This man makes me want to jump on my board right now.
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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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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.
“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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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.
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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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Customization or Death
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Laundromat story
I’m sitting on my handrail in the sun, waiting for my dirty laundry to get less dirty when she pulled over in her little wagon.
She comes out speaking out loud, “I am so happy today!” which I smile to, and that was a wrap. She started to talk to me.
For the next 45mn I listened to her story, how she’s in love with that man. How her mama passed. How her daddy passed on father’s day. Some tears show up in her eyes. How she’s 65 and how his kisses were so great this morning. A Malcolm X-related quick tangent. Missouri. Struggle. Red car.
She gave me a blueberry muffin as her man “don’t eat them” and I answered “stay in love!” to her telling me that people talk shit about her and her dude. She smirked back and shouted from behind her mask, “thank you, my brother”.
I helped her maneuver to the street, and she was gone.
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Silver Laugh
Back in my old neighborhood, Silver Lake, to see a comedy show. It was great albeit a bit stressful in those COVID streets. Still not used to crowds like that but it was airy, vaccination was mandatory and masks were still up. My friend killed it on stage and we had great fun!
Back to yawning all day now.
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Bluetooth tags
“You get to use the Find My network to help locate any missing devices you have”
Bro your phone is glued to your palm or pocket 25/8, you’re never missing your device because you never leave it alone.
The lack of questioning is disturbing these days. And Bluetooth sniffing is bad.