Author: harold

Answer me

Fine not everything is bad in France and debt wise, UK and USA are much worse. But we also know that they have a faster, more fluid way of building value and create activity leading to jobs etc

Fine, it’s a cultural difference. But the denial about how things are bad in France is atrocious. And the debate always ends up being overly abstract when I’d like French people to solve and think about things like:

How come a highly educated Arab dude can’t find work in Paris but can in London?

How come France has 8,450 companies with 50 people or more and Germany has 20,340? Is it because in France going from 49 people in your company to 50 or more adds 34 laws to respect?

Why do French people think it’s totally normal to have so many different work contract shaping society in a ridiculous pyramid? Isn’t “equality” part of our constitution and written everywhere on school walls?

Why so many smart people leave the country and why so many live on unemployment checks?

You can’t tell me all is good. It’s just not. Reforms are needed asap.

Me Myself&I

F the cloud

One column, up to 46 To of data.

That’s a lot. If it’s curated data, the best of your pictures, music everything, that’s even more. After ten years of digital life, I’m not even at 1 To of data I want to save “forever”.

The “cloud” Skydrive, Dropbox, Spotify, Flickr and all are convenient and useful but these services are not private (that is, these companies have access to your stuff and have rules about it) and don’t allow you FULL freedom. Which is for personal stuff kind of crazy to me.

I don’t trust hard drives and I don’t like burning optical discs. But they are the cheapest, safest, most private way of saving a lot of data. If you take the time to burn your backups once or twice a year, the probability of losing precious things goes toward zero.

Me Myself&I

Bad boys

A few weeks ago. Just a music video shooting where I happened to dance around AND in a swimming pool and Verdell’s dog Buzz aka Boots who for the first time chewed up some recycling garbage. He looks at me like I’m going to beat the shit out of his ass.

I’m scoring a mini-web series on YouTube, will be out in January I think.

I did my last biometrics exams this morning. I feel like with chips in my green card and full fingers prints if I don’t wash my hands in a public restroom, a drone will make me regret that.

You know this warm breeze in late May in Paris when you feel for the first time summer coming? This is today in LA. That and black people’s nodding at me and everybody else not making this my-life-sucks-please-kill-me face, I don’t know if I’ll ever get bored with that. Shit is powerful.

Also, LA Game Space. Please back this project, it’s going to be awesome.

Music

Punk to the hop

Throughout punk rock history, technical accessibility and a DIY spirit have been prized. In the early days of punk rock, this ethic stood in marked contrast to what those in the scene regarded as the ostentatious musical effects and technological demands of many mainstream rock bands. Musical virtuosity was often looked on with suspicion. According to Holmstrom, punk rock was "rock and roll by people who didn’t have very much skills as musicians but still felt the need to express themselves through music". In December 1976, the English fanzine Sideburns published a now-famous illustration of three chords, captioned "This is a chord, this is another, this is a third. Now form a band." The title of a 1980 single by the New York punk band Stimulators, "Loud Fast Rules!" inscribed a catchphrase for punk’s basic musical approach.

It’s interesting to me because it kind of makes no sense. Music is much more than just energy coming out of speakers. Refusing it and going against musical virtuosity is like being against Michelin chefs: if you like food, you can’t be against great food. At worse, you ignore it and enjoy your junk food. I never liked the arrogance of thinking that doing something is enough and trying to elevate things is wrong. If you don’t try to get better, you have no goal and you’re just running in circle. It’s not that great of an advice, creatively speaking. Eventually punk music got more musical and ended up mutating to New Wave. The Sugarhill Gang impressed the Clash so hard (funk dance-ish tracks, political lyrics) they made Rock the Casbah back in the UK.

The interesting part of punk rock in the 70s/80s VS hip hop is that it wasn’t a problem of money that lead punk bands to be limited and raw in their musical output. It was a decision, an aesthetic to follow against the “oppression” of Pink Floyd and complex music.

Hip hop on the other side is the pure product of a real oppression, poverty. No money to buy instruments, no money to rent a place to rehearse, no money to tour. Hip hop is born from black people’s ingenuity to make music with nothing but music players. For two genres born around the same time in the same city, both being full of energy but limited musically, one was the product of an obligation the other was the product of a necessity. No wonder why the latter took over the world so hard.

True, deep things often explode and expand. It’s physical.

Me Myself&I

legalization baby steps

The best part of US elections are ballot measures. We don’t have that in France and damn, it would be great as it really feels like you have an impact on your life and decide for things, directly.

So Washington, Colorado and Oregon legalized pot through a democratic vote and simple propositions. It fills my heart with joy. In France there’s no debate, no vote, citizens are kids who have to follow the rules.

Anyway.

I’d like to focus on the drug war because to me, it almost looks suspicious: after more than a decade of war against drug lords in Mexico, legalization starts to spread in the USA. Really? I guess weapon manufacturers saturated the market and can’t sell no more.

People think pot legalization is going to finally hit drug cartels where the DEA couldn’t hit them? Wrong.

Mexico cartels have been busy diversifying their money, they didn’t wait for pot legalization to act. They have been busy taking over the entire country, politically, economically, slowly, violently. They have been taking over the population with “you give us 30% of your income or we get 3 fingers” kind of deals. The corruption is endemic.

Mexican cartels don’t need pot anymore. Cartels don’t care about the merchandise, they sell what is in demand.

And of course now that pot is legal they’ll sell cocaine, heroine, meth, which are much easier to ship, with far bigger margins.

That’s why if we legalize, we need to legalize every-thing.

It boggles my mind that presidential candidates debate on Syria but don’t say ONE word about the state of Mexico and its 60,000 deaths related to drug wars for dominance of the US market since 2006. 60,000 violent deaths, in a country sharing borders with the US and no one freaks out? I kind of do.

Audio&Games

Game audio requires innovation

Post author By harold
Post date November 10, 2012
No Comments on Game audio requires innovation

Notice that the instrumentation takes up the entire spectrum of sound at the beginning, but then right as the vocals enter at 18 seconds in, they part. The strings become higher, the bass gets a bit lower, and everything that was in between the two drops out. It’s a virtual parting of the waters to make room for the voices in their proper register. Just to show it’s not a fluke, it does the same thing at 0:43.

I can’t think of a single game that really nails this concept, which surprises me.

There. It’s not surprising if you understand how game audio works and worked on different platforms. To do what the author wants in a game means having individual control of each instrument in the music.

Technically, no problem. In a game though with constraints of I/O, RAM and CPU usage and things more important than music, it’s impossible to dynamically mix individual streams of audio. We’re talking about let’s say 8/16 minimum individual streams fading in/out, just for one track. It’s overkill. Sound is already taking so much space on install.

That’s why to introduce this much beloved dynamic in a technically much lighter way, we need MIDI. Like it or not, it solves all the issues at once if you’re willing to sacrifice some sound quality. The created dynamic is worth it.

We don’t solve that through discussions between composers and designers about emotional goals in a game and its music, we solve that early on by trying, iterating music over a custom audio system allowing the depth wanted while staying in line with the rest of the game development. It’s a fucking huge task that’s been solved in the past here and there but never spread. 3D graphics took the priority.

Looking forward to another article wondering why we don’t do game audio like we do audio for films on a website for professional game developers that I’ve been reading for ten years.

Audio&Games

Developer logic

Devs: so this Windows 8 app store thing, I don’t know…

MS: look people, we tried to learn from our industry successes and we’re offering you another channel to broadcast your games and apps, what is so wrong about that?

Devs: well we always loved the openness of Windows and want to take advantage of it.

MS: that’s cute and all but that’s also bullshit. How many of you developed great things that took advantage of Windows’ freedom in the past ten years? How many valued the freedom?

Devs: …

MS: that’s right, pretty much no one. Meanwhile how many run for/found success on XBLA and Apple app store?

Devs: …

MS: exactly. How could you blame us for taking reality in account? You guys rushed for complicated approvals, expensive console dev certifications and liberticidal walled gardens. The better you guys are, the more you want to be trapped in closed systems. Blame yourself for opening the Pandora box…

Devs: but you’re supposed to be wise because you’re a giant.

MS: I’m just a company with shareholders and my goal is to make money, like all tech companies and even non-tech companies. Sorry.

Devs: but we’re making games which is art which doesn’t really need to make money.

MS: make up your mind and explain why you would do anything to be on Steam, then.

Devs: to reach more people.

MS: You don’t need Steam to reach people on the internet. Come on now.

Devs: Yeah but you fucked it up with GFWL and PC OEMs never have been able to make great, simple gaming machines.

MS: I’ll give you that but today through the rise of laptops and tablets things are more unified than ever. We offer all the tools you want to develop easily and another channel to distribute your games and apps, we finally understood why design and performances are important and you still can install whatever you want, what the hell do you want?

Devs: We don’t know what we want but we know that we don’t want you to do it!

That’s pretty much the vibe today in the game industry. So mature.

Me Myself&I

Social pressure

In a sense I’m glad we did our big Europe trip before social networks existed. We checked our email maybe once in every city — if we could find an Internet cafe. For the most part we were on our own. Just one couple amongst a sea of tourists. There was nothing different about the bottle of wine we had in that one Italian restaurant. Except that it was our bottle of wine, and we shared it just with each other. Not with anyone else. It was a whole month of secret moments in public, and we were just… there. We didn’t check in on Foursquare, we didn’t talk about it on Facebook, we didn’t post any photos anywhere. I now look back and appreciate the incredible freedom we had to live before we all got online and got this idea that the value of a moment is directly proportional to the number of likes it receives.

Elezea.

Now, imagine kids growing up with the social network/pictures default world. There’s no way that at some point they will not go dark, all dark and inexistent online.

Funny how for my old ass the internet was freedom and how for younger generations it already is not.

Me Myself&I

Perspective

The trick to being truly creative, I’ve always maintained, is to be completely unselfconscious. To resist the urge to self-censor. To not-give-a-shit what anybody thinks. That’s why children are so good at it. And why people with Volkswagens, and mortgages, Personal Equity Plans and matching Louis Vuitton luggage are not.

A short lesson on perspective. He’s talking about the ad industry but it works for any creative business…

To resist the urge to self-censor. I totally do not resist these days and that’s not good.

Me Myself&I

Categorization

Why do we have such a need for putting things, people in boxes and then compare them constantly?

It feels right when mapping the unknown, -nature, Mars, DNA- but doing it for stuff that have no secrets to us is kind of moronic. Having a tattoo I guess meant something at some point but today? None. It’s just a drawing with ink on your body, it doesn’t automatically make you cool or means you are a biker. You just have a tattoo, because you wanted one. What consoles/computers mean today when they share pretty much everything, including bugs and patches? Nothing. We just have devices to play on, with different inputs. Notebook/netbook/ultrabook/tablet/smartphone? Oh, you mean computers. Indie, AAA, mobile, social it’s just computer games made with the same tools all around. This stupid segmentation confuses the hell out of people. I know it’s the goal because then they rely on brands and other deity and then it’s fucking irrational and childish. It’s the ??? before profit in this heavy capitalistic world.

I know, things look dead simple and boring without categorization enabling religious and zealous behaviors. But could we please favorite simplicity and fluidity? Long term values, right? Better off this way, wouldn’t we?

*crickets*