Categories
Me Myself&I

Free sex

We should not ever pay for sex, water and air. I don’t know, these things seem way too precious, too essential to have them monetized. Water largely is and that’s totally wrong and I really wish I hadn’t had to buy bottles (I still drink plenty of tap water, though).

I’m pretty liberal I guess so paying for sex shouldn’t bother me too much, but it does. Because I know that it’s not about sex.


“I’ll suck your tits for 2 credits!” Wait, that’s just wrong.

You see women who need sex, masturbate. Or because it’s obviously easier for them (17 times more contacted than men on OKCupid according to this), they’ll get a dude back home but really, maybe the best is using this vibrator and at the end, women don’t seek to pay for sex. It’s interesting to me that 50% of the population doesn’t seek to pay for sex while the other half overall thinks that it’s OK to do so. There’s something wrong if half of us don’t do it, right? Because it’s not worth it. Because men don’t pay for sex, they pay for something else, something men seek so hard. Power, charisma, or the illusion of having some. It’s very, very old news for feminists.

There’s this pretty amazing interview over the Rumpus with clients and sex workers.

And then the following summer, I wanted some money to buy something (some really cool mod boots that I would never be able to afford on my own) and I thought I could use his lust against him. He came to work way earlier than everybody else, so I showed up early too and told him I could do some of those things for money.

Very important, money. In the US people would do ANYTHING for easy money. Or get ANYTHING for free (this girl on The Soup getting a “slut butt” tattoo because it was free). It’s a disease at this point. So to buy some stupid shit, this young hetero dude is ready to blow some guy’s dick, “using his lust”. That’s fucked up, and that’s how it works for quite a lot of women too who only think about that material shit. I’d rather work a full year to get these boots than executing a pathetic plan like that.

At several points, I had disdain for certain acts, but when I felt trapped or needed rent or wanted those shoes, I crossed those self-imposed boundaries.

It’s important to note how people fuck themselves by getting used to easy money. Auto-coercion. Yes, it’s not only with prostitution.

I tried meeting women on the Internet, but fat, drunk and married does not exactly make for a compelling personals ad. And then one day, about ten years ago, I ran across a personals posting that was clearly an ad from an escort.

It’s incredible to me that men think that it’s normal to be fat drunk, in a relationship and not score pussy. Women do crazy ass shit to be sexy and grab some cocks! It ain’t free, for anyone! So dude grow a pair, divorce, hit the gym drink less and you might get some, for free (drinks not included). Not only it will be better for your entire self, it will cost you less. Men, stop being lazy ass losers with high demands.

The most positive experiences were always ones where there was a real emotional connection, where the sex part of the relationship took a back seat to just talking.

Note people, we’re talking about sex workers but it’s more like take-care-of-me-I’m-such-a-loser-I-have-no-friends workers. It’s NOT about sex. It’s about the power of having someone doing what you want, even just sit here and listen to your tribulations.

I think the thing I am most ashamed of is that I’ve been to Asian massage parlors. These are places with women who are very recent immigrants from China and Southeast Asia, and for a fixed door fee you can get a massage, and for a fixed “tip” you can have sex. On the one hand, it’s convenient; it’s cheaper than a typical escort and you don’t have to make an appointment in advance or have your references screened by the woman. You just show up. On the other hand, the sex is often not that great.

And call me naive, but what I discovered after a couple of trips to these places is that many of these women are victims of sex trafficking.

No shit, Sherlock. You’re naïve, you’re a moron and you don’t know how to use Wikipedia or a search engine for anything else but “escort close by”.

Other than the women in the massage parlors I visited, I honestly don’t believe that most of the women doing this felt degraded. The ones that were escorts who didn’t have pimps, didn’t have drug problems, and weren’t trafficked, I honestly believe that they chose their profession about as much as any of us choose our profession.

What is most when it’s the minority of sex work? Most have pimps, drug problems or are trafficked or all of the above. What is choice when you really need this money right now to pay some debt and not start a homeless life, money that would save your ass and that this thought is very well known by the one trying to hire you? You still have the choice but you know you will do it, for the sake of efficiency. This is how people also “choose” other not-so-great jobs. Duh. But if you demand weren’t there, there would be no supply either. You start this sad business, not sex workers.

Many years after my first blowjob-for-money experience, I went through a bi-curious phase and I guess I have to say now that I’m really a bisexual who leans hetero. Speaking only for myself, if my only two choices were becoming a warehouse picker for Amazon for $10 an hour, or sucking dicks ten times a day for $50 bucks a pop, I’d buy me some kneepads.

So many Americans would do anything for money. Greedy to the bone, to the core. Even on app markets, developers have a “whore mentality” trying to get you with anything with the help of disgustingly bad, sloppy apps. Easy money.

Somebody can point to, say, a fellatio porn scene where the guy is rough on the girl and calls her names, and say that it’s inherently degrading, and my argument would be that it’s only inherently degrading if the girl doesn’t want to do it. I mean, I’ve had it done to me. I thought it was a blast. And I didn’t even get paid.

Of course, everyone can have a blast with that kind of stuff. People can do whatever they want to themselves and partners sexually, it’s all right. It’s when you are paid, when it’s your job, your daily function in this society to be a bucket for cum from guys you wouldn’t bang, doing this not to have fun but to pay bills, your child school and debts that the situation is slightly different. If you can’t see the difference, I don’t know man.

The money changing hands is a way of saying, “This money symbolizes our agreement that this is temporary, a fantasy, it’s just pretend, and at the end of the hour we go our separate ways. Now c’mere and let’s pretend!”

I mean, the “pay and let’s pretend!” is sad to me going to Disneyland so in this case, it’s ridiculous. I don’t know how guys can do it again and again.

Next time you’re in a fast food drive-thru at 2am on the way home from some bar, look through the window at the people in the kitchen, see how they are spending their Friday nights for minimum wage, and think about humiliation. Read about chicken-processing plants, Amazon warehouses. There are a million humiliating ways to make a living in this capitalist world we live in.

So maybe we shouldn’t push people to do anything for money like you do? Maybe we should explain that you can be happy without a 5 bedroom house or crazy car rims or fucking shoes you want? Or that maybe waiting a little longer by working a low income job that doesn’t make you cry your soul out or want to try meth to escape is a better plan? Dignity is not about how much money you have/make, people. It’s about how you sleep at night. People lack education to understand that, but it doesn’t change the fact.

Also, people react very strongly against sex— or at least against sex done in a way that they disapprove of. People are going to say that sex work was created by the patriarchy, to serve the patriarchy, that it commodities women, treats them as objects to be bought and sold. I don’t agree. To believe that, you have to believe that all of these women lack agency, lack any will at all.

But it’s stupid to think it this way. Women try to make easy money and dudes like you are showing up and are ready to pay thousands of dollars. Supply, demand. Yes, it serves the patriarchy and builds up ignorance. Yes, it serves these women who will have all the chances to get fucked up in their future life but fair enough, a lot choose this way for money, attention and fame. Yes, a couple of women who haven’t been fucked up by ultra religious childhoods nor sexually abused, who love the taste of semen might have careers and make more money than what they do now with a “classic” job but it’s like athletes, the career is short and it’s physically hard. These people exist and are for all I can see, a true minority. But yeah, they do exist and they usually have a career plan, save money for their next business/house and disappear asap. They just try to make that dollar and if the situation was inverted, wouldn’t I be interested to do this, save money and invest into things I’d like to do? I would run some numbers and think about it, I have projects and times are rough. I don’t judge. But I damn sure know that that would screw my mind up and be a huge trade, a big mental risk.

We shouldn’t be proud of  a society that values putting ourselves to the very end of the edge to exist. The US are building and sending drones everywhere for security reasons blabla, it’s still wrong and always will be. It’s wrong to facilitate war for security reasons, as it’s dumb to say prostitution is OK because an extremely small minority make this choice and lives it all right, all their lives while we forget about the pandemic problem. Society decided that wealth, bank account health is all you are and it serves men in more ways than one. What about our human health? Maybe legalization would make it better but I’m not so sure legalizing goods like drugs is one thing, legalizing services and human trade is definitely something else.

The only way I can think of being OK with paid sex is through one of these couples running websites and fucking in front of cameras. There is certainly no coercion, not from life or from a pimp, and people genuinely love and craft these videos. You can only be a bit jealous but as soon as more people will run that kind of business, people will not be able to live from that. Back to free sex.

At the very end, the problem lays in our sexual education, which is inexistent, laughable and/or terrible at best. The day our society output young adults who are not afraid of sex, know their bodies well and want to master them even more, the day we stop forcing this idea that we should aim for monogamy despite pretty much everything indicating that this doesn’t work at all, the day we don’t laugh at the dude who really comes hard with a female armpit in his face, then maybe people will be like “what is porn? What is prostitution? People paid for that? lol.”

Yeah I know. It’s far.

Categories
Me Myself&I

From soccer to what do we do


Thanks, Tibö! What an inexistent defense, it hurts.

Fine, the French team (EDF in French) has some work to do. But I’m surprised about how people react like the EDF doesn’t represent France. Uh yeah, it does represent it.

Slow, not giving a shit, not caring, not running? That’s the France I know and experience more than often everyday.

Thinking that being in quarter final is good enough? That’s the France I witness in everything.

Getting a check for a bad job and feeling no shame? That’s France in a lots of ways .

Their salaries? Do you know how much money football generates a year? FIFA has a bigger budget than the UN, that’s how much. You know players careers stop at 35 top and that they will still have to live for a long time? I don’t pity them but it really is simple economics, supply/demand stuff that French can’t stop being stupid about. Nasri insults journalists? He talks bad? What are you guys, virgins? You know where he comes from don’t be coy, let’s move on. His job is to score, not to have eloquent discussions about how the team lost. Come on, be smart about that journalists but I guess you can’t, you need to sell your paper and true, we live in a gossip society. Blame the game, not the player (who apologized).


Spotted last weekend (click to enlarge). Dude, we can find the IP. Second, it’s so childish.

Do you know why so many French players do/did so well in England (you need to check out Thierry Henry’s stats at Arsenal, it’s insane) or elsewhere but can’t score in the EDF? Like Trezeguet, third French all-time top goal scorer with great careers in Italy and Argentina. Absolutely fucked by Domenech -the worst coach ever, protected by the French Football Federation, the closest thing from Sicilian mafia with SACEM– and totally ignored by France since he missed THAT penalty in 2006. But he made us European champion with a beautiful shot (perfect left, good god it still is so good) and I’m sure he would have saved us often since then. The one who really messed up at the 2006 world cup is not Trezeguet, it’s Zidane.

He certainly made the team super anxious before the shootouts by getting a red card, he ruined his public image forever and ever, he ruined the celebration we were going to have for him and he enabled everything in people’s minds about stereotypes of how Arabs are violent, can’t control themselves and don’t apologize. Terrible. In one move, he destroyed the beautiful illusion of a  somehow united, multicultural France that he represented. That sad moment and the 2005 fall suburbs riots started white people in France to think that minorities are indeed, a problem (that is minorities became visible, before they were only on CDs).

Obviously minorities are not a problem when they clean up our streets, take care of your kids, suck your cock in Vincennes’ woods or win France a world cup with 2 goals from one dude of Algerian Kabyle descent but as soon as they’re desperate, using bad language as anyone can do from time to time or fighting police harassment or selling cannabis to white people, we condemn them as if they were the worst filth of this Earth.

This is not how integration will work. You can’t have a relationship that alternatively goes by either kisses on the mouth or punches in the face, you know?

And if all these people from minorities or fresh immigration do better, perform better, feel better outside the country they are born in, there’s a problem within the country.

Categories
Audio&Games

The problem with Unity

It’s mostly made to create universes, scenes, worlds. It’s not good at creating games.

Let me explain.

There are so many things made easier with Unity. You drag and drop assets, you drag and drop scripts and press play to immediately see what is going on. In 15 minutes you can create a room apply physics and move inside this world, according to the law of gravity, or not.

For that it’s pretty insane and an excellent tool.

For creating games that is, designing rules and applying them it’s pretty terrible. I mean all of sudden it’s not drag and drop or pre-fab or anything designer-friendly, it’s pure code.


Help. Halp.

It’s not that it’s too complicated, it’s just that it’s not designer-friendly. Look at how much information you get for stupid visual things that you really care about far, far into the development process. First, mechanics, core mechanics. I build a game.

All of sudden it make sense that everybody on YouTube is doing the same with this tool, creating 3D environments and eventually dropping some FPS style gameplay or third person whatever.

To me it’s almost like the Unity team should do it in reverse: make everything about gameplay with pre-made stuff (like setting a time limit, a score, simple behaviors and operators like they do for the input), a lot of documentation about how to make great controls and rules and much less about shaders et all. This stuff is complex and only experimented coders use them, it’s almost like they don’t need documentation, they know what they’re doing. Designers trying gameplay ideas? Not so much.

Designers can learn to code but it’s so damn slow! It’s so tedious, I think we know enough about games to pre-fab a lot more or make it more granular and fluid yet friendly when it comes to create mechanics. Game Maker is closer and yet lack other stuff.

 
The little mechanics engines of my game prototype, thanks Playmaker!

How is that visual programming is not more prevalent in game development? In this article they aim to build entire apps but it’s not a good way to look at it, parts of game development could definitely profit visual programming simply because there are more about design than code parts.

I definitely miss those not-really-existing-yet tools. It’s almost like we’re artificially supporting two different worlds, design and code, when they should merge to some extent and create something different. Let’s make it happen, people.

Categories
Me Myself&I

Over the counter

Mom (accountant): so I was looking at your income for 2011, it’s uh…

Me: Yeah, yeah… I know.

Mom: So, what’s happening?

Me: Well the situation is pretty bad, as you know.

Mom: Yes, only 2% of my clients are paying taxes on benefit, worst ever.

Me: Wow.

Mom: So are you searching? I mean I know you work on some stuff…

Me: Yes, it’s tough companies are in trouble, they close or lose money or certainly don’t hire. It’s all about 4 or 6 months contracts at the very best.

Mom: Are you searching in the US?

Me: Yes, first and foremost. But it’s not great there either. I applied for a great position for a great company where I could do a great job but you know, I don’t know.

Mom: I see.

Me: Sigh.

Mom: And uh, do you plan to do something else than sound in games or?

Me: You mean joining dad and my sister to do some woodworking? Ha, I don’t know I’m not against completely switching careers but it’s tough, I want to apply what I learned in twelve years, at the end ditching the all thing when I know it’s right here… But yeah, I know what you mean.

Mom: Because you know…

Me: Yeah mom… I do.

There’s such a gap between gen X and boomers, it’s really tough to have sane conversations without the classic “you don’t know SHIT” ending them.

The funny thing is she never knew unemployment, she started her own accounting company only after a couple of years at a bigger firm and never stopped since. I always knew unemployment even before working and I only have been able to start my own thing after 9 years, when Sarkozy did something that fucking everybody could have done way earlier but I digress. My mom uses a ten or fifteen year old accounting software and support ends this year. She told me she won’t change her old habits, they are working! I am so used to learn new software it’s a second nature for a game developer. And she’s asking me if I could forget about knowing how to produce a full sound spectrum from blips to soundtracks applied to software, game and UX design and start something else, are you shitting me right now. No, I can’t. I love it, it’s deep I’m good at it and games and apps are too huge to feel that I should give up because my timing in this world was worse than my mom’s. That’s not cool.

See you on Sunday mom, and thanks in advance for the champagne we will have for my 33.

Categories
Music

A decade later people still don’t get it

Again,

I would suggest to you that, like so many other policies in our society, it is up to us individually to put pressure on our governments and private corporations to act ethically and fairly when it comes to artists rights.

Oh really? Were you fighting Apple when they were offering 160 Gb iPod that obviously no one could entirely buy the music for? You should have gone apeshit on Western Digital, in the name of artists. I’m serious.

75,000 albums released in 2010 only 2,000 sold more than 5,000 copies. Only 1,000 sold more than 10,000 copies.

I would stop at the first number. 75 motherfucking thousands in ONE year. And you want them all to make money? Do you realize how it’s like, unrealistic? It’s not food, it’s not an amazing tool like a computer (that you can use for other things than downloading music, you know?) and you have music everywhere around, how can you almost demand that these albums make money. It’s ridiculous.

The accepted norm for hundreds of years of western civilization is the artist exclusively has the right to exploit and control his/her work for a period of time.

You dreamin’. Artists didn’t own shit up to very recently -thanks digital freedom- and that’s why it usually ended up badly, especially with bands. Don’t you watch Unsung or Behind the Music?


And journalists applaud and everybody follows.

Now while something like Spotify may be a solution for how to compensate artists fairly in the future, it is not a fair system now.

Neither was iTunes! And yet, you all embraced that pathetic pile of shit so that you can sleep at night for not going on the internet, “stealing” even though you still “steal”.

Apple takes a 35% cut from every song and every album sold, a huge amount considering how little they have to do. Record labels receive the other 65% of each sale. Of this, major label artists will end up with only 8 to 14 cents per song, depending on their contract. Many of them will never even see this paltry share because they have to pay for producers and recording costs, both of which can be enormous. Until the musician "recoups" these costs, when you buy an iTunes song, the label gives them nothing. Despite huge new efficiencies created by internet distribution –no CDs to make, no distributors to store and ship them, no CD stores to build and run– artists receive the same pathetic cut. That is the disaster of iTunes. Instead of using this new medium to empower musicians and their fans, it helps the record industry cartel perpetuate the exploitation.

This is from the still very informative unofficial iTunes page.

On the other side they are very happy to sell a bunch of iWhatever, music is just a way to attract you (like apps and games). Also, Spotify: “24,000 people have listened to the Dear Esther soundtrack on Spotify. My revenue for this: 93 euros. Hmm.”. It’s the same disaster as iTunes, same cartels controlling rates (so that even independent artists get fucked too) except that you stream instead of downloading which technically is the exact fucking same, same terrible hype and same terrible greed.

I didn’t hear you guys complain to Apple. You swam in their kool-aid, happy. So when I hear artists complain about how Spotify is unfair I really want to say STFU quite a bit. Join good alternatives. Bandcamp is the star at the moment. Sell directly, it’s still better.

On nearly every count your generation is much more ethical and fair than my generation.   Except for one thing.  Artist rights.

Untrue. It’s more like a large majority of artists still believe in the old system from your generation and get fucked by it through Spotify and what not. Artists today have not only rights but also power they never had before and they are respected as long as they don’t play the game like dicks.

I saw some artists who don’t sell but ONE of their albums on the internet, the rest being ONLY available on P2P. It is stupid (but maybe it’s a legal problem with labels? Sorry guys). I saw artists selling their CDs on their websites but sending you the wrong one that you already have without even bothering to tell you etc. I think artists are bad -if not retarded sometimes- with technology and distribution but it has nothing to do with gen X or gen Y not wanting to spend some bucks. It’s totally untrue. I’m not proud but I paid a CD album more than 50 bucks on Amazon because I loved the shitty mp3s I had so much. It was unavailable anywhere but thanks to Japan, I had a perfect CD. When you genuinely love, you spend. It will happen, with no effort.

I make music, 70+ tracks on the internet entirely made by myself, some for free some streaming only, some for download some are asking a minimum price of $1. I just try to make good stuff that will still be good in ten years or more and put my heart in it. I don’t tour, I know a thing or two about musician’s depression and I still don’t think Emily is wrong.

Actually I think her generation will get tired from hardware ownership and visual dictatorship and will blossom with sound, music and silence. Because cycles, son.

Categories
Me Myself&I

Metro and the fall 2012 computer collection

The Metro UI is the shit. After a year and a half of my Windows Phone I can’t wait to get my hands on some Windows 8 goodness. Metro is really, really great I’m not kidding. Anything with icons simply looks like the past, from Windows 7 to iOS to Android. You look old and inefficient, guys. And XP? Oh boy.

Somehow Microsoft transformed apps in “apps”. You have an OS, a UI and services running through them. That’s it.

It’s a perfect mix between Software as Service and an operating system giving you full focus on data. The future, right now.

You don’t need visual designers on Metro (it’s perfectly clean and lean from the start of making “an app”), you need flow designers. On my phone, apps simply porting the icon paradigm and menus are the worst. In Metro flow is everything and when it’s well done it’s pretty perfect: data first, moving around is fast and fluid what the hell do you want? Exactly that.

 
The new Microsoft Surface

Gizmodo does a great job at explaining what is great with this thing above. My first reaction was, this is too small. 10.6 inches? Meh. It might not be for me. But then thinking about the form factor, the touchscreen the pen and the keyboard (You can easily plug a gamepad too), the mobility and of course the great UI, it might be kind of the definitive computer for a lot of people if not most of people. It’s also a big “you need to aim that high in quality” heads up to OEMs.

In short between a new OS, new machines, new focus on design with Microsoft showing the way to PC manufacturers (and yes Dell and HP, what the fuck have you been doing for years?) while some totally get it by themselves, something interesting is happening. Now it’s up to developers to take advantage of that and play the platform game: the first good apps -that everyone will get as must have- can easily make you a millionaire. *wink wink*

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Me Myself&I

Outside the fence

The Misconception:  You celebrate diversity and respect others’ points of view.

The Truth: You are driven to create and form groups and then believe others are wrong just because they are others.

Article about groups, pretty interesting as I’m part of the Misconception by default. [by the way doing an experiment with teams of boys only instead of 50/50 boys/girls is a huge bias for the results.]

You remember high school. You’ve worked in a cubicle farm. You’ve watched Stephen King movies. People in new situations instinctively form groups.

Yeah, and that sucks. I always have been singled out because I’m on the fence. Either way or none of them is fine. I’ll probably go on my own. In a zombie situation, I would probably be Michonne. When you have been living in a pretty isolate state, you don’t think groups. And it’s a good thing because they’re based on BS.

Hopefully by now you’ve had one of those late-night conversations fueled by exhaustion, elation, fear or drugs in which you and your friends finally admit you are all bullshitting each other. If you haven’t, go watch The Breakfast Club and come back. The idea is this: You put on a mask and uniform before leaving for work. You put on another set for school. You have costume for friends of different persuasions and one just for family.

I always wanted to have only one mask the closest to who I really am, the better. I hate masks. I see them, they make me cringe. I understand how they work with our group-based society but I don’t like to play this game. Because I value honesty. I’m dumb.

Every human gathering and institution from the Gay Pride Parade to the KKK works to remain connected by developing a set a norms and values which signals to members when they are dealing with members of the in-group and help identify others as part of the out-group.

Exactly, which is if I look back on my life why I constantly have been going in and out groups. I’m never satisfied with them, there’s always a set of norms or values that doesn’t fit me. Musicians who will only vomit everything electronic, praise anything unbearably hard to play and hard to listen to or will be addicted to audio gear porn. Game developers who have a pretty narrow sense of style or black people who might have too much of it (with bling) and so on. And you have to say “yay!” to this or you’re not part of the group. I always feel like the skateboarding tribe as one of the most open and not caring who you are one -at least it was like that where and when I started- but really, no women? But what puts me off groups is what this article described, when you spend more time on outsiders than you do on your own group. For some people it’s all their lives. It’s pointless to me.

So when I enter a group -always pretty easy from the fence- after studying it I always want to improve it, fix it. Sort of expand its boundaries I don’t know I’m in search of universality, not division. Change alone is a problem and it comes directly in conflict with power inside a group and then it either gets complicated or “unnoticed”.

“The research suggests you and rest of humanity will continue to churn into groups, banding and disbanding, and the beautiful collective species-wide macromonoculture imagined by the most Utopian of dreams might just be impossible”

Well, I was hoping on that so leave my goals alone, research. I already know that it probably will not happen in my lifetime but I like to believe in "at the end, we’ll have to hang together”.

What makes me a bit of a pessimist is how groups shape people’s minds and will bury every single bit of rationality. Think of crowds after a soccer game. But the same with socialists or what not. Groups fuck individuals and prevent them to think otherwise by providing enough for their egos. Let’s just be real for a moment.

As psychologist Jonathan Haidt says, our minds “unite us into teams, divide us against other teams, and blind us to the truth.”

Categories
Me Myself&I

Second Fence

He was too dark in Indonesia. A “hapa” child — half and half — in Hawaii. Multicultural in Los Angeles. An “invisible man” in New York. And finally, Barack Obama was black on the South Side of Chicago. This journey of racial self-discovery and reinvention is chronicled in David Maraniss’s biography, “Barack Obama: The Story,” to be published Tuesday.

I read this article (2326 comments) and it’s fascinating to me, this search of being who you are and with whom you’ll grow as a person and feel like yourself. Barack went through a lot and settled down in South Chicago with black folks. I kind of resist thinking about it but I crave it too. I don’t have enough. I have too much of something else. Need more blackness.

Barry and Eric had much in common. They were tall, athletic, smooth, outwardly confident. Moore had grown up in Boulder, Colo., attended predominantly white schools, and like Obama had survived and thrived in an environment where there were few people who looked like him. He came to Los Angeles looking for “a more urban African American experience” where he, like Obama, could sort out his identity.

“Obama was a multicultural mainstream Oxy guy,” Hook said. “He fit right in with anybody. As long as you accepted him, he was good.”

It sounds so familiar to me. It’s the base of our social design: we needed to be part of a group to survive, back in the day and it stayed as the “only way it works”. But when you’re on the fence you don’t choose a group somehow, you’re invited and you can stay but you never really feel like belonging. Until it gets to a rawer level, people looking like you. Is it enough? I don’t know I never joined a group of black folks. I would in LA.

He had been living in the rarified environment of Oxy and Columbia, self-absorbed with his choices, contemplating life on an intellectual plane, and here were people talking about sports and life and family in ways that were not fraught with meanings and symbols. “I felt a greater affinity to the blacks and Latinos there (who predictably comprised about three fourths of the work force . . .) than I had felt in a long time,”

I do understand the refreshing change as it happened to me too, only in reverse: I had been living with countryside white collar down to earth folks and then I was on this intellectual Paris plane. It was good though I learned that with meanings and symbols comes a hell of a lot of BS and segregation, making me divided about knowledge. Sometimes, life is better when you just enjoy it plainly as a life form on a pretty stable amount of matter.

He was a double outsider, racial and cross-cultural. He looked black, but was he? At times he confessed to her that “he felt like an imposter. Because he was so white. There was hardly a black bone in his body.” She realized that “in his own quest to resolve his ambivalence about black and white, it became very, very clear to me that he needed to go black. I told him that. I think he felt very encouraged by my absolute conviction that his future lay down the road with a black woman. He doubted there were any black women he would feel truly comfortable with.

I never thought about my future with any specific concerning the ethnicity of the woman who I would share my life with, but it sure resonates with me. Fuck, it’s like I could have a very private and interesting conversation with the president of the United States of America right now.

“His perspective was universal, removed, not racial. He had reservations about people of every race when it came to tribal thinking.”

*bumps fist* that’s right. And it’s where it’s complex because humans tend to group themselves which is only good to a certain point where it becomes the worst thing. At first it builds up and then, it destroys. History proved it quite often and at a smaller scale, two words: indie game.

But we people on the fence see that as easily as Jedi knights abuse Jedi tricks. And that’s why we freak out/are reserved: we want to be part of all groups and not being part of any group at all, at the same time. It’s unnatural, that’s for sure. The good part is that we have an angle, a capacity of weighing things that nobody has.

Categories
Me Myself&I

First Fence

I always been an outsider in France but now it’s becoming serious. I feel like a stranger. Speaking French is incredibly odd, searching for words and not feeling comfortable at all.

I don’t know why but seeing Asians and black people NOT speaking English freaks the shit out of me. I want to hear this rolling and low riding Californian accent. This tone.

Of course speaking French fucks up my English and I try not to speak my native language if I can, which is easy by living alone coupled to the rise of self-checkout machines. But my biggest problem is that I really don’t care a lot about what’s going on here. I did before, feeling “back to my hometown” but now I really don’t. Because I don’t feel close in any way. I feel like nothing changes in my old country and my generation is heavily settling down now so it’s going to get worse, as an individual. Being the guitar playing black friend in the park hanging out with white couples+ babies? Not really wanting that. I’ve seen this soft cooning, it’s sad. I’m trying to escape that.

It’s difficult to sit on the fence. Looking back and forth. Left, right.

Categories
Audio&Games

Bros and dicks

This is the everyday sexism witnessed in game and software development cultures, cultures I’ve been less and less comfortable to deal with because I like to work with women. What makes me crazy is that they were supposed to be fields where women and men are totally equal as they are all about brains. But these cultures still have a hard time to get it, if at all.

The Male Gaze.

Rape culture in gaming.

Harassment, misogyny and silencing.

During that time a female legislator who dared say ‘Vagina’ during abortion debate has been banned from speaking on house floor.

I’m telling you, gender war is heating up.