h. Play

I keep reading about 50s/60s/70s design. It’s incredible how much was measured during those decades.

Basically, everything. Everything was measured, observed and noted to design better everything. Better kitchens, better cars, better ways of sitting down. The whole nine and more.

We know everything about living in peace and in an optimum flow today. Our ancestors did the math. We can’t seem to focus on that though.

I was reading about Herman Miller’s chairs. Fantastic sitting from the Eames Shell castles to the Aeron citadels.

The amount of research, prototyping and iteration is staggering. Of course these chairs are phenomenal! They couldn’t possibly have had more data to make decisions. Years in the making. Just to sit right! Sitting everyone (wild spectrum of asses) correctly is quite a challenge. And it’s been done from the late 40s to the late 90s. Do we need more research on that? No. Unless you think you can outsmart decades of experience from the best designers who spent their entire lives doing just that one thing.

Two conclusions. One, it’s a crazy world where we don’t need more things. Rather, we need the best things to be distributed everywhere, and most of those best things were invented in the past. Nothing new is better anymore and if it is, it’s nasty and abusive (say VR or macOS Tahoe).

Two, seeing and reading so much about intelligent folks and smart ideas from decades ago, juxtaposed to this *waves at the current zeitgeist* is making me internally bleed.

Shit is dumb as fuck right now. It’s demonic.

Almost overnight, my Latino skaters disappeared last year.

We don’t talk. We nod. We hit boards on the ground to celebrate. We motivate ourselves by taking turns one after another. Committing to that trick even more.

All of them usually wearing all-black skate costumes. Gone.

I am still looking forward to skate with them. I still have lingering hope. But it’s been a whole year and the odds are not great by now.

I don’t know where this is going. The plunder is real.

“In the United States, the House of Representatives and the Senate are supposed to give their approval in cases of foreign conflict. They were neither consulted nor even informed ahead of the operation carried out on Saturday to seize Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.”

Also, the UN perhaps? Can someone stop this man and the military-industrial complex please.

I’m super early thinking about appliances and whatnot for my house, but I’m looking around, pondering.

I peruse at all those touchscreen-based temperature controllers, those Bluetooth-infused radiators or coffee machines or cooking tops and I’m like HAHAHAHAHA. Never.

I want switches. I want buttons. I want the satisfaction of using my fingers to turn on/off something. I want zero updates and internet-deprived appliances, yes. 1,000%.

I found this shower mixer tap from Italy.

Isn’t it cool? Hi-Fi looking switches. Fantastic grip. Satisfying click sound and textured contact. Perfect rotary control. Probably lasts for a hundred years before it needs to be replaced. I’m sold.

Germany will provide the best cooking top I have ever seen. It’s just induction with built-in ventilation (no hood to install/plan, yay!) but instead of having those sad touchscreen controls, there’s the option to use rotary knobs to control the burners!!!

I can’t cook well if I can’t rotate heat up and down, it is a law of Physics. Sorry.

Touch is great. Touch is real. Touchscreens and internet-connected appliances are cheeks.

Assault on Precinct 13. I enjoyed it! Love me some LA from way back.

There was a huge concern about youth violence in the 70s, apparently. Many movies, shows, anime from all over the world took on that subject at that time. Which would be part of the equation for the 80s copaganda culture.

Half a century old movie. Hard to believe said like that.

Still the 31st here. It’s raining. Some mild covid symptoms. There’s a variant that gives me diarrhea for sure and it is here inside me.

What a tense year under the stupidest government we have ever experienced. Hoping everyone gets back to their senses and stops being insane? Not sure hopes are enough. Get off your phone.

For myself, I hope a lot. Working super hard. Studying like a maniac. I am building this custom house to pursue a lifestyle with no name involving reading books, cooking and skateboarding in and out the crib, possibly. Fancy or not, immensely satisfying to me.

Thankful. Let’s fucking go.

I couldn’t even read the subtitles, I swear.

It’s that bad. I don’t understand how it’s not absolutely illegal. It is completely insane here in LA. It gets worse because people’s reasoning is “I’ll buy the same insane headlights so that I’m never blinded!” and now everyone not having those stupid lights is suffering.

I’ve never looked more at the bottom right corner of my field of vision than these days. It’s that or complete blindness. Sometimes it is so absurd (like rearview mirror literally being an intense white page of #ffffffff), I laugh like a maniac, ducking in my car.

Sadly, it’s not just on the road. At work they started to replace fluorescent lights with 4600K LED bullshit and I told them hell to the fuck no are you insane?? Transforming the office into a gas station!

At home I bought a 65W LED “warm” light for a table and this shit is not only loud as fuck (I needed a 3W one) but it displays a way too uniform, robotic light. It’s creepy. It’s flat, unnatural. I swapped it for a 6W incandescent light and it’s so, so, so much better. Much closer to fire and sun. Nice colors.

The issue arises on a show like Andor, too. “we’re using simulated daylight with LEDs and it’s awesome!” If it’s immediately recognizable, especially in 4K then no, it’s not awesome at all.

So, they’re not great. They’re expensive. They’re not clean, full of plastic and PCB. People are getting used to them because they keep looking at their phones and all that LED blue light grossness is numbing them. Manufacturers keep pushing them on some “oh you wanted some lighting? Here’s some balls to the wall, 10,000 suns light in your damn face bitch” BS.

Fuck LED lights.

Thinking a lot about the digital world because like:

• Algos, bots, AI.
• Online search basically dead.
• Pictures and videos, also dead.

So who is real, for real? I know I am and a few blogs I’ve been following for 10+ years are too. But for the rest today? I don’t know at all.

This is a first in internet history.

I’m reading a book about a music label and there are multiple reports of women talking about going back home alone at night in NYC and never once feeling scared of anything. It was truly like that. 1950s.

In the 2000s, you never felt like the online profile or username was not real. It always was. If it wasn’t it was quickly obvious. The point was to find people like you so you needed to be you/define yourself.

2010s social media massively changed that (clout-chasing) and now it’s all pointless trash.

Writing online helps in so many ways, but I’ve been doing this for so long. The gains have already paid off. I remember starting though. After a few posts, wondering if that was useful at all.

The youth is emptying their energy online in manipulation-ridden silos controlled by private companies. That’s probably more problematic than starting a website and sharing thoughts.