h. Play

It’s interesting how engineers love to solve problems but much more importantly, love to solve challenging problems. The more challenging, the better.

The problem is that solving the problem becomes secondary because the challenge is what is important.

One example: green energy. We need more  of it and the numbers say worldwide, 42% of the Co2 produced comes from buildings and homes (39% in the US). Around 30% from transportation and the rest from the industry. So it’s pretty well spread over three sources, right?

But which one is “hot” and makes people dream? Transport. Electric cars. And why? Because the challenge to make a safe car with great mileage running on electricity is a huge challenge.

Making a house reduce its energy consumption by 95-100%? it’s too easy! Hemp, passive housing and much less constraints compared to engineering a car. There’s no challenge, just optimizations to build on.

Green house > Tesla. Sorry. 

You can see how we’re missing out on solving this green energy challenge: rationally we should attack the building/housing problem first because it’s the biggest source of pollution and because we have the solution, right here right now.

“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.”

I’d rather have that than having a couple thousands of electric cars running every year, at best. We can build green pre-fab houses much faster, with a much lower carbon print and virtually no hazardous material than any electrical car so why the fuck aren’t we?

It feels like the same with browser’s 3D technology. So challenging but so useless in a world of extremely powerful native solutions. The goal is noble -code once and run anywhere- but it turned out to not be true at all -different browser, different stuff- and the performance headaches are bigger than compiling natively.

Engineers you gotta focus on what counts, solving the overall problem. Forget exploit or “cool” stuff. Aim for effectiveness. Make the world better today, not tomorrow.

Yesterday, I un-mounted a massive full oak kitchen in Le Raincy in a house from a dude who was beating his wife and his kids and who would occasionally shoot at people in the street. He died alone in his bedroom and his body was discover three months later. The house is now the property of a gay couple who was selling this wood stuff if you were willing to come and get it, which we did with my dad.

Life is weird and cool and weird.

I don’t know if it’s a human feeling or my generation hitting the 30s or if it’s related to our fast times, but I feel like we’re trying to slow things down. To stop them. The problem is that it’s still moving. Things constantly move and change and we have to change and adapt too.

This is what I see; nostalgia is up: remember the 90s? Yeah I do and it was great but I don’t want to spend time on it, now. France, what are you doing with Arafat who gives a shit solve your problems and reduce this massive state that costs so much without being effective. You thought having an iPhone and Spotify was solving a decade of digital mess but they’ll go down like Windows XP or Real Player and you need to fight to keep your freedom and be nice to content providers like musicians. Facebook is awesome if you continuously spend some time filtering shit in two clicks -game feeds, hide all- and retain information to yourself (no phone number, minimize apps accessing your shit). Same with game developers stop whining about Steam and educate users, tell them to go to yourwebsite.com to get your game and if they don’t understand why it’s so important well, fuck them. Discussions are great but at some point we have to move on.

2012 babies will probably not have the stupid, retarded school system we got and that’s great. Erase it from your mind, it’s the past. Start thinking about how you will take care of that with the new technology we didn’t have. Possibilities are mind blowing.

Change, adapt and if people don’t around you, still change and adapt.

It’s September. Shit is getting real.

I know I can do even better and that it’s only the beginning but I’m pretty proud overall. I feel like I could inject some diversity into game audio, bring in some new flavor, if only developers could embrace change a bit…

Some trivia:

– Vimeo interface slaps the shit out of YouTube’s. It is SO much better and intuitive and clean to do your thing there.

– Germans and the demoscene share consistently more than anyone else, I could download the original HD file every time. Americans, Brits and the commercials/motion design crowd are the worst (you can only watch, never download and remix).

– The main edit was done in one shot, then days of tweaking polishing and cleaning.

– Rendering time on an old dual core with 2G of RAM: around an hour. Slow, but not so bad (I know the time when it was hours to do the same).

Meanwhile, three tracks and a game in progress…

Age restriction has nothing to do with it, even the heaviest gore, most brutal massacres can be captured in screen shots and published inside the community as much as you like as long as they are part of a game, any game on Steam – exposed female nipples, however, even if they are part of a game, will get you banned.

It’s not how people agree to private companies’ policies like Apple’s or Valve’s that kills me.

It’s not even how they don’t question shit about double standard, censorship (remember this one?) and ridiculous, unfair rules.

It’s the fact that they want more of that. They want these companies to take entirely over their lives because they have brands tattooed on their eyeballs and don’t want to see shit. YAY! All my games in one place (how many greenlight posts demanding Minecraft on Steam?) and all my life on idevices.

Internet freedom is shrinking in usage, not so much because of governments or laws. So many people already think that the internet IS Facebook and nothing else (you have everything there: news, friends, games). I’m freaking out.

Woke up. Had to go to my parents to help with some internet cable-needs-to-be-rewire-from-the-street-problem. RER A, RER E. Apparently my help isn’t needed, dad’s way to not make me feel like I have to be there for them. My sister has some eczema on her face which seems to block her from doing anything useful at home so I set the table, go get some bread and help mom while dad goes picking up the grandparents. My grandfather’s friend, Parkinson is keeping him warm and also, very very stiff. He can barely swallow so it stresses out mom and all of us enough that we can’t really have conversations. Plus, talking about a 53 year old shooting his ex boss in NYC or Apple winning against Samsung is not that funny, more like signs of a completely sick society.

Tension, I get that dad has like 300 things to build/fix/repair and mom is on his ass it feels like they reach all the time for the last strengths they have to not fight or scream. Grandpa is losing it he almost wants to punch his daughter when she forces him to drink water and he’s all like “no, you calm down” it’s time to grab him with dad and put him on his bed for a nap, it’s always a little weird after a bottle of wine and lunch, dude’s still heavy. Dad asks if I want him to drive me back to the RER A, I decline politely and push him to go nap, I know he needs it. My sister is gone to bed because her eyes hurt but she come down with me and put her ass in front of the TV while I clean up the kitchen. Mom thanks me, I say bye to everyone, go see grandpa who’s sliding off the bed, put him back in position and talk to him a second but it’s like, he’s not here at all. I smile and go. RER E, RER A.

Public transportation is good to see how bad people’s behaviors are. Back home, grab my skateboard change clothes, back to RER A. Stretching, breathing, pushing, focusing, jumping. Smiling, spitting, snoring, blowing my nose, sweating. Finally, train back home. Black baby in stroller looking at long nose white dudes like they are really weird makes me smile, makes me think about my past, creates one of those big ball in my throat. Doors open and it’s like the world is on fire and I don’t need no water, let the motherfucker burn.

Burn, motherfucker, burn.

My father doesn’t play music, has no rhythm, no pitch and doesn’t listen to music either.

My mom played harp when she was eighteen, I never saw her play it in my life. She played a bit of piano and can read music, she likes some music from time to time (her parents had a music store).

My sister is a mix, she listens to some music with her headphones but otherwise, she’s like my dad.

No one in my extended families plays music. Obviously, I’m the only black dude of the clan and naturally, I’m the one living and breathing music.

It’s been weird, I started piano lessons at 6 in a situation where my new parents tried to give me anything I’d like to try and me trying to please my new parents by saying yes to everything. Well at twelve, I was over classical piano. I was frustrated to play a music that doesn’t make me feel so good, I wanted upbeat and funny stuff to play, fat chords and imaginative melodies. Black music.

Took bass at fifteen when my friends needed a bassist for a rock trio. I remember thinking that I would like this instrument, because I loved bass notes on the piano ( does being a lefty affect that? I don’t know). My parents didn’t give a shit so my grandparents took me to a store and bought me my lefty bass and an amp for 200 bucks. A week later like every fresh musician I was like “was it a good idea?”.

A bit more than fifteen years later, my parents still don’t give a fuck. I mean, never encouraged me, never asked me to play, never asked me anything about it, never said anything cool about it to people, they just kept telling me to turn my shit down at home. My take on computers, composing, playing piano again, starting guitar and making songs? Not a word. Except once or twice in front of a lot of family people, like to make it like they care about what their son does musically, which is kind of not that true. Sigh.

So when I’m compiling a couple of years of tracks and music, building sound design for my 2012 demo reel, I think about all that. I hear my stuff, it makes me pretty proud or really proud knowing how I had to believe in myself and work harder. Some stuff I almost don’t even know how I composed it, how it came to reality but I sure feel like having A LOT more to express refining my skills and tools. Yeah.

Of course it would have felt better, I would have felt more confident with some support or I can’t even imagine what’s like to simply enjoy playing music with family but that’s the way it goes. Some room for improvement in my life, definitely.