h. Play

In my adventures with Unity.

So, I have a game prototype and I want people to try it. For that it needs to be exported as an executable. It’s all done by Unity, two buttons to press like exporting a jpg in Photoshop. But for some reason, no sound in my game build despite the fact that it works nicely in the editor. Very annoying in a game with a big focus on audio.

Everything’s all right, no warning anywhere. I start searching and the solution doesn’t come out straight, no one is really having this problem.

I know I’m using weird stuff (plugged Fmod Ex through Squaretangle .NET wrapper) and I know it’s because of that because when I try to build another game with sound triggered by Unity built-in audio system, it works.

Fuck. And this is where making games is about folder agency, what this file is used for and so on. Dumb work.

In audio and video software we usually have this cool tool that basically says “clean up all the unused files and references and consolidate my project, computer slave”. There’s nothing like that in Unity. It’s SO useful, especially with dozens of folders and files.

I finally found the answer through forums and my knowledge, trying out copy/pasting .dll. Would it be hard to have Unity builds made on the basis of “everything that is used in the editor to run the game is exported, regardless of where it’s at on the machine”?

How come we still need to do that kind of micro-management shit in 2013 with game tools, it’s beyond me.

Real talk. *cries*

Google is already taking heat from lawmakers and privacy advocates who think that the device’s ability to capture what is going on around the Google Glass user is a horrible idea. The other concern with this particular app is that it could be used to create "revenge porn" (capturing a sexual act and then posting it online without a participants permission to publicly shame them).

Google bans first Google Glass adult app.

It’s an “adult” app. “revenge porn” doesn’t exist, you either give your permission to have a camera in the middle of the action, which means that these raunchy pictures can end up anywhere in the world, or you don’t give the permission to your partner. Like people waited for Google Glass to shot fornication.

It’s an app for adults, those people who are legally responsible for what they do. What the fuck is this world we’re living in and even worse, how is that not upsetting us more than not at all… We’re all so weird toward sex, we simply stay so conservative, even with the most futuristic and individual piece of hardware today made by a “cool” tech company.

Impressive.

Ta-nehisi Coates is amazing and his analysis are always beautifully perfectly melting in my mind. His last one as well. Public policies, discrimination, the Twice as Good mantra, the president.

I also know that, if cousin Pookie would vote, get off the couch and register some folks and go to the polls, we might have a different kind of politics.

But Cousin Pookie did vote–at historic levels, no less. And Cousin Pookie’s preferred candidate has taken that vote and continued about the business of busting all the other Pookies out there for things the candidate did in his youth. And those busts are happening at rates well beyond Pookie’s other American neighbors. There is no reason to think this will change any time soon.

That saddens me. 

It’s rough, man. That angers me so hard because just from a rational substance abuse point of view, we know how much damage alcohol does and yet nothing happens, either for communities of people drinking too much or public policies about it.

It’s never been about public health. It’s about  keeping a system where white people got what they wanted (beer!) and where minorities still hope to get what they want (weed!). You can change the subject, patterns are always the same.

In this case though we have a black man as a president, who still is the system’s bitch where policies are locked in and profit WAY too many people to be changed. How can we have hope with this shit.

We need to change things directly. We need a new system. We need liquid democracy to regain our individual power.

But there’s another reason Google decided to put its RSS reader to death. According to Mountain View, most of us simply consume news differently now than when Reader was launched.

“As a culture we have moved into a realm where the consumption of news is a near-constant process,” says Richard Gingras, Senior Director, News & Social Products at Google. “Users with smartphones and tablets are consuming news in bits and bites throughout the course of the day

These news are more than often coming from RSS links, stupid. Nothing changed, you want me to change to follow your agenda Google, and you will wait like forever.

As a user says:

I don’t want to read what Google thinks I want to read. I want to read what I want to read. I used Google Reader as a way to check on all the sites I read without having to bookmark and visit every single one. I kept up with webcomics. And it did all that by me just clicking a button and subscribing, not by having to "teach" it and wading through recommendations I wasn’t really interested in.

Fuck your algorithm and your attempt to control what I read.

After two days at my foster mom’s I realize that I’m a real life hack. Her granddaughter is my age and lives up the street, she never invites her for lunch. Only when I’m there.  My foster mom always cared for me but she’s still surprised that I come regularly, after all those years. After all, officially I don’t have anything to do with her. Her sister who lives across the street fostered a black kid too, she never saw nor heard of him again once he left.

So hacking. I broke into this family with my nice baby face and now I’m as part of it as if I had the same blood, without the problems like resentment or jealousy. Same with my (other) family! Anyway, it gives me a sense of why I never want to just do and follow like everybody else and almost need to hack, make it my way, questioning everything, trying to build healthy bases in everything I do etc.

It’s exhausting talking to two moms that having nothing in common either with me or between them in the same day. It really brings me a different perspective though.

The problem wasn’t and isn’t austerity. It’s applying it at a bad time when it doesn’t work but yes, austerity should have been what Europe does. Look at Germany, they’re good. They went through twenty years of hard austerity though, while France Spain Italy Greece were like “nah, let’s just abuse a little bit more our national debt”.

I feel like we abused Germany on this because well, since the end of WWII Germany can just STFU, right?

But Germans were probably right to push other countries to follow a plan that is making them the only big European country that has a running and alive economy. We can now STFU and follow them, I think (which is not what the US want because if the entire Europe becomes strong like Germany, they can say bye-bye to China’s support of the dollar. Yeah, humans are nasty). Instead we’re doing nothing, pushing further away what we should have done years ago. France has still this little advantage that Spain or Italy don’t and that’s why it hasn’t exploded in France that much. But it will.

We needed to build a strong politic Europe (everyone has to follow the same rules, starting in ‘86) we didn’t really fail, we didn’t even try!!

“La souveraineté de l’état” sovereignty of the state, is what politics constantly pushed in France. We’re paying and we’ll pay more of this non sense in global and local economies.

Nations in Europe are a thing of the past, I’ve been witnessing it my whole life. And that’s why I’m mad at European boomers: they knew the € wouldn’t be enough. They knew but didn’t give a damn because hey, it wasn’t going to concern them so much.

Wrong.

Meanwhile people of Turkey, a democratic republic trying to get in the Euro club are remembered that human rights are still a big problem with their country.

Social progress is slowing down, no doubt.

The thing is, owning a car is a thing of the past and owning a ready to be off the grid passive house is the future.

That’s why I never really quite get into excitement mode when I hear Elon Musk. Electric cars and battery charging stations, cool. But I don’t want to invest in that, only use them as a last resort in my life. I’d be much more interested in some kind of quick and fast public transportation system deployment based on monorails, owned and co-operated between cities and private companies (It happened but failed: Nobody Walks in L.A.: The Rise of Cars and the Monorails That Never Were). You know, trying to reach and help as many people as possible.

Annual energy cost in average Alaska home: $5,470. That (passive) house? 900 bucks. In one of the toughest climate in the world. It’s a small house of course in this hell you can’t do passive AND big. But it cost $169,500.

That’s two Tesla model S “lite” cars. The performance model is at $96,070 (sold $146,500 in Europe). It makes me daydream.

A passive house for a “normal” climate would probably cost around 80K, maybe less. And now it looks like something I would totally invest my money in. That’s pure Quality of Life right here. That’s saving money, forever.

Little passive boxes, little passive boxes, little passive boxes, little passive boxes.

What I’d like to see is a website where you would order your house, get it prefab, mounted in a week, finished in a month. Hemp insulation all the way, local farms and plants to grow and make houses in order to limit transportation.

Best part? All of that is possible right here right now, not in 2016 at best when finally Tesla cars get kind of affordable to start to make a difference. I am just saying.

One more thing I read on the internet.

Buildings have a lifespan of 50-100 years during which they continually consume energy and produce CO2 emissions.  If half of new commercial buildings were built to use 50% less energy, it would save over 6 million metric tons of CO2 annually for the life of the buildings—the equivalent of taking more than 1 million cars off the road every year.”

Boom.