Category: Me Myself&I

Back to Paris. The sun was here and it really helped. Today is hard. Re-figuring out how to do things, while wondering if the past four months really happened. Jet lag’s charm. You frown upon your own thoughts like “was that real?”. Yes it was, is.

Thermal shock, time zone shock, culture shock, personal shock, I kind of feel knocked out but also quarantined. I have a bit more than a dozen tracks I made on my laptop in LA to mix and finish on my big beast @ Chocobeam Sound Lab. I got some assets to create for my game prototype, quite a lot to experiment on.

Also.

Here’s my a bit over a week Windows 8 start menu. I use it on a 12” laptop with trackpad and mouse. It’s great. No, really.

It’s a lot of change too. I like change now. When I was a kid, I did not. I remember seeing Windows 3.1 and being like, “this is lame. What’s the point. Command line or GTFO”. I grew up and I no longer hate something right before really trying whatever I read hear see. In my experience the big changes with Win8 are:

– Focus on full screen

Very destabilizing for someone used to have 20+ tabs open and a dozen apps running front and back. I know it’s not healthy or that efficient. I know I procrastinate a lot with all these windows, one click away from a lot of distraction. The focus on full screen is just that, killing this procrastination of wandering between icons, browsing between apps. In Windows 8, you do what the app launched does and then you press the win key to go back to the start screen, open another and do something else. There’s an implacable efficiency, no “dead time” in the way you move around these tiles with information/full screen apps. Very weird but good. It feels less stressful. No “notification hamster” feeling.

– Horizontal scrolling

After years and years of reading lists like in our browsers, it is awkward. Lists are great to scan rapidly and I excel at that so when apps push for horizontal scrolling a lot, I’m no big fan. It might be better with a touch screen though. The interesting part is that I take more time to read this way and if I’m not in search mode it’s more pleasant, no doubt. Like reading a magazine. But when searching for immediate info, I’m too used to lists (I’m using ClassicRSS for a reason). No biggie though, there are apps for all tastes. I expect different apps to aim at trackpad/mouse and touch.

– Internet Explorer 10

I swear, I used Chrome from day one when it came out and never looked back (well, I did use another Chromium based one with no Google tracking). So many habits and shortcuts. Well IE 10 is good enough to make me want to open links in it. with the charm bar, sharing is easier and more fluid than ever. IE 10 is indeed fast and the rendering has something, not that Chrome’s rendering is bad but IE has a little something more, sharper. I’m still switching on/off with my desktop one but IE 10 is gaining on me. Proof is I installed some ad blocking rules and can’t wait for an AdBlock add-on. A webkit, non-tracking my ass browser in the store would be nice though. Let’s keep the competition on.

– Apps

They kind of replace web sites a lot. To search something on Wikipedia I was used to open a new tab and directly use Wikipedia’s search engine with a shortcut. Extremely efficient. Now I can go back to the start screen, click on the Wikipedia app and use win + q to search within. Not as fast but not slow, definitely more “natural”, less “program-y” I don’t know. With Reddit though, way better to use an app (dark theme, fetching faster than in one of way too many Chrome tabs). The look and feel in apps are usually awesome and slick. Sometimes it’s too much. There’s a lot of design work to be done in win 8 apps and it’s exciting. The so called modern UI is three years old now and still feels like the future more than anything I’ve seen around. So readable and clean.

There are some stupid things like not having a consistent “going back” esc button experience. It drives me crazy. Or the new file explorer with its weird arrow to go up the hierarchy, which does the same thing than clicking on the folder’s name but it made a lot of people happy because it’s “like XP”.

It must be really hard to make something to both attract people ready to change and get better workflows and people who don’t want to change, even if it was making their lives a little better/easier.

I think Microsoft did well looking at the challenge’s size. Also, Surface -even RT- makes a lot, a lot more sense to me now. I can’t wait for these Win8 20” tablets and my favorite audio apps on them. My almost carpal tunnel’d right wrist using the mouse would appreciate.

TL;DR: Get it while it’s cheap, at least for performance enhancements if learning new, cool ways to do things is like punching yourself in the crotch area.

Reading a book on black Los Angeles, seeing how segregation built up and created this city in detail. In East Hollywood, Latinos are a majority, followed by white people through gentrification. If in four years I’ve seen a dozen black people in Silver Lake, that would be the max.

In Paris, that would happen in four minutes. It’s heavy on my mind. It’s disturbing to me.

Even more so with the fact that I don’t experience segregation like history shows me how it exists and founded interracial relationship in the USA.

But when I get a flat tire on my bike, a pretty old white dude riding his bike on the other side of the street stops and asks me “need some tubes or anything?” That would never fucking happen in Paris.

It is so destabilizing. I feel like being in a dream, living things no black people live.

It’s 26°C today and in a week I go back to 0°C winter, my white family and its ethnocentrism.

Sometimes I’m proud of how I handle what I have to put up with.

Wow, a lot of articles about Aaron Swartz.

It’s weird that I just wrote an article about how using proprietary formats wasn’t so bad. Aaron helped writing the RSS 1.0 specs which I wish developers were building apps around instead of using Google’s Reader API which could be closed to developers anytime Google wants. We saw Twitter.

I feel like when they should use open, stable formats developers don’t and when they should probably help themselves with proprietary solutions, prefer to enter a world of pain by building these themselves.

At the end whatever you use to build apps and services, let the data flow. Monetize around but free access to information. It’s crucial.

I think it’s all about the flow. I love the flow.

The flow of the 24/7, delivery, consistency paradigm. The flow of these large streets where doing a U turn is a breeze. The flow of kilometers of square blocks of beautiful little houses and small buildings, empty spaces or ruins that are going to disappear soon. Present, future, past doesn’t matter. The flow of empty sidewalks, silent rad bikes and skateboard sounds. The flow of smiles and slow cars. The flow of the music I hear in public, last time was this while getting cash at my favorite ATM. By far not a perfect world but definitely more fluid. It feels so right to me. It definitely outweighs the bad, at least for now.

France’s everyday friction made me sick but now every time I go back it eats me up. Lefty black dude producing audio for games is by default frictional enough so if everyday things are too… Family and friends create this bubble where I’m cool but I feel frozen in time, not moving forward. It’s comforting but I like moving on. Or do I? Sometimes I don’t even know anymore.

It’s delicate.

I’ll have to take that plane again in a couple of weeks. It is so getting old.

I don’t know, I just feel good personally.

I feel right on it on so many things, I can’t stop thinking how my “method” of thinking works well and allows me to get excited so often, on so many things simple or complex.

Willing to learn and get better, always. That and chilling are the best things in life.

And yet I feel like being in a fantasy game where I’m the only one playing. I feel stupid or way too smart alternatively.

I don’t know how to fit in this world. I look around see if things are picking up in a good way, nope. Let’s be positive and say that if our western world is so chaotic, it’s because it’s changing pretty dramatically and that’s a good thing. Readjustment.

But what if we go the wrong direction? What if we miss a path that would make most people happy? What are we building? And if we’re not building a society and improving it, why are we faking caring about it? Should we go back to clans to prevent inertia to make progress worthless? Is it already the case?

This all thing is blurry.

That was my first “sweet!” moment after upgrading my laptop to Windows 8 yesterday. For the rest well, it feels like what I suspected:

It’s like the Windows 8 new start menu becomes a classy, modern living room to use everyday apps while the desktop becomes the clean, flattened workshop to create stuff and get complex shit done. All in one OS.

What is weird to me again, is how people spend so much time hating on things and don’t even try them! It almost made me skeptical. Maybe I shouldn’t upgrade as old Windows users know but at least have a clean, brand new machine with it. For budget reasons I upgraded and my little buddy feels super snappy, modern and all my old stuff works like before or better.

Who the fuck is going to complain? All these whiny bitches called reviewers, that’s who.

If you don’t know him, he has his Wikipedia page. A great dude. 

I’m reading a book on dog psychology and I can’t help but see numerous things I do or feel that are alike of what Cesar Millan says about our canine friends.

How dogs in nature are naturally balanced and how they start developing issues once in cities and buildings all day. Like us.

How they need a purpose, a task to do even just walking with their pack leader. How they need exercise. How there is no wrong or bad but things that happen and how you react to them. How they pick up on energy. How they value calm assertive energies and would never give an unstable dog a role of leader (thing that we do all the time in the human world with extrovert people). How the role of leader is following a natural order but is also interchangeable. How dogs don’t care about the past, move on and eat today as much as they can because their instinct is telling them that tomorrow or the close future could be without food. How it’s all about balancing and sustaining a pack. Rules, boundaries, limitations. Like us. I mean, we’re forgetting that.

I try not to. Playing and creating music requires a lot of discipline and simplicity. I try to nurture that balance in my life, having things run smoothly already makes me happy. It’s as challenging if not more than “gettin’ rich”. But like Cesar and unlike a lot of people, I grew up in the middle of nowhere and know this feeling of simply feeling good when the day is over, when your body is relaxed after working out for hours, simply enjoying each other’s presence before going to sleep.

Like dogs.

Outside my computer, another world.

I was watching E.T on TV and couldn’t help but think how great of a movie it is. But I remembered that I saw it at kind of the perfect age, seven. I say perfect age because a little younger than the movie’s hero which is perfect because when you’re seven, you really want to be ten and when you’re ten you really want to be fourteen, at least that’s how I felt. So you really get into a “fascination mode” watching someone a bit older doing amazing things with an E.T.

Same thing with watching Akira at 11 (full story here), when the hero is sixteen. Same thing watching The Matrix at 20, when the hero is in his mid twenties.

I feel lucky to have seen these three monuments at the theater at a perfect age but also, if they marked me so hard was because I didn’t know anything about what I was going to see. Like, nothing except the main poster before getting tickets.

Also, sound. From the first ten minutes of E.T. exclusively based on sound effects and no faces, to Akira’s unique music and soundscapes to the tightest audio I had experienced with The Matrix, they all left a big mark on my forehead and my earholes.

Also, social commentary. E.T. is clear about what its director thinks of divorce. Re-watching it, I see how personal it was to Spielberg and I find that it’s awesome to point things out with determination, but in a honest way in a science fiction movie. Akira’s cyberpunk tone seemed a little too dramatic to me in 1991, but in 2012 it feels oh so powerful: corrupted gigantic decadent and shallow society controlled by the army in 2019? It looks like we’re doing it, we already have the drones and the decadence with the 1%. Again for a science fiction, action movie what a great vision twenty years ago. The Matrix social commentary is too obvious and too painful: yes, people are mostly like the dude who wants the fake steak as we can see how people prefer the comfort of freedom-killing silos on the web instead of being in the real, server-side-I-install-my-own-shit and I’m free web.

So to me that’s where the art VS profit discussion falls short because these three movies have both. Strong vision, innovation but also enough compromises to make it to a larger crowd, would it be by cutting off the complexity (Akira) or spending time explaining what’s going on (The Matrix). Because these movies are widely considered landmarks and really punched me in the face, I think we should analyze more these successes instead of going for Indie VS AAA VS Art VS Profit pointless game discussions, creatively speaking.