Hello!

Headphones

Lets kick this off by saying that bluetooth headphones have a weird tradeoff to them: on the same price range they have usually worse sound, specilly when talking about duplex communication (i.e.: mic); but they are also so practical that many times I find myself using them just because it was the easier path.

See the tradeoff? Weird. Also very human.

Random fact: when I am writing blogposts I usually keep sort of a stack of next topics right below the correct text.

Blogging and writing

Next topic, “did I never properly learn how to blog”. I was thinking about this just now. I think in my posts (maybe also in real life?) I talk too much, about too many things, but without having any clear general direction or cohesion.

The result from that is what you expect: the sheer confusion of the reader while reading anything I write and not getting any particular point of the thousands I make each line.

Thinking that was naturally followed by “should I focus on improving my writing?”. I really do not know the answer, I do like to let my mind wonder, and maybe it is not that my actual writing is bad, but just that I do not do enough passes on the piece as a whole - I hear professional writers tend to review writing quite a few times while I am just here publishing the exact 1st version of something.

Maybe I cannot expect it to be good.

That has an extra validation when I think that on the texts that I write with different purposes, e.g.: academic and short stories, you can actually see the direction they are going. And the difference in my writing pattern is exactly that I review each paragraph and each chapter and each phrase many times until I get the exact feeling I want.

It’s interesting to talk about feelings in some kinds of writing you would not normally expect them to be that pronounced, for example in academic writing, but I do believe that it’s the most important detail to look for for all types of writing, humans are little bags of feelings slash hormones.

TV

I am not watching many TV shows right now. I was following the new Star Trek, because I do love Start Trek (feeling about as old as me blogging). I also occasionally watched a Netflix anime called “The Great Pretender”, because it has a great opening and some (sort of sporadically) good animation. Also watched a bit of “Mr. Inglesias”.

I saw the guy from that last one did a AMA on reddit, maybe you would like to check that out? It’s here.

Music

I actually love German ballads. They have just about the right amount of everything I like. Sprinkle some classical music on top and I can go on for hours and hours on end.

Speaking English

The more I speak English at work the more I feel that my English gets worst. Maybe it’s not really getting worse but it certainly freaks me out.

The Issue with Text Dialogue in Games

That’s a pretentious one huh?

It occurred to me recently that the issue with people not reading text in games might be actually just an attention/artistic problem.

The issue is, text is easily much much more static (in the literal sense of pixels moving around) than everything else in the game.

This idea does not actually come entirely out of the blue. Some years ago I worked in a system which would display tweets in a TV. It had a lot of animation going around, and the fact you could not skip ahead to check the next words because they were still being animated actually increased a lot of the attention while reading.

Also, I noticed that some games with a lot of text but which just breaks it down in actually speakable bits are much more readable.

So now you probably see what I saw: it may be just the case of our brain wanting to not be bored when in a medium which text is the most boring part.

While reading a book this does not happen because the book is not fully animated and full of distractions. This makes a lot of sense when you think that text actually works wonders in interactive fiction.

The solution here seems actually stupid but I believe it’s great. We need to gamefy the text in the game. Animate it all around and tie that animation to gameplay by using bit sized text stringed together with consequences - which need not be something other than text.

How to kick up Nibble adoption

I was talking to Talbone those days and she was thinking of some ways to increase Nibble adoption. Of course all of them invove - and I kid you not - actually working on Nibble… which I promise I will do at some point when I have my life sort of stitched together again.

The biggest idea is to use the mobile version of Nibble and jams to drive adoption first instead of hitting our heads too much at the start in creating the actual hardware.

Pandemic

Staying inside really sucks, nothing else to comment here. It seems that walking around was actually one of my best ways for me to recharge batteries, plus doing things I didn’t do before. Both are mostly dead now, together with the fact that I don’t have time to do anything new because I need that time to fix things in my life, so it always feels like dragging my life and not living it.

Bare-bones advanced nns

I really like this idea of “bare-bones advanced” for a lot of things: get the advanced core concepts but implement them in a very simple way that seems almost kidplay. I have been thinking about doing that for advanced neural network techniques, more as means of increasing professional knowledge than anything.

And…

My little stack of topics is over!

End of this giant nonsensical post.

I hope you liked it!

See you all!