new imagery from inspiration. In that sense, you get to direct and watch the process happen inside its transparent brain.

Feed it some pictures, and then supervise a process in which short sections of lines and contours are traced. Fill the waiting palette with as many ’tiles’ of these samples as you want, add up to three manually selected ‘cutout’ areas (think scissors and a magazine), and then it’s off to the races.

After you hit “Generate”, the system takes those lines and rearranges them into abstract compositions. Mostly random, but often with loose rules. For example, the Mona Lisa might be reduced to a handful of curvy lines, which then get drawn as a spaghetti monster in 3D space. Is the pastafarian blob the equal of Da Vinci’s masterpiece? Obviously not. But could you say it came from it? Hmm, maybe? In a manner of speaking?

If the human brain is a supercomputer, then this program isn’t even an abacus. It’s possibly a pile of stones in a circle, drawn in sand. You could produce some interesting pictures with it, you might even use them as desktop wallpapers for a short time. But it’s no artist. Like AARON and those greater predecessors, it only exists to make you think about where our art comes from.

Related: I made a series of 39 artworks called Subconscious Heirlooms in the summer of 2022, the hand-drawn precursor to this idea. You can read about them on this page about my NFT projects.

• Ex-colleague Jianjia was in town for a short stopover and we met up for a coffee on Tuesday. She’s about to make a big move across the world, so it will probably be many years before we meet again. Although we last saw each other two years ago, meeting her this time reminded me of the people we were back in 2017, and how much has changed. I think we’re both calmer, a little more jaded, but less to prove.
• Afterwards I decided to bite the bullet and go watch Supergirl (2026) at a nearby GV theater. I’ve seen talk online about how it’s bombing and people are unfairly blaming Milly Alcock for it, and it’s another example of misogyny among comic book nerds or Hollywood or whatever. I can tell you that the movie has problems and none of them are her; she’s fantastic to watch and brings most of the life to be found in this dreck. I mentioned last week that Craig Gillespie directed this, but I don’t see enough people blaming him. It’s a film that not only fails to carry the baton that Superman (2025) passes it, but fails to achieve anything of value cinematically. It’s a pastiche of boring plot points and cliches. Its needle drops and beat ‘em up fight scenes lack emotional impact. Jason Momoa doing an impression of Jack Black is probably the second best thing about this film. 2.5 stars.
• After that I came home and fired up the MUBI app like a thirsty man crawling towards a desert oasis. I decided it was finally time to watch the first of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Trois Couleurs series: Three Colors: Blue (1993). No point saving all the good films for someday that never comes, because you never know when you’ll fall down the stairs and break your neck. Maybe it was the contrast whiplash, but what a glorious experience it was. In its first five minutes, it does more than Supergirl manages with a hundred and eight. 5 stars!
• Not having learnt my lesson, I agreed to watch The Devil Wears Prada 2 (2026) with Kim on Saturday. It was okay, but a far cry from the fun of the first film, too focused on making current moment social commentary but then (unintentionally?) winds up being a downer because it can’t find a silver lining to this shit cloud we’re in. The only way to stop a billionaire is… begging another billionaire. There is a moment near the end that echoes the first film’s resolution where Andy reminds herself Miranda’s life isn’t worth what it costs, but any anti-work sentiment is swept aside and nullified almost as soon as it lands. Miranda’s victorious closing line, “I love working. I really do. Don’t you?” is one hell of a message for the establishment to lob at the general public; a naked admonishment from those boomers who complain “nobody wants to work anymore” without bothering to ask why that is. 3 stars.
• You know what else was gross? The actions of ex-Apple design team leads which were revealed in a suit filed against them and their current employers OpenAI/io. I’ll leave you to look them up on your own, but I didn’t think it was possible for me to have even less respect for that group than after Jony Ive appeared in his partnership announcement video with Sam Altman. Ive isn’t named in the suit, but whether he knew what his closest lieutenants were doing or just has terrible judgment about who to partner with, it doesn’t look great. What is the point of all that money which lets you do anything you want, if what you choose to do is unethical and stains the only name you have? Absolute loser behavior.

• I suppose my latest coding project also has something to do with “copying”, if just barely. It’s called Subconscious Samples, and borrows conceptually from the Subconscious Heirlooms series of drawings I made a couple of years ago. The idea is that your mind is always noticing and storing lots of visual patterns and ideas without you knowing it, and when you draw ‘mindlessly’ in a state of flow/play, some of them will emerge. This new software attempts to replicate the process, with a more transparent brain. You add some images, extract contours and shapes, and then it’ll compose new abstract forms out of them, in 2D or 3D space. I’m almost done with it but am still undecided if anyone but me will enjoy having a go.

• The Rolling Stones’ new album Foreign Tongues is out, and I’ve been listening to it over the week. There are some good songs here, and it’s astounding how good they still sound. One of the comments on the music video (below) starring Anya Taylor-Joy and Charles Melton notes that she was born when the Stones were already 34 years into their careers, and that was 30 years ago. I’m in the middle of the hour-long Zane Lowe interview they’ve done, and hope to be even half as lucid as Mick Jagger is if/when I get to 82.

• I may have lost a sticker collection when I upgraded my laptop a couple of weeks ago, but I’ve already got some new ones going from my last visit to the B-Side Label store and Village Vanguard in Shimokitazawa. The “How To Enjoy?” #StayHome one is actually from a series of three, with the girl reading a book and playing videogames in the others. What can I say? They spoke to me.

• On Thursday, I had to go into town to run an errand and thought that I might treat myself to a weekday afternoon screening of the new Supergirl movie starring Milly Alcock. Incidentally, it’s directed by Craig Gillespie, who also did the first two episodes of Apple TV’s Your Friends & Neighbors, which I’ve just started on. In the end, I decided to visit the National Gallery Singapore instead.
• There’s currently a retrospective for the Chinese artist He Xiangning (1878–1972), on loan from China. Really lovely stuff, which reminded me of the time I spent on my own Chinese Era website, discovering classical Chinese art and poetry. Instead of an appropriately Chinese soundtrack though, I viewed all of it while listening to the clubby sounds of FKA twigs’s reissued version of EUSEXUA. Quite the trip.

• After that, I stopped by Maji Curry at Funan — to my tastes, still the best standalone Japanese curry rice in the country. Lately they’ve taken to declaring their curry’s base is chicken broth. Odd. In their Thailand outlets, I believe you have a choice between pork and beef-based curries. Nevertheless, still the best.
• The next night, Kim’s brother inherited a reservation at a small private dining omakase joint run by a single chef in a strange no-nothing mall. We went not knowing what to expect, and got a pretty nice experience with lots of unusual fish directly imported from Japanese markets. Like pomfret, which is normally only eaten here steamed with ginger, or fried. It did, however, cost 10x as much as my Maji Curry meal! The other spendy patrons appeared to be on either side of our decade: in their 30s and 50s, which provided evidence against the prevailing Reddit narrative that everyone out there is struggling and jobless, respectively.

But these are the songs I chose to put on, was aware of, the earworms that played in my head as I brushed my teeth, the throwbacks that made me feel old, the ones I might still love a few years from now.