Author: harold

Categories
Me Myself&I

LGBT

There is a homeless transwoman living around in the neighborhood. I see her regularly. At first we would just both frown our eyebrows at each other, not sure what to think. Then we just started to wave at each other.

One time on a Saturday as I was slowly biking through a big baseball game crowd, I saw her making her way through too. Families everywhere. People judging, staring hard. She’s walking and she’s trying hard, but she’s afraid.

She sees me, I have my headphones on, I simply say “hey” to her, smiling. People turning their head toward me wondering who I am talking to. She smiles and says “hi” back. Her whole attitude changes. She raises her head and walks stronger. The Glow. She just needed to be recognized as a person in this sea of eyes and closed mouths.

It’s weird how scared we are of other people. We all need and want the same things. In different forms and shapes, but that doesn’t matter.

Categories
Me Myself&I

That blogging void is alright

It is psychological gravity, not technical inertia, however, that is the greater force against the open web. Human beings are social animals and centralized social media like Twitter and Facebook provide a powerful sense of ambient humanity—the feeling that “others are here”—that is often missing when one writes on one’s own site. Facebook has a whole team of Ph.D.s in social psychology finding ways to increase that feeling of ambient humanity and thus increase your usage of their service.

Fantastic blog post circulating these days.

The feeling that “others are here”. It’s true, when I write on here I don’t really feel that others are here, even though my blog is completely public and available to anyone on earth with an internet connection. I mention it but never push people to it.

I love this. It’s discrete. Discretion is a beautiful paradox. It’s here, but only if you pay attention, look for it. That’s the opposite of how social media works, where anything that’s not amplified times 10,000, doesn’t exist. Discretion is way more human than it looks like. Appreciating something or someone comes with YOU looking for something in the first place. You then find it and enjoy it.

I know. The younger you are, the less this feels natural but trust me, it’s the best. Like discovering some music on your own. We all lived that. It’s more rewarding than being force-fed some bullshit.

It also gets better with time. I have some blogs in my RSS reader that I’ve been following for over ten years. Understanding and reading about someone’s life over a long period of time is a strong positive feeling. It becomes a real lens, with an angle that social media doesn’t give you because we stunt on social media. We brag, we exaggerate. When you’re discrete it’s just you, your reality, your thoughts. It’s clean. It’s a bit scary from time to time to be vulnerable like that but we value authenticity, don’t we? I do.

In this age of insane misinformation, fake news, fake butts, fake everything, reading people’s actual thoughts is refreshing and satisfying. Get on the train, embrace discretion. Plant those seeds and watch growth.

Categories
Me Myself&I

We really have bad sound now

I’m not sure what the variable bitrate is on FB or YT/Spotify but it’s grooooss and weird. Those digital artifacts, that metallic sounding shit or ultra-compressed audio, ew.

Phone speakers/earbuds are the worst and yet used all the time here. All the small speakers are BOOMY as fuck with no mids, no air, no stereo. And now they listen to us too? No pasarán.

Meanwhile they’re ready to push for 8K when no one cares about 4K, that your eyes are fine with clean 1080 and always will be because they’re not getting better. Our phones are filled with super HQ videos of dumb shit that we don’t watch anywhere else because each one is the size of a DVD and it’s a pain to transfer.

Why listening is being downgraded while watching is being upgraded? Technically, audio has been perfect for over ten years while video still had some improvement going. So they had to find some ways to sell audio gear. But also, ads. Eyeballs. Compulsive behavior doesn’t work if you listen and think while closing your eyes.

Don’t sleep. I mean, please do actually.

Categories
Audio&Games

PUBG/Fortnite BR

It’s fascinating.

First, names. You know I like to pay attention to that. PUBG’s name is an acronym and even though when there was no competition it was fine, now it makes an impact.

On one hand you have Bluehole’s Player Unknown’s BattleGround. Weird. Sounds like a malware/hack tool.

On the other hand you have Epic’s Fortnite Battle Royale. Okay!

The latter just sounds more legit, even though it’s the one copying the former. Battle Royale is not even used, Fortnite became the game’s name by default (even though Fortnite is a different game at first).

It’s confusing.

Also both games are powered by Unreal Engine, owned by Epic. I can’t even imagine the tension and heavy breathing going on in those studios.

Aesthetically, Epic’s colorful game is immediately more prone to be picked up to chill and have a good time with after a day at work. The grim and realistic tone of PUBG is not that sexy, never was. Once again, it’s not detrimental when the gameplay and experience brought are unique. They’re not now.

Moreover, Fortnite brings some nifty mechanics with the building part. Watching a good player like that Ninja dude is mesmerizing. It looks so fun. It takes a very realistic concept to another level (you can basically build while moving so you create your own stairs to take over an enemy, that kind of thing).

Epic has been aggressive as hell with the F2P part. Also the sound design is much funnier and engaging with a wide variety of people (though I think the weapons’ sounds are a bit brutal).

I’m pretty sure the F2P model brought so many people of color to the game. Fortnite seems a lot more popular with black and brown people than PUBG. We broke, don’t judge, read. And now that rappers and celebrities stream it the snowball effect is in full effect.

Both games are available on a lot of platforms including mobile but of course, it’s when you play with a keyboard and a mouse that shit gets done. Crossplay is so unfair. Windows computers still are the master race aren’t they. Mouse control is so insanely precise and fast compared to a thumb on a controller. But, it doesn’t matter too much. As long as people have fun, which is the case. Also, eyeballs.

Can both games coexist? Will one win the battle? It fascinates me. *grabs popcorn*

Categories
Me Myself&I

AMD Slays

CPUs

My favorite is the small one on top of that big Pentium II cartridge, the Am386 DX/DXL-33. So many memories.

AMD fascinates the shit out of me. It’s a “small” company led by a woman, Lisa Su.

AMD competes with Intel, a company ten times bigger and fights against Nvidia, a company about the same size. Both are aggressive as hell. It doesn’t matter. In this ultra-complex world of billions of transistors sandwiches, AMD is and has been able to sustain themselves in both CPU and GPU worlds. That’s so insane. I swear, it’s absurdly amazing.

They bring great products to the market. They launched 20 different CPUs and a bunch of GPUs last year and they’re all excellent. I really wish I could buy some and enjoy them and built rigs for people around.

Keep pushing, AMD.

Categories
Audio&Games

Jason Out

Jason Rohrer on his last released game, One Hour One Life.

But if the games press isn’t relevant anymore, how do people find out about new games? There are two ways: word of mouth, and YouTube videos. Word of mouth has always been the most important factor for any game, I think.

Word of mouth is insanely powerful. It’s random, unchecked, pervasive. It just happens. I keep hearing about FortNite even though I don’t play it nor do I see people play it nor do I watch people play that game. But it’s around and that makes me want to try it.

I designed One Hour One Life intentionally to operate well in this new paradigm.

That’s a crucial statement. I’ve always heard developers talk about making the game they want to play but I always felt that this was not necessarily business-savvy. Jason didn’t hesitate and designed his game so that it works with how people “behave” with new games. Very interesting and apparently, successful.

I hope it gives other developers ideas. Let’s free ourselves from silos a bit, shall we?

Categories
Me Myself&I

Slowing the tech roll

I’m so appalled at the state of technology right now. It looks like everything bows down to services.

No one is forcing companies to not be dicks. They get away with it. Take Twitter, who became big by having so many people making apps for their service. They meticulously killed those, stealing their features. They started to modify chronological order and shit.

My phone is old but it works perfectly fine. Everything that Twitter does –displaying text, pictures and short videos- can be done on a 2012 phone. I shouldn’t have to upgrade anything *at all* to display not 140, but 280 characters. Flickr gives me that shit too: “you should upgrade your browser”. Your website displays a grid of pictures, the fuck you mean? Any browser can do that.

The other thing is, those services could be so awesome if they hadn’t gone AI and Big Data on us. True Chronological Order on FB or Twitter would be so incredibly powerful. I would be on it all the fucking time instead of being grossed out, kind of forced to check here and there.

Imagine tabs on FB with you sharing to different people, easily. Imagine never having to dread a back and forth in your timeline. Imagine FB as easy to filter as your email. And fast as hell. Mmh.

The sad part is that we’re a few lines of code, a few refactoring away from freedom. It fucks me up.

Categories
Music

I am Charlie Wilson

I had always wondered why the GAP Band was in this weird zone, universally praised and known while being completely obscure and different.

I had always wondered why so many of those grooves and amazing anthems sounded so similar.

All the answers are in his book. I read it months ago and it still makes me sad. They got robbed. They got pissed. Brotherhood might not be what you think it is.

The GAP (standing for Greenwood, Archer and Pine, where the Tulsa riots happened) Band is huge. Charlie’s voice’s enthusiasm is unmatchable. I feel him when he talks about learning music and how he was fascinated by harmony while teachers were telling him to focus on melody. I had the same shit happening to me when I learned piano. Stacked notes over sequences of notes any day, I don’t care.

I’m glad you’re at peace now man. Thank you for the absolute bangers you guys created and thank you for writing it all down, uncle Charlie.

Categories
Music

On that music and Mars thing

The Grapevine. IS BRUNO MARS A CULTURAL APPROPRIATOR?

I mean, yeah. He’s one of the best-selling artist of all times already. It’s not just that he’s known. He’s making mad money and started by impersonating Elvis, the dude who stole black people’s moves and music. Patterns.

That’s how music business works. Music sells primarily to white people, in a much bigger volume to white people. Since about the 40s so it’s been a while.

For this reason, artists need to cater to that market. And there’s nothing better to cater than to look alike, especially since videos are how the word spreads out (and the reason why I don’t like them: music is about listening, fuck watching).

It’s no coincidence if Rihanna and Beyoncé are not dark skin women. That Drake is very white. The Wknd. That Bruno is even whiter. There is an absurd amount of talented black artists who were/are too black for TV. It all started to really hurts with the rise of MTV almost 40 years ago.

So many originators of black music –that is being used in various ways in ALL pop music- have never been heard or seen. I dig them online, listen to their music, find their pictures and love them. Music will always be more important than faces.

I think that’s the core argument: most black artists were making their own shit, creating their lanes. Trying things out. On the last Prince’s album he toys with house music and dubstep, but it’s still a Prince song with his guitar licks and ways of arranging horns and keyboards. MJ’s Bad album is fucking unique in so many ways. You can recognize a GAP Band groove from miles away.

Bruno copy/paste shit and says shout out to the OGs. It’s a different vibe. But yeah the song 24 Magic slaps and it’s annoying. It itches.

The worst part is that this entire appropriation phenomenon makes black people hate their black skin when their black skin is perfectly fine. Black skin is a symbol of creating timeless music genres and songs. Be proud of it.

Categories
Audio&Games

Wing Commander II

Outstanding article on a pillar of computer games’ 90s culture.

In retrospect, the Speech Pack for that game might have been one of the thing that made me think that sound is important in games. Even then as a preteen, buying sounds for a game felt wrong but I thought this was just because technology was moving so fast, developers didn’t have the time to do everything at the same time. Which was true, to some extent.

The technical craziness to me was that this game used 20MB of space. My hard-drive at that time was 20MB, which was standard and not enough for Origin’s game. 40MB hard-drives were ultra expensive. It’s as if today a game coming out required you to have a 2TB SSD ($1200 as of now). Not recommended, required. That was nuts.

The game was pretty bad. The fake 3D didn’t work well. The divide between gameplay/story was already there and yes, the story wasn’t that great. But it didn’t matter, I really wanted that game. The jump between the CGA-based awful game clones on MS-DOS to this mind-blowing 256 colors fest with digital effing sound was ludicrous. 3D-rendered bitmaps were sexy as hell.

I loved the visual style and design: those spaceships look like they were straight out of Robotech and I couldn’t get enough of that back in 1991. At the same time, Sonic was blowing everything away and Street Fighter II was punching everything away. Dragon Ball, Ranma½, Saint Seiya were airing in France.

That summer, Japan was reigning supreme in my young designer’s head. Japan, and Origin Systems.