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Me Myself&I

X-chills

I watched an episode last month you know, one of those that you vaguely remember about and it makes you giggle because nostalgia’s showing up in your brain.

It’s so slow. That show is so slow. It reminded me that that was the great thing about it, those episodes felt like full movies.

In the 90s we were chilling, man. 2000 was coming, the future was probably going to be exciting. It is and it’s also weird because we lost the ability to chill for real. Take your time, enjoy it.

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Audio&Games

IGF changes

Helvetica’s proposal about the IGF. I love it. I love the fact that this way we don’t dissect games through weird lenses. Like visual art and design: everything is design and art in games from input, code to audio to graphics. Those categories always felt way too blurry and stuck in an old way of looking at games as “content sandwiches”.

Games are a whole meal, they’re not sandwiches. They are something different. Choosing to separate games based on their length is more inclusive than anything other criteria. We need that and we should try those IGF category changes right away.

Categories
Me Myself&I

Snapblack

That picture. On the left, that left-handed president with a personal story close to mine. On the right, that dude I’ve been listening to a lot last year, who represents so much Compton, 20 minutes away from my place.

I don’t see change in this picture. Far too many black people dying for no reason in this country to be allowed to be positive and feel good with just a picture of fraternity inside the Temple of Power.

I just enjoy the moment because this never happened before. That’s already big.

Categories
Audio&Games

Entertainment time

Me when I find some fascinating charts:

It’s a great one showing a few things:

– Social Media exploded. We all know when this happened and how we can’t stop.

– Audio (music and podcasts) is still huge. We forget about it because music is so everywhere for free.

– Games are last and barely grew in terms of consumption. Game production on the other hand, exploded.

I am still asking here and there what people play and it’s clear that 25-35 people don’t play games that much, social media is the main game. And if they play, they don’t want to mention it. Saying that you’re using [insert favorite social network] a lot is fine though. It’s interesting.

Slow gaming growth with supply exploding (500 new games a day on iOS, over a billion games available on Steam) means we’re going to hit some harder truth soon.

So when I see a vast excitement about VR, that is demanding a $2K investment upfront to properly enjoy it, cutting you off from the real world and even digital social interactions… Good luck with that.

Meanwhile, social media is making money thanks to games:

Interestingly it’s mostly in Asia. It’s confusing to see all those trends kind of cancelling each other out. The West is not into games like that so I wonder where revenue for WhatsApp and others will be coming from.

One last one that I find interesting:

The sharing experience doesn’t need to improve, it’s easy to share music. It’s just that people don’t want to do it. Why? I think because music is deeply personal. I might listen to the same song for an hour. I might listen to that very, very silly song by a very big artist. I might listen to something you can’t listen to for more than ten seconds. I might be listening to that artist because I don’t know her/him while everybody knows the lyrics to those songs. Music is personal. You share music with people in real life, live. In a notification center? It adds nothing to anyone.

Categories
Audio&Games

I’m just watching

I Miss Watching Other People Play Games.

Me too. I have so many games on Steam, playing them alone. Online gaming? Nah. Latency drives me nuts and the all voice chat thing no thanks.

I remember watching my cousin play that French RPG on my mom’s brand new IBMs. Taking notes on paper. I was amazed. I couldn’t understand shit but it was exciting, he was telling me what was going on. I remember learning the word “to bribe” (soudoyer en français) as you could do that with NPCs. I was like 7.

Then the 16bit era was entirely a bunch of dudes sitting on a bed/couch passing the controller experience. I didn’t have any console at home so I sucked at most games and watched my friends play. Cheering them up “man you were so close next time you’ll have it” following the story unfold together… During the boring parts I would grab a game magazine and talk about that next game page 43 with my dude while he was doing that boss again and again.

I hate bosses in games. Fuck ‘em.

Consoles were awesome at that time. Switch on, boom. These days it’s horrifying. I remember last year trying to play some MarvelVSCapcom on a PS3 with a friend… Controller issues, updates to discard, reboot. After 20 mn of shenanigans I was over playing.

Watching people play ultimately led me to making games because seeing all those smiles and passion during all those years made me want to do that: make people happy through interactive stuff.

Categories
Me Myself&I

You Too Big

Fantastic article describing something much better than I could. How the web sucks because it’s too heavy.

I mean, it’s ridiculous at this point. Why? He explains the situation this way.

So for web programmers and web designers, it’s just cool to work on the next thing because complexity. I think it’s a bit bullshit.

What he calls complexity is just a Look At How Big My Dick Is contest. It’s not to make the web better, it’s to make brogrammers –I mean we had to come up with a term for them- happy because of how smart they are. That’s unhealthy. What it does is that it allows people to solve problems with one skill. Thanks to hardware getting better Brute Force works, basically. But it doesn’t really solve anything that would allow a better experience for all of us. That’s why despite computers vastly superior to what they were ten years ago, websites still load and break browsers. It’s fucking bullshit.

It’s Feature over Fix and it’s an endemic problem from the Web to Windows to everything.

Solving issues of rendering a website in countless formats and rendering engines while making it fast AND profitable is challenging and a complex problem with many more angles and more responsibilities than simply go “let’s code some cool, hard shit”. The funny thing is, in the end it’s actually easier to say “fuck yall use only this, it’s nifty we worked hard to be able to have parallax effects” than go toward more simplicity that works every time for everyone.

Engineers love to do hard and useless shit all the time like run Windows 95 on a 3DS. What the actual fuck.

Which brings me to the second point of why the web has become an obscure creation process: they don’t want you to learn. Designers and programmers don’t want you to make websites easily, that’s their jobs. The more those jobs have become a norm –they didn’t exist 15 years ago- the more complex making a nice website has evolved into. You have to modify a .html a .css and a .js now to do anything, with no consistency whatsoever, libs dependency it’s a nightmare than only people getting paid to do so, do.

I hope it reverses back to what it was. All tech-literate people today know that any text article should load instantly even with shitty connections and a couple pictures.

Engineers and designers reverting back to minimalism –not the fake one we see online these days, actual minimalism- would change things more than buying a bigger data plan or a new phone.