Month: November 2009

Bluuurgh

Great.

A week that I’m back in Paris after three months in LA. Going from couple/sun/music/english to alone/rain/nomusic/french is an experience I heavily do not recommend. It’s pretty much driving me nuts to the point where I need to grind my teeths way too often while looping a song 120 times in a day. Yesterday was Patience from Aurra.

*scream*

I feel like comparing and seeing the good and bad of everything between two different lifestyles and of course I’d go for a mix of them at least just to make me feel that there’s room for progress and stuff to do I guess.

It’s exciting. But I have to cool down on difficulties. It’s like everytime I have the choice I choose the hard way. Going around the hill or going through it? I’m taking the steep route. Falling in love? I choose the one 10 000kms away. Computer games industry? I choose the most obscure field, game audio.

When it’s going well it’s so rewarding. the main problem is that it’s exhausting man! But the paradigm for next year is pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty good (Sorry France, Larry David reference).

Also I’m recovering 200 gigs of data from my dying NAS. I think I’ll never go after 500G+ hard drives because it’s too much to keep up with. It’s like when we pass the billion scale (Gb, Ghz, $B) we can’t really follow or enjoy it. So when it goes around one thousand billion.. Even for 90 bucks I don’t want to (1To drives, 10*12 omg).

Ok I’m bored.

PS: Bluuurgh is also a metal band name. “So what are you listening to?”

Me Myself&I

US/FR: car

Under the freeway, LA 2009

USA, CA land of the car lifestyle. You quickly understand that you need one to move around. What struck me:

– Toyota Prius

Third generation

The car is the most fuel efficient car ever produced and has a better reliability that some expensive german cars. Add the built-in technology (the last generation includes a voice-activated touch-screen DVD-based navigation system and an 8-speaker JBL audio system) and you can easily see why this car –at least in LA- is like the R5 in France in the 80s. It’s fucking everywhere.

– Where are the US cars?

*cue More Bounce To The Ounce*

Short answer: nowhere. In the pick-up category, there’s still some. For every other brand new car or old ones, it’s like 90% of them are japanese. Maybe more. Sure some people are still cruising with good old vintage Cadillac Eldorado or of course some ‘68 Ford Mustang but it’s a very narrow percentage.

I don’t know why but seeing this I can’t help but think about Hiroshima. If Germany had bombed France with one of the deadliest weapon ever created, I don’t think we would ever love their car to the point that our national production would be almost dead. US/Japan relation is weird. And yes, we don’t care anymore.

– Traffic lights

*cue drinking in LA"*

I guess it’s a classic one but damn, it makes so much more sense to have it in front of you instead of on your side like in Europe. Because you don’t have to look away from the road and because it’s on the other side of the intersection, you always have time to use the breaks without little panic.

– Driving

Night Life

For my first time driving one hour alone on the freeway and all I was scared as shit. But it’s easy. I mean with a gps it’s easy. Everything is large so you rarely have to do some weird and dangerous stuff to get out from a wrong way. Road signs are not confusing and never too late. People drive safely, I mean I come from France and on a traffic jam people are just bitches. Here I was the bitch, sneaking from lane to lane. I didn’t see a lot of asshole behavior. Around Paris on the Boulevard Périphérique it’s simply war. With a lot of trucks and 2 wheels. In LA there’s almost none of them. It simplifies a lot what to pay attention to. Also people know how to park, I’ve never seen someone doing two or three times the entire process of doing correctly a parallel parking move. It has to do with the wide roads and the car culture.

– Law

”So.. How about sandwiches for diner tonight?”

Man it’s tough. A friend got a 450$ ticket for not stopping long enough at a stop sign. I had a 80$ parking ticket on a saturday morning at 8:03am. Another friend had a 300$ ticket for crossing the street while the pedestrian sign was saying he could not. They don’t mess around. In France every driver would be in jail with laws like that. At least it makes people careful and on the road that’s the priority I guess.

– Parking

Ha! Wait..

Night-mare. Worse than anything I did in Europe. Frustrating because from my narrow french point of view everything is wide large and fat here so parking spaces should be that way too. Oh boy.

– Relation with the car

Time to nap

I saw so many people hanging in their car. Like this time when I went to the music store, this guy was almost laying down in it, chatting on his phone in this dead and dusty parking. One hour later he was taking a nap. I saw a lot of that, people parked and chatting, having diner etc. In France only workmen are doing that for lunch or students to smoke some pot or make out in winter but otherwise the car is alone, left in the street like an object. Seriously.

– Thoughts

With everybody in cars one thing really cool is that sidewalks are empty. It’s great to walk with no one interfering your path. It never happens in Paris.

LA should have something like Velib and an extended public transport system. The city is lucky enough to provide the best weather ever to bike all year long. If it was easier to move from a side to another one (tons of buses, but for the metro..) cars would be less useful unless you have to carry a bass amp or something. Nobody likes to be stuck in traffic. Everyone hates parking hunting. Public transportation allows you to safely tweet, read, dance and not care about these things. I mean how great is that? How can you be against that?

Next comparative subject, probably services.

Audio&Games

It stinks

I fell.

Steam got me. Steam is awesome (I don’t get that people are afraid of this platform while they use iTunes and don’t see the problem with it). With the release of Left 4 Dead 2, I ended up playing the games I bought and didn’t play like Half Life Episode One and Two. Pretty great. Of course I’ve downloaded L4D 2 Demo and of course now I want and I am waiting for the L4D/L4D2 pack at 39$.

About Episode 2: crazy how npc like Alyx are emotionally bringing something while I totally didn’t care about the story. It’s boring. Aliens. Portal. Rescuing whatever.

Also enough with these corridors, especially when they look like intestine. It’s boring, it’s not really scary it’s just gross. I don’t like having the feeling I’m running into a giant sphincter. you find it funny? Okay..

The part outside with the car and the Striders is great though. But the last part when you can’t run with the gravity gun and some bomb you have to throw while you have like, 7 weapons including a rocket launcher is just plain annoying. I know it’s for balancing the gameplay but it’s not logical at all. Against Striders you really want to run.

Nothing like a gameplay flaw to put you out of the immersiveness.

Alyx Vance, hacker, scientist daughter, chatterbox

On the other side L4D 2 is making sense. Not a lot of weapons, only two to carry and tough choices (long distance riffle with a fried pan or shotgun and unlimited gun?). The AI Director is great. I don’t know how many run I did but they were all feeling different and that’s pretty much the point of it. It works, even on a solo game offline, even if the level design is quite linear.

But still, it’s classic fps. Watching cutscenes in HL2 I could not help but think about some fps with HUMOR! Why do we have to get this seriousness in this type of games I don’t understand. I want to laugh and move my mouse to look at the sky before having some action, not listening to a discussion trying to be mildy amusing in a dark corridor, waiting for the next dark mission in an alien belly (or worse, a missile silo).

Modern Warfare 2 is out and it’s the biggest game launch of the year. I watched a lot of footage and the fact it’s connected to wars from now with this uber realistic aesthetic makes me feel I don’t like it. Not funny at all.

And this is it, I feel fatigue: last week headlines were about Zynga –Farmville, Mafia Wars, YoVille!- using scam practices to get revenue.

Also this inner interview of Keita Takahashi at Gamasutra:

“There are two main reasons for it, I think. Firstly, I‘m just frustrated with the industry as a whole. I can’t seem to predict where it’s going, which makes me feel uncomfortable," he says. "Or maybe I just don’t like where I think it’s going. I’m not sure."
"That’s probably related to my second frustration. I just can’t perceive where the fun is in recent hit video games. I see nothing in them that resonates with me and, their success leaves me feeling confused. The things I find interesting and enjoyable just aren’t reflected in the popular games of today and, I feel like there’s not much room for my voice because of that.”

I sort of feel the same way, even if I’m enjoying a good fps. I feel I could be addicted as a user. I could be addicted to some Facebook scam games easily too.

But as a developer I don’t think it’s great. It’s complex but I feel what Keita means, especially with games like music games or something as bad looking as the last Tony Hawk game. On the indy side, I feel fed up with the retro 8bit aesthetic, or platform games.

So the game market either seems like it’s not fun or it seems like you have to dig the addictiveness, especially with leaderboards and online rankings. Like this report said free-to-play game developers are using the social weaknesses –like peer pressure- to gain audience and money.

It’s not that it’s shocking in itself. It’s more like we’re basically doing the same shit that casinos and pachinko machines are doing for decades.

This is not good. It’s a sign that we’re totally in the mainstream though. But fuck, I don’t want computer games to go this way. I mean, not THAT much. And when I see EA rushing for this business instead of doing costly AAA, it’s not a good sign (they said that they would invest on quality and innovation; no more the case I guess).

I hope you guys at Project Horseshoe found some hope. Please share it!

Me Myself&I

Back to Siberia

I’m stressed out. Some big decisions to make, important things not coming on time and a little low on money (though it’s always good to see that 100$ is “only” 67€). California sun is smoothing everything but still.

I feel the biggest point of this stress is the difference between real life and the virtual one. Hell sometimes I complained that it takes a couple of minutes to share to the world a picture while finishing a track or finishing a game takes days, months, years. Moving very important digital stuff takes a second and is free, moving very important furniture takes ages and costs a kidney.

The differential is huge. Internet makes me go anywhere I want in the world without a visa for as long as my computer is on. In real life it’s so not the case even if at some point of civilization, we eventually will be as free to move as we are on the web.

But it’s slow and hard. Or Internet is too fast and too easy, I don’t know.

Anyway, I have to go back in France at the end of the month. Needless to say it’s a fucking pain in my ass. Needless to say, I don’t like it.

Bye Eggs Benedict and Granola..

It’s temporary of course. Also I don’t blog a lot because I’m playing like crazy. More in the next post.

Me Myself&I

4 tech things that changed my life

Post author By harold
Post date November 1, 2009

Widescreen

Open wide

“According to manufacturer NEC: "The vision of humans naturally moves horizontally rather than vertically, and ergonomics experts have recommended a broad format for a long time. In a professional setting, the use of large screens better facilitates execution of the tasks on the screen and thus contributes to increased productivity."

Couldn’t say it better. From the first 16:10 laptops to big wide screens for desk or TV, this aspect ratio is just a drug for me. I had a good CRT 4:3 19” monitor but I felt constricted. Doing sound and having a timeline in all my apps made me want to have a landscape setting and much more room which means much less scrolling. I can now stare at my 24” widescreen 12hours a day when with a 4:3 I could not (also the LCD technology is easier for the eyes). So it’s better for work, it’s better for movies, it’s better for games and everything. It took so long. Now you can buy a good 24” widescreen for less than 200 bucks.

A mechanical fragile piece of hardware on the left, static realm on the right.

The Solid State Drive. Once again it’s a lot for work purpose that I bought one two years ago and I was blown away. The HDD has three major issues: it makes noise, it heats and the more the disk is full, the more performance is going down. I had a Fujitsu 15K SCSI HDD and it was ok but the SSD just kills it in every way.

You launch a window, it’s instantaneous. You install/uninstall an app, it’s fast as hell. You launch Photoshop in 4 seconds etc It doesn’t heat at all, it’s totally noiseless and even full at 99%, performance are exactly like if the SSD was empty. So for your system –because to stock music and medias hard drives are way cheaper and efficient- I highly recommend them. I guess with a 64bits OS, a lot of RAM and one of the last SSD available, you’re not gonna wait often in front of your computer.

A vacuum cleaner on the left, a monolith on the right.

This is the biggest change I have encounter in all my computer life. You launch YouTube in HD, or any media player made with Flash and fans are kicking, blowing. You launch an app, fans are blowing. You launch a heavy javascript website, fans are blowing. It’s just a terrible experience but we are so used to it we don’t pay attention to it.

Until you experience a total free noise use of a computer.

Everything I do on it doesn’t make any noise at all. No low fan blowing, no water pump, not even an electrical buzz or something, just no-thing. Scary as hell at first, so used to monitor computers with sounds. I have no longer this survival aural need, I don’t have to mentally kill the noise and my ears, my focus are enjoying that so hard. The only thing is that it adds heat to the room, in a good way though (passive convection). In LA it’s not very useful but in a colder environment, this hidden heater function is pretty great.

Main problem is very few people had the opportunity to experience that but when you do, without compromise on performance ( I have a desktop dual core, and I can go quad core) you just can’t go back. When I hear the G5 of my girlfriend screaming, or my laptop vacuuming it annoys me a lot because I know the effect of noise on the brain: fatigue, irritation. IT people know that very well.

I wish I could invest into or create a company around totally noiseless computer tech. Seriously it’s just teh awesome.

Netbook

And I wash my hands as much as possible.. We need washable keyboards.

I use and used it everywhere. Equipped with a ssd, it’s just the most reliable piece of tech I’ve ever owned. I poured a big glass of sake on it while using it, screen and sound stopped. The alcohol was dripping out of the RJ45 port. Made it dry under the sun a whole day and Windows restarted perfectly. It would be dead if I had a mechanical hard drive. I made it fall a couple of times, still here.

I like to type on it because my hands are more curved and my wrists love it. The only problem is that for the one I have, the screen is not very good (no LED backlit). Also it’s hard to switch keyboards size (from netbook to laptop to full keyboard). But like the ~~last phones~~ pocket computers, this piece of hardware allowing me to get the hell out of a desk without compromising my computer addiction, has changed my lifestyle. I’m currently editing this blog post laying down in bed.

I love when technology is affordable and makes the life easier.