Composed in 2014 in Paris, lifting and re-mastered in 2017 in LA.
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Author: harold
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Elections
French people are salty all the time, by default. Even if the candidates were perfect, people would not believe them and they would resent their propaganda about earth needing our help, or how we should be dismantling the banking system etc.
It’s just how we are. We don’t trust and we like to not trust. It’s a sport. Which is also why nothing is going anywhere because well, there’s no goal besides being the smarter in the room. That leads nowhere though.
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Moment
My dad lost his mom a couple weeks ago. 103 years old. It was time. She felt it, called her kids to say goodbye. They had a nice funeral, all the family but a few including me was there.
I still think about him telling me online, at 65, how he felt a little lost without his parents now. I saw the kid in him in that moment like never before.
We’re all kids forever, in a way. Sometimes we doubt it.
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Creative process and critics
Rock Paper Shotgun talking about Full Throttle:
On release, Full Throttle was perhaps the first sign of adventure fatigue from critics. It was 1995, and the flawless DOTT and S&M had in years past rightly received rave reviews from everywhere, inducing everyone else in the industry to try to copy. The press were perhaps looking to take LucasArts down a peg, and Full Throttle provided the opportunity. It was short, the puzzles were simpler, and it had some absolutely god-awful action sequences. It didn’t receive a drubbing, of course – but it did represent the beginnings of the tedious decision that the time of the adventure was coming to an end.
They. Were. Trying. Stuff. Out. It’s something that critics get-but-don’t-get most of the time. Creative people try things out, find a recipe. They use that successful recipe for a while. Then they want to switch it up, change things. Consolidate, reduce, add.
Short? Yes, because we’ve known for a long time that people don’t finish games.
Simpler? Yes, because we’ve known for a long time that people hate difficult, convoluted puzzles.
Action? Yes, because we’ve known for a long time that people like action a lot.
Yes, most of the time it doesn’t do as well as previous output but… That doesn’t really matter because the reasons for changes are not stupid and if you want the old stuff, it’s still around.
We’re here now in 2017, where the most popular games have some narrative going on like Uncharted or Thimbleweed Park or Mass Effect. Adventure games never really died, that was a headline trick. That’s what I dislike with journalism/coverage of creative stuff: pushing a narrative when really, there’s none.
We just create entertainment and try to sell it to continue to create entertainment. If you want to write about that, dive into the design and business decisions that are shaping games but don’t go for the kind of lazy and obnoxious “X is dead” or “Y is everything now”.
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Playoffs
I’m all for the Spurs because:
– It’s the home of international folks and immigrants. In Texas. That’s weird and I like that.
– it’s my brother from Paris Tony Parker’s home.
– They put the D in Defense. Pretty much the only team that will come at every single shot taken, and try to block it. Watch them, it’s unreal. Every. Single. One. Danny Green is a nightmare, I wouldn’t like to play against him.
– They grind and out grind other teams. They can play a full game with a 1 point difference and you can be sure that they will stay focused and win. If they lose it’s because well sometimes, you have bad luck or a dumb ass referee.
– Kawhi. I remember watching him on the bench being shy and shit, I thought he had so much potential. He exploded. First, top notch defender. Then, he got good at 3s. Last year he had issues with dribbling, this year he’s BALLING. I’m noticing now that he’s working on his left hand a lot. The dude is updating his game faster than your apps and devices.
– The Spurs are the only team that will beat the shit out of Lebron’s without thinking about it. They lost in 2013 to him and it wasn’t because of him. He’s almost a non-factor to them, which is unreal.
I think Greg Popovich and Tony Parker played mind games all season, making everyone believe that Tony couldn’t score anymore so that during the playoffs, he would and that would be a disaster for other teams.
Professional teams know positions, techniques. To win, you need an extra factor. It can be an absurdly good 3pt shooting like the Warriors or Rockets or it can be something else, like a point guard scoring when he spent the entire year passing the ball. That’s why I like watching Kyle “Frame by Frame” Anderson at the Spurs. You never know what he’s going to do. Dude is random as fuck –in a good way- and that screws up other teams. J Simmons is the same. It’s so good to see. Pop is so damn good.
That’s why the Cavs, defendant champions are in trouble: they are predictable as hell. We know who will shoot the ball three passes earlier. We know they can’t do well without Lebron. It’s going to be rough for them to get to the finals, the East is thirsty. The Warriors have become a lot more unpredictable this season and that’s scary for my Spurs but San Antonio is I think even more scarier, they have d e p t h (and no pressure like the Warriors have). The bench is dope and they have the best mix of veterans and young bloods IMO. Hopefully the WCF is those two teams going at it. It’s gonna be LIT.
Tony, you know it’s the last time you can maybe get a sixth title. I wish I could send you some muscles or a third lung because I feel like, it’s doable. It’s doable son. GO SPURS.
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3DPrint
Architecture time, bitches!
So maybe you missed that stuff and a Russian company with American funds made that and these days Russia and the US… Anyway, it’s a 3D printed small house proof of concept (38m²/400 square feet) made in 24 hours. About $10K. They have a great post over there on specs etc.
It’s more magic than magic to me.
Some thoughts:
– Sci-Fi designers, get on this shit. Stop doing the same annoying huge ass towers since Blade Runner, be creative, fuck shit up, create cool looking neighborhoods with those. Create stories around the fact that we can print houses, I don’t know. Make. It. Legit.
– The shape is weird you say? You’re right but the best shape insulation-wise are circles and curves. 2nd best is square. Then it’s downhill and bad. L-shape house? Awful. Rectangle? I guess that kind of works.
– The wall are empty and can be filled with whatever. I’d choose hemp. Actually if they could find a mix of concrete+hemp for the printer’s ink, that would be so dope.
– So let’s say we double the surface, which would make it around 80m². A tad small still but at 100m² you have everything you need for a small family. People trip all the time on having a big house but it sucks, in a lots of ways. A small house is where it’s at.
I can’t wait to print mine. Pretty sure regulations, zoning and laws will slow the hell out of that amazing progress though.
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Russ
Dude is the quintessence of Most Valuable Player.
Drags his OKC team to a 5th seed in the playoffs. Beats the unbreakable triple double record with a game at 50 points, 16 rebounds and 10 assists which is stupid. His team won on a buzzer beater three Russell shot from almost half court, that’s the quintessence of What The Fuck. He was rated worst 3-point shooter of the league not so long ago.
It’s nuts. He deserves 2 MVP trophies just cause.
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It will be back
“Today, small, easily hidden speaker systems are the mainstays of home listening. But how did we get from full cabinetry to speakers not much bigger than a tin can?”
From statement furniture to unseen tech.
Because TVs took over, changing so fast that people kept their money to buy a new one every three years instead of buying speakers. Music was well, everywhere and portable. We started sharing albums more than ever digitally but we didn’t share the listening experience anymore.
I use headphones a good 6 hours a day at least and it’s nice but there’s nothing like listening to music on a nice set of speakers, both pointing to each ear, without clutter in front of one or some weird angle on the other. It’s just a lot more exciting, natural sounding experience. Bass frequencies have to be felt physically. Sound fills the room.
Maybe nice stereo or 5.1 setups will be back once an entire generation gets fed up with screens, pictures, videos and all that visual noise 24/7.
Closing your eyes and listening to left and right nuances is a magical feeling.
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Ewin10
Speaking of Windows. I recently tried Win10 and it was the worst Windows experience since Windows ME. At least Vista was bringing security and quite some stability. This doesn’t bring anything but trouble.
Win10 is the worst UI/UX sandwich I have ever seen. The focus on the right side of the screen is annoying. All those notifications, gross. Using the desktop with touch is tedious. Unlike Win8 where you could thrive on the start screen with your fingers, you’re stuck with floating windows and small icons here. It sucks.
I see exactly how Win8 start screen could have become a dope ass launching deck on big screens and 4K monitors but they had to freak out at MS. Win8 is, was the best route. Many things that felt kind of off at the time it came out make a lot of sense now. Like having only 10 tabs allowed in the browser. Search, find, pin down/save, get the fuck off the computer instead of hogging its memory with 40+ tabs for no reason, what’s wrong with you? Tons of little things that were simplified and that was awesome. It just needed a few UX adjustments and some robustness tweaking. It needed MS to not listen to power users but to step up and say “y’all, we’ve been making operating systems for a while now. We have a pretty good idea of how people use those damn computers, don’t tell us how it should be. Grow up or stay on 7 and STFU.”
Instead they forced Win10 all over the place by giving it up for free. It’s not a good sign when you give things for free, in a way. And after trying this bad OS for a week uh, yup.
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Native Soft
It’s a weird time for software too. Take the example of audio listening. I haven’t changed anything in many moons. Same Foobar, same interface since forever. Same keyboard shortcuts since Winamp 2, 17 years ago at least. ’bar can play absolutely anything. No new type of audio files since forever and we probably will never need new ones.
Technically there’s really nothing to add. the piece of code is probably as efficient and stable as possible already. It deals with absurd sizes of content, way bigger than I ever will be able to remember. They released a version 20 days ago, fixing a bunch of minor and ultra specific stuff. That’s it.
Witnessing the actual stop of growth, iteration needs for main software –audio, video, word processing- but also creative software –pro audio, image processing, 3D- is an interesting time because software always has been connected to “the future of” and now it’s really the past. It feels like the past 10 years were like, “hold on, maybe we can improve those?” and now it’s like “OK, not really man”. Only game engines and real time-procedural-whatever still have quite some room to grow and mature.
Having said that, I still can see where the UI could be more unified and streamlined. Fuck floating windows.