Author: harold

Hot takes finals

That game 4 was pure bullshit. Someone got paid. The Warriors lost by a combined 5 points without the fouls in the first quarter and of course, Cleveland wouldn’t have shot that well with Golden State right behind on an elimination game. Suspicious af.

KD is pretty good at basketball. At the same time he was the only one big name on the floor that didn’t have a ring and it showed. Mofo didn’t stop and was ultra efficient. Jesus.

LeBron… I told my friend that to win he needs to have some midrange jumpers in his arsenal. Why? Because they consume 1/3 of what a drive to the basket costs. He never does it because he sucks at it so he drives and is gassed in the second half. He’s either going to the basket, passing at the last second or shooting 3s. We all know. Might be a coincidence but: MJ, Kobe, Hakeem, Duncan, Dirk, Kawhi. Kevin Durant. They all have/had a “goes in 100% of the time” midrange shot to counter a tough team. LeBron thinks he can just leave that shit to someone else but that’s not enough, if you’re the star player you need options and the ability to bring chaos. A good midrange J is annoying as hell for any defense. How the fuck do you guard someone who can shoot/pass at anytime, from anywhere? The Cavs were too obvious against GS’s defense and we all know that they got very lucky last year. We also all knew that their defense was tuuurrible. They didn’t disappoint.

The Warriors are not invincible though, the Spurs showed it for half a game (they also beat them 2-1 during the regular season). Intense defense and smart, tall players give them all the trouble they don’t want. The Pelicans new duo –AD/DMC- aka the Twin Towers might be the answer. Tall players that can do everything at a more than decent rate are the future of the NBA.

The Cleveland Specialists lost to the Golden State Generalists. Good Game, Peace.

Audio&Games

Live commenting the Andromeda

Post author By harold
Post date June 10, 2017
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Mass Effect Andromeda behind the scenes.

From conversations with nearly a dozen people who worked on Mass Effect: Andromeda, all of whom spoke under condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to talk about the game,

It will never be not weird to have NDAs that long. The game has been out for months, it’s a $100B industry. We should be able to talk and have conversations without all that hiding going on. It’s unhealthy, we can’t learn and do better this way.

Mass Effect: Andromeda was in development for five years, but by most accounts, BioWare built the bulk of the game in less than 18 months.

Five years. Half a decade. Probably 3 years of trying things out and 2 years of absurd pressure. Classic, quite standard but definitely not good.

Rather than develop a Mass Effect 4 at the studio’s main headquarters in Edmonton, which had made the first three games, BioWare decided to put its Montreal studio in charge.

Game companies have massive tax cuts in Montreal. Games cost a lot. It makes sense to send an expensive franchise to be made where it costs less. Cutting off the main team though, is… Very risky.

“No Man’s Sky with BioWare graphics and story, that sounds amazing.”

I mean. Any seasoned designer or programmer would tell you that it is ultra risky to do something like that because tons of technical reasons. It blows my mind that they would try something that cocky on a huge franchise. Cockiness should be in the polish, not the scope. Try new things out on short projects, not pillars.

Frostbite is capable of rendering gorgeous graphics and visual effects, but when BioWare first started using it, in 2011, it had never been used to make role-playing games.

No problem! Risk on top of risk on top of more risk for a beloved franchise. All good! This is going to work!

I just don’t understand how Electronic Arts, a 35 year old game company that produced hundreds of games still makes pretty much all the bad decisions possible on one of their biggest franchise. Wouldn’t you polish the previous games main features, perfect them? Create a spin-off, less costly, with procedural exploration? Have a RPG engine or layer developed and perfected for years for RPGs to come? Five years, hundreds of people working hard and the result is memes and an IP put on halt. Pretty sad and probably avoidable.

Me Myself&I

Dave pls

Post author By harold
Post date June 6, 2017
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“Get a blog. If your ideas have any value put them on the open web. Facebook is trying to kill it. Trust me you will hate yourself if they succeed. Same with Google.“

Dave,

It’s 2017. For years you played dumb with Facebook and Google, acting like they would not just try to kill everything that is on their path to lucrative margins. They’re companies, of course they’d suffocate RSS and the open web! You are a developer, you lived the 90s with MS, you are one of the very first blogger and you couldn’t see that coming? I don’t believe that.

I want the same as you: people independently owning their own spaces online, sharing their thoughts. And for that we can’t be whiny for a decade, we need to bring up actual solutions. Allow me to be blunt: no one cares, not even a second about technical detail. It’s a classic issue: developer gets so worked up with his/her own software, she/he forgets what the goal of those pieces of code are. We need a blogging solution, a full package now. For everyone, not the three friends who like to set up software on a server.

People type, record stuff on their phones or laptops and want to put it online and get it done quickly. That’s the Facebook lesson. No user should care about the backend, that’s the hosting companies and nerds problem. No user should care about syntax to format text, bring familiar GUI, allow people to flow.

Users need to be able to:

– buy/lease online space.

– produce and share anything they want, from paragraphs to live streaming.

– be able to archive and move to another online space with their stuff whenever they want.

All that in a few clicks. There are no other way. The other way is called “stay behind a private walled garden” because people are intellectually lazy and also, it just works. *opportunity shows up*

We need those tools now and yesterday: 10 year old kids today only know walled gardens and don’t understand the importance of the open web. Let’s go devs!

Me Myself&I

Technology nitro-boost

Yo,

Earliest estimation for computers to beat humans at Go was 2027. It was done by 2015. Two years later, not only computers can beat the best Go players in the world but it’s done with ten times less power. Last month the games were close but ultimately the machine won and probably would forever. AlphaGo is retiring.

It’s very difficult to grasp what Google learned here but it’s probably prodigious. Damn.

Other news, they just announced 5nm process ready for chips, which is a staggering achievement. That’s 3 times smaller than the current 14nm top of the line, still pretty rare. We cram 5 billion transistors in current chips, we will be able to go for 30B in a few years. That’s a lot of computing power guys, I try to imagine it. I can’t. I think it will be enough for machines to take over everything. Of course, there’s more innovation –that we don’t know yet- to come. I mean.

Your kids will not have any jobs. You should probably not have kids and if you do, don’t be surprised if they basically become Wall-E’s humans. They won’t leave their VR headsets and will cry when not getting an achievement for putting their socks on.

Brace yourself, it’s coming.

Me Myself&I

It don’t matter if you have no defense

Post author By harold
Post date June 4, 2017
No Comments on It don’t matter if you have no defense

People always are realizing after game 1 of the NBA finals that basketball is a team sport.

The finals are always about defense.

That’s something Cleveland is not so great at. Yeah yeah last year bla bla but it was the exception, not the norm. The odds are not in this happening again.

After those playoffs and the circlejerk around LeBron I was curious and watched some of those old 90s WCF/ECF. Boy. Those playoffs have everything: 3-5pt game until the last second, fans loosing their entire shit when a player hits ONE three, bricks thrown at, hands in the face everywhere… Look at the ‘93 ECSF Knicks VS Bulls in 6 games. Games were exciting and it really feels like the Bulls –who seem so invincible in our memory- were not doing so well. they had to fight damn hard to get to the finals. I remember reading magazines thinking “that big New York dude, Ewing, he might win it all this year” except it never happened. Because it’s a team sport and one dude or two isn’t enough.

People forget that aspect. MJ was showing up on both ends of the floor then Pippen would too then Grant would too and so forth.

This is what is happening right now with the Warriors. It’s not about individual stats and one guy doing everything, it’s about the actual teamwork and communication and all about adapting to the opponent. And they’re damn good at this. Spurs in 6 tho I don’t care.

Me Myself&I Music

Listening to music

It’s difficult to measure exactly how better audio people become at listening to music. In my case, it started with bass. Before playing bass in a band, I didn’t care so much about instruments I had my preferences and knew some of them I guess but didn’t care so much. Now I’m playing the 4-strings bottom so I’m more into that. It took over my life.

The first step was to watch music videos but the 80s sucked at that because you would have people fake playing instruments that have nothing to do with the music. It was confusing as hell. They didn’t even plug instruments in! In the 90s with the resurrection of rock and guitars, it was much better. I was spotting the longer neck, and big strings and looking at what bass players would do.

These days I can hear a clap, the reverb behind it and tell you if it’s Dayton or Kashif. It means I can recognize an artist with no melody or harmony information, just on a mere 900ms of percussive sound. It’s kind of nuts how much you can train your ear. I loved it when I started to be able to recognize styles of production. I remember being like I KNEW IT when I heard the Ross Robinson-produced Limp Biskit’s first LP. I knew that sound.

Sound is a mix of specific brands of instruments, specific effects, composition skills and mixing techniques… And they all influence each other constantly. It’s hard to pinpoint but your ears know, they will sense it. Knowledge obviously plays a huge part. Once you play some Stratocaster and Les Paul guitars, you know and understand. Once you know that FM rhodes sound, or that 808 hit hat, you know. And once you listen to Nile Rodgers Pharrell or Thom Bell for a while, you know too. It takes years, decades. So many parameters to memorize and remember.

As often with everything people are either too much into the detail “I think he uses this keyboard but the thing is busted so it sounds different” or don’t know nothing about musical instruments or the basics of low and high frequencies. Sigh.

Music is organized and satisfying noises layered in a convenient package and I love it so much.

Music

Sowing the seeds of love

Listening to that song after hearing it at my local supermarket, instinctively knowing when the song changes because I loved it so much when I was a kid.

You know that feeling when you hear a song you know and all you picture is you in the back of a car, looking outside with music coming out of the radio? I love that feeling.

This song –and the singles from that album- is incredible. There’s so much going on. It might be too much. There are not a lot of song out there that have an opera singer and a vocoder, big drum toms dropping left and right, reverse snares and trumpets, luscious strings and still sound like a pop song only it’s over 6 minutes long. That break kills me every time. I remember DJs talking over the sound design at the start of the song.

At first the album was a total financial disaster. A huge toll on the band to the point where they parted away. I try not to focus on the fact that everything today is made to make efficient money but when I hear big stars having really conventional music out there, not taking any risks, I cherish those absurd late 80s jams man. They are out there, forever.

Me Myself&I Music

Fast Lane

Post author By harold
Post date May 24, 2017
No Comments on Fast Lane

LA, 2017.

Me Myself&I

The age of spin

Yo Dave,

I was watching your last standup special again after a few months and man, the “he rapes but he saves” thing I mean it’s smart and real but… Fuck no to the hell nah.

Nah because you know it: all women on earth, 100% of them, including the ones not born yet and the ones gone will experience that creepy ass motherfuckingly disgusting behavior that some of us men have and that we most of us (RIGHT?) condemn. So that makes us not really qualified to joke on this you know what I mean? And you do it well, I don’t think you could go through that joke on stage with lights on your face better than you did but…

I don’t know why I picture your wife going “nigga you’ll see” on you but I do. My girl on my couch, women in the audience, none are not like “wait, that’s not funny is it?” pondering, which is bad in itself. But also I giggle and I feel stupid and sad because I know that it’s because I’m not as concerned about rape as women are. Shit is wrong. Fuck rape, nothing to laugh at there when half the planet will have to deal with it in a way or another.

About Bill Cosby. Fuck him. He will stay in history just because he also did marvelous things, whatever. I’m like you a care bear-raised, Cosby-was-so-important-to-me type of dude. I want him to be gone from the realm of heroes though because we have to have standards as much as possible and we can’t be sad about a grown ass, smart dude doing that fucked up shit. Fuck that.

I thought we would find the weirdest shit about Prince like some appalling fetish or something. Dude wore heels but he was a simple romantic and kind of a nerdy lover for what I read. He probably stole credits for some songs here and there like his guitar licks straight outta Carlos Santana’s playbook, but that’s it. That’s all the wrong he did. We should celebrate him as a hero of ours more. Make jokes about him and his absurd life, celebrate how much life he gave to the entire human sexual spectrum, all that shit. Maybe that’s bad material I’m just bitching on a blog.

Anyway I love you bruh and I hope you leave that rape/save/cosby combo that makes my head tilt 30° sideways in the past. Peace,

Me Myself&I