Links

https://youtu.be/MPANooz_b9Q?si=Rx2n00YYCtBijVQc

This week’s music link is a mixtape that has a title which is changed every day through a script. The progression into the fifth song (which I do not want to spoil) of the mix is what makes it notable for me.

This particular channel, mai, uses puzzles, indecipherable paratext and cryptography as a kind of aesthetic to accompany the mixes creating a feeling of internet strangeness borne out of a decontextualisation of data. While mai is particularly interesting on as its own thing, there are many other youtube music mixtape channels which release mixes with these sorts of unsearchable titles. Sometimes a blank unicode character is used or the video title are gibberish, and the kind of music that turns up is always a mixed bag. The only real way you would find these is through the recommendation system putting it in front of you or by someone sharing it with you, like I am right now.

These are doing something with the platform that is in an intersection between rejecting normative ways of playing to its systems, eschewing visible metadata that could help make it legible to the algorithm but at the same time making its visibility reliant on it. The fact that I am consistently getting these recommendations means that there is a signal that the system is picking up on; the absence of signs becoming a sign in itself, pairing with the actual data that is being presented.

Reality is a Camera Trick: Film, Bodycams, and the First-Person Shooter

Jacob Geller uses the starting point of bodycam-style first person shooter games to embark on an investigation into the history of the first person perspective itself within films and video games.

The mechanical reproduction of perspective is something I have been thinking about the last few months as I am reading Johnathan Crary’s Suspensions of Perception for a class. There is a shared hypothesis between these two works which I find immediately important: the forces that shape the construction of our perception and representation of such perceptions of the world shapes our subjective realities.

The video essay goes both deep into its subject matter, presenting its points through a rough historical overview but also looks widely at many related ideas.

Essay: All Images Are Quite Useless Now by Gideon Jacobs

Around me I have begun to notice more and more people talking about trying to return to more embodied and sensuous modes of living. I doubt that it is altogether new, the technologies of modernity in some way or another pull us away from singular, immediate contextual experiences and into the imaginary (both fictional and non-present reality) which comes with its gifts and curses.

What is interesting about the hypothesis of the essay is the idea that the result of LLM generated images shattering the illusionary relationship between photography and reality is a return to the embodied and immediate. Technology defeating itself, but also freeing us from its own grasp.

A place to eat in Tokyo:

Japanese curry is well known as a food to try when visiting, but Hokkaido soup curry is relatively unknown so I would like to introduce the restaurant in Tokyo that got me to fall in love with the dish.

Ponipirika is located in a part of Tokyo known as Shimokitazawa, an area is better known for theatres, vintage clothing and coffee but it also has a high density of soup curry places. This one is on the second floor of a building a three minute walk from the station. I do not remember how I first found my way to Ponipirika four years ago, though the photos I have of the occasion remind me that I was with a friend, and it was in spring.

Soup curry can be described as just about what you expect from hearing the name. It has the flavour profile of regular Japanese curry but with a little bit more savoury than sweet, and has the consistency of a light soup. It is generally served with a heaping of vegetables, restaurants will often describe how many different kinds of vegetables are in the soup as a way of enticing customers. Fried chicken is the usual protein that comes in these, though the option to leave it out is almost always present. When you order at a soup curry place you are usually given many options to adjust such as soup base, spiciness, amount of rice and additional toppings.

I think the reason why I like it so much is that it reminds me of the south east asian curries that I grew up eating in Singapore. Some soup curry restaurants even have options to add coconut milk, which brings it even closer to the south east asian taste.

Ponipirika’s soup curry stays true to the stereotypical preparation of it, but it is a very very technically proficient version of it. The balance of flavours in the soup is perfect, with a consistency that is not watery but also not at all approaching the goopy of regular Japanese curry. If you ever find yourself in the area do give it a try!

I went to: Game Market 2026 Spring

There was a Game Market in Makuhari Messe again — I was there for the first day only which means that I did not get to see all the day 2 only booths (and the second day has more of the TTRPG related people boothing) but here are some broad trends I noticed:

1. There were more maid related games this year than I remember there being in the past
2. There are so many card games now: specifically indie TCGs which is a concept I find kind of mystifying because TCGs often rely on large amounts of product and players existing to create an ecosystem which these indie games will not have
3. Specifically also there were also a few card games that are built around drafting decks similar to how a Magic: The Gathering cube would be drafted. This particular one that is designed explicitly for 1v1v1 play and has two versions a la Pokemon games caught my attention.
4. There was at least one instance of a product looking like it might be using AI generated visuals and we were not able to tell and could not find an artist credit so we decided against buying it.

I like my notebooks: unopinionated

I have like eight notebooks of different sizes that I use on a frequent basis as handwriting is a big part my life. Over the years I have gravitated to using the Midori MD A5 notebooks with the dotted grid as my primary choice for a general purpose notebook that does not need to fit into a pocket. It has a plain cream coloured cover and no text whatsoever (excluding the first and last pages which has some branding information). I settled on this choice because I realise I do not like my notebooks to have designs on the cover or for there to be any pre-existing templating. I need for it to be a literal blank canvas on which I draw the boxes or formats into, turning it into exactly what I need. I want them to be as unopinionated as possible so that the ideas themselves sit singularly on the page. The notebooks that I have purchased that have too much influence on how I am interacting with my words inevitably are abandoned before I even finish half of their pages.

Updates and Acknowledgements

It has been a little while since the last issue. The seasons have moved from spring to summer and I have completed a semester of study for my master’s degree; that’s 1/4 class semesters over already! Getting used to research student life has taken up so much of my time that I have played very few TTRPGs since and also have not made much progress in getting any of my projects to a finish line. Perhaps the influence that has had on this newsletter is that a lot of these sections are not about games, and more personal thoughts. I hope they have been interesting in some way to read because I have considered that alongside the analysis and essays about art I want to also have some more personal pieces on here. I hope to find a better balance as I work towards the next issue though.

I will be also be making a little bit of a change as to how I upload to the blog and how this newsletter will be formatted. Each newsletter has consisted so far of a few mini-essay length sections on particular topics, which I saw as a way for me to write and think about my ideas in a way that is longer than a tweet but shorter than a properly explicated essay length post. It occurred to me though, that the shorter posts should exist as posts themselves, and I would like to be be able to post them as I finish writing them instead of waiting until I’ve completed a few to compile into the newsletter. Grouping all of them together also makes it more difficult to keep my motivation up through the writing process, which is why this issue is a little shorter than the previous ones because I primarily was interested in getting it done instead of having a bunch of half-written sections for it lying around. So, the newsletter from here on out is going to compile the mini-posts instead of being the sole container for them. There will be sections that I reserve for the newsletter, such as the links, so there will be new things to look forward to when a new issue comes out.

For anyone still reading all the way though this meta text about the newsletter itself, thank you so much for your attention, I am looking forward to working more actively on these creative pursuits now that I have more capacity this second half of the year. See you in the next one!