Blog on luis.zip

Thirdleft Sessions

Sun, 03 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Sadly, it’s been two or three years since I’ve played music. And two years since my last blog post. It’s only expected because life has been a mess.

So much has changed in my life in the meantime that even my website wasn’t compiling anymore, writting this blogpost turned out to be a surprise of how much things break if you leave them untouched.

Anyways, I recently purchased a Novation Mk4 keyboard to slowly return to music. Here’s an evolving Bandcamp collection of music I’m improvising during my practice sessions. I’m just recording them in case I accidently end up creating something actually good.

I’ll be adding music there so it’s not really a finished album. Sorry in advance.

Voice?

Fri, 12 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Who is the voice inside my head?

I have a voice in my mind. I’m hearing it now. It dictates what I write.

Sometimes when I think about something, it speaks to me as if it were not me, as if it were not a product of the imagination that belongs to my domain.

For instance, the other day, I dropped an egg on the floor, made a mess, ruined dinner, and naturally got annoyed; but as if that weren’t enough, it proclaimed “Good job, Luis!!1!” in a sarcastic tone, as if I were asinine.

I wonder if I should emancipate this voice, give it a name and a life of its own, declare its independence; on the other hand, I don’t want it to go away and be silent, or else it would be very lonely. The concept of silence is merely theoretical for me. As soon as I wake up, I already hear it uttering ideas, criticisms, and plans for the day (sometimes not for the current day, but for some ambiguous day in the remaining time continuum).

Some say: “I’ll sleep when I’m dead”.
My voice says: “I’ll be silent when you’re dead”.

Pretty Petal Flower Shop

Sun, 07 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I remember leaving Petalburg Forest, accompanied by a somber melody that heightened my anxiety with every step I took on the grassy paths where wild creatures hid, where every corner and visible person reminded me that something ominous was about to happen.

But before anything bad happens, the forest comes to an end. And immediately after, with the striking of the sun (which is never seen), I encountered the petal shop:

Pretty Petal Flower Shop

Almost in contrast to the lingering anxiety within me, albeit fleeting, the store calls out to me; the leitmotif music is no longer a cautionary tale of something bad, now it is energetic and calls for happiness.

Inside, three people to converse with, each offering something: a seed (to plant), a Wailmer shaped pail (for planting), and a mission (planted in me).

The mission?

I want to see the entire world filled with beautiful flowers. That is my dream. Please help me, Luis. Plant berries and bring more flowers to the world.

In that store, no products were sold. Only a new game mechanic was offered, with a simple request that, in my childhood, sounded like a life mission.

Yes, I will plant flowers and berries.

Why, 20 years later, do I find myself waking up in the middle of the night, remembering this point in the journey of Pokemon Sapphire, with tears in my eyes?

The music, the pixel art, the entire nostalgia of the journey; and the simple request asking for more flowers — perhaps innocence that is missing in my life.

The Mitochondrialism of Malware

Sat, 18 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

When I was a child, computers were expensive and inaccessible for my family. Only my aunt, who had a store, had a computer to do graphical work. They were a sight to behold and I was given the chance to work with some of them at school. So you can imagine my happiness when I got my first computer.

With it, came my fear of breaking it. Every little thing that was out of place would scare the shit out of me, like when I would remove a floppy disk while it was reading and the computer would BSOD.

So, for survival, I would investigate a lot about malware and viruses, read reports of how they work and learn all of the associated lingo. I remember reading and being afraid of mydoom, also known by the sexy name of W32.MyDoom@mm. The computer magazines in Portugal had articles pages long explaining the differences between trojan horses, worms, spyware and adware. I knew all of the terms by heart and I would explain them to my family and install the best antivirus I could.

Today, computers are much more secure. So much so that I dont even think about which antimalware I should install. I’m not scared to use online banking. SSL is everywhere, thanks to the disruption of the Certificate Authority mafia by the good people of this earth¹.

Mitochondrialism

But, did we really eradicate viruses? Are they really less common now? It certainly looks like, long gone are the days of connecting a Windows XP machine to the Internet and being bombarded with viruses that seem to came from space. But, malware is diverse, and I would like to focus on Spyware and Adware. If we look at the popularity of the terms, it might seem like they became less of a problem; one could expect that when a word ceases to be used it’s because the subject has been deemed irrelevant.

Search Trends from Google²

While that could have been the case, unfortunatly it’s not. Just like the theory that mitochondria were bacteria absorbed into our cells and became part of us³, I would posit that the same happened with Spyware and Adware. They don’t exist as much anymore in “isolation”, because they became part of our computer cells. We didn’t defeat it, but rather it has become “socially” acceptable to have devices who spy and who shove ads randomly in our machines. We adapted to support it. That transformation was due to the market strength which took all the opportunities it could to legitimise all kinds of businesses that relied upon the abusive collection and processing of personal data of individuals, and that is why the words are dying.

It’s only natural that we would be complacent with their demise. After all, it’s not comfortable to state that the biggest operative system in the market is Spyware. But maybe we should restart the usage of these words as they were before.

I try my best to fight for my privacy with AdBlockers and trying to buy products that respect me as an user. But I admit my weakness, I cannot stop using them altogether or be more fierce about it. But I can certainly name things as they are, make them more overt instead. My childish dream of affordable computing and an ever evolving technological society was too innocent. But, alas, I am not political enough for loneliness.

Marina Herlop at the Panteão Nacional

Fri, 29 Sep 2023 09:40:34 +0100

cadi cadi.
I had the most amazing experience at the Panteão Nacional (National Pantheon 🇵🇹) the other day ¹. I actually never been inside the Pantheon even though it’s close to home. My friend took me to see Marina Herlop, where she performed her famous 🐌 abans abans 🐌 and 🐚 shaolin mantis 🐚.

Here’s a small recording. I didn’t want to be distracted while recording so I only recorded a little bit, just enough to remember it forever:

The Pantheon had a natural reverb, and it was a loooong one (10secs according to her instagram post). Her music was engulfed by that natural reverb instead of a digitally filtered one, and the songs naturally morphed with the sacredness of that place into a very soul-envolving sound that ressonated inside your body.

It was an amazing experience, and Marina had the most engaging presence. She played all her songs in one go. No pauses! A non-stop emotional rollercoaster.

Also I saw Elsbeth Tascioni there and my heart melted into an arrhythmia. 🐧

27th September 2023 ↩︎

Joie d'écrire

Fri, 11 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

One day someone posted the list of the best pens of 2021 on hackernews. I went there to check it out and fell in love with one in particular: the Kaweco Sport.

Being small and cute, and me being in a depressive phase due to the pandemic, I decided to read more about these pens to distract myself; two years later, in the midst of the serindipity that infected me, I ended up with this collection:

These days, the one I use the most is the bronze one, and second place goes to the steel version. My hands tend to have a comfortable, subtle scent of pennies.

Over time I have bought various inks to experiment with and find the one I like best. My favorite inks are KWZ Honey, Diamine Earl Grey and Diamine Tobacco Sunburst.

There’s a special magic in writing with a pen I appreciate, using carefully chosen ink. It’s very different from writing with traditional blue/black pens. We all have a unique handwriting, so writing is already a personalized act in itself. This is an extension of that very expression.

And it’s so much more beautiful. 😌

but also expensive…

Collective Ownership

Mon, 07 Aug 2023 17:02:10 +0100

For quite some time the game development team I work with has been practicing Feature Ownership.

A Feature Owner is a central point of contact, someone who is the front person for a new feature to be developed. That means scheduling Refinement sessions, helping the team reach conclusions, answering questions about the feature, keeping the producers and game design in the loop, guaranteeing its quality and maintenance post-release, etc.

Although it is a very precise role, at the same time it tries not to be authoritative. Instead, our internal motto was “be the driver”, devaluing the “owner” word. A “Feature Driver”, if you will. Instead of doing all of the above, do it together with the team and ask for help.

But there’s no denying that having a specific role with the “Owner” word in it brings a different feeling. And even if we changed the name to “Feature Driver”, it would still be a role for a single person.

Adaptability

As our game evolved, it eventually started being worked on by more than one team. Adaptability became important, and that meant that any team had to be able to work on the code, regardless of who the original developer was. ¹

Although Feature Ownership does not necessarily impede that, it could (does?) reduce Adaptability on other fronts. Reflect on the following questions:

If the Feature Owner goes on Vacation during development
- is there loss of knowledge?
- can the team continue to refine the feature without them?
- is the team empowered to make new decisions?
- is the team empowered to make changes that could contradict what was already defined by the feature owner?
Does a Dev who is not a Feature Owner share the same level of accountability for the feature?
Is everyone equally informed of decisions?

Consider the vision from Extreme Programming:

ExtremeProgramming considers code to belong to the project, not to an individual engineer. As engineers develop required functionality, they may browse into and modify any class. They are responsible for keeping all the UnitTests running (and writing new ones for new functionality). They take on the same integrity-preserving duties as the class owner in a CodeOwnership situation.
– https://wiki.c2.com/?CollectiveCodeOwnership

Is Feature-Ownership compatible with that vision? And is it compatible with Scrum?

Who is the Feature Owner?

Traditionally, Feature Owners were always Client developers. Why not a QA Developer? Or a Server Developer? In our team, since we usually only had one server developer, there was more or less the consensus that they act like Feature Owners for the server side; although they are not given the role formally. There was never a QA Feature Owner as well. But even if we had, does having three Feature Owners make sense? Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of having a central point of contact for the feature? Why not the entire team altogether?

And, if we consider replacing “Owner” with “Driver”, I ask, what is a driver? Is it a motivated individual? If the entire team is not motivated, can the driver still lead the team to success? Or does the driver need the team to be fully engaged as well? If the team is engaged, is the team the driver?

Trying out a new approach

I asked our team to experiment not having a Feature Owner - that is, practicing Collective Ownership. That meant that, contrary to other features, there would be no central point of contact for the feature. There’s no person responsible for scheduling refinements or talking to producers and game design about things. There’s no unique individual to be kept in the loop about information. The entire team is responsible.

At first, it sounded weird. But like most things, we need to experiment and later reflect on the experience to learn more.

There was no initial setup set in place for this - we just tried going into it without a Feature Owner. We let the discussions around the Feature start and evolve organically.

What I personally observed

I noticed more team members to be engaged with the discussions during Refinements. This led to more discussions and more ideas on the table. The people who were usually more quiet were more engaged and caring about the implementation.

The team didn’t had many problems when people were in vacation. This was a big plus, and something that was hurting us in the previous Feature when we had a Feature Owner. It’s also important to reflect that sometimes the unexpected happens, people get sick, people need to take their dogs to the vet, and being prepared for this.

Some roles came up organically (a specific team member was mostly the one doing the scheduling of refinements and or other meetings). It’s expected human behavior, but also one that might not be good as it takes the chance of other people to do different things. Depends on the case, but it’s usually good to ask people to rotate certain responsibilities.

What the team observed

After the feature was done, we did a post-mortem and draw a Systems Thinking graph together to reach some conclusions.

Overall, it was a positive experience. We understood that some things led to an increased Lead Time: for instance, more people participating means more debate, which means more time is needed. However, some others things reduced Lead Time: everyone has more knowledge, therefore more capable of achieving the results; there’s no dependency on one single person, therefore no loss of productivity in absences.

With more debate and more knowledge and more diversity of ideas, the quality of the project increases, which reduces Lead Time in the long term.

Adaptability overall increases.

Not a Panacea

This is not a one-size-fits-all solution, as almost nothing ever is. It will depend on the team and the culture (or team personality if you prefer), and the goal you’re trying to achieve (in our case, adaptability).

One of the questions that we had was: if everyone is the owner, does it mean that more people will feel responsible? Or will it be the opposite? Wouldn’t it be that if everyone is responsible then no one really is? In the post-mortem we concluded that it did work in our favor, but your mileage may vary.

Something that Feature Ownership had good feedback about is that giving the chance for a person to be someone the feature depends upon had a very strong motivating effect. It also gives the person the chance to grow in other areas, such as Leadership and Planning skills. Collective Ownership immediatly reduces this; but other solutions can be applied here to help. (For instance, having everyone to rotate roles and have equal standing in planning and refinements, increase frequency of feedback).

Additionally, I’m still skeptic this would work in larger teams. Our team has six devs, if it was around 10 or more people, this might bring some more challenges to the table.

Overall

The team enjoyed Collective Ownership and we decided to keep practicing it 😌

I’m using the word Developer to mean anyone who is actively contributing to the development of the feature. This can mean QA, Server, Frontend, Scrum Agilist, Etc ↩︎

Crypto is not web3

Sun, 30 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A Manifesto for the revindication of the word Crypto.

Crypto is not web3.
Web3 doesn’t even exist yet.

Crypto is neither block nor chain.
Crypto is XOR and Diffie-Hellman.

Crypto is not a token. It’s not a wallet.
It’s not N, F, or T,
nor Ponzi.

Crypto is symmetry and asymmetry,
a geometry more beautiful than a pyramid.
It’s the sovereignty of my communication,
the privacy to love and be loved.

Crypto is cryptography.
It’s our word.
The rest is something else.

Blurry Selfie

Sun, 12 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

There she was, the wonderful lady of the neighborhood with her friends at the café. Smiling louder than the others to be heard and declare her presence in that commercial establishment. She took out her phone and took a selfie with her friends. She posted it on Facebook. You can see that she has a faint smile on her face, but little more: the selfie came out all blurry.

And so it was, all blurry the selfie traveled the Facebook servers, backups were made, and finally reached its recipients, her Facebook friends.

Blurry like her figure when she gets out of the shower and the mirror is foggy. Blurry like the smile she made for the said photo. Blurry maybe even like the last years of her life, which went by too fast with nothing to be said about them.

And the team of engineers, with no credits anywhere, whose talent created the functionality of sending the blurry selfie around the world, remains anonymous. Who knows if the café owner has a daughter who worked at Facebook and did some of the code that ran on the lady of the neighborhood’s CPU?

And how many other algorithms and digital eyes looked at the photo as it traveled through the transistors? And who made them? And are these geniuses still alive?

At that moment the blurry selfie became a wonder of the eighth planet. The comments started to drop. “You look happy friend kisses” and “miss you lots of health and peace”. All good wishes, some emojis but zero criticism of the blurriness.

Since when have blurry selfies become acceptable in society? How many photos taken with miniaturized Nikons in 2006 were deleted or rejected due to a slight blurriness? The comments continued to drop. That night the couch was the vehicle where she sat to answer her friends who commented.

“Thank you” was the most repeated word. Some likes.

The night ended and the selfie stayed there, blurry, forever.

My Habbo Hotel Rooms

Sun, 29 Jan 2023 08:37:21 +0000

Here’s an archive of my Habbo Hotel mini-rooms, in 2023:

Leite Condensado

Chocolate Quente

Águas Passadas

A Terapia

Laranja Caliente

Sancta Simplicitas

Escritório Doméstico

Negócio Satânico

Alter Ego

100 days to offload

Mon, 09 Jan 2023 22:06:47 +0000

I am entering into the 100 days to offload challenge:

The whole point of #100DaysToOffload is to challenge you to publish 100 posts on your personal blog in a year.

Posts don’t need to be long-form, deep, meaningful, or even that well written. If there are spelling and grammar mistakes, or even if there’s no real point to the post, so what? What’s important is that you’re writing about the things you want to write about.

Your posts could be how-to guides, or links to another post you have found interesting. They could include your own thoughts about that post, or a response to it. It could be a simple update about what you have done that day. Tell us about your dog, your cat, your fish tank, or whatever hobbies you have. Someone will find it interesting.

Is it cheating to make a post only to say that? With a verbatim copy paste no less? Are all copy pastes verbatim?

I don’t think so.

p.s.: Fábio, your turn.

Temporary Developer

Fri, 04 Nov 2022 19:24:00 +0000

i am
a temporary software developer

my code is written;
is compiled
but never commited.

i forget it
the binary exists but its not mine anymore

it's someone elses

🤧

Memento Cookie

Wed, 02 Nov 2022 19:58:19 +0000

every day
you have to take time
a short time
to eat a cookie

there will be a time
when a cookie will be the last cookie you'll ever eat

so if you eat a cookie every day
you're fighting the chances that the cookie you last ate was the ultimate last cookie of your life

the last cookie

of your life

Covid Dream

Sun, 30 Oct 2022 19:32:47 +0000

Covid came and Covid went (well, not really).

There was isolation for a long time. Then there was not, as long as you wore masks in private spaces. Shortly after I started going out, I began having these recurrent dreams.

I would dream that I entered someplace (the bus, the shopping, whatever) and suddenly notice that I had forgotten the mask. And I would get so nervous, lost about what to do, that I would wake up.

The most peculiar thing is that I stumbled upon some people on Reddit who also had the same dream experience. I guess our dream generator is very affectable in our day to day. I wonder how it began… that so many people dream of having their teeth fall.

When Christmas was ruined

Sat, 19 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

With Christmas approaching, it’s only normal to find articles such as “How not to ruin the magic of Christmas for your child” randomly on social media. So, today I bring you a story. The story of how I discovered that Santa Claus wasn’t real. Spoiler alert: I wish that article was written in Portuguese and in the ’90s and that somehow my family had read it.

My family is very religious and very traditionalist, Christmas was a time for everyone to get together and for children (my cousin Jess and I) to enjoy the coming of Santa Claus and their gifts. Our tradition went as following: at midnight, my cousin George was to dress in a Santa costume, come to the house and distribute the gifts. It was a very exciting thing to see the clock approaching midnight, listening to the bell of Santa echoing in the building, while he came up the stairs. We then sat on the floor while Santa Claus distributed the gifts to everyone.

Eventually, Jess and I started growing up. We started to suspect that Santa could possibly be fake. I’m sure we asked our parents about it but I don’t remember their answers. They probably deflected the question. But I had a plan: I suspected that it was my cousin George who was dressing up as Santa, so we should keep an eye on him and see if he would get dressed as Santa or if he was to disappear when Santa came.

Some days after coming up with the plan, Jess came to me and said that Santa had to be real because she saw Rita talking to Santa through the keyhole. Rita was the spouse of George. Looking back at that moment, I realize that Jess probably asked her parents or George about Santa. So my family knew that we were trying to figure out the big mystery of Christmas.

Well, Christmas time came, but that night, contrary to the other nights, there was no Santa. Instead, there were two letters sent from Santa (or Jesus, I don’t remember), one for Jess and one for me. We were told we had to read those letters in front of the entire family.

And so it was, I stood in front of the television, with 15 or 16 people looking at me, and read out loud the letter, which contained a story of Jesus Christ and how Christmas came to be. Then, George said that due to our disbelief, Santa would not come ever again to our house and that we should be ashamed for doing that. Everyone had this reprehensible look on their faces.

I remember feeling quite down for the rest of the night, feeling like Christmas was ruined, while the adults continued their talk at the table, happy with their wine.

Memórias de Peixe (Fish Memories)

Fri, 20 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Memórias de Peixe by Louisload

It is with great joy that I am releasing a new album this next monday (23rd of november) with songs that I have composed in the past 10 years.

It’s called “Memórias de Peixe”, which is portuguese for “Fish Memories”. Each track is a reference to some memory of my past, memories of places, people and feelings that do not exist anymore.

The album name is a play on the fact that fishes have a very short memory, and also a dedication to a friend of mine who passed away recently. Her last name was “Peixoto” (which in portuguese is a word similar to fish).

Tracklist

The Day We’ll Be Gone
Hidden Land
A Loja Das Gomas
O Rádio da Lucília
O Fogo no Celeiro
Reminscências do Avô
Sete Palmos de Amor
Um Universo na Ponta do Mato
Haecceity
Roni
Love in a Virtual Hotel

It’s being published by Gruta, and it will be available on Bandcamp and all other major music distributors such as Spotify and Apple Music.

Weird Laws for Homemade Musicians

Sun, 15 Nov 2020 19:37:21 +0000

I make music at home. I’ve submitted three albums to major platforms and used two different distributors. And every single time, I encountered something that I had to change “or else”. I don’t have a big following, nor money, so I am totally in the hands of giants.

Here are some of those Laws that I had to abide that I wasn’t expecting to encounter. Unless you’re only using Bandcamp (which is awesome), expect some of them:

1 - Track Titles Must Be Capitalized Like This

This might be the most known rule out there. There are certain rules about capitalization, and those rules apply to track titles and artist names too.

When I released “Pigeonneries” back in 2017, I thought it was cool if the title tracks were lowercase, but alas CDBaby said no and automatically capitalized the track titles. No biggie I guess? However, the last track of the album, was submitted as “Le Pigeon Est Mort, Vive Le Pigeon!” (The pigeon is dead, long live the pigeon) but ended up in the stores as “Le pigeon est mort, vive le pigeon!”. I guess that since it’s full a sentence someone decided to change the capitalization.

Back then CDBaby said you could be creative in your artist name if you had a following and a Wikipedia page. Clearly not my case.

The days went by, and styles such as Vaporwave and Lo-fi, characterized by their aesthetics which go beyond the music itself, became more and more popular. This rule had to change. Nowadays Distrokid allows you to create your own capitalization (Wikipedia page or not), under a hidden setting. But… then it warns you that Apple Music might change it if they want to. ¯\(ツ)/¯

Your music, but not your title.

2 - Cannot have more than one language in the album tracklist

This one was surprising to me. I recorded a four track EP, three of them had vocals in English and one track had vocals in Portuguese. Being 95% english (the portuguese track only has 8 words in it), I set the album language as English. Alas, when I submitted, it said that my portuguese track had non-English characters in its title, which was not possible.

Turns out, it’s actually against the rules to have albuns with more than one language in the tracklist. Even if your track is an instrumental, or if the vocals are in English, you cannot use words from other languages. The Distrokid FAQ seems to indicate that it only applies to the track titles, not the track lyrics, however I’m not 100% sure about it as their phrasing isn’t the clearest one.

Here’s a track titled “You Chose “English” As the Language for This Release. But the Title of Track 6 Contains Non-English Characters. Stores Don’t Allow This.” by the artist “Soja Calcium”. It seems like they’re a French artist so it’s obvious why they would find that problem, just like myself. And what better way to fix it than renaming the track with the error Distrokid gives you?

Again, it’s your music but not your title

… unless you’re Enigma, with an album that contains English, Latin, Spanish and French with non-English characters in the tracklist.

3 - iTunes/Apple Music doesn’t accept classical music

Not sure if this is a Distrokid specific issue, but I found this out accidently. If you select “Classical” as the genre, that warning pops out. Thankfully I don’t do classic.

4 - AppleMusic has very specific rules regarding Avatar pictures

As typical of Apple, everything has a guideline. I know this from Software Development, but it seems that it applies in other areas too. And I’m not talking about the usual rules like “no pornography”, “no blurry images” or a minimum resolution. They have rules on where your eyebrows and your mouth should go in the picture.

It’s no biggie, but I did end up having to take a special picture just for Apple Music. And then you have to wait as it will be reviewed and approved by someone at Apple.

That’s it for now! Hopefully I’ll keep releasing stuff in the future, so I sense I might have to update this list.

Louisload

Thu, 18 Jun 2020 22:38:17 +0100

Many years ago the Internet was still made up of HTML pages created in FrontPage, a Microsoft program that promised you could make web pages easily without touching any code. That was an exciting time for a child like me who loved computers and dreamed of one day having my own Internet connection.

At that time, to “go to the Internet” I had to be go to my aunt’s house, and to be able to have fun at my house it was common to look for downloadable games that I could take with me to my PC at home. USB pens were also a concept of the future, what we used at the time were CD-Roms. I had drawers full of CD-Roms with nothing but JPEG images and low quality videos that came by email chains, so I could review them in the comfort of my home.

At that time I had no gaming consoles. My only entertainment was the computer and the television. So all games I’ve played were for Windows only. And in one of my online searches at superdownloads.com.br (a website which still exists with the same logo) I looked for Sonic and found a free game called Neo Sonic Universe that was perfect. Perfect because I liked Sonic and I was never able to play at home, and it was also free!

I played it from end to end, looking for a supposed secret Espio character that I never figured out how to unlock. I remember that nobody figured out how to unlock it, even though there was a screenshot of this character on the site. On some levels there were secret zones with a mysterious poster that also appeared to do nothing but contributed to the mystery. Maybe it was a great troll from the game’s creator (I remember his nickname was @lex).

When the game opened, a small advertisement for your site appeared on the screen. If my memory serves me, it was something like “GamingBrasil: Game creation is here!”

When I entered this site I noticed a small community of happy people creating fan-games. Tutorials, sprites, MIDI songs, some pirated software 😝, and that’s how my journey started. I created my first (of many) Super Mario clones. I made 700 Sonic clones too. And then, of course, I wanted to put my games on the Internet.

At that time I needed a name for my beautiful website built on FrontPage… Since my real name is Luís and my games always started with a screen saying “Loading” the first thing that came to mind was Luísloading. My internet aunt suggested to me that this was a good nickname and that I should keep it forever. Eventually it evolved into Louisload and remained so, even today.

p.s.: if someone from GamingBrasil reads this, please tell me if Espio was real

p.p.s.: I could have done some fact checking on some stuff that I spoke about because I’m sure that the game still works on Windows 10, but it would bring that powerful nostalgic feeling and my heart would blow up

Jake, the Moldy Dog

Mon, 09 Mar 2020 21:03:56 +0000

“Jake, the Moldy Dog” was a small unplanned art exhibition that came to be due to my temporary unemployment after adventures in a Startup.

During my small stay in the unlaboured world I decided to invest my time making small figurines in cold porcelain clay made at home. I made Eevees, Napstablooks, random small animals and the three Jakes:

“Jake, the Pinched Dog”, whose posture had suffered too much from my thumb;
“Jake, the Moldy Dog”, with mold coming from 100% natural causes, whose species I cannot divulge as to not ruin my artistic reputation and;
“Jake, the One-Eyed Dog”, with only one eye.

It became an art exhibition when I left the moldy version in the street, hoping that a child would find it and bring home a new, moldy friend. The next day it was gone.

Nostalgic Distortion

Mon, 02 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

There’s this quote from a book by Brian Eno:

Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.

This was written in 1996, long before our day and age where we have all of these genres like Vaporwave, Lo-Fi and so on and so forth, that serve as a testament to how right the quote was. It’s amazing how right he was. And it makes me think, what is it about the music of today that will make the future-me recognize it? What kind of sound will make me feel nostalgic about the music of today?

As we evolve, our music evolves with us. My consumption of music is through a digital medium, streaming through the Internet. There are still limitations of course, but are they perceptible? I don’t think the sound quality of my Spotify subscription alters the sound. What about other digital mediums? Deezer and Tidal and Youtube and whatever? They do have some Loudness Normalization but that only changes the volume. What about my home made 320kbps MP3 rips?

I don’t think I can hear any peculiarities in today’s music due to the medium its recorded or played at. But, as far as I remember, I didn’t either in the 90s when I listened to audio cassettes.

The First Post

Sat, 22 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been wanting to have a space of my own to write stuff, so this blog has been in the backlog of personal tasks for a loooong time now.

Well here it is! Writing for myself. And as every blog did since the dawn of humanity, it has to have a first post.

And in the process of trying to figure out what to write, I just started thinking about my first post.

What was my first post? Ever?

I had an old blog, done in Blogspot. The first post was dated 2008, its title was “Primeiro Post” (which is portuguese for “First Post”), and it simply said “Yay or nay?”. It had 12 comments, most of them are now marked as “Anonymous” because, as we know so well nowadays, databases rot and not everything on the Internet lives forever. It’s as if they wrote the posts with fading ink and now I can’t read who wrote them, although some of them I can guess more or less who they were.

Still, that wasn’t my first Internet post for sure. I remember that I had an account on a Tamagotchi web forum. I remember posting about my Tama screen being scratched. Fun fact: if you placed your ear close to the Tamagotchi V2 you could listen to its heartbeat. I remember how excited I was, leaving the toy store with a new Tamagotchi in my hands, and almost dying because I didn’t look at the road and a car almost hit me. That toy store doesn’t exist anymore.

I also remember being a member of a message board called Enigmaspace, a fansite about the music of Enigma. I wrote about how I was only 13 and loved Enigma! I guess being 13 and liking Enigma was cool. I specifically remember being 13 because it was a weird word to write in English, “thirteen”. This forum doesn’t exist anymore.

My guess is one of those two would’ve been my first post. But, as databases rot, so does human memory and I can’t know for sure. And that’s yet another reason to have a blog, encouraging me to write so that certain memories don’t become fading ink.