Spoilers, duh.
So dialog was super low, was it just me?
It was a cool movie. Kylo makes me laugh I can’t take him seriously. I’m sorry.
Luke was dope, so long lightsaber cowboy.
That opening zoom felt like I was in a computer game so hard.
That salt planet was awesome. I wish the casino part took longer. It’s so great to not watch trailers.
Speaking of trailers what on earth was that Alita Battle Angel disgusting shit? No, no. It’s super wrong. Just thinking about it is ruining my Christmas.
I’m writing my book proposal now that I have my FirstDraft. There’s something called competition analysis in which I have to find books kind of like mine. Well, there aren’t a lot of those.
Looking on Amazon.com I saw and read summaries of a lot of books on adoption, foster families etc. I hadn’t paid attention to those before. Never felt the need to care about that literature. What is going on is:
– Most are about that Christian thing. Most are written by white moms. And most are about the convenient but also kind of dull story where people look back and find their biological parents and relatives. Everyone was reunited weee.
I don’t have none of that. I don’t have biological relatives, at all. None, zero. I don’t have any idea of what my biological parents look(ed) like. No sisters or brothers, old aunties, someone? Nope. I have been spawned on this earth. That’s how it feels. I wasn’t there, and then I was.
I’m not crying about not having what most people have in one way or another, I’m more realizing that if I always feel different, it’s really because of that spawn thing. It wired me differently. It makes me care about everything and at the same time allows me to be ice cold, utterly pragmatic when needed.
For instance I’m not for the death penalty at all, but Dylan Roof needs to go. He can’t be released in the streets –he wouldn’t live for long anyway-, keeping him in jail for life is useless and extremely expensive. Sorry man, you just needed to not murder innocents. People might see conflict here. I don’t. I’m just pragmatic.
That’s why I love playing games like toys, grinding rules to see how strong/interesting they are but I don’t care about finishing a game or having the high score. I don’t need goals (when playing, of course in life I have some). I can admire, have fun, play inside something for a long time. Goals bother me, in a way. They’re artificial.
Being spawned pushed me to overwhelmingly care about *actual* things. It’s hard to explain.
I so want to fix or make things better that I look for simplicity and realness all the time. Anything that makes this more confusing or further away, I avoid. I want to know what’s going on. The as close as possible truth, the most unaltered reality. Then we fix it and enjoy it.
Spawned. That could be a book title.
350+: days riding my bike.
1500+: miles on my bike.
2: flat tires. I didn’t get any flat for two years (world record beaten) and got two in the past two months.
10,000+: shots taken on the basketball field at Rodeo/MLK. 50% swishes. I mean, almost.
365+: hours playing bass.
600+: people I helped with their computers at the library. 98% black, 65% black women.
1billion: job emails sent.
5: job interviews (in person, on Skype, sound design test) I got.
1: part time job secured.
1: car bought.
91: sessions of audio design, music production, foley etc.
3.4: gigabytes of 24bit/96kHz recordings I did around.
1: GDC I went to.
3: neighborhood councils I showed up to.
40+: kilos of tuna I have ingested.
48,332: words written for a book.
0: cigarettes smoked. Okay, I did have two puffs on one last weekend but it didn’t even register. It fascinates me how nothing matters once drunk after 2am. Maybe I should do that more than once a year. Maybe not.
Verizon owns Tumblr. Verizon has no chill and probably will kill this service anytime they want, which might be tomorrow. Probably in the next couple years.
I always thought having a slideshow of my likes at my funeral would be the shit. I wish I could save them all in a convenient file with a big ass folder full of gifs and pictures. I found a script that does it but I haven’t tried it yet. SAVE YOUR LIKES AND POSTS TOO, DIGITAL STORAGE IS ULTRA CHEAP.
To users and post makers: I love you. I love y’all (not y’all over there stirring up shit and stealing content, of course). Tumblr has some of the funniest shit I have ever seen online and I’m decently old now. Thank you for all the work, all those perfect gifs. All those inspiring posts. I’m serious. It’s phenomenal.
To women of color of Tumblr: you already know. You know you made that website a million times better. I’m still giggling at shit like Dick Me Down Darius™ and so many more.
To youngsters: if you feel something for someone and this relationship is reasonably doable, just go and fucking give it a try. Embrace the offline world. We’re so incredibly polarized and you will live longer than any previous generation so pace yourself, give some love, get hurt, regroup, give more love, block, give more love. Stay away from the dark forces, I know they’re strong. But I also know they don’t lead anywhere.
To my followers who still can read more than a sentence at a time: heyy thank you for reading.
Filfre.net. A history of computer entertainment by Jimmy Maher. Absolutely bloody amazing. Please donate to this man.
This week I read the genesis of the Commodore Amiga. The 68000 Wars, part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5. This is awesome and so precious.
In France the Amiga was rare as hell. All my friends had computers and consoles from C64 to NES with ROB, none had an Amiga. But magazines were always reviewing games on it, displaying those amazing colors that were inexistent on my IBM, still running in CGA/EGA.
The Amiga was vastly superior and yet, was sort of not existing outside printed pages. Weird! Even weirder was when they closed everything and died early 90s right after announcing new machines, that was so unexpected. On the front page of all magazines that month. Thanks to Jimmy, I understand now why and how Commodore and Jack Tramiel and all those folks were on the verge of bankruptcy the whole time, ready to take insane risks and playing dirty.
Learning that they went to see the guys at Digital Research to adapt their dying OS to a brand new platform that wasn’t running the same hardware, and actually made it work in a few hardcore months, tells you everything about the mentality of the computer game industry. We Brute Force. We Crunch. Since 1974.
The future would lie with modular, expandable design frameworks like those employed by the IBM PC and its clones, open hardware (and software) standards that were nowhere near as sexy or as elegant but that could grow and improve with time.
I first-hand witnessed that as a kid. The IBM PC was not exciting for games in 1988 but was the shit in 1992. Improvements were made every month and you could just swap a card or plug an additional one. Look at graphics: the Amiga was the star with its legendary HAM mode. But then VGA and SVGA happened discretely, games started supporting those modes and that was it. The Personal Computer wasn’t bragging about its technology, it was a consortium of manufacturers who simply were just pushing hardware out, selling more and more.
Anyway. Historic stuff right here.
I wholeheartedly agree with Jesse. Why aren’t those principles applied more systematically in everything we do building those games? I don’t know. I know playing bass daily gives me a very tight sense of rhythm and flow that I can’t really explain or quantify easily. But it is in me and it comes from another field, music. Which is a game. That follows patterns and design principles.
Design is the same everywhere.
On my IT gig I’ve been helping this old Asian lady for months. She comes to see me to get help. She’s over 75. She has no family around, she works and needs basic email stuff etc. So I show her how to do stuff on her devices. Once I’m done explaining and showing her, she’s always excited and happy like a child.
She often says "oh I love you so much!" and I’m like "I love you too!". Yesterday she comes by. New phone, new stuff to learn. I show her the process of uploading pictures and she’s super excited and happy as usual. She says "do you like pineapple?" And I’m like "yeah" She comes back 3mn later and gives me a pineapple.
I don’t know if she got rid of it or if it was a true present but it’s all good. “How did it go today?” asked my boss. I raised the fruit, shaking my head laughing, she started wheezing. My bagpack was heavy this morning and I remembered that it had a pineapple in it. A pineapple.
"He was rich in personality and getting pineapple for free" on my tombstone y’all.
The pursuit of popularity in a hyper-connected digital environment accentuates the populist style of communication that already characterized media-driven forms of political communication well before the internet age—a style characterized by dramatization, confrontation, negativity, emotionalization, personalization, visualization, and hyper-simplification.
Important article. Get involved locally, focus, make moves, support what you believe, don’t stop.
Raph Koster at it again. After reading most of the discussions and his awesome blog posts. Two things:
– Our capitalist society destroys the middle inexorably. Mid tier developers, middle class, same. It’s by design: capitalism focuses on maximizing profits which exacerbates both ends of the spectrum. The bottom and top rise while the middle deflates. It’s almost pure physics at this point. I don’t like it, I like the middle, the middle is balanced. We barely mention game developers but we are the ones suffering the most from that strong tension between small teams/budgets or huge teams/budgets. Both bring crunch and unemployment, stress and means to brute force as much as possible (loot boxes are some kind of brute force financing). Capitalism needs to chill. We need to chill.
– Generations, as always: a lot of gamers are over 35 and hate those loot boxes and pay for win systems. Younger generations? They love that stuff. They don’t mind subscribing, they care about showing off their new avatar’s outfits. It’s a generational gap. They have less than ever offline and want everything online, that makes sense. Millennials and internet natives are a much bigger, juicer crowd than gen X. As the industry focuses mainly on youth well, they mostly try to tell 35+ to fuck off. But not too much because they still bring a lot of money too. They can’t afford to lose that crowd either.
That’s where I think something will happen in the next five to ten years: population is aging, living for a much longer time. Most of the wealth is going to move to older brackets. Publishers will have to go and reach out for this money and they might have to rethink their business models and subscriptions to include 40 and 50+ people.
I finished editing the first draft. 207 pages.
Writing a memoir is a trip. There’s something mind-bending, thinking back and forth, forth and back over almost four decades.
It’s liberating. I wrote down some stuff that I had in mind for years and I don’t think about them anymore, as if my mind knew that now that it’s out there, there’s no need to keep thinking about it.
It’s exhilarating and weird.
Going through pages, jumping here and there makes me realize how much Design has been and is my life, my soul. I obsess about designing better. For anything and everything. I need to fix this shit. It’s like an emergency, a countdown to me. It’s beyond passion. I know where it comes from.
Now what? I have to hand it over to a few readers I guess. See if I can find a publisher. I’m toying with titles, it’s fun. One that still makes me laugh after months is “I Got Out I Guess”. I haven’t seen the movie yet. You have to read my book/know me well to truly understand why. I also have “Baguette & Burgers” and a dozen others.
The pitch? “from 80s socialist France to post-Obama America follow the fascinating, intersectional life of a different tech worker of color.”
BITCH BUCKLE UP