1961, Japan. Architect: Antonin Raymond. Remarkable career, and this is by far my favorite work from him.
The “angular toad” feel makes me smile. I enjoy diagonals.
Inside looks phenomenal. The rib cage structure and polygonal sight feel super futuristic.
It looks very cozy with warm lights. This looks like this would fit right in somewhere in a galaxy, far, far away. But it’s here in Japan. Built 64 years ago by a dude born in 1888.
A timeless exposed concrete structure, indeed.
There’s something hilarious to the fact that there’s still a debate going on, that we’re still testing and pondering on this. All the way to very recently: I read a French blog post on the clitoris with 2020s research papers at the bottom. The clitoris, this obscure thing that half the planet always has been playing with lmao. What I think is safe to say as being completely true:
Now speculatively, I’m thinking that the earlier a woman learns to get nice with herself, the more likely she will squirt later? I feel like there’s a big element of understanding your own body. It changes through life as well. You win the ability. You lose the ability. Random!
Anyway. It’s so odd how we can collect rocks from asteroids, zoom in the universe to see incomprehensible nebulas or X ray manta rays to understand what’s up, but women’s bodies? No, let’s just keep cultural shame around this clit juice thing.
The LeBron Lakers. I never could, man. They just lost to a team shooting 7-47 (!!!) from three.
That Russell trade was so weird, but that Luka one was even weirder. It would have made a lot of sense to trade LeBron for Luka and keep AD. Sure, it would have been a PR disaster. But I think they would still be going at the Wolves.
It’s super simple: basketball is easier to win with long dudes. If you don’t have any and go “small” then you need extremely good shooters and a team which knows how to protect them. And even in that case, you’d better be on point (see Warriors vs Rockets with Sengun and Adams).
Lakers have nothing. No big, no shooters, no teamwork. I don’t even know how they made it to 3rd seed, that is so odd.
But that’s also why they got gentleman swept.
I just bought some scissors. Fiskars is a 375 years old Finnish company. They sell and design things in America and they build those things in China like everyone. Because China is just about unbeatable in manufacturing costs.
Treating China as an enemy in politics while it is a 30-year partner in business building everything we have, virtually, is so much bad faith I can’t believe it stays in the air.
China is spying its citizens. So is everyone in America and Europe. Remember Snowden? We can’t get into China much so we’re jealous I guess.
It is an authoritarian communist country. Yeah well then why the fuck are we doing business with them for long decades, complaining that jobs are leaving our countries? Why do the Olympics over there then? And of course, how are we much better these days? We are not. And stop letting them build Chinese police station outside China, tf.
They will take over. Over what? We need each other and they have a lot to do inside their country. I trust them to find a better system than what we know. We trust them to build everything we have, we can trust Chinese folks to evolve. We need to evolve as well.
They copy everything. Who the hell doesn’t in business? IG didn’t copy TikTok?
National security, Harold. What does it mean in a global economy with 100K+ flights a day and where the worst things are always done by local folks? School shootings in America, cars ramming people in Europe and gang rapes in India. All locals.
So attacking Meta on the basis that they’re doing business with China, who has been doing business with everyone company in the world prior, is not a good angle, I think. Cisco helped China with surveillance and censorship before by the way. I wonder where it went.
We live absurd times.
From Careless People.
It doesn’t sound enticing, but also you do not need to be a multi-millionaire to do those things. Let’s analyze them.
Travelling. Travelling is simultaneously good and overrated. It does open one’s mind if done right, but you don’t need to overdue it to understand different perspectives. And if you do it to simply add the most expensive hotels on your resume and do nothing by a pool, you might as well not travel. You’re just wasting money (and will get bored).
Personal goals of being in shape is cheap as hell. Just move and don’t eat too much, all the time. That’s about it. Again, no need to be ultra rich for that.
Buying an expensive hobby. It might feel good for a hot second, but we all know someone who did that and has their expensive hobby sitting there, collecting dust.
Start-up. What is there to start in 2025? Nothing.We have services and businesses for absolutely everything and anything. And the goal for a start-up is to get swallowed by a giant for the biggest number possible, to do what? Buy a 8th house you never go to?
Philanthropy. The most boring and dull and kind of inefficient venture, sure. That stuff has never changed anything. It looks good on you though.
Those young multi-millionaires are aimless. Don’t have any real sense of what it takes for the world to work the way it is (hint: tons of unpaid labor; advice: change that).
So not only it is dramatic that those folks fuck up the world through social media, their wealth is idiotic and doesn’t make them happy.
Because happiness is a process, not a pre-processed destination.
And today the status/hierarchy game is irrelevant.
I think she maybe meant spineless sycophants.
I just finished Sarah Wynn Williams’ book, Careless People. Very well written. Like a movie except that this is reality. Recommended.
In a way, everything she describes is mostly how I imagined things to be there in the 2010s. But I also hoped that I was cynical or too harsh. But I could smell it.
FB knows more and more how and exactly when we become docile. Knowing that at the scale of countries and entire regions of the world, for every generation alive and being able to run tests and tweak things to see what happens? That’s ridiculously powerful and unprecedented. FB learns more everyday, and with people on the Facebook’s board who also are heavily involved in politics and AI development, I feel concerned.
I’m not feeling it.
The latest elections. Oh boy. Sarah’s book confirms it all. Leadership and board do not care.
And today we have ICE raids sending Americans to camps in El Salvador.
I was dragged into Facebook. A couple friends annoyed me almost daily during summer 2008 to “get on Facebook!!!”. So I did at the end of the year, reluctantly.
I hoped, though. As a tech-savvy dude I admired how they scaled up to the big B (billion) without crashing. The opportunity of having that many people together on a common platform, felt like a civilization milestone.
All of that to sell ads made it the lamest, worst possible shit you can think of.
I am so glad I stayed strong and never joined Insta and kept my brain from rotting by not looking at endless streams of insipid performance.
No one realizes the damage. I do, being off all social media for years. Young adults who grew up with it are some of the most clueless, soulless people I have ever met. They’re conscious of it. They know the cause is 24/7 social media on phones. They can’t stop. It’s not a good look.
I keep going back at a point Sarah makes: Meta and its people could do the right thing and still be filthy rich and powerful. I would almost say, it might even make them richer and more powerful! For that you need knowledge, understanding and perspective. They don’t have that. They never had that. They never grew their understanding of the world. They’re just drones building systems and then claiming “I didn’t know it could do that!”. But they do know. The petulant child, ad nauseam.
I still have to have FB. If it was ethical, neutral, impartial, it would be the best thing in the world. But Facebook is completely unusable these days. I mention skateboarding to a friend in messages, my feed is now 90% skateboarding. I say one thing about playing music, guess what happens. He’s a straight dude, let’s try cleavage.
This moronic approach gets on my nerves. I haven’t logged in in months. Fuck adtech.
Why?
Firefighters+jetpacks is a great, great concept.
What happened with the original game?
It came out on the Saturn, which wasn’t doing so great at the time. The game didn’t get marketing support and the Dreamcast came out a few months later. It couldn’t be successful.
What to retain, what to redo?
Retain the music, impeccable funk-pop. Everything else can be improved upon. Much bigger levels, obviously. Special effects. I’d say, don’t base it on a futuristic story. I think it would be best to have it in an alternate contemporary setting. Maybe a mode where you need to strategically put out a fire to save as many items as you can, dollar wise. Old couch burns hard, don’t care. Brand new computer is close to flames and needs to be saved, etc.
An emphasis on wildfires would be great, trying to save nature would feel better than items inside buildings.
Why?
Spider robot that can climb walls, strafe, jump and shoot unlimited bullets. And can fire 6 homing missiles at a time. Never been done before, never been done really well after, if at all.
What happened with the original game?
It was well received! But a bit bland and limited by the PS1’s processing power at the time.
What to retain, what to redo?
Retain the music, fantastic techno that fits the cyberpunk setting just beautifully. Retain the settings and spider robot specs. Everything else can be improved upon. Bigger and more intricate levels. Better polish. Better scenario. Levels at sunset and at night. Wind. Rain. Not harder but more surprising would make it a hit.
Why?
Rabbit robot jumping on platforms in first-person. First 3D game to ever do that. The double and triple jump mechanic is super addictive.
What happened with the original game?
I think it did OK, but those were the early days of a new generation of consoles, so it was noisy. People didn’t know about it.
What to retain, what to redo?
The music, the hilarious, nonsensical setting should stay. The double and triple jump mechanic have to stay, obviously. Maybe a collab with Katamari Damacy would be great: a second player rolls things to become big and the first player uses that to jump higher? I don’t know, maybe not so fun. But yeah, better levels, bigger. Time limit has to go, that was lame. Levels based on real locations would be fun. Triple jump to reach the top of a hill in Rio. Caves. Maybe add an emphasis on saving humans? Jumping around to rescue skiers or something like that.
In the process of buying some land, y’all. I mean finding it first.
I am browsing a lot. Lots of interesting things happening. Like prices dropping by more than half in less than a year (???). Or value going from $75K in 2001, $476K in 2006 and back to $70K in 2011 and now $140K (???). Lots of sus.
Location is getting more precise I think. My supervising architect is waiting and I can’t wait to sign a contract and write her a check.
Workworkwork. Anything but this shit show with all these clowns I’m so sorry rest of the world! It’s just impossible to describe the difference between what I live daily in CA and the news. I’m so mad every day.
Yes, I’ve seen the Ghibli-fication of memes via ChatGPT. Yes, it’s mesmerizing and touching and it grosses people out because many said that AI can’t do shit and now their little hearts are moved by a synthetic organization of colors and shape on screen, and they. Can’t. Take. It.
And here’s the usual media take on how we, humans, are so much better than extremely complex systems (which is what we are, btw) who can do a lot and more every six months or so:
“I think the proliferation of AI tools and the subsequent explosion of AI-generated art is just going to lead to newfound desires and appreciation for the human-made varieties.”
It will not. For one, to appreciate the “human-made varieties” you need to know the world before AI-generated art and that’s a diminishing number of folks every year. Two, this assumes that humans can separate AI-generated art and legacy-generated art, and that’s as of today in the middle of giant improvements of the former, already impossible.
Third, this assumes that people give a fuck about human-made art that much. Everyone makes art. It doesn’t really have any value but the one we give to it.
What AI does is shatter the world of expensive art, yes. Did it ever make sense? I don’t think so. A hour or two of work and you sell that piece $40,000 because the patron is filthy rich? That’s the world of expensive art right there, and that market is now kind of irrelevant. Overnight.
So, everyone born 2000 and up is cooked enough to never see or even bother to see the difference between human and AI art. People born before don’t really give much of a shit.
Everyone with a bit of imagination can now create whatever they want, quickly. Unprecedented. We need UBI, on god. Let’s go.