Author: harold

Hi,

If you’re reading this, you did some research and clicked on links. Nice to meet you! This is my personal blog where I write about a pretty large variety of subjects. Sometimes it’s a brain fart, sometimes it’s deep enough to maybe make you think for a while. There are grammatical mistakes and typos. Blogs! What can you do.

I am passionate about sound design in computer games and animated movies, mostly. I am an avid reader and spend most of my free time devouring articles and reviews about architecture of houses, CPUs and GPUS, audio tool chain, games etc. With a side of memes, of course. I record, edit, play music and sounds constantly. I am the best I have ever been! I understand a lot of things now that I was only able to conceptualize a few years ago. Psychology of sound, technical improvements, musicianship, I am trying to unify all of this in my brain to be as efficient as possible to make a decision in front of a new audio challenge, on a new project.

It has been a little while since I have worked on a big game. There’s this joke that goes like “Best advice in game audio? Marry well!”. It didn’t pan out this way for me and as an immigrant starting from scratch, I had to do what immigrants do: take any job available. Now that I successfully did that, I am more than hungry to design sound and produce audio for awesome worlds and experiences.

So, let’s talk! I’m a bit awkward socially, I stopped smoking a year ago so I might sweat a lot but other than that I’m ultra-focused, nice, extremely reliable and resourceful and the person you want on your ship. Don’t worry, I will wear black shirts.

Best,

Hey, that stuff was supposed to be quite impossible when I was a kid.

Combustion engines have gotten so much better and are still improving, that’s pretty crazy. We are going to need those old school gas-powered cars, as there will be a shortage of cobalt for car batteries in a few years. EVs are not going to become cheap anytime soon.

I often think about FB these days. 2 billion people, what an achievement. The engineering part stimulates my brain like crazy. It’s a feature to connect so many people seamlessly, even more so earlier when they didn’t have unlimited cash flow.

But then of course I think about the implications of such a giant network. I keep thinking about the fact that FB knows when we give up. It’s one thing to know where we’re going online, what we buy or secretly want and sell that data to advertisers but it’s another thing to know when we stop giving a shit. The breaking point when we collectively don’t protest anymore. FB knows more and more how and exactly when we become docile. Knowing that at the scale of countries and entire regions of the world, for every generation alive and being able to run tests and tweak things to see what happens? That’s ridiculously powerful and unprecedented. FB learns more everyday, and with people on the Facebook’s board who also are heavily involved in politics and AI development, I feel concerned.

I’m not feeling it.

There’s not a single exception. All screen activities are linked to less happiness, and all nonscreen activities are linked to more happiness.

Do not buy phones to your kids.

It’s interesting because it’s mobile screen activity more than others. On a laptop you can create, make things, play deep games. On a phone social media wins all the time, it’s the perfect form factor and perfect interaction for it.

Every generation deals with the world with new tools previous generations did not have. Because the world has not decided on a lot of things, kids compensate and do what they can. Gen X parents, brainwashed by news, think that the neighborhood is worst than ever –it’s not- and prefer to have their kids around, who are turning into zombies more than we ever have been.

The comments section focuses on who did what in the past. It doesn’t matter anymore. What we can ponder and think about is the future and VR/AR. It really feels like we should fix a bunch of stuff in the world –UBI, what do we do once we’re over 50- before a new generation grows up on almost 100% digital world being more important than the actual world.

It’s probably too late already. Maybe not!

Beauty of the internet right there: I was reading Scott McCloud’s interview at No Don’t Die. In there, a reference to a Simon Pegg’s blog post. Who in it, talks about Jean Baudrillard, a well-known French sociologist. Simon writes:

Recent developments in popular culture were arguably predicted by the French philosopher and cultural theorist, Jean Baudrillard in his book, ‘America’, in which he talks about the infantilization of society. Put simply, this is the idea that as a society, we are kept in a state of arrested development by dominant forces in order to keep us more pliant. We are made passionate about the things that occupied us as children as a means of drawing our attentions away from the things we really should be invested in, inequality, corruption, economic injustice etc.

I was thinking about User Interface these days. Circled icons and pictures. rounded corners everywhere. Why? To make us feel like we are safe, playing. To make us feel like those companies are soft and cozy, that they are not harmful despite the fact that they have access to everything we do online and use that to leverage money in a way (ads) or another (investor’s money). Do not forget that they know exactly how long we stay online, what we click, what we look at etc.

Emojis is the culminating point. It’s not cute, it’s language’s infantilization right there. Icons everywhere instead of words is the same tactic. I was looking at iOS 11 and how there was one thing where they had to write what it was for (screen mirroring) because you can get confused on a sign, but not on a word. Words are strong, you can’ really interpret them. They say what they say. Images and symbols on the other hand are open to interpretation, always will be.

Those interfaces are not trying to help us, they are trying to keep us in a state.

I’m writing a book. Not a big one, just my biography from a few angles. I thought it was time to do it before I forget some detail. It’s weird, it makes me feel like I might die soon or something but I do not plan to do that at all, thank you. Writing at the past tense, I guess. Remembering the good old, innocent days.

After writing thousands of blog posts, writing a book is not very difficult. I’m approaching 30K words at about 10,000 words a week.

Reading a lot.

Writing more.

Composing (here and here).

Fixing a damn phone.

Hustling.

Sleeping.