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Me Myself&I

Spurs way

I’m here to simp on my man Dejounte Murray and yes, I’m banned from Twitch.

DJ has never stopped improving. It’s so great and potent to see the progress year after year.

Yes, the Spurs are not doing so well this year, barely making it to the play-in. But they have so much poise. DJ is a beast and, he still has room to improve. Meanwhile the team is playing this 18 year old, Josh Primo, who is absorbing knowledge like a sponge right now and might even get a little taste of playoff intensity in his first year playing in the NBA. The Spurs are allowing all the growth possible for their players, it’s beautiful.

Organizations that foster growth and potential are pretty all right in my eyes.

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Me Myself&I

Plant daddy

You already know what that screams: G R O W T H (the stem has gotten bigger than the trunk lmao)

It is now in bloom and wet wet. And at this instant, my mind is deviating.

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Me Myself&I

(So, those last 24 hours in the news)

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Me Myself&I

Ishod

This man makes me want to jump on my board right now.

Categories
Me Myself&I Music

Blurry now

“This was the dawn of a new digital-era way of experiencing time, something we’ve since become totally familiar with. And every gain in consumer-empowering convenience has come at the cost of disempowering the power of art to dominate our attention, to induce a state of aesthetic surrender. Which means that our gain is also our loss. It is also becoming very clear that the brittle temporality of networked life is not good for our psychological well-being; it makes us restless, erodes our ability to focus and be in the moment. We are always interrupting ourselves, disrupting the flow of experience.”

Simon Reynolds in Retromania.

Bro. It really explains well how ten years later we are now slugging through mountains of art and entertainment, how we are basically intellectual zombies. My good friend R was telling me last week how he downloaded a new album and listened to it without listening to it. How he didn’t understand what had changed, why he didn’t enjoy music as much as before (he’s a big music fan).

We have too much. We don’t make any choices. We are drowning.

And it feels like there is no end. It’s one of the most bizarre thing about the West today.

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Me Myself&I

Not you looking at me like that

I already see folks on the sidewalk smirking at my mask.

See you in the ICU when you get BA.2, boo.

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Me Myself&I

You should start making native desktop apps again

“Remember Picasa? There is no native application that still comes close to it’s feature parity. But sadly it was discontinued in favour of a cloud application: Google Photos. What happened with Picasa also happened to millions of other applications around the same time Picasa was discontinued. The applications we use to run on our PC have moved to cloud.”

Why You Should Start Self Hosting | Rohan Deshmukh (rohanrd.xyz)

I loved Picasa. It was beautiful, ran super smoothly and was very useful. Yes, the pictures were on my local drives but they could have been online as well.

What mattered was that the software I was using to edit my pictures was a native app.

I think the fact that apps have moved to the cloud is detrimental mainly because we have *so* much computational power locally. Having things online is not bad per se . But software –the processing and editing part of interaction- needs to be local, forever.

In 2006 Picasa would run perfectly on a single core Pentium M. Today we have so much more computational power in a basic computer that I don’t even want to do the math. It’s probably five or eight orders of magnitude more, if not way more. Phones have 8 CPU cores now! I mean. Gross.

And we use that power to spin browsers to do and re-do and re-re-do what native apps did better. It’s absolutely ludicrous. It was in 2012, it still is the case in 2022 and even more obvious: I have a 2004 Win32 native RSS feed reader that updates and displays feeds far faster than anything I’ve ever seen.

There’s something wrong when 15-year-old tech is better in pretty much every way.

We need native, solid and full-featured apps more than ever. I’m begging you, programmers. We want to consume less electricity and use our computers as best as we can while enjoying some privacy? We need those mid-2000s software/apps with once-a-year update if any, back. Right now.

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Me Myself&I

Mr. Obvious

Dear future,

The media keep saying that Russia has lost since two days after they started their invasion. But we’re almost a month in and they’re still circling cities left and right. Mediaganda.

France and Europe sold weapons to Russia between 2015 and 2020, when it was illegal to do so by the way.

Again in the media, there’s this weird dance around what war can be, as if there was organic non-GMO war and then nasty, full of sugar war. There’s only war, which means anything can and will be used to hurt and kill from chemicals to rape to everybody of any age dying in atrocious conditions.

I feel like that’s why we really, really don’t want war in the first place, but maybe I think too much.

Categories
Audio&Games

Big Switch

Pros of building your own game engine:

– It’s yours, no licensing issues ever

– It’s completely, exactly what you need for your game

– It’s probably extremely well optimized

Cons of building your own game engine:

– Maintenance

– Maintenance

– Maintenance

And that’s why one of the last big game developer with its own custom game engine, is giving up to use Unreal 5 for their next game.

Capcom –a company making its own game engines for 30+ years– also switched to Unreal not so long ago.

The funny thing is, while building next games, those companies might still feel like they should have used their custom stuff! But considering how *insanely* complex a robust game engine can be—especially when you think about all the platforms to support, now and in the future—, having Unreal support and other developers to share issues with is an absolute YASSS for everyone involved.

It’s a big shift for game development. Unreal is becoming the default tool akin to cameras on movie sets. Which is a great thing because designers have been desperately wanting this for twenty years.

Are custom engines dead? Not quite yet. Noita, Nintendo games. Those game are made with highly customized engines and those games are unique, in many ways. They have their own feel and that’s really, really something you want to achieve when making video games.

Can you afford it, though? The list of people who can is shrinking.

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Me Myself&I

Customization or Death