I’ve been frustrated with all photo processing apps for the entire week. I basically got 3 choices when it comes to it:
- MacOS’ Photos app. This is what I’ve been using on this trip so far for almost all of the photos. Performance wise it’s really the best. It literally flies through the photos, and it is very convenient for culling. But you have to import the photos into it (basically making a copy), editing tools are pretty good but missing Dehaze and the way it develops photos is kinda ass because it smoothes everything. It’s fine during day time, but night ones are soo bad… Literally all smudged instead of having nice grain.
- Affinity on MacOS. It’s unusable for culling, extremely slow, lacks a lot of tools, BUT the way it develops photos is literally perfect. Retains the beautiful grain without the «raw» feeling. It also correctly corrects lens distortion. I use it for my best night photos to make them even better.
- Lightroom on Windows. It’s very slow on Windows. This is probably a fault with my laptop, but Windows is also veryyyy slow at even just reading photos from SD card… Like importing photos takes 10 minutes vs 5 seconds on Mac. So why not use Lightroom on MacOS? You can’t █████████████ it there and I don’t want to pay so much for it.
So this leaves me constantly yearning for something that combined convenient culling, editing and with good development profile.
I started working on my own program. Since I only really know JS well, I’m doing it as a web app. Been toying around with LibRaw WASM and WebGPU to see how it goes.
█████████████ got some infection and had to go to a clinic in the morning. Seems like another expense, and it’s about $160, which is lower than insurance’s $250 deductible.
We finally went to the sushi place near our apartment. It was a very local and nice place ran by a couple. The sushi were very flavorful and delicious. We also got some miso, which was a nice pairing with sushi.
We got another meetup planned today. My last trip was actually planned with █████████████, but after I learnt that █████████████ can come, I basically cancelled the plan with him and went with █████████████. It wasn’t a very nice decision, and understandably, he was hurt and we stopped talking for about half a year. Recently we started talking again, and he’s been actually travelling japan since August. We’ve been talking about possible meet up for the past few days, and today was finally convenient for us to meet.
We had to run for a bus on the way to Shibuya while the golden rays fell on the road. I felt something strange and beautiful at that moment. After we got to Shibuya we once again went to the rooftop of Parco, and waited for █████████████ there. He came like 5 minutes later, and we met at the little corner up top.
The cafe was actually open today, and we went there for coffees. He was way more fun irl than I expected! We share quite a lot of common topics, so speaking with him wasn’t awkward from the first second. We reserved a spot in a brazillian steakhouse about 3 hours from now.
We ended up all having different IC cards and took a pretty fun photo in the elevator. He told us that he really wants to find Exploding Kittens card game somewhere, and that he might be able to find it either in Mandarake or some random store I don’t remember the name of.
It already started getting dark, and Shibuya just started glowing its lights. The entrance to Mandarake was pretty lowkey and neat, but the most shocking part was that you had to go down really deep into what felt like an actual cave.
Mandarake didn’t have the game nor anything that interesting, so we left after a short while.
Short walk away, we went into a small alleyway into my favorite lil spot in Shibuya I’ve seen so far. Really liked the green cafe and neon lights in that district. ██████████████████████████████████████████████ and got photographed by some Japanese guy, and we had a nice lil interaction with a short talk and him showing the photo he took. We both enjoyed the scenery there.
And right at that alleyway was the games store, so we went inside and he actually found it! He bought it and we continued onto Tower Records. Tower records was cool as fuck, but my feelings about it have remained the same as they were the last time I was here.
We then went to MIYASHITA PARK and got some sugarslop from the Starbucks there and then played the Exploding Kittens. It’s a very fun game, but █████████████ as always didn’t like it or smth and basically was completely passive and careless about it. Made me kinda sad.
█████████████ also showed his Even G2 glasses there, and they’re really fucking cool. Seeing display in front of your eyes was really neat. And translation app worked way better than I expected. Sadly they do look kinda too weird though. I wish it was possible to make them more low-key.
When there was 30 minutes left, we walked to the restaurant. Went through mostly residential areas without much to say about them.
Holy fuck, the restaurant was so fucking good. Sooo much yummy stuff. The concept itself is also really cool, you basically get a badge thing that has red on one side and green on another. You can flip it green and the waiters will come to you and propose you to give some meat. I tried so much meat today, at the end I felt like I was gonna explode. Everything was incredible though.
We also had a lot of cool conversations, it’s nice to have a person who shares a lot of common interests.
We came home very full and tired. Didn’t really have energy to pack today, so just gonna wake up a hour earlier tomorrow.
