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Me Myself&I Music

Are You?

Kind of a I don’t give a shit track, just bop that head. Full throttle until the scorching solo done in one shot, one take. The first keyboard solo I’m proud of!

Next track might be some light, spring-ish jazzy and sweet house music… Love,

Categories
Audio&Games

Oculusbook

Well, that made the headlines.

Money and roadmap wise, it makes sense. For so many other reasons, it’s super weird. Worrisome? We can only speculate.

Classic game developer paradox: Be angry at capitalism buying your favorite technology out but adore Nintendo, a capitalism champion. Anyway.

I’m more concerned about VR in itself, seen by a big part of the industry as the savior of the “videogame bastion”, where players get lost and forget about the real world. The Real Escapism.

To me, not including audio as part of the built-in experience is already a big design flaw (that they can now solve, thanks $$). But I have a bigger concern about Escapism. I think we need less of that, instead of more.

I feel like I want way more people playing on 7” to 70” tablets than having them plug VR sets. I feel like there’s still so much to do and bring to people before going nuts for something I have been dreaming of ever since the start of those helmets back in the early 90s. It’s not because I dreamed of how cool it could be that “it has to happen”. In today’s society, already battling a terrible plague of people incapable of not looking at their phones while talking to you, I think VR can wait a bit.

I want 2D. I want sharing. Collaboration, fair competition. Neat games, software, local services etc. I still want to empower people more than making them my bitch, my ultimate bitch with VR. VR is so far away in my head.

I want less excitement. I want people to chill. I want people to enjoy stuff, games, your game, my sound design, on devices that did not even exist a decade ago.

So much work to do. VR can wait.

Categories
Me Myself&I

On your own

Very long and interesting interview of  Sophia Amoruso, CEO of Nasty Gal on YT. If you don’t have the time, Wikipedia.

The down to earth, I do everything I can approach talks to me. Like Morten says it’s simple, not easy.

I really wonder how that plays out in the world of fashion, not necessarily the most pragmatic field but I guess they’re doing all right.

I’m about 45% in getting my attic clean and ready for insulation. I’ll soon have done on my own a couple thousands of euros/dollars/crypto next thingy worth of work.

At first you cringe at that mountain of shit you have to deal with but then you don’t own nothing in any way to anyone and that is a pretty comfortable feeling. It’s also lonely and a much bigger scale like a thriving business doesn’t change that, as Sophia points out. Not that I didn’t know, it just validates and ticks another box in my mind.

I never know when to reach for help, maybe that’s a side effect of fierce independence and strong patience. Isn’t a bit poisonous at some point? I always feel like mating with the wrong people doesn’t yield better results and, you lose time, the most precious currency available to us humans.

Why is that always about balance? It’s ridiculous. Oh and focus. Right.

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Me Myself&I Music

Beat N62

Experimenting. Exposing my feelings, quite confused I guess. Love,

Categories
Me Myself&I

GDC 14

I still can’t believe how efficient game development made me. When I freelance for some other stuff, I’m blown away by the habits, the use of technology on top of older technology which makes everything go slower and so much more terrible things, still haunting me the next day.

Most people wouldn’t be able to ship a game, ever.

It’s weird how I want to be proud of those skills learned building games and at the same time when I see what gamedev peeps mostly look forward to –MGS5, better pixel art lightning whatevs, VR, nostalgia- I’m not going to brag about being part of that community, too manchild-ish.

And I love them, gamedev folks are hard-working, problem-solving angels. Culturally though, game development still smells like a sweaty man cave and it just stinks, son.

Fourteen years of that smell. It was kind of fun when I was 20, but now I feel like a weirdo who decided to grow up when everybody else is complacent about what game culture is today. Baby steps here and there, we’ll see how it goes.

Categories
Me Myself&I

Foster Care and biological BS

Great article, Priceonomics..

Foster care, they say, is a temporary solution until the children’s biological parents can take care of them once again.

That is some horseshit. It’s so ridiculously out of this world to think that biological parents are the Holy Grail. They are not, so many kids growing up with their biological parents can tell you that sometimes, and more often than we’d love to they are the worst shit possible to your upbringing. So no, they are not/shouldn’t be a goal at all cost that’s disregarding Life.

Let’s be real.

Also because I have a couple of cases around me these days but seriously, what biological means when you learn that your dad isn’t your biological dad even though you thought he was all your life? That’s right: biological, DNA-bonded connection doesn’t mean anything and you people who haven’t been adopted and had nice childhoods, you agree on this while totally hoping it’s untrue. Others wish it wasn’t true.

Sorry, it is true.

By biological parents are the best, you mean stability. But stability is not a synonym of biological parents. Stability comes from people who care about you, the social system around you. You can be raised by a foster family, an adoptive family, wolves or even pigeons and be happy as long as you get a healthy, stable environment that provides what is needed. Nothing biological in this bitch.

This has led to the perception that foster families are in it for the money.

So? Firemen are getting paid to rescue people, how fucking gross. How could they do that? If you rescue people, how could you get money from that? Aren’t you supposed to live on God’s love? (I just puked in my mouth a little)

Sometimes America, you are pretty weird: everybody is trying to make it, that’s a constant for all of us. My foster mom that I went to visit last weekend, in part did this for money. She was a nanny, she enrolled as a foster mom to make more money, knowing that she was good at doing her job and I would give her a 5/5 for the care she provided. Even if she made a small profit on me –I’m pretty sure she hasn’t- I’m like, “good for you! Thanks for saving my ass too!”.

People have little brains with tiny ranges and small hearts.

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Me Myself&I

77

It was her birthday last weekend so I brought her that picture that she didn’t know of. It’s a cool one, August 15th 2009. It’s hot as hell and I’m about to leave for California a third time, this time for months man! I’m happy, they are too because he’s in cancer remission.

Maybe a black frame wasn’t the best idea when all of the others are gold but somehow, I like it. It makes it a little special, as our relationship is/was. It feels like I welded it and that now I can move on.

It breaks my heart to leave every time even though I need to be far to be myself. Her voice man. There’s no older human sound in my head and that kind of says it all. Happy 77, young lady.

Next time I see you might be the last time before a long time.

Categories
Me Myself&I Music

Beat N33

I like to name them with a number. Instrumental here. Love,

Categories
Me Myself&I

Orange Prison Break

Watched Orange Is The New Black season 1 again. Such a great show.

I’m sad that I find a bunch of female characters so exciting when female characters shouldn’t be a thing, right? Well I’m happy too though. It’s so refreshing after Breaking Bad, damn. The cast, the characters it’s just kind of perfect and rich as hell.

The prison theme, yep. Because we all are in one, aren’t we. My prison? I don’t know. Not living with any black person ever for 34 years as a black dude? That’s kind of a prison. A tough one. That’s like my SHU.


Oh I feel you girl you don’t even know.

Not being able to speak English but having to write it on the internet while I have to speak in French? Prison. Not sharing with anyone what’s like to live half a year in a country and the other in another one? Prison. For privileged people but still, I feel alone and it fucks my mind up. I don’t recommend that situation. Game audio? Kind of another one (seen recently: a game company having all the jobs listed on their website but the game audio designer one, posted somewhere else like game audio is totally something different).

I guess any hardship that isn’t shared with people around you feels like prison at some point. Of course, even more so when it’s not shared with loved ones.

Like the show demonstrates though, people outside of your prison don’t give a damn about your prison.

Surviving here is all about perspective.

Categories
Audio&Games

Gimme yo tool

It’s a nice post on game audio tools.

I’ll go ahead and say that I agree to totally disagree with that.

To me it’s a huge loss when tools are lost. We are not at war. There is no war. We build things. I repeat, we build games and game audio. The better toolset we have, the better teams can make cool stuff. The more we can share our tools, the better. The web industry shows it to us all the freaking time: a nifty WordPress –which is an open cms engine, right- plugin? 15 people show up on the website to make it better.

250,000 websites will use that stuff. Some will pay for extra features some will get the basic version. That’s awesome. That’s how game development should be if we want to thrive because development is hard. Reinventing the wheel is such a waste of time, we don’t need to have another audio engine that fades in/out audio streams which is why news of Fmod and Wwise going free for small projects is awesome. We need(ed) game audio tool standards and those two do a great job.

Starting from scratch without looking around is a mistake. First, to think that it hasn’t been done perfectly before you is kind of a dick move. And second, it is just smart to use the best tools available out there! It’s about creativity, not about how your tool looks like, how many files it can handle or how low you can get that CPU meter while manipulating complex reverb settings for a 3D room. Fmod designer has never been perfect but hell, how awesome it is to type a couple of lines of code, to have a sound designer doing his thing and tada, it works as best as it could while the focus on sound design aesthetic is maximum. I like it. I like it a lot. I like like it.

It’s very weird to me how game audio tries so hard to look “tech” as if we were jealous of 3D and its shaders. The microphone, that very simple and elegant technology mostly hasn’t evolved since its inception. It works perfectly, shitty ass electret mics can do miracles. Y’all know that any under $200 netbook can play 24bit/192KHz? Audio tech is awesomely low profile but we act like we have problems when we don’t. We have massive power. We lack smart tools.

A lot of games don’t have hundreds of sounds (outside voiceover). Hotline Miami has a very memorable game audio that doesn’t rely on HDR, 3D audio or 7.1 output. The need for game audio tools is not in the “more tech, more complexity” but in the “we should rethink the way it works today, was there a tool solving that?”. We don’t do that enough.

When we lose knowledge, tools, problems-which-were-solved-but-not-anymore-because-the-tool-is-dead, that’s bad for us. iMUSE did things that we can’t do with audio engines 15, 20 years later. That’s extremely bad for us. We feel the lack of audio flexibility in AAA games. We feel the weight of audio streams in mobile and mid-sized games.

I’ll go ahead and ask developers to release their audio tools, regardless. For The Love Of The Game, Yo. Let’s share and innovate.