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Music

I am Charlie Wilson

I had always wondered why the GAP Band was in this weird zone, universally praised and known while being completely obscure and different.

I had always wondered why so many of those grooves and amazing anthems sounded so similar.

All the answers are in his book. I read it months ago and it still makes me sad. They got robbed. They got pissed. Brotherhood might not be what you think it is.

The GAP (standing for Greenwood, Archer and Pine, where the Tulsa riots happened) Band is huge. Charlie’s voice’s enthusiasm is unmatchable. I feel him when he talks about learning music and how he was fascinated by harmony while teachers were telling him to focus on melody. I had the same shit happening to me when I learned piano. Stacked notes over sequences of notes any day, I don’t care.

I’m glad you’re at peace now man. Thank you for the absolute bangers you guys created and thank you for writing it all down, uncle Charlie.

Categories
Music

On that music and Mars thing

The Grapevine. IS BRUNO MARS A CULTURAL APPROPRIATOR?

I mean, yeah. He’s one of the best-selling artist of all times already. It’s not just that he’s known. He’s making mad money and started by impersonating Elvis, the dude who stole black people’s moves and music. Patterns.

That’s how music business works. Music sells primarily to white people, in a much bigger volume to white people. Since about the 40s so it’s been a while.

For this reason, artists need to cater to that market. And there’s nothing better to cater than to look alike, especially since videos are how the word spreads out (and the reason why I don’t like them: music is about listening, fuck watching).

It’s no coincidence if Rihanna and Beyoncé are not dark skin women. That Drake is very white. The Wknd. That Bruno is even whiter. There is an absurd amount of talented black artists who were/are too black for TV. It all started to really hurts with the rise of MTV almost 40 years ago.

So many originators of black music –that is being used in various ways in ALL pop music- have never been heard or seen. I dig them online, listen to their music, find their pictures and love them. Music will always be more important than faces.

I think that’s the core argument: most black artists were making their own shit, creating their lanes. Trying things out. On the last Prince’s album he toys with house music and dubstep, but it’s still a Prince song with his guitar licks and ways of arranging horns and keyboards. MJ’s Bad album is fucking unique in so many ways. You can recognize a GAP Band groove from miles away.

Bruno copy/paste shit and says shout out to the OGs. It’s a different vibe. But yeah the song 24 Magic slaps and it’s annoying. It itches.

The worst part is that this entire appropriation phenomenon makes black people hate their black skin when their black skin is perfectly fine. Black skin is a symbol of creating timeless music genres and songs. Be proud of it.

Categories
Audio&Games

Wing Commander II

Outstanding article on a pillar of computer games’ 90s culture.

In retrospect, the Speech Pack for that game might have been one of the thing that made me think that sound is important in games. Even then as a preteen, buying sounds for a game felt wrong but I thought this was just because technology was moving so fast, developers didn’t have the time to do everything at the same time. Which was true, to some extent.

The technical craziness to me was that this game used 20MB of space. My hard-drive at that time was 20MB, which was standard and not enough for Origin’s game. 40MB hard-drives were ultra expensive. It’s as if today a game coming out required you to have a 2TB SSD ($1200 as of now). Not recommended, required. That was nuts.

The game was pretty bad. The fake 3D didn’t work well. The divide between gameplay/story was already there and yes, the story wasn’t that great. But it didn’t matter, I really wanted that game. The jump between the CGA-based awful game clones on MS-DOS to this mind-blowing 256 colors fest with digital effing sound was ludicrous. 3D-rendered bitmaps were sexy as hell.

I loved the visual style and design: those spaceships look like they were straight out of Robotech and I couldn’t get enough of that back in 1991. At the same time, Sonic was blowing everything away and Street Fighter II was punching everything away. Dragon Ball, Ranma½, Saint Seiya were airing in France.

That summer, Japan was reigning supreme in my young designer’s head. Japan, and Origin Systems.

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Me Myself&I

∞

It’s like a bad joke.

If you’re challenged in life, you’re supposed to talk to a therapist.

Therapists require money, quite some. If you’re challenged, you might not have access to that money. You might have trouble to even pay for basics like food or shoes.

If you vent out to friends, they stop wanting to see you right?

If you let friends vent out to challenged-you so that you can forget your own issues, you start looking like fucking Gollum.

If you stay alone, away, it hurts and things don’t get better magically.

If you socialize heavily, everything feels shallow as fuck and you feel empty for days.

If you look for help, people think you should man up.

If you don’t look for help, it doesn’t come either.

I’m pondering the emergency. Writing helps. Sound is the best.

Categories
Me Myself&I

Playoff horizon

Could my Spurs miss them? Will the Cavs make it to the ECF? Nothing is less sure. I don’t care about Cleveland so much though but how could San Antonio stay in the race?

Well, maybe the staff wants to preserve players for next year. But that’s not how it works, all those new players need playoff experience. If LMA and Kawhi are back in full effect, they could upset tons of people because nobody has played against them in ages. That would be a serious advantage in the ultra-competitive West. Pop is the smartest, we’ll see.

I miss watching Kawhi so much.

Speaking of the West, the Pels are super scary now. With Okafor and Mirotic added, AD can fest while Jrue is tearing all defenses apart while defending like a demon. He is the most underrated player this season. He is crafty as hell, you don’t know what’s going to happen but bam, 2 points in yo face that’s what happened. They’re a nightmare in the fourth and they have tons of experience in OT. They will hurt bad.

The Lakers won’t make it, the Jazz are ahead and definitely strong right now. My man IT doing well considering what he’s gone through, enabling LA to win in Miami for the first time in ten years. Not bad at all.

3s are cool until they’re really not cool, killing the game.

Categories
Me Myself&I

I Hate Atlanta

It’s so good.

I hate the simplicity and minimalism, so on point.

I hate that I feel Earn especially when he says after inhaling, “I’m good”.

I hate how the show is always the same shit and that I can’t get enough of it.

I hate that I recognize René & Angela, Breakwater, L.T.D, The Delfonics and Curtis on the first beat, even filtered out.

I hate that I’d love to work on that show. Or the computer game version of it.

I hate that I’d love to make a show like that, based on my book. Or my friend’s life.

I hate that I’m anxious AF and that this show doesn’t relax me.

I hate that Atlanta feels like a dream that I want to watch again.

I hate the clichés and love the clichés.

I hate Katt *soft damn* Williams for being great. I hate the cast for being so dope.

Atlanta is good. I hate Atlanta.

Categories
Me Myself&I Music

In The Summertime

Produced, recorded, performed, mixed and mastered by Harold in Los Angeles on an AMD A10 computer.

Categories
Me Myself&I

Actual megaproblem here

Porshe Mission E

So, electric cars don’t make noises. Sports cars are supposed to though? Car fans are really into roaring engine sounds. How will they survive when they buy a $150K car and you can only hear gravels under the tires in the driveway? Are engineers ready to play some engine sounds in the car so that the driver feels powerful again? What’s so great about noise, especially loud fart noises from an exhaust? High pitched sounds from Prius cars are annoying when there are a lot of them around.

It’s an interesting design issue.

Categories
Audio&Games

Paid saveslot. They did it

Yoooo.

It seems Metal Gear Survive only comes with a single free save slot – if you want a second one you’ll have to pony up a significant chunk of extra cash.

Metal Gear Solid requires you to create an avatar, which is tied to your single-player and online multiplayer save file/account. If you want to start a fresh playthrough, you’ve got to create a new character, which means you’ll have to delete your original save or cough up 1,000 SV Coins. Konami is selling their premium in-game currency in various set amounts — 550 SV Coins will set you back $5, while 1150 will cost you $10.

If you share your Steam, Xbox Live, or PSN account with family members, each additional player will have to spend that extra $10 to play with their own character.

This is out of control. Also, this is successful: Metal Gear Survive is apparently selling well.

The sunk cost fallacy has become standard in Games as a Service. This is where the focus is in my field: how to funnel those Gen Z kids. How to tractor-beam those people that hoard digital “goods” for hundreds of hours in digital worlds. How to make them feel guilty for quitting. And all that casino and slot machine psychology.

Man.

Categories
Audio&Games Me Myself&I

Glover

I felt that article so much. I see comments about Donald but you guys miss the biggest point:

Tina Fey, the show’s creator and star, told me that the answer was in large part yes; she admired Glover’s talent but hired him because funds from NBC’s Diversity Initiative “made him free.”

There’s a wildly missing consciousness in game development and computer entertainment. Yes, some kind of affirmative action needs to take place. This is how we got the very refreshing and needed Atlanta show. Black people have been waiting for years to get their own quirky, special thing that makes us giggle and memorize lines (I still haven’t recovered from the fact that once a black teenager asked me if I knew Gucci Mane on the playground and that I didn’t reply "I locked that nigga up too"). It all happened thanks to a Free Donald Glover, subsidized by a giant company. Sometimes capitalism does things right to un-do the things it did wrong. It’s rare, but it happens.

Any kind of affirmative action ideas are not frown upon in the computer game industry, they’re not even on the table in 2018. "There are already pushing for women so much already!!" would say the average dude working on games. And yes, it’s messed up that we need those kinds of initiatives but as you know, we didn’t create the unfairness in the first place. Accountability needs to happen. And yes, the laws of survival and progress suggest that people who can survive for years, maybe decades in an unfriendly environment have to probably be skilled, reliable, talented, driven and pretty good. It’s just mathematics. We have to overcome more. We have to deal with so much more. That makes us stronger. The fact that we don’t get hired though, is just politics ("meritocracy" and "culture fit" spirit humming around in games).

It’s dramatic that none of that is discussed at all in one field but is an open secret and prints money in the next field. Both being about entertaining people in the evening. It’s crazy.

10 months that I’m doing some help desk stuff every day in the middle of black LA. Basically working at a version of Issa’s We Got Y’all only for adults. GDC is coming, there will be a few discussions on the topic, most white people will be like "interesting…!". Most Asian folks will not even care for a second, a handful of black folks will hope things will happen and then nothing will fucking happen. And I’m supposed to remain calm, witnessing all that year after year.

I’m a little tired to see everything unfold or not unfold.

It’s not too late though. It’s never too late.