Small tool to write without distraction. It’s free, you can save in .rtf .odt. It’s the best I found.
I made four themes with wallpapers found on the web a while ago:
Nothing fancy, but I thought I would share. Now write these thoughts!
A lot of creative people see the world this way:
Boxes, nice ones. You go there. You’re part of that. Your role is. There are sound effects, music, sound design. There are music genres.
But I mostly see it this way:
There’s a pool. The audio pool, for instance. In it, there’s everything that triggers sound whatever it is. Then I use this whatever it is for a purpose, to convey something. Distinctions between a bass guitar or a 8bit bleep don’t matter as much as we believe they do.
It’s this philosophy that keeps bringing my ass to Japanese animated movies because this is exactly what they do. They don’t care, they use whatever could work and be original. Soderbergh cries out about how we use music in films today and it’s because of seeing things in perfectly marketed boxes, again. Same with the game industry except that there, boxes are titanium-reinforced stainless steel boxes. Hence stagnation, mutation is not encouraged.
And it’s the same with so many, many things. Where are my games with vintage filters rendering, fucked up 2D perspective, fisheye effect and so forth? Where are my giant trackpads for two players or more where people finally don’t need to try to look through their hands to play a touch game? Why can’t we have a contract for gay people that just gives the exact same rights as for marriage but -wait for it- we don’t call it marriage so that old people STFU? “I got our G-union contract, baby. we’re set!”
Are we humans so dumb that we need to put people and things in virtual, non-existing-outside-our-minds boxes even when we know that it’s fundamentally a broken system? Disappointing. Dumb.
It’s from 2009 and I watched it again because you need to be physically ready for the visual explosion. It’s insane, you can pause every single frame and contemplate so many things. The animation is incredible, it’s crazy, full of expression.
Seven years in production, bam. A review says “you haven’t seen animation until you’ve seen this movie” and I agree.
Crime: Murder, attempted murder.
Crime: Using and conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction resulting in death; malicious destruction of property resulting in death.
…
It’s murder, you malicious sick fucks.
Also, why the FUCK didn’t they burn that boat down? Don’t even try to answer.
On November 20th, 2011 I started a blog post with these words: I feel that a real gender war is going to happen and finishing with All that together, projected in the next few years means more friction. More friction means a higher chance of extremes.
Go women.
Google announced today that it’s shutting down Google Reader on July 1, 2013. It’s not a big surprise to us as we knew that it was going to happen someday but may be not so soon. Anyways, R.I.P. Google Reader – we loved you and we’ll miss you as developers although you never gave us an official API. ;-)
Spotted on a developer’s website, which is the average developer reaction after Google announced the big change.
Imagine you run a business, some dude connects an audience and builds a business around this, all on his own. You close shop without notice or helping out this business to run without you and the business is thanking you for these good old days full of uncertainty and stress.
Don’t you want to abuse developers when you seen that kind of shit? Developers are crazy. This “as long as I build things I’m happy, even if they’re destroyed or rendered useless” mentality has to stop. Sustain your work, goddamn.
I’m standing in front of the shop, it’s 11 30am (opens at 10am). No one inside, a sign says that I have to knock if there’s no one at the desk. I do.
I wait a couple of minutes wondering if I should knock harder. A dude shows up behind me and looks like he wants to enter the shop. I recognize the shop owner and say hi. I start to explain my bike brake problem and he’s all like “oh yeah, that’s not the good cable” and I’m all like “yeah, this bike stuff is confusing, so many standards” and he’s going all “meh, not really” on me. Bitch.
“how much does it cost?”
“We’re at 50 euros an hour and it’s probably 15 minutes of work.”
“OK so I leave my bike to you and come back later today?”
“No, keep your bike and come back this afternoon.”
“??? OK, what time?”
“After 3pm.”
“??? OK, thanks.”
I don’t fucking understand how this shop is surviving. I don’t get France. Fifteen minutes of work he could have done with me, chatting and my day would have been different, the future would have been bright.
Of course I’d rather do it my fucking self with services like that, no wonder I dived into independence so hard.
It’s things like this.
I’m bragging and writing how I’m the best thing on earth but I kind of need it, it’s never been that hard in my head. I feel like shit.
I desperately need a job in L.A. I always have been able to do without it for now but I can’t anymore. Last job opportunity looked awesome but before I could make a difference it didn’t happened. Meanwhile the game industry is in full restructuration there, is kind of in a hibernation mode in France. I could rent my apartment at crazy Parisian prices but the place needs quite some work done, for which I don’t really have any budget.
It is such a bad time to leave as my parents def need help and my sister is near useless. I was reading Derek’s blog post (you should subscribe) an American living in Singapore these days and he was talking about how there they’re all about family while they’re all about individuals in the US. Well in Europe we’re both and we are indeed, getting fucked.
Add the immigration layer: I am a permanent resident of the US but I spend too much time outside and they don’t like it. Trust me USCIS, if I had been able to import my tiny world and simply settle, work and pay taxes I would have. But it’s a little more complicated like, a lot. Somehow traveling every couple of months makes me neither American or French. I am this weird English French speaking hybrid who knows that there is not perfect place but hey, turns out you have to choose a fucking destination.
I always found solutions but I can’t find a good one for this big, poisoning headache.
I realize that I don’t’ dream anymore -that is, making plans- and I need to but all I can do is get stuck with odd boring jobs, game development problems or difficulties to focus on sound. Shit.
Well. The decade old black security guard at the Monoprix doesn’t have that kind of problems and I should probably shut the fuck up. Damn it feels good to have a blog.
Steubenville rape case. Another one.
Two weeks ago I saw my feminist crew, all awesome. We don’t talk as much about terrible things in the news like rape cases, how media treats them etc as before because we’re sadly, so used to it. Angry, not surprised.
We walked the streets. We had heated debates, we wrote thousands of pages, we met this way. I still remember the feeling of entering a bar 90% full of women and sit down there like “yes, I’d like to know more it’s interesting and I’m totally not overwhelmed and looking weird”. I was in my early twenties and it would change my life.
Learning that women weren’t coming so much with the help of a dick was amazing. Hurting like “oh shit, the power balance I’ve been told doesn’t exist! Tell me more, damn *recalculate*”, learning things that looked rock solid but in fact weren’t. Two big paradigm shifts in my head were the realization of all the work women do in this world and gets unnoticed for. Unbelievable. Massive failure of a system forgetting half of its population. The second one was realizing how much physical harassment women get and how much rape is something spread out and happening most of the time inside close circles. These twos things made me think hard.
That stuff clearly pushed me away from the classic machismo culture. Which is the only one in the game industry. I was sad to be sick of deep sexism -and thus avoiding bromancing/networking- but I was also happy to get that consistency that I love so much in my head. When news like Lara’s controversy, the lack of women in tech or terrible female characters show up I just stare at it and feel that I made the good decision. Happy to see that the message is spreading, slowly through the now classic explanation-men outrage-backlash-little progress loop.
And then there’s Rihanna and Chris. I never fucking want to hear anything about them, ever.
It’s just that sexism/racism are this big thing reducing my enjoyment in this world by a LOT™Louis CK. Like for all of us actually.
From Wikipedia:
Minimax (sometimes minmax) is a decision rule used in decision theory, game theory, statistics and philosophy for minimizing the possible loss for a worst case (maximum loss) scenario. Alternatively, it can be thought of as maximizing the minimum gain (maximin).
I first heard about the term through Olivier’s blog title and it struck me like lightning: this is what I’m doing and keep doing all the time and if not achieving it, going toward it. Minmax, maxmin all the way, all the time.
Minmax example: staying in shape even slightly underweight for that moment where I’ll indulged myself for a while. It will have less impact on my pants. Keeping my relationships friendly with everyone so that hate or resent doesn’t add up when shit goes down (which will happen, right? Always does). Less furniture, faster cleaning. Reusing things as much as I can. You got it.
Maxmin example: getting the best deal on a precise laptop when I could just get the new laptop du jour. Rarely eat dessert so that when it happens, it’s joyful. Do few light abs exercises everyday instead of a few heavy workouts a month so that back pain from playing bass disappears while my belly could be used in commercials or music videos. Instead of going hard on my body, I smooth it out through small routines for maximum efficiency and minimum hassle. Maximum pleasure, minimum hassle as much as I can.
Even for big events in my life I feel like I did minmax. For instance one of my bullet point to make game audio was that I was minimizing competition (everybody wanted to record music or score movies, almost none did though) and maximizing possibilities (less creative dictatorship and conventions, so much more to explore/get paid for). Sounded good to me, at least to sell it to my skeptical parents.
It’s all good except that this engineered, long term efficiency is not that popular. Actually society is almost entirely going the other way, wasting and being inefficient everywhere it can. On the other side minmaxing leads to OCPD and some kind of fanaticism about things being a certain way. It’s hard for me to witness inconsistency and wasteful behavior, even though I know that nothing’s perfect, that the world is born from chaos etc.
That really creates a tension, socially that I feel everyday a bit more.
