Author: harold

Serendipity:

NOUN

serendipities (plural noun)

the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way.

This does happen less and less, thanks to algorithms. I’m realizing how much of my life has been brought up to me by serendipity. You have to be active to enable positive events and now you have machines deciding for you, for everything. All the time.

You grow/grew up with those machines deciding for yourself so now you don’t even have the tools built-in in your mind to make serendipity happen. You say “no” or “yes” but the “why”, “what” “how” are disappearing.

I guess we need chance less now that we have access to so much in a few clicks, being able to be part of multiple worlds more than ever. But I don’t like when the built-in processes, the good habits are going away.

Me Myself&I

NBAAAAAh

This off season is crazy.

Here’s what’s going to happen: LBJ joins the Lakers next year. IT follows him. IT and I, both 1,75m lefties fusion. We beat all the teams forever.

The NBA cancels the East Coast in December before y’all get your ass whooped by the entire West Armada.

It’s going to be interesting. My Spurs have the hardest road, filled with teams that are very different with all those trades. That’s going to be their strength: they all know how to play together compared to teams that just got players with strong ego and skills. Down the stretch, that will make a difference.

I’m scared of the Pelicans, man. If AD and Boogie go off, shit’s going to get ugly. They can’t be stopped. The Rockets with CP3, are a walking nightmare. Hopefully Chris clashes with James so that Aldridge the Fridge –WHO SAID THAT– can score and ruin other teams’ hopes that he’s the weak link. I hope Popovich put him on a skateboard all summer so that he worked on his balance and foot work. I believe he woke up after the last playoffs. I want to believe he lands switch 360 flips by now.

The Warriors got another absurd 3-pt shooter so there’s that. And OKC has three crazy good players now. I think that might be a bit too much for a team to digest at once. It looks good on paper but they will have to change so many things in their habits. The Wolves look hungry as hell, they will hurt.

The season starts soon and I’m so ready.

Audio&Games

Controllers

I was reading Jeff’s blog post on fad controllers and read a comment thread where people shamed some dudes who were playing games on keyboards. Here’s my take.

Controllers –joystick, gamepad, keyboard, Ouija board- are like musical instruments. You have your preference and you can play any music with it but probably, it fits some genre better than others. With the right skills though, you can do whatever you want: beating Super Meat Boy on a keyboard is a bit like covering some early Pantera on a saxophone, that sounds risky. But if you’re good, you probably can do that. And you’re awesome.

Controller choice doesn’t matter so much. People are having fun? You good. What developers need to do is test different input and make sure they’re all decent, instead of polishing one input scheme to death while forgetting about the others. And of course, a re-mapping tool should be standard these days.

I miss the Wiimote. I could play golf and physics-based games for the next five decades with it without any issues.

Music

Prince The Machine

“and I don’t need to hear that anymore.” I’m screaming. This book, Prince, Inside the Music and the Masks was a great read. It focuses on the creative endeavor and business side of his life which was basically his entire life or so.

Prince’s parents, with six kids and a father dreaming of making it big in music, were struggling. They divorced, his dad left the piano behind, Prince started playing it. The rest is history.

His relationship with Warner starts almost immediately. He is poor and receives his first advance, $80,000, from them after they heard his prowess in the studio. Then he has to give the label seven albums. But producing creative outputs is not like producing furniture or food. He was sometimes right on point –Purple Rain- and sometimes way off –rapping- and it’s fascinating reading about him conquering the world, losing influence, battling with the music industry practices, being thirsty as fuck –his duo with Beyoncé at the Grammys- while he was destroying every single stage on earth on monstrous tours (his last one made close to $100M). So many of his songs sound much, much better live.

He was constantly looking for new ways to sell his shit. He pioneered many business models. His songwriting might have gone down –just kinda lazy I’d say– but he was sharp as hell on the contract/payment end. I’m really sad to not know what he would have been doing right now. I am pretty sure he would have started a social network/streaming service. During the 2000s, he was around but he was mostly just making more money than ever. For what? What would he have done with it? Building a new label with only women artists? Just burn bills in a giant fire pit during one of his show with a new song called Money Flames? Would he have released a dozen jazz albums now that he was getting older? Would he release them only on DVD Audio with discrete surround sound?

We’ll never know.

Me Myself&I

adfool

So if just one of Facebook’s 2 billion users entered “Jew-hater” as her “field of study”—whether out of malice or a misplaced attempt at humor—an advertiser who typed that same term in the same field could then include that user among the target audience. (Following ProPublica’s and Slate’s reports, Facebook disabled these targeting options.) To the extent there’s a problem, then, it’s not a case of machine intelligence run amok but rather a lack of any intelligence in the process, machine or otherwise. In short, Facebook’s ad tool is dumb.

The entire ad business is dumb, always has been. That’s also why we don’t like ads. Find another fucking business model. Lower your filthy profit expectations and have a good life. Is that hard?

Me Myself&I

Check up

Oh yeah, I forgot that I stopped smoking tobacco a year or so ago so happy birthday to me! I also not long after stopped putting sugar in my coffee. Not really something that I planned to do but there is so much sugar in all the food here that I figured that would not be bad to cut down a bit.

After sweating less, not smoking made me sweat more. Under stress, not smoking anymore would make me wet like I have never been before. It’s getting better. The sensation of losing focus progressively went away, I don’t have the issue anymore but I remember how strong that felt. Nicotine trying to be smart.

The funny thing is smelling someone smoking without seeing him/her and thinking “wait, this smell smells familiar but I can’t.. Oh right, cigarettes”. I forgot! Of course the hard first 5 minutes on my bike are gone. I can bike at full speed immediately, lungs wise. I can feel them getting cleaner. Cool, but not life-changing for now.

Coffee is definitely better without sugar but I sometimes miss the sweet morning kick. Sugar stimulates so much of our excitement. It wakes us up, keeps us awake more than the coffee itself. But also it’s such a drug. I. WANT. SWEETS.

Anyway, my wallet is happy for me too.

Me Myself&I

Keep your phone simple

How often do we have our phones with ourselves or in sight? Or more like, how often do we not have them with us?

The answer is pretty much never. They are in our pockets, our hands, nightstands. We do not need complex security to simply use them, it’s overkill. People talk about airport security, forgetting that a vast majority of people never fly. Kids, girlfriends and family? You have bigger issues in your life if you cannot trust the closest people around you. And again, they don’t have much time to do anything to your phone, as your phone is with you 95% of the time.

I have never set up a pin to unlock on any smartphone ever. I got my phone stolen this year for the first time, it was definitely my fault (simply leaving it on a desk in a public space). Some LTE data was used. I could track it precisely but then the battery died (and the USB port was fucked up so, the phone can charge wirelessly but no one knows especially the homeless person who probably used it). If the battery had not died, I either was finding the phone, blocking it or erasing it. Now I can’t but the phone is probably buried in a landfill. Nothing of importance was on it. I lost a few dozens screenshots and mildly interesting videos. I upload my pictures regularly.

I don’t know how you guys can type the same 4 pin code hundreds of time a week. Or people trusting the system and then losing 4 or 6 years of pictures and memories. I know interfaces are sleek and responsive but backend technology is a big mess, don’t forget about it. Do not trust computers blindly.

All I’m saying is, companies induce fear and the need for you to upgrade. Fear is the biggest trigger for action. They know friction is at a minimum: paying for something with cash, or a card, vouchers, is fast enough. the gain of paying with your phone barely exists. But also, without bank and payment data on your phone if it comes up missing that’s a whole lot less stress.

Don’t sleep.

Me Myself&I

Saturdaymn

Well,

I had forgotten again that I have comments enabled on my blog. Sorry! I replied to the few from the past few months. For your information I have vomited 1,668 posts, and you barfed 1,124 comments since 2004.

Man, writing a book is a trip. I have my 150-200 pages pretty much done, now tightening up, trying to make it a little fun. It might take months.

This week was rough in the news. The most famous YouTube streamer let a “fucking nigger” out of his mouth, a developer took action, everyone is quiet now. Meanwhile an ESPN journalist speaks the truth and she immediately faces losing her job while the president finds the time to tweet about it. Kaepernick is still unemployed for protesting. And an ex-policeman in St Louis was acquitted of murdering a black man with his own personal AK-47.

I just spent two hours with my mind frozen on those facts (and more). So as I always do in those moments, time to clean up rooms, hard drives. Change strings on my bass. And get ready.

Audio&Games

Sonic is the past

There is a new Sonic game that came out this summer. This is the original ad I guess.

Sonic

So the new game is called Sonic Mania and it is basically the continuity of a game that came out in 1991.

To this day, I’m not sure you can do a better first game than Sonic the Hedgehog did. It destroyed me when I saw it. I was going to the store to buy a game for my birthday. A platform game for PC that looked gorgeous and fun and that I had been eying for months! Sonic was running on the Sega Genesis on the demo stand.

It blew my fucking mind, took the ashes off the ground and blew them in my face again.

The speed, the colors, the shapes, the sounds –that ring sound y’all, think about how perfect it is- it was so insanely better than anything I had seen and heard in my life. I didn’t even care about the game I wanted anymore, nothing meant anything in front of that little TV, watching beautiful scrollings and animations. Sega was in another league at that time.

Now, 2017. I really don’t care about Sonic anymore. Not by disrespect or anti-nostalgia, it’s just that the gameplay, the concept, the music are part of the past. A pillar of game design and one of the best aesthetic produced in the 90s. But it’s still just a platform game where you go fast and sometimes stop to jump on some trigger. I don’t know.

26 years later, almost 3 decades is a very, very long time with computer culture. Imagine if people demanded the original Mario Kart in mode 7 to be re-done because that’s the real Mario Kart. That would be weird. If Sonic Mania had come out in 2004 when Steam came out or 1999 to finish the decade with the most famous hedgehog, that would be different and make a lot more sense.

For me nothing can beat the first time I saw the original. Ecstatically traumatized by a blue animal.

Music

What’s wrong with you DJs

Post author By harold
Post date September 4, 2017
No Comments on What’s wrong with you DJs

It has become so stupid.

DJs these days “spin” 30 seconds of some stuff, add a fucking air horn, spin another 30 seconds of something, repeat a hook over and over, completely changes the genre of music after half a hour. What the fuck is this?

We had a block party on my block yesterday and I wanted to get on stage and cancel the entire shit.

It’s like DJs have become incapable to make people enjoy the music, the vibe, to make them slow dance. It’s about them doing something on the mixer, like pressing buttons and reading waveforms on a laptop is a big skill. The more you like and know the music, the more infuriating it feels like.

“Oh now that’s my JAM” well enjoy real quick girl because that’s going to be over in 3, 2, 1…

I don’t get it. Is it a copyright/broadcast issue? DJs have to pay fees to if they play 75% of the song so they only play 20% of it? I’m still mad.

And what is this weak ass selection? You want to represent the West Coast there are so many anthems, not just Dre and Eazy E. Like, ugh.