Categories
Me Myself&I

23 and h.

Spit in it.
Weird to think that there’s so much information in saliva.

I think I’m scared. Here I have this 23andme DNA kit ready to go. This DNA kit would give me answers about predisposition to disease and also where I come from, pretty exactly.

32 years later and finally, I have the opportunity. But I’m right in the middle tendency I-don’t-want-to-know right now.

For disease we’re now pretty sure that genetics play a small role in the life of an individual compared to his/her environment which tells much more, as Dr House knows it.

And for knowing from where I come from… I’m scared it’s going to change me. Not knowing this fact was the first playground for my imagination when I was a kid. Where do I come from… Awesome I can be whatever I want! Let’s say my grand grand grand-father was a pharaoh and then my mom was from the US OK? Or maybe an alien, a black Super Saiyan. Yeah sounded good.

I’m scared the results would give me a sense of affiliation that is just not relevant to my life. From the beginning until now I feel that this reduced sense of affiliation gave me an advantage, I get to see the big picture much faster and clearer.

Let’s take an example with a situation where people feel a need for affiliation: 9/11. Now across the world, some people said it was horrible and some people felt that it was right. Some people created conspiracy theories and some others, like me, are like “this shit is not so tight”. There’s no feeling, just no definitive answer.  Now if I was affiliated to a part of this world let’s say, Egypt or Tunisia, that would probably make my blood turn differently and affect my thoughts.

Another example, when I was a kid and would receive a French ”son of whore” insult. In my mind it was like “well, it’s technically totally possible that it is the case”. I was already “above” these primitive concepts of insults, it very soon in my life felt like afraid puppies barking at me or each others. Directly in the position of looking at a system instead of being involved in it. The big picture. Often in my face.

It’s great to be “out” of this sense of affiliation, by design. It’s great to not be like well, most of you. Now I need to exploit that shit.

Categories
Me Myself&I

Six month with a Windows Phone

Six months that I use it daily for various tasks. I have now enjoyed the market, bought apps, bought games, played with more services etc.


299 bucks unlocked on Amazon. 

What to say? It’s a fantastic product. The phone, a Samsung Omnia 7 is flawless. I made it fall on a brick ground so I fucked up a corner but everything works fine. Only rebooted it after updates so yes, the OS is stable.

+ + +

-The dedicated camera button is more than great. Weirdly, kind of a game changer.

-The Metro UI. Not only in itself -sleek, fast- but because it becomes truly, deeply personal. I take pictures on vacation, people change their pictures on their Facebook and all that gets alive on the tiles of the home screen. The more you have content, the more it feels personal. The picture hub is mesmerizing -it shows up random pictures you took on the home screen-, it’s simple but absolutely perfect in terms of experience because it’s automatic customization. I never felt that kind of engagement with a device before. It’s like after a while, the UI sweats you.

-The back button: once you get the back button (it works as a browser back button and not like back buttons on Android/iOS), it is a joy to use it. Imagine you’re in the middle of a deep research in your Ebay app. You push the home button, go to your email, answer something. Instead of going back to the home screen, re-launch the app, retrieve your search you instead just tap the back button twice and you’re back to your search in Ebay. No multitasking sucking your battery like a vampire and yet, fast, fluid app switching. Can’t go back -haha- after tasting it.

-The battery life: extremely good, the best I have ever seen on a smartphone with a huge screen. Every time I think it’s going to die it keeps up for quite a while. Sweet.

-The marketplace is better than I expected it would be. All the standard apps are here and the overall quality is I would say between the iPhone and Android but closer to the iPhone. Prices are higher (3 bucks instead of 1 for example) which is a bit annoying for users, but a great deal for developers. For now it drives quality up and creates a better relationship than the race to the bottom and bad schemes low prices apps are allowing.

– – –

The marketplace weird region lock: you sign up on the phone with a hotmail address and mine is US, hotmail.com but my credit card is French: can’t buy anything. I can get all the free stuff and trials. I know it’s a relatively not common problem but that’s just lame. Totally fixed.

-The marketplace confusing mess outside the phone. You have zune.net, marketplace.windowsphone.com and xbox.com, three websites with different names for three different things: music and videos, apps and games with ID identification through hotmail or live.com. Let me tell you: unify the fuck out of this shit! It is fluid on the phone, but it’s awful on the internet (different UIs, emails from zune/xbox/hotmail etc).

Despite a great service in the US, Zune is a dead brand and a lame sounding word, sorry. Xbox is a strong hardcore gamer-related brand and you can’t change that, especially with this word, Xbox. So I would use a live.com/music live.com/apps and live.com/games, one account, one interface. Even better, offering people to only use Facebook to connect to all that because the Live website interface is horrendous. You have to make it much more cleaner and simpler. Which leads me to…

-Skydrive. Great service but god, please make it cleaner and simpler, drag and drop from the homepage, a right click menu or even a special command to send files automatically from Windows, I don’t know. Also why calling the desktop app “Live Mesh”? Brand/service: Skydrive. Download Skydrive for Windows Desktop (built-in for Windows Phone), is that difficult? Is that hard? Geez. It’s depressing to see such embarrassing mistakes in terms of marketing and usability when on the phone it’s so sumptuous. I guess and hope changes are coming.

-No built-in screen capture tool. Again, how is that possible to miss a small feature that people love to use. /facepalm Is it to save battery life (no background task)? Sometimes I wonder because the excellent battery life has to be paid somewhere.

-Lazy developers who try to make a quick buck with lame ass apps. Come on, son.

-I wish you guys in Redmond would buy Flickr and integrate it so that pictures are taken and sent there without any sort of effort. Or at least please make their app because though it’s beautiful, it sucks quite a bit (weird UX, weird crashes).

That’s about it. The next phone update, said to bring in 500 new features is about to land next month. Yes. YESyesyesyesyes…

Categories
Me Myself&I

Computer Ecosystem

A lot is going on these days about ecosystems and I think the dream of One Ecosystem to Rule Them All aka The American Matrix Dream will not really happen.

Two Worlds

Technologically, we need both hardware and software. The more both can communicate and work together reliably, the better. The more consistent they are, the better. So it makes sense for a lot of analysts to say that the company who has the hand on both can provide the greatest experience and thus, the biggest success. Right.

The equation

Problem is, hardware is made in Asia, software is made in the West. This is a crucial point. Nobody can really compete with Asia’s 30 years of experience building computers, motherboards, graphic cards, monitors etc. We can’t, just on a worker salary basis. It’s pretty much the opposite for software with the West having a huge advantage and experience since Palo Alto and the Silicon Valley. Despite the availability of a robust open source OS, nobody in Asia really conquered the world with its software (except for Nintendo, who does hardware too). But they are listening, trying, testing (HTC Sense). And when a company like Apple ask Asia to build beautiful devices, Asia learns, copies and does it more and more precisely  (Samsung’s laptops and lawsuit for their successful Galaxy Tab) and innovates too (Asus netbooks, EEE Pad).

It’s a fascinating relationship where I believe the separation will stay this way: It will take a long time before Asian job cost equals the West one so that a Western company can really invest the hardware department and it will take a long time before Asia figures out how the West works in front of a monitor (massive culture shift there, very clear when comparing Western/Japanese game developers and their creations). Everybody needs everybody.

Therefore the scenario of a  few companies having control over their own hardware/software ecosystems, vertically, seems unlikely. There are way too many players in the game and the patent mess will maintain a very slow progress.

The past

Every single closed architecture, super great closed ecosystem controlled by one company died, but one (resurrected through the music lie of “being fair” with artists via iPod/iTunes back in 2003). Technology follows Darwin’s law: the one who can adapt faster and more than the others wins. Apple is a good case as the once really closed company had to switch to Intel and make iTunes available on Windows to touch more people and more than just survive, make an insane profit and be the company we know today. It’s not just about innovation, there’s a fine balance to find between design and business model.

So an ecosystem controlled by one company either die through the complexity or overhead of two distinct businesses in one (hard/soft), or subtly, massively change. That fact plus the Western-software/Asia-hardware separation makes sure that ecosystems can only work through multiple companies and partners through multiple countries at huge scales (I’m talking about the half a billion computer/phones sold every year, not the 28 million iPad or 100 million Wii sold to this day). At smaller scales, it’s a double-edged sword: When it works, it’s awesome (Wii) but when it doesn’t, hardware makes it hard to be flexible (what to do with the 3DS now?). At bigger scales it becomes very risky.

The future

I think we’ll see hardware manufacturers offering full hardware ecosystems (cloud@home+sensors+monitors+sound bars+tablets+phones) like Ikea is selling full kitchen and then you will have the usual players for the full software ecosystem part: Microsoft, Google and always Linux, which will probably get more stronger as generations of computer wizards will emerge. And when Asia will be capable of producing software for the entire world, the West will probably be able to produce hardware too. We’ll then see what happens. A new loop in our history.

At the end what really counts is the software, which runs the world.

Meanwhile, Steve Jobs just resigned as CEO of Apple. Interesting.

Categories
Music

Why I don’t want to pay for a mp3

The CD was supposed to bring album prices way lower than vinyl ones. One of the main point of the introduction of this new support wasn’t just that the sound quality was superior or that it was more practical to skip songs. The CD was supposed to answer the high production cost of the vinyl that was making music expensive.

But they fucked us. Maybe because people were so psyched about CDs, they believed that it was a high end product (though CD players were not that expensive in the 90s). The music industry certainly played on that, making the CD a weird combination of luxury and convenience (all CD players are pretty much producing the exact same sound compared to vinyl). They just didn’t reflect the price cut the technological innovation brought. Actually albums were more expensive on CD than on vinyl. And it didn’t change over time, my first new CD I bought was 21 euros in 1993/94, in 2003 it was 23 euros for a new release and still an average price of 20 bucks today, when the optical support cost is trivial.

The greedy bastards from the RIAA enjoyed the 90s, the decade where they became insanely rich by not only screwing artists over but also consumers and music lovers. They profited this for years as we didn’t know and didn’t have the choice to buy music. After the all Napsternet affair, it was over.

They panicked, sued listeners, discovered singers on YouTube, competed and killed indies.

Today despite true freedom for a lot of artists, the market is a mess.


Scary

For an artist the more convenient it is to access people with your music, the less you make money! How is that?? Today a solo artist needs 143 self-pressed CDs a month @ 9.99 to make the US monthly minimum wage. Or for the same $1,160, about 4,549,020 plays per month on Spotify. That’s quite a lot of work to barely live. During that time Lady Gaga sells a full LP for a dollar on Amazon. How can you compete with your EP-sans-marketing at 5 bucks?

So not only they ruin people’s lives for a few downloads on the internet, not only they screwed so many artists for decades it’s just impossible to track how deep and how far they went (which big artist doesn’t have a history of problems with labels and contracts), but now they also sell music at a price where an indie musician just can’t compete because they’re flooding the market and eyeballs.

I swear, I don’t see why I would give these people money through Amazon/iTunes etc. It sickens me to know that if I buy a Billy Preston’s track  the money goes where it shouldn’t, to some rich ass executive somewhere on the RIAA planet. It’s just wrong. They are sharks, there’s no way for me now to buy any kind of music online when it’s RIAA-approved. They will not receive my money for a god damn mp3 file. Fuck that.

Categories
Me Myself&I

What tablets need

CPU wars, 1080p features and Display-Lightning 9000 ports, whatever. Tablets fail on one major point: our human interface heritage.

READING

One of the very best and natural use of a tablet is to read something. On one hand it’s unreadable outside or not different from a laptop (iPad), on the other hand it’s B&W (Kindle). E Ink is awesome but just barely started to feature colors.

I’ll buy a tablet the day I can read Akira in Palm Springs without a problem. We’re a couple of years from this.

Book
Reading anything, anywhere. That’s the goal of the perfect tablet. 

WRITING

I can’t believe how device makers are slow at taking small risks and set trends (I would have pointed out how iPads are exactly for big fat baby fingers and play on that). Of course the stylus is awesome. Not in itself but because humans have wrists, absolute marvels of mechanics, and that we learned to use them to write, draw, sketch and so much more that in thousands of years of that diet we’re now pretty good at using them, especially with a stylus.


You don’t want to use all that precision? You crazy.

I’ve always been bad at drawing, being lefty and having my hand ruining nice attempts traumatized me. The problem would be solved with magic electronic ink. If we could sketch precisely, sync drawings, ideas, lyrics, in the cloud/send them anywhere from a friend phone around to social networks, that would be super neat and a great addition to our digital lifestyle. And what ideas and ways of communication young generations would come up with a device like that? An encrypted handwritten new language? Collaborative penis drawings? Who knows.

 

Now that’s interesting! An electronic device that makes me able to do two really human activities I can’t do with my laptop or my smart phone as well, a real value that I don’t see in what tablet makers offer today.

Forget about watching movies on them, we have computers and TVs. Forget about games, we have computers and phones. Forget about surfing the web, we have computers and phones. These are not selling points, these are lame ass selling points.

Give us something we CAN’T do properly with what we already have. Add VALUE. Create an eco-system of devices.

I think that the first manufacturer to nail the reading/writing aspect of tablets will have a huge player if not a winner in its hands. HTC is on a good path. (too small, no e ink, next!).

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Me Myself&I

Let the heat goes on

White Privilege Diary Series #1 – White Feminist Privilege in Organizations (via @Nick_Lalone)

More often, however, splits emerge along racial lines — the white women simply aren’t receptive to the core ideas put forward by the women of color.  Those ideas are "too expensive" in money, time or resources.  They’re outside the boundaries of "the purpose of the organization." The white women "don’t think they’ll work" or don’t feel they’re "fair." The donors might object. And so on. White rejection is usually passive aggressive, and resembles the Transactional Analysis game of "Yes, but…"  The women who attempt to bridge are shut down by both communities because the women of color feel that "it’s happening all over again," and the white women experience the list of proposals as some kind of "attack."

I feel that very much (2% of black people in the game industry for the win! Smallest minority in 2005, I don’t think it changed much). At so many levels did I make bridges and it’s a schizophrenic task to defuse white people’s feeling that I’m attacking their views while at the same time trying to push my ideas which are often different because of being a minority. I really like simple things and getting straight to the point so something like that feels like a necessary and complex chore that I’d love to make disappear.

The thing is that there’s no end to that. Once we’re all grown-up we can’t change our views, it’s too late. We hit a strong lack of malleability at some point in our life. Look at how old people today screw us all with no remorse. We are pressured, over-taxed and debt-ridden just to maintain a system that only profits our parents and grand-parents. Fucking selfish humans.

So yeah, I know the situation in interracial relationships will barely change during my lifetime as it’s not even going well in intergenerational relationships. Quite the opposite actually.

I should have been born in the future, I know.

(totally forgot to post this blog post.)

Categories
Audio&Games

Game design butthurt

It’s weird how it’s polarized: in one hand, mobile and social games succeeding at abusing players with psychological exploits, on the other hand AAA games that developers want to think as pieces of art that can’t be dissected on why they fail to make an impact.

Gamasutra’s huge philosophical article from last week generated 156 comments. Ian Bogost pretty much argues that to expand the medium, we should just do whatever we want in games, experiment etc. He somewhat opposes Raph Koster and Daniel Cook, who think that there are methods, systems, things that we can grab and tighten up in the game design process, leading to a road map to follow for success and long term viability.

Useless debate. Daniel and Raph are arguing that in the real world of making games for a living, you don’t go for single-player story-driven games because it’s extremely hard to do something good as it’s unnatural for games to be formatted this way and furthermore, people play more multiplayer games anywa. It’s in the blood of what games are. Ian argues that there shouldn’t be “a way” to make games. These statements are not mutually exclusive.

It’s just a matter of absolute or non-absolute and that annoys me a little bit because it’s debating for nothing. I think it pushes a lot of game developers out of design discussions, creating some kind of elitism that is not good for the game development community.

I feel more connected to Daniel and Raph stances. Gamasutra people are usually making a living, or trying to by making and designing games. Arguing that it’s totally fine to do what you want, like a huge single-player story-driven game is a very wrong message.

Again, if you don’t want to make a living, please do exactly what you want to do. I guess you can get any risk you want. But if you need to make some bucks, sustain yourself with your work, you will study markets, smell trends and try to minimize risks, at least a little bit. Multiplayer games with short play sessions etc. Today it seems to be the way to go. It doesn’t mean you want to exploit people. There are games out there which despite using “trends”, are respectful to players, like Realm of the Mad God.

Heavy Rain/Alan Wake are good examples of what is pretty much impossible today: being supported by a gigantic corporation like Sony or MS to do a game like these. These games failed at so many levels. High production value hiding game design shallowness. L.A. Noire is the last one in the series and didn’t do well. It doesn’t mean there’s no market or demand for that kind of games, it means for developers that it’s highly risky or suicidal to go this way. But I’m sure a lot more can be done with these story-driven games, starting by much better, stronger stories and characters (Heavy Rain’s Madison /o\).

Debating on the design front of what to do is really useless. We know we’re free to do whatever we want but we also want to kind of make money too, don’t we? Indies as big publishers (even more so, years of development to cover first).

And yet people get butt hurt with Raph’s views that single player games are doomed, despite having him explaining that he just looks around and doesn’t condemn or embrace the trend. They fear that he’s probably right so they say he’s almost insane.

People, just make your game and prove him wrong by making a single player game with as much impact socially and culturally than games like Go or WoW if you like challenges. I mean, it’s never been as opened as it is today to make games. I think Jon Blow might be able to pull a nice one off with The Witness.

It’s so tiring and exciting at the same time.

Categories
Me Myself&I

Searching

I’m listening. Watching, reading a lot about black people in the US. I’m sort of studying that stuff. Through documentaries, articles, Wikipedia, musician biographies –we are really over-represented in this area-, blogs, everything.

I said earlier this year that I was kind of loosing faith about the situation. Well I guess it didn’t change!

Look at today’s situation for a black dude on earth. Africa has been looted forever and now the continent is a terrible mess with wars, famines and poverty. Middle-east? Arabs and black people are not that much into a friendship. Asia doesn’t know black people  more than what the US are sending as cultural references, basketball players and rappers. For the rest, describing black people as monkeys is pretty OK for them and like everywhere, stupidly, the lighter the skin color, the better.

Australia? It’s considered as one of the most racist country in the world (if you’re white you don’t really notice that I guess). America Latina? Chile? Less than 1% of the population is Afro-Chilean. Argentina? 86.4% of the population self-identify as being of European descent. So yeah there are Black people in Brazil and it’s the country with one of the largest gaps in income distribution in the world with 10% (almost exclusively white) of the population earning 28 times the average income of the bottom 40% (mostly black). Oh, and there’s a trend that shows something; 1835 Brazil black population: 51.4% of the country. 2000: 6.2%.

So there’s Europe and Russia. Both are kind of cold in large parts though. South Europe is not that cool with black people. North Europe is not that cool with black people. France in the middle, has the largest European black population. Makes sense.

And then there are the US.

Let me sum it up: arrived as slaves in the South. Got free, moved to the North, got jobs. Got fired, moved to the West. Got jobs, houses, palm trees and still heavy, grinding segregation. Got fired again, sold crack. During all that time, every single movement trying to change black people’s lives for the better is a failure. Assassinations, murders, black leaders have it all, even the FBI is involved in some cases, like it’s totally OK. Hope’s dead. People are tired, they just want to be happy now, not start a revolution. The 70s/80s are the decades in which a few black stars are going to hide the truth to the world about black America’s actual state.

From there everything goes down, more jobs get axed thanks to technology and under-educated black people, money has to solve everything, start of the crack-cocaine. Black men flowing to prisons, being killed (12 cops spraying an unarmed drunk dude’s car with 100 bullets a few months ago). Generations of black kids growing up in this shit and bam, you have a 50 Cent or a Charles Cosby. This is where I understood the hustling thing. I got it. You have to get your ass out of that hell, you need money for it, you do whatever it takes to get that money. It’s simple, it’s about survival. Nothing personal. It just became cultural. During that time, after ten years of the more-than-white Bush (remember Katrina?), Obama is the new black star like the 70/80/90s ones (The Holy MJ’s). He’s a tree hiding a dead forest (statistics are too awful, I’ll let you wikipedia it).

And that is all one of the freest country in the world with multiple ethnicities from the start, has been able to pull off for black people: a promise that it’s going to suck. It’s like being a lefty! Through history, all across the world it’s never been a good thing to be one, in practice or culturally.

I happened to be both. I’m pretty sane for someone conscious of all that. Or maybe it’s killing me softly.