Month: November 2012

More than ten years ago I went to a feminist forum to learn stuff and then we met in real life and I became bff with six great women.

I can say the same about a funk dedicated message board that made me musically richer more than anything else, brought me countless live music with internet funkateers and great moments.

Where is all of that at with social media (aside of Twitter, kind of special)? I can’t find any big improvement.

Anonymity really helped to create a safe environment for people to share on specific, fascinating subjects. Message boards are not here to be here, it’s meant to be use to argue, to share. Social media doesn’t push anything in depth.

The fav/like/heart mechanic didn’t work with blogs but it sure did with social media enabling users anxiety, passivity and shallowness (this just in). The feed flow gives interesting information a 5 minute window before disappearing.

On message boards, things stay forever and will still be useful for new comers. My articles are still on the first page of one because they’re good enough that people discuss about their subjects, add new things. I love it.

I always thought if you search for something quite general, browse anything. If it’s specific, aim internet forums. I’m currently looking at updating my laptop and on one forum, dudes are listing every single machine matching the specs I want, in my price range, updated daily or so with the last deals. I can’t get that with any search engine, there’s way too much information. There’s no information on a 1 billion people network like Facebook. There’s nothing to help me.

But there are people out there searching for the same stuff and sharing it. They don’t need no like/fav nor they need friends or followers to output things, they just do because they love it. This shit is precious.

I want that genuine, socially engineered internet feeling back. Individuals connecting as they want, all together. No pressure.

But with on one hand generations growing up without boards, BBcode, IRC or web servers, technically illiterate and dependent on FB/Twitter/Tumblr and on the other hand a government and system that really wants to close this free internet and control it, I’m not sure it will happen.

Nerdcore shit, sorry.

Looking at it, things that seem obvious but aren’t for OEMs and all actors of this microcosm.

• WEB

What do we do on the web, most of the time? We read. Displays and text rendering techniques are getting better but there’s one thing that stays out of the discussion: FONTS. We live with like, 9 different fonts and that’s it. Publishing and text should be able to use any type of font, how awesome it would be. We’re starting to have options but there’s no standard and it’s all about hacking. The HTML5 specs don’t contain ANYTHING about this.

Meanwhile they try so hard to run 3D in my browser. It’s useless native apps do that much better, which leads me to:

• 3D

We’re using small form factor devices these days and obviously 3D makes everything hot. So why don’t we already have external graphic cards for when we game? PCI Express allows that and both main graphic manufacturers have solutions ready for this since 2007/2008. It never took off because they suck. And it sucks for us because finding a laptop with enough GPU power without costing you $1000 or looking like a Transformer is a nightmare. Which leads me to:

• AMD

You see today chip manufacturers search for the Holy Grail: being able to make CPUs and GPUs. Intel as huge as they are suck at GPUs, years that they say they have something when they have nothing. Nvidia is starting to make CPUs -only ARM based though- but are really into GPUs. The only company that has experience in both is AMD. The sad part is that they didn’t deliver so well in the past and with Intel pressuring OEMs, machines with AMD tech are always super lame 17” ugly ass laptops. It’s terrible because their shit is really good: a quad-core and 384 shaders units embedded in a slim notebook with which you can play 3D games better -up to twice as much fps, that’s no little bump- than on much more expensive Intel “ultrabook” stuff. Best deal ever.

• APIs

Developers are trying to avoid to be dependent on one company making one OS, but they’re willing to be dependent on one company making an API, which is much more restrictive. Despite countless examples showing how it ruins the ability to build for long, developers don’t rush for open APIs or standards so much. Twitter is the best example. To get news in a stream form we have rss/opml or the new river of news, both totally open. Make apps using these. Don’t silo data, don’t make people sign up. Let the data flow and build/sell nice, simple and designed things around them. People will rush to them.

Spotify and the problem of endless musical choice.

the Internet frees up cultural treasures while simultaneously eroding the mechanisms that endow them with value.

Abundance in a twisted way doesn’t help us out. Scarcity creates value, buying creates value and these are not part of the online world where things are 0s and 1s.

It’s weird to be on both ends of the stick where producing music feels like losing my time sometimes when there’s so much online which is something that I appreciate as a consumer on the other side. But I feel like constantly trying to limit myself, to take time to appreciate and on the other side, I try to make music and games that last. Basically going against the grain.

F2P games offer the same engagement problem than Spotify: why people would invest x amount of time in a free game when another free one could be even better a click away. Profusion of choices. It’s too volatile of a behavior to be able to build things on a system like that.

One of the core mechanic of our society – fair exchange- disappeared in our digital culture and I just can’t find a solution except pushing people to be fair and reducing the number of middlemen between customers and creators. But that doesn’t solve the issue.

France’s timebomb.

Fine not everything is bad in France and debt wise, UK and USA are much worse. But we also know that they have a faster, more fluid way of building value and create activity leading to jobs etc

Fine, it’s a cultural difference. But the denial about how things are bad in France is atrocious. And the debate always ends up being overly abstract when I’d like French people to solve and think about things like:

How come a highly educated Arab dude can’t find work in Paris but can in London?

How come France has 8,450 companies with 50 people or more and Germany has 20,340? Is it because in France going from 49 people in your company to 50 or more adds 34 laws to respect?

Why do French people think it’s totally normal to have so many different work contract shaping society in a ridiculous pyramid? Isn’t “equality” part of our constitution and written everywhere on school walls?

Why so many smart people leave the country and why so many live on unemployment checks?

You can’t tell me all is good. It’s just not. Reforms are needed asap.

One column, up to 46 To of data.

That’s a lot. If it’s curated data, the best of your pictures, music everything, that’s even more. After ten years of digital life, I’m not even at 1 To of data I want to save “forever”.

The “cloud” Skydrive, Dropbox, Spotify, Flickr and all are convenient and useful but these services are not private (that is, these companies have access to your stuff and have rules about it) and don’t allow you FULL freedom. Which is for personal stuff kind of crazy to me.

I don’t trust hard drives and I don’t like burning optical discs. But they are the cheapest, safest, most private way of saving a lot of data. If you take the time to burn your backups once or twice a year, the probability of losing precious things goes toward zero.

A few weeks ago. Just a music video shooting where I happened to dance around AND in a swimming pool and Verdell’s dog Buzz aka Boots who for the first time chewed up some recycling garbage. He looks at me like I’m going to beat the shit out of his ass.

I’m scoring a mini-web series on YouTube, will be out in January I think.

I did my last biometrics exams this morning. I feel like with chips in my green card and full fingers prints if I don’t wash my hands in a public restroom, a drone will make me regret that.

You know this warm breeze in late May in Paris when you feel for the first time summer coming? This is today in LA. That and black people’s nodding at me and everybody else not making this my-life-sucks-please-kill-me face, I don’t know if I’ll ever get bored with that. Shit is powerful.

Also, LA Game Space. Please back this project, it’s going to be awesome.

The best part of US elections are ballot measures. We don’t have that in France and damn, it would be great as it really feels like you have an impact on your life and decide for things, directly.

So Washington, Colorado and Oregon legalized pot through a democratic vote and simple propositions. It fills my heart with joy. In France there’s no debate, no vote, citizens are kids who have to follow the rules.

Anyway.

I’d like to focus on the drug war because to me, it almost looks suspicious: after more than a decade of war against drug lords in Mexico, legalization starts to spread in the USA. Really? I guess weapon manufacturers saturated the market and can’t sell no more.

People think pot legalization is going to finally hit drug cartels where the DEA couldn’t hit them? Wrong.

Mexico cartels have been busy diversifying their money, they didn’t wait for pot legalization to act. They have been busy taking over the entire country, politically, economically, slowly, violently. They have been taking over the population with “you give us 30% of your income or we get 3 fingers” kind of deals. The corruption is endemic.

Mexican cartels don’t need pot anymore. Cartels don’t care about the merchandise, they sell what is in demand.

And of course now that pot is legal they’ll sell cocaine, heroine, meth, which are much easier to ship, with far bigger margins.

That’s why if we legalize, we need to legalize every-thing.

It boggles my mind that presidential candidates debate on Syria but don’t say ONE word about the state of Mexico and its 60,000 deaths related to drug wars for dominance of the US market since 2006. 60,000  violent deaths, in a country sharing borders with the US and no one freaks out? I kind of do.