Emilio Coppola

Lately I’ve been obsessing a little bit with time perception. There is this VSauce video which covers the topic quite well, but one of the things that really stuck with me is the story of the time traveler. The story goes sort of like this: In this picture from the 40s you can clearly see a person who doesn’t fit in. He has clothes that look very modern, sunglases, a portable camera, etc… So what’s the first idea everyone got? he must be a time traveler.

He was of course not a time traveler, but a person that was dressing extremely casual for that time. This then generates the question: If we dress extremely casual for what it is normal today, are we going to be dressing as people will do in a hundred years? Who knows, maybe you even have existing photos that would make people in the future to freak out.

This phenomena is haunting me for a while now, and I recently found something that also fascinated me. I was an emo kid, and I listened to a lot of emo music during my teenage years. Most of the bands were terrible, but some of them really stuck with me and I still listen to them today. When reading about the origins of this kind of music and style, a band that I never heard before (not sure how) popped up: Rites of Spring.

The band formed in late 1983 is by many considered “the first emo band”. Which it’s a bit of a too-broad term, but it makes sense. Listening to the song “For Want Of” I just can’t believe that this music was out there in 1985. It feels like the time traveler from the photo but in music form. If I hear this song among the rest of the early 2000 emo bands, I would never suspect that this song was playing at the same time as “Like a Virgin” from Madonna, or “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tears for Fears were on the Hot 100 singles. If you listened to early My Chemical Romance, you can clearly see how similar their music was.

When I listen to “retro” music I can usually navigate in a very straight path from genre to genre, from sound to sound, and it is quite easy to follow where the influences are coming from. But I wasn’t aware that even Kurt Cobain cited Rites of Spring’s record as one of his favourites of all time. That also made me realize that yes: this music was made before Nirvana existed.

The band didn’t like the term “emo”, and didn’t want to be associated with it. But unfortunately that’s not how labels work. It is funny that being emo myself during my early teenage years, a meme between the emo kids was saying that “I’m not an emo kid”. We all knew we were, but we didn’t want to be associated with the label either.

Half of the musicians from this band went on to make a much more successfull band called Fugazi, which has its own merits, but they don’t resonate with me that much. Fugazi feels more grounded in its time and even if it has great songs, my brain can contextualize them in that time period.

I now have my eyes and ears open trying to guess what thing from today will be something considered “ahead of its time” in the future. And I hope that by then, I can be as facinated as I am now with Rites of Spring.

This year it was my first time attending the Game Developers Conference (GDC). To be honest, I wasn’t expecting much from it. When I searched for videos/coverage or blogs about it, it all felt really confusing. Once you are there, things click, and you start to understand the hype.

The most valuable things I was able to get from the event are the personal connections. We spend a lot of time online watching Twitter threads, Reddit posts, videos, and emails, but all those signals can only get you a general idea of the person behind the screen. Meeting people face-to-face is a whole different experience. While I already knew this from working remotely for many years, the difference this time was that everyone was there for the games. I spent countless hours talking about web development and design in the past, but games is something that I do almost exclusively online or with close friends.

This was also Godot’s first time having a booth at the GDC, and it was clear that everyone loved it. When pitching Godot to people who didn’t know about it, I was surprised to know how easy it is to sell something that’s free and open source. I didn’t have to dance around with words to convince people to buy something they don’t want. I just had to talk about what the engine is and most people who didn’t know about it were surprised to find out that it’s free (as in freedom and as in beer) and were eager to try it out.

Unfortunately, this sort of events are still very inaccessible for many people. The costs are really high, and the event is hosted in San Francisco. I’ve been to San Francisco before, but this time it felt like a post apocalyptic movie. Everything was extremely expensive, the homeless population was alarming, and the city felt unsafe. This is of course something that happens outside of the Moscone Center (where the event is hosted), but it is something that is packaged with the GDC experience. I’m not the first one to say this, but I believe the event should be hosted in a different city every year.

Overall, I would say that if you have the chance to go, you should definitely do it. No matter in which point of your career you are, you will get something out of it. I’m looking forward to next year, but in the meantime I’ll be working on some games, being around so many talented people was truly inspiring.

So, since Twitter is not what it used to be, and I feel a bit weird taking part of a website led by a person who represents everything I don’t like in the world, I made my website look like social media.

The goal of this is to create more posts without the pressure of them being a proper “blog post”. This way, I can express in a format I’m familiar, without having to be in Mastodon or Twitter.

I’m, of course, not abandoning any of those platforms, but I still romantisize the idea of an open web, where everyone has their own little corner.

Welcome to this new experiment, happy to have you here!