Month: September 2012

In the 80s I grew up with toys from the garbage, fixed by my foster dad. It was great.

One year later mid 80s I had brand new Lacoste shirts, before the French suburbs knew about the (rich) symbol it represents, at the same time that New York rappers from the ghetto were buying all the chic European brands like Gucci or wanting to do so so badly. It was great too.

86, bitch. With my dad, at the grand-mother’s.

It kind of says it all. I’ve never been trying to show off my status so much than having a few cool, sturdy things. It’s a very privileged position to not be spoiled, knowing what things are worth and at the same time, not wanting anything because you’ve been growing up with little and not needing anything either because the new family can provide. I never craved being rich nor felt disdain for not so rich people. I understood that you can be happy/unhappy regardless of what you have on your account, it was amazing getting aware of that at an early age, living it like I watch a movie. Kind of a perfect balance.

Knowing this I quickly focused on the fact that obviously, quality stuff have a price which is fine to pay. But paying for social status, no way man. It was disturbing in high school, when it was all about brands and shit. Even more when Paris minorities were all about Lacoste and that I was like “thank god I don’t have to wear these white-people good quality shirts anymore, looking like Carlton.” They would be parading in their fresh Lacoste tracksuits and I would smile, thinking how lucky I was to be out of this stupid pyramid of meaningless status bullshit. Because I knew that wearing some expensive clothes doesn’t make you part of a class, no amount of money will. I mean I didn’t know, I felt it. I learned about it later on in my life.

Anyway. Today my adult world is shallow, cares too much about brands and status (sad and hilarious to look at people looking at each other’s smartphones in the metro). It became an obsession through the 00s, actually. I guess my generation is really fucked up on that. I don’t care! My jeans are like $10 with shipping but I get quite a unique style. My laptop is $500 but you don’t do much more on your $3000 one (yes I have a SSD so it’s fast too). I use the "horrible brand, ew” Windows-powered phone which gives me the best mobile experience -I tried them all, you haven’t- and it feels like you’re missing out for a question of status.

Nah wealth is knowledge, the capacity of deciphering things so that you get the best for the buck is being rich. It might be because knowledge is pretty much free on the internet that people stay on Facebook, measuring where they are on the social pyramid. Free tools to change your way of thinking? Meh. Free wealth symbols? Fuck yeah.

I think I modestly participate at flattening this world. I like this idea.

There was a drive-by (it’s more like a scooter-by) with an automatic weapon yesterday in Belleville around 11h40pm. A small street away and a couple of minutes after we got out of the restaurant with friends.

Apparently, drug-related violence. I guess I can’t fear getting shot in L.A. now.

It kills me. I warned my parents if you don’t take a stance, if your generation in power doesn’t make drugs and at least cannabis legal and controlled, combined with terrible unemployment it’s going to explode.

It was five years ago. Since then, even the socialists now in power said no no and no, despite things like Portugal’s drugs policies, despite violence increasing in the country. It kills me.

Violence in Marseille is out of control and the solution according to France’s government full of old rotten fucks is to deploy more security, more cops, more stop and frisks, more racism, more tension, more fire and more desperation. On the internet all you can read about these murders of young French people over money and drugs is “good riddance!”. Arabs and black people know they can’t dream of achieving anything in France (it’s not like there’s a lot of examples in 40 years of immigration), and selling hashish is very lucrative. Infinite loop.

There’s this big country called USA which went through that with crack and repression didn’t work out, it fucked up the country socially even more. But maybe the goal is the same, putting as many non-white people in jail as possible. Maybe a lot of people are cool with that.

You guys were great. 

That was fun. Seven years, damn. Weed -the product- is still controversial as fuck, you can brag about being super drunk, not really about being stoned. You’re hiding it from your family, some of your friends despite the fact that it does less harm than any other socially accepted drug. A bit sad when you have a show on TV often describing the hypocrisy around pot for eight seasons.

The show really made me respect TV more, tackling subjects like that is still bold and for example, is absolutely inexistent in games.

Anyway, a lot of memories and hilarious moments in my mind. Thanks Jenji and Showtime.

M.I.L.F (I mean, the product)

I’m obsessed with fixing things.

It’s a curse, it feels like a craving, an emergency. Because being adopted is being broken from the start somehow or let’s say that it makes you feel like stuff needs to be fixed because apparently the system (family system) doesn’t work!

Both of my dads were/are skilled and repair, fix things every time they can. I’m obsessed, twice as much. So I try to understand. I never missed TV because I spend my nights in my little worlds trying to understand the in/out of systems and how to fix them. Yesterday was some passive house stuff again, and how depressed it makes me to read that the DEA is ruining opportunities to make a better world with a simple plant. Anyway.

Even my game prototype started from a problem-to-solve approach, not from my ego wanting something super cool with lots of particles on screen.

I get so much satisfaction from fixing things and make people happy. It’s also because the first problem I got, the family problem, can’t  be solved. You can’t fix humans. We’re too complex and we don’t have a reset button. We auto-generate our solutions but we can’t say we can start from scratch and do it over.

So I guess feeling that I can fix or help fixing people’s environment excites me a lot because I’m like “I can nail that shit down, it’s doable to its full extent and it’s going to change things for good now, and for the future.”

It’s interesting how engineers love to solve problems but much more importantly, love to solve challenging problems. The more challenging, the better.

The problem is that solving the problem becomes secondary because the challenge is what is important.

One example: green energy. We need more  of it and the numbers say worldwide, 42% of the Co2 produced comes from buildings and homes (39% in the US). Around 30% from transportation and the rest from the industry. So it’s pretty well spread over three sources, right?

But which one is “hot” and makes people dream? Transport. Electric cars. And why? Because the challenge to make a safe car with great mileage running on electricity is a huge challenge.

Making a house reduce its energy consumption by 95-100%? it’s too easy! Hemp, passive housing and much less constraints compared to engineering a car. There’s no challenge, just optimizations to build on.

Green house > Tesla. Sorry. 

You can see how we’re missing out on solving this green energy challenge: rationally we should attack the building/housing problem first because it’s the biggest source of pollution and because we have the solution, right here right now.

“Buildings have a lifespan of 50-100 years during which they continually consume energy and produce CO2 emissions.  If half of new commercial buildings were built to use 50% less energy, it would save over 6 million metric tons of CO2 annually for the life of the buildings—the equivalent of taking more than 1 million cars off the road every year.”

I’d rather have that than having a couple thousands of electric cars running every year, at best. We can build green pre-fab houses much faster, with a much lower carbon print and virtually no hazardous material than any electrical car so why the fuck aren’t we?

It feels like the same with browser’s 3D technology. So challenging but so useless in a world of extremely powerful native solutions. The goal is noble -code once and run anywhere- but it turned out to not be true at all -different browser, different stuff- and the performance headaches are bigger than compiling natively.

Engineers you gotta focus on what counts, solving the overall problem. Forget exploit or “cool” stuff. Aim for effectiveness. Make the world better today, not tomorrow.

Yesterday, I un-mounted a massive full oak kitchen in Le Raincy in a house from a dude who was beating his wife and his kids and who would occasionally shoot at people in the street. He died alone in his bedroom and his body was discover three months later. The house is now the property of a gay couple who was selling this wood stuff if you were willing to come and get it, which we did with my dad.

Life is weird and cool and weird.

I don’t know if it’s a human feeling or my generation hitting the 30s or if it’s related to our fast times, but I feel like we’re trying to slow things down. To stop them. The problem is that it’s still moving. Things constantly move and change and we have to change and adapt too.

This is what I see; nostalgia is up: remember the 90s? Yeah I do and it was great but I don’t want to spend time on it, now. France, what are you doing with Arafat who gives a shit solve your problems and reduce this massive state that costs so much without being effective. You thought having an iPhone and Spotify was solving a decade of digital mess but they’ll go down like Windows XP or Real Player and you need to fight to keep your freedom and be nice to content providers like musicians. Facebook is awesome if you continuously spend some time filtering shit in two clicks -game feeds, hide all- and retain information to yourself (no phone number, minimize apps accessing your shit). Same with game developers stop whining about Steam and educate users, tell them to go to yourwebsite.com to get your game and if they don’t understand why it’s so important well, fuck them. Discussions are great but at some point we have to move on.

2012 babies will probably not have the stupid, retarded school system we got and that’s great. Erase it from your mind, it’s the past. Start thinking about how you will take care of that with the new technology we didn’t have. Possibilities are mind blowing.

Change, adapt and if people don’t around you, still change and adapt.