Month: October 2011

I agree with Sean. People are pissed. But occupying the streets is not a 2011 method to gain power back, sorry.

I think about all these rich people. They abused the system and moved their pieces in the dark, behind, slowly. For decades. They didn’t get disgustingly rich by stopping traffic and screaming HEY BITCHES WE’RE FUCKING STEALING YOU IN YOUR FACE OH FUCK IT’S COLD LET’S GO HOME. It wouldn’t have worked as good as it’s been. They worked hard, in stealth mode-ninja style to screw us. It worked really well, I guess we can all agree on that.

Now, they are in a position of power with no equivalent in history. The same can be said about the world which isn’t working as before, more interconnected and interdependent than ever. I still remember the millions, dozens of millions of people across the world protesting the war in Iraq. It didn’t do shit. All over the world, in Israel too people are protesting about the Gaza problem. It doesn’t change anything. Protesting loudly is a method that doesn’t work well if at all in long democracies as “the West”. North Africa is fighting decades of dictatorship, it’s absolutely different. It had to explode this way, with people in the streets but also a lot of dead bodies.

“The West” isn’t in this situation anymore. We’re in full cold war with the 1%. I think that protesting and making sure that they hear us is OK but might not be the best way to change things. They own us for so long, even cutting their heads off and putting them on spears ala French revolution, wouldn’t change anything. I hope Anonymous and Wikileaks and more underground movements are fighting back. I know every single politician is a sell out. For good or bad it’s done, the system works this way. I can’t trust them more than that. Corporations and politicians aren’t going to end their relationship because we demand it. Oh, and they own the police and the army too, so.

The 99% need to erode the power, slowly. It’s going to be long. But the more we aim for independency, sharing, sustaining and giving them less money, the better. I always think that if people were drinking sodas like I do and did, none of these companies would have been big enough to fuck the entire food system, the FDA and pouring so much money to lobby politicians and giving more sugar to millions of kids who didn’t need it at all. People don’t think enough about the butterfly effect. It always seems out of touch but it’s just a matter of being consistent and thorough. Persistence is required to change, progress. The 1% knows it very, very well.

I feel stupid in front of death. Being adopted means that you need to kill your biological parents in your mind. You need at an early age to live with the fact that they are not here. They don’t exist. They sure are missing but they will never come back. They are kind of dead.

It’s so hard that a lot of adopted people go back later in their lives to resuscitate them by any means necessary. I haven’t and I don’t want to. With the luck of having people taking care of me, people who don’t look like me at all, it expanded my empathy, it expanded my will to kind of love everyone regardless you know? I care a lot. By design, nothing that I really chose upon.

I just don’t know what to say about death. I feel extremely cold about it compared to most of you. I only had one very close death but I was away from him since so many years. It wasn’t a shock, even less with a throat cancer and decades of heavy smoking. I only lived with him during my first six years on earth and then every year for a week or two, that’s not the same. The bad part was being so far away and useless. I still feel bad sometimes when I receive a private message on Facebook and of course, I miss him.

To me death creates a sense of emergency to do my best at anything I do, an urge to be the best and good and make people happy. To beat myself at being even more happier because I am alive and don’t need a lot. MinMax.

I know that anybody can at anytime, disappear. Like not just knowing, acknowledging. That’s the first rule in my life. “Hey you’re supposed to have your parents when you’re born! Guess what, not you. It happens. Sorry”. Which makes me believe that we should really like what we do and shit like that. But also makes me really precautious, sort of shy, maybe too much even if I feel confident overall. It’s hard to find a balance and it’s a weird mix.

The thing is that it will never change. I’m like an aggregator of people, families, I get really close to all of you but I don’t share enough either, like a son and a dad, a mom and her daughter or sisters and brothers. Maybe gladly because you are all fucked with these strong connections, I noticed.

I’m a monster. So I try to be a nice one like in the Pixar’s movie.

Boo

I was about to install Disqus comment system because it’s neat and everywhere but then, I realized that they would host my blog’s conversations and have control over it.

“When you’re not paying for a service, they own you” would make a good movie line. I want to keep control over my stuff.

I didn’t join G+ because Facebook is enough. I am not doing this shit all over again with another company.

Google Reader. To me, it’s the worst of them all, as big G knows everything about everything I have a big interest in, all the time. I was very reluctant to use their service but had no choice if I wanted to sync multiple devices. Peer pressure (go on Google Reader dude! I love Google!). Plus they bought Feedburner, now we have fugly feedproxy.google.com or gross utm_source=feedburner& instead of nice HTML links. Fuck Google Reader.

RSS is barely use by the Internet -like 3 or 5% of people are using it- though it’s used by highly influential people. It must be fascinating for Google, much more interesting than what Facebook gathers when your cousin shares a stupid video or likes that you were drunk last weekend.

So there’s Tiny Tiny RSS which is nice and cool but hell, this is so rough. I dream about a OPML file on my server with clients (desktop, mobile) connecting and syncing to it. That doesn’t seem that crazy, does it? Well it doesn’t exist so I guess it’s crazy.

I almost signed up for Spotify. Peer pressure; “125 of your friends use it!” bullshit. I signed up on Facebook through peer pressure too from people not using it at all since then. At least it’s very useful for family stuff, especially when distance plays a big role.

Diaspora was meant to be a nice replacement but it went nowhere. I don’t get it. It was great. Tabs used as filters is the best shit ever. Every single browser does it but wait, I just saw that they killed that feature on the website. Anyway, they seem back on track for something, stay tuned.

Flickr? Well I pay so I own my stuff. Paying automatically creates a much better trust. I just wish they would evolve much faster than what they do now. There’s no real alternative but they really have a hard time evolving, it’s painful to watch.

Twitter? All the competition died. I found status.net but like Diaspora, it’s pretty weird. An open source software that does Twitter should be doable or am I missing something? I love Twitter but I don’t understand what they do with it, they still have technical problems, they focus on pictures (???), don’t want developers to create clients even if it’s what made them, there’s nothing that makes sense. I still can’t have access to the thousands of tweets I sent like I have access to my six years worth of blog posts. Fucking silo.

The number of things that can happen in a week and spin your head a thousand times.

Fred L. Shuttlesworth died at 89. He was a civil rights movement fighter. An excerpt of the NYT article about his life fighting over stupidity:

In one instance, on Christmas night 1956, he survived an attack in which six sticks of dynamite were detonated outside his parsonage bedroom as he lay in bed. “The wall and the floor were blown out,” Ms. McWhorter wrote, “and the mattress heaved into the air, supporting Shuttlesworth like a magic carpet.”

When he tried to enroll his children in an all-white school in 1957, Klansmen attacked him with bicycle chains and brass knuckles.

Derrick Bell died at 80. First black professor at Harvard Law School. Article here.

In 1980 he left Harvard to become dean of the University of Oregon School of Law, but he resigned in 1985 when the school did not offer a position to an Asian-American woman. After returning to Harvard in 1986, he staged a five-day sit-in in his office to protest the school’s failure to grant tenure to two professors whose work involved critical race theory.

My brother-in-law Sean Wilson died at 38. I don’t have any NYT article for him but he was a good man. Generous and loved by everyone. He will be immensely missed.

I guess it stops here as my grand father has not yet passed away but fuck, he’s so close to it. I know it’s going to happen soon.

Of course, the news of you know who died and made the headlines all week, really annoyed the hell out of me. That was just gross, too much, ridiculously too much, you all disgusted me so bad over this shit. Fuck. Decency Jesus fuck, decency. You don’t have a fucking one. Of course I know, it’s just that the timing wasn’t good.

A society overdosing on shallowness, glorifying fakeness and worshipping a freaking, useless social status through devoted consumerism and unlimited love for a dictator bitch. I mean, we should just all die in a fire right now, shouldn’t we?

I was kind of sick today, I thought it was the 20°C drop in temperature but it might not be the only thing cramping my stomach.