Categories
Me Myself&I

Dustcore

Well I still have two fireplaces to dismantle but, the big dirty cleaning of the attic is mostly done.

Dust, man. Dust is tiring. At first you really don’t care but after five hours you just need to lie down uncomfortably with water running down your nose. Good thing it’s over.

All the trash has to go somewhere though and I have almost 40 bags of that. It’s complicated to get rid of that stuff, you either have to show 3 IDs at the same name –I get screwed on the car one- to drop it off in a waste bin, where thrash is filtered out and you pay if it’s not done before and I didn’t do it because it’s fucking trash.

It’s crazy how complex things became in 30 years sometimes. Before, you could just drive to any dumpster and drop your stuff in, the end. Now I have to get my bags one by one from the attic, three times a week and make my neighbors hate me for filling up the main trash bin. All of that to get rid of stuff from someone who lived here back in the 50s, THANKS BUT NO THANKS MAN.

I’m going to be so in shape back in LA, I might become an action movie star/governor/Austrian wait no but uh, I’m hungry.

Categories
Me Myself&I

Patterns and communities

I realize that the most efficient, stable, future-proof, private and fair protocol is peer to peer. Bitcoin, Bittorrent, Tor but also B2C or eCommerce. The more direct the connection is, the better. The more atomic, the more flexible, the stronger. The less spectacular too.

I always wonder why that P2P pattern doesn’t  stick well despite all its qualities and I think it’s because of communities’ attractiveness. Communities create interest, hierarchy, friction and ultimately war against other communities. It doesn’t matter how the community has been created, would it be to genuinely make things better. At some point, that community will annoy people out of it, people in another community or people inside that community who are a bit different. It’s just a matter of time. Meanwhile, individuals, us, are suddenly made invisible and irrelevant.

It’s everywhere, we see it all the time from Crimea to Mozilla. It’s a really weird problem. If history tells us that communities are poisonous, why people still bother building them then? Habits. I think it’s a thing of the past, even though we are passing debt from countries to countries today we still socialize at a tribe level. Also, greed: communities become that really efficient machine that takes control over individuals and sucks everything –time, energy, money- out of you and makes a giggling minority abusing its power in some way, at some point, always. Power is exciting and then you get drunk on it.

In a P2P system that can’t really happen it’s all about fairness, trust and peace. It’s boring, but it’s stable as fuck.

Why stability would be important? Well that’s how the universe gave us the Earth, through stability. This is how humans made insane progress in the last 60 years, through stability. This is how you raise a family at best, through a stable life. It’s a beautiful constant in this world.

We humans should stabilize our shit more. It’s boring, but someone has to do it. We’ll have fun after that. Loads.

Categories
Me Myself&I

The classic sex talk blog post that ends up with Bonobos

My biggest problem with all the discussion around sex work and porn is not how it makes some people survive, some people live, some people happy. It’s like, “cool story, hoe.” (I HAD to do it, only five years that I’m writing English)

My biggest problem is that sex work and porn are so ridiculously aimed toward men’s really dumb sex culture that it inherently cannot be something good for women, as we can witness: look out for sex discussions online today and you will see young women finding masturbation –touching your own body- disgusting while they think they should have anal sex to have “real sex without problems”.

I mean that’s fucking twisted, people. That needs to stop. It’s damn confusing for them too.

See, women even the horniest ones are not avidly collecting DVDs full of big dicks and if they do, they don’t brag about it. Women don’t argue to have the ability, the right to pay for sex. They mostly don’t do that, only men. Not all men, just some of us.

So why the fuck would we shape ALL laws and ALL markets for those guys? That’s ridiculous.

It’s the same pattern with porn business: fine, porn, fetish, hardcore sex, no biggie. These are performers, nothing good or bad. But why is that always so awful with a focus on what I guess old white dudes in control of that industry think is turning people on? Why the nails, why the heels, why the gross dudes (“they come across as unappealingly gymmish and overdone: shiny, smooth bodies annelid with veins, and usually something slightly Lou Ferrigno about their faces.”, says Julieanne, very accurately) why the socks, why the you-are-so-not-on-target-sir cunnilingus and the so sad because mandatory money shot. Why virtually all of my dude friends got a finger in their butt and liked it but SHHHH it virtually doesn’t exist in porn? Why the kid-like pussies? I want some real, prominent vulvas in my face because they scream womanhood and make me uncomfortable that is, hot. Anyway today’s porn standards are very, very, disappointing. Still. It’s a damn shame.

We focus so much the sex work/porn star talk on rights, it’s not about rights of doing whatever you want with your body, I think you guys are totally doing it. It’s about the actual impact of decades of a pretty vile culture out there, which is far from good. It’s not the lauded acts: it’s the terrible, doesn’t-want-to-die porn design. I believe that men have most of the heavy, sex culture lifting to do and rearrange that mess, which is why we don’t do shit (hey, we’re men!). Of course none of the people making money out of sex will care about the culture they are fostering, nothing personal it’s business and if you young motherfuckers think it’s real life well you’re dumb! People are more capitalist than capitalism itself.

The thing is, there are a lot of not so bright people and I don’t think they deserve to be manipulated, from young folks growing up today confused by our own taboos, lies and double standards toward sex to women who “choose” to do something pretty hardcore out of necessity or lack of choice. Saying “but this is how it works” is usually something said by someone out of the problem or profiting the issue.

I don’t think people should get paid to get on their knees and suck genitals, but I don’t think we should pay people to clean up our toilet bowls either. I know it happens, I applaud people’s courage to do those jobs (no, for real) but I ultimately think that people should fuck a lot more (endorphins), for free (FREE ENDORPHINS), and that toilet bowls should have built-in robots.

But this way I just killed very lucrative businesses and if I could do that in a heartbeat in real life, a hit man would be standing in front of me right now, ready to complete the mission.

If only we could live like Bonobos “Hi, is there a problem?” *goes down on you* we wouldn’t need none of that trade shit. That would be swell, wouldn’t it?

Disclaimer: working sporadically on an erotic game prototype for the past four years, I still do extensive reading and research on sex.

Categories
Audio&Games

Game jams are about games

So that was the big story yesterday: Inside the disintegration of a game jam reality show. It’s always great to see integrity.

But to me there’s still a notion that game jams are something you want to show to the world. Zoe Quinn gives us her wishes:

Capture the inspiration, the hard work, the 3am delirium and the dumb jokes that come with it. Show people how we all band together and support each other through the deadline. That’s what I want to show the world about game jams.

I think we have to face the fact that this is not sexy or interesting to most people. It’s awesome when you’re doing it, not watching it. Game development like most building processes is not something you want to show people THAT much: it’s messy, it smells like sweat and pizza more often than not, it’s hard, it’s tedious, it’s slow, it’s nerve wrecking. Did I mention that it was hard? You are a pile of useless shit after a game jam. Really useless.

I mean even with elegant and “artsy” medium like music or movies we don’t care so much about behind the scenes. Culturally, people know that it’s messy and thus are not very interested in the making of, which is why behind the scenes stuff are usually hidden promotional tools. People want to play guitar not because they know Jimi played that part 23 times before having the good one, but because listening to that song make people want to learn guitar.

Documenting how gamedev works is great but that will not trigger a wave of thirsty young folks to join in. Nerds are already toying with code and games and others will be like, ew.

What I would love to see is an app store like distribution of those jam games. If I could install/uninstall in one click and run all the games, share them easily regardless of your platform of course, that would be amazing. I’m sure there are some unheard of gems from the hundreds of games made during jams on top of which people could expand.

I want edgy, unethical, indecent –indie-scent, yes I’m sorry- games in game jams, that’s what I wish we were focusing on more than the community aspect. I want individuals more than tribes. I want games more than jams.

Because ultimately, people and their games will make other people make games.