Giants. Thom Bell passed away the other day. Fantastic composer, arranger and musician. I’ll listen to his stuff my entire life for sure.
Pelé, well. He really is one of those characters that made me think as a child“so if white folks like him so much and praise people like him and I… Why is it so bad for black folks out there, apparently? I’m 7”. Oh, brother.
Anyway, Pelé is something else.
I played Elden Ring on a PS5 this year. I played some Noita on my laptop. And then I stopped caring completely.
Too many things are not right in games.
Maybe you don’t work enough in your life but I do and I don’t want to do it again “for fun”. Fuck that. I don’t want to gather shit, I don’t want to level up, I don’t want to go there do that, go back there, being told what to do, go there collect that. Enough of this. The wandering in digital worlds sure, I’ve done that for decades. I’m wandering in books and cult movies these days.
Everything is about crafting abuse that can’t be seen. It is lucrative as hell, but the peer-pressure induced culture destined to make you buy more and more and more, and bet more and more and more is not right. And never will. I know, it’s everywhere now. It kind of got really efficient and scalable thanks to games. Remember how cute gamification looked in 2010 and now you can’t go grab a taco without an app, a leaderboard and some utterly meaningless “quest” to go after to collect “points”? It’s horrendously dehumanizing.
Seeing many, many game developers that I respected and trusted come out as manipulators and abusive folks in the past few years, has been sobering. I’ve also had the most unprofessional interviews ever with game studios, by far. Again, really sobering.
Today we have games in Real Time Ray Tracing in 4K with 1995 pathfinding. It is so jarring. Insanely realistic lighting with game states that we had when the PS2 was hot, is nonsense. It feels like nothing progressed, really. Shaders better than ever simulating clothes, hair, flames, wind, shadows all over the screen but the NPCs still can’t hear me drop from 30 feet right behind them. It’s nonsense.
The graphic treadmill is insanity and a 13 year old boy thirst trap.
The discipline is way too often about “me too, I can make a [trendy game design based off 90s nostalgia]”. Very few explorations. Insanely low progress in themes and worlds. For a profession that combines all other entertainment it’s quite amazing how generic games feel, consistently.
I understand! Making games and making a living off of games is extremely hard so in any design decision you tend to go for the most sound and secure approach: a first person shooter with zombies, for instance.
The issue is that game design has been doing this for twenty years on a loop, now. That’s half of video games’ existence. That’s a problem.
So yeah, time for me to go on a sabbatical about this entire thing.
Spotted this year. Use your Illusion 1 & 2 by Guns & Roses. Apparently when the first volume came out in ’91, they sold 500,000 copies in the US in 2 hours. Music really used to be central.
With the smash hit November Mayne (imagine Terrence in the music video), you can’t go wrong.
It keeps giving me so much energy:
We need to build for timelessness, as the earth doesn’t like our wasteful habits. So creating structures taking care of us and harmonically combining with our planet, is a goal.
Meanwhile, it looks like we need better housing everywhere I look at.
LET’S FUCKING GOOOO
Just went to FB after half a year off of it. Kind of interested to see wassup!
Nothing much. Same algo. Same stuff repeating like a tile in a 3D game after five minutes.
I missed a message and a few comments congratulating me. Cool.
Groups have been updated on average 30 weeks ago. Okay.
This interface is so noisy. FB has a billion clickable things around.
Twitter tomorrow. Ugh.
Yeah so I just got owned by a WordPress plugin that I updated and it broke everything.
I think outside audio, plugins/extensions are the absolute worst:
Back in the days I had a neat Firefox that I had customized perfectly. A few plugins, all set up. This idiot program updated to the next version, killing all my plugins at once.
I never used Firefox ever again. Nor browser plugins, outside the crucial ones like anti-spam plugins called adblockers for some reason.
With audio software plugins work because by design they are easy to deal with: drop them in a folder, done. Plugin crashes? Take it out of the folder, done.
Don’t make your digital life depend on plugins. The least possible, please.
The feed is everywhere. It’s very convenient: a list of interesting things that you scroll through, at your own pace. Great design.
It’s in social media, in group chats, in RSS.
Slack is essentially used as a feed by most people.
IRC is a feed, podcasts, Twitch and Discord as well. You get the point.
Email isn’t a feed though! Email is that thing where for every item you need to make a decision for. The feed isn’t like that. The feed flows.
I know a lot is going on right now with social media slowing down. Dave Winer, RSS godfather has a vision for the feed that I don’t really share. There’s Mastodon that I don’t really want to get into. There’s ActivityPub which seems to be overly-complicated, a feature of all new software since the 2010s.
Anyway.
This is how the feed should be, based on RSS of course.
The feed should be your own carefully crafted curation of what you want to keep around you. The feed shouldn’t be shared, the same way you don’t share your clothes even though you could. I recommend having things to try out, people with different opinions or maybe aesthetics that you’re curious about. Be curious, subscribe and grow.
And the app should be extremely simple: one left pane with the feeds, a right pane with the content of the feeds. I’ve tried all the feed systems. The two-pane paradigm is by far the best, allowing you to move quickly and effortlessly through your curation.
Synchronization of feeds between devices is unnecessary. Don’t pretend that you have 2 minutes to kill waiting in line somewhere, and that this is why you need to know exactly where you are in your feed consumption. If you’re like that, seek help. Consume your feed responsibly by checking it a few times a day, not every single second when you idle. Idling has big value in that it lets your brain “print” what you’re learning.
Completely avoid general news in your feed. Think about your feed as something to inspire and motivate you. News ain’t it. They will make you depressed and quit your feed. Don’t add them.
Use this service to convert newsletters to RSS feeds. Remember, your inbox doesn’t flow. Don’t mix those things up.
It’s been so good to me this way.
All I’d need is a new feedreader with sqlite, chromium rendering and full client-side styling (if I want to read your stuff in Times New Roman or Segoe UI, I should be able to do so).
The pandemic is raging over there. The world went there for the Olympics in summer 2021, infections flared but came down. 2022 showed up with a revenge plan.
Stay strong, Japan.
You might want to open the picture in a new tab, sorry.
It’s amazing to me: as a society we keep piling up on social media and I keep maintaining that the issue is phones. The issue is constantly reaching for it, all the time. Faking everything, even presence.
Y’all are completely addicted and everyone is trying to avoid that conversation. You are addicted to your phone, and you can’t stop.
Instead of being bored and deciding to do something, to plan something and meticulously think about it, you just scroll endlessly with the attention span of a fish. It is important that you stop doing that.
(I am not addicted to phones because I deliberately chose to fight that shit back in 2010, sensing the addiction creeping up already)
We will look back at mobile computing being a mistake that supercharged abuse and dogma in a few years.