Nuku-Nuku / Future Brain

Quick introduction

Nuku-Nuku was the main hub of Future Brain. He was a jack of all trades, proficient in everything. Although most people remember him for the winner track “A world of dreams”. You can listen to it on Youtube, with additional versions by Psirius and others: Nuku Nuku / Cueder / J.P.M. - A World of Dreams (8 Parts)

Nuku-Nuku’s real name was Alex. He picked the nickname Nuku-Nuku after the name of an android girl in a very crazy anime: All Purpose Cultural Cat Girl Nuku Nuku (万能文化猫娘 BANNOU BUNKA NEKO MUSUME). Also note that “nukunuku” 「温々（ぬくぬく）」 means “warm and cozy” in Japanese.

You can find a list of his productions while at Future Brain in here: Future Brain (Amiga demoscene)

His life through my eyes

Geek god

I can only tell Alex story through my eyes. When I met Alex in the 90s I felt a bit overwhelmed. He was very smart and a jack of all trades: he knew about hardware, music, graphics, programming, anime, manga, and he was native speaker of English, Spanish and Catalan. He was a good geek and many people from the Commodore Amiga scene visited his place.

Although I joined Future Brain, I felt he was kind of far away from us. I somewhat felt we were lucky to have more of his time than others, and it was fun to share crazy moments like when we scanned our faces with his document scanner, for the intro of Digital Fanzine 6 (the first intro I ever programmed).

So when he met an American girl over IRC, moved to the US to get married, and totally lost contact with the rest of the group, I felt it was just normal. He lived in a different world we couldn’t comprehend. He was someone I looked up to, but he may not even remember my name. I tried to contact him on several occasions, but the emails bounced back. I suppose he changed his email address and we had no way of contacting him again.

More than 20 years later…

Alex found me in LinkedIn in January of 2020. I was surprised that he remembered me and that he wanted to call me and talk, out of the blue. It turns out I existed after all. I had no idea of what he had been through, but from a couple of calls I could tell he wasn’t doing great. He lived alone in a bus in Florida and he worked from home, doing phone tech support.

Life is a lottery. Unless you are born in a rich family or something, you need the 4 things from the horoscope to survive: money, love, health, and luck. He had not been very lucky because the genetic lottery gave him hereditary diabetes, and it had badly affected his health, which badly affected his ability to work, which impacted his income. I do not know if there was something else going on and I don’t want to speculate. Everything here is from what he told me, and I only have his version.

From the talks we had, it seems he had a successful life, working for an important pharmaceutical company for many years. He had several pensions from that time that kept him going. He divorced the Sailor Moon girl. He didn’t give me many details, but I think she became a hoarder and it was taking a tall on him. He married again, and his new wife thought it would be a good idea to live in a bus and travel around the US. When I started talking to Alex, they were separated and she lived in Los Angeles. He still talked to her so they were in good terms.

Another recurrent topic of conversations was the constant arguments he had with his family in Barcelona. I think some friends and family asked him to leave the US and come back. He told me that his plan was to finish paying the loan on the bus, for another 2 years, before considering moving back to Barcelona. He also confided me that he was frustrated with people because they don’t understand how hard it can be, in terms of bureaucracy and energy needed, to leave a country after that many years. I lived for almost 12 years in Japan, and it took me a lot of planning to move out from Japan into the UK. And I only did it once I had secured a job. I think this was one of the points we had in common and I’m glad he felt he could talk to me about this.

But still, what was I doing in his life all of a sudden? Didn’t he have other friends? I soon became overwhelmed. He would call me almost every day during the pandemic. Sometimes even twice a day. If I had the day off, he may call me for hours. Some of the calls were longer than 4 hours, difficult to bear. But because we were all trapped at home, I didn’t mind the company. I would turn on the speaker, and left him talk while I cooked or had lunch. But it was too much, and eventually I had to put some limits. We agreed he would at least “ping” me to check if I was available. He would message me with a penguin 🐧 emoji (“ping” in Japanese is read “pingu”, like the famous penguin series), and if I didn’t reply he wouldn’t call me. Still, in the past 2 years (2023 & 2024), I counted 216 calls.

Slightly odd phone calls

I got so much praise in those calls. All of a sudden I was the geek god. He wanted to know about Japan, about my job, my side projects… He watched all my Youtube videos and call me after having watched my latest video or read my latest blog post to comment about it. Of course we had many common interests, like our past experience with the Amiga computer, the interest about Japan (he knew some basic Japanese sentences), anime, computers, etc. But surely he should have other friends he’d made during these more than 20 years we hadn’t been in touch. I concluded that perhaps many of his friends had grew tired of him.

I understand how one would get tired of him. Without a proper job, he had a lot of time, and he lived alone. And because of his health issues, his brain would “fry” after a while. It was hard to tell in a 15-minute call, but those very long calls we had happened because at some point he was low on sugar or something and started talking a bit of non-sense, as if drugged. He went into loops, repeating the same thing again and again. Because he was smart, it doesn’t sound like total gibberish, but it was frustrating and I tried to end the conversation, but he ignored my “let’s talk some other time” and kept going. I had to end conversations abruptly in more than one occasion.

The other day I heard that Alex health (body and mind) had only deteriorated in the last couple of years. That it’s not true. He was clearly in a bad condition since 2020. And it’s been deteriorating bit by bit for 5 years. In recent calls he would be in that bad mental state from the start of the call, but if you had longer conversations with him in 2020 he had the same symptoms. Recently it would take him days to recover and become functional again.

He also had big memory gaps that made conversations frustrating. Because what’s the point to talking to someone if he’s not going to remember the next day? Eventually I started taking it humorously. For instance, in 2022 I did a short trip to Las Vegas. He called me while I was there, at the pool of the hotel, and I showed him the pool. And he told me some stories from the times he had visited Las Vegas. When I came back to the UK, he called me again and we talked about the trip to Las Vegas again. 5 days later he called me and said: “Hey David, I’ve seen from some photographs in Facebook showing that you’ve been to Vegas. How was it?” 😂

Despite all the frustration because of how his health affected his brain, he was still Alex. He wasn’t a different person. When he was more or less lucid, he could go very technical. He would call me every December to discuss the Advent of Code problems. He wasn’t solving them, but he was curious about everything I did and he tried hard to keep up.

Tell me beautiful stories

His car on fire, the hurricanes, the broken fridge, the broken air conditioning, half the bus without batteries, the expired passport, and countless other issues that became harder and harder to deal with with his worsening health. Of course he wanted to vent his frustrations a bit, but most of the time what he wanted was to disconnect and to talk with a real person. He would often asked me to tell him beautiful stories, “cosas bonitas”.

Last time he called was on the 5th of November, 2024. I was in a break from work so I could only talk for 15 minutes. He told me he was in such pain that he couldn’t climb back the stairs of his bus, so he hadn’t left his place for a while. But he didn’t want to complain. He just wanted to hear nice stories. So I told him I had been in Barcelona, near his place, and I told him what I saw. I also told him I was going to go to Naples for my birthday.

The day of my birthday he sent me a “happy birthday” message and I reacted with an emoji. I was too busy to send a proper reply... 😢 That day was the last day he was online.

He passed away soon after.

Rest in peace.