Month: March 2013

I’m standing in front of the shop, it’s 11 30am (opens at 10am). No one inside, a sign says that I have to knock if there’s no one at the desk. I do.

I wait a couple of minutes wondering if I should knock harder. A dude shows up behind me and looks like he wants to enter the shop. I recognize the shop owner and say hi. I start to explain my bike brake problem and he’s all like “oh yeah, that’s not the good cable” and I’m all like “yeah, this bike stuff is confusing, so many standards” and he’s going all “meh, not really” on me. Bitch.

“how much does it cost?”

“We’re at 50 euros an hour and it’s probably 15 minutes of work.”

“OK so I leave my bike to you and come back later today?”

“No, keep your bike and come back this afternoon.”

“??? OK, what time?”

“After 3pm.”

“??? OK, thanks.”

I don’t fucking understand how this shop is surviving. I don’t get France. Fifteen minutes of work he could have done with me, chatting and my day would have been different, the future would have been bright.

Of course I’d rather do it my fucking self with services like that, no wonder I dived into independence so hard.

It’s things like this.

I’m bragging and writing how I’m the best thing on earth but I kind of need it, it’s never been that hard in my head. I feel like shit.

I desperately need a job in L.A. I always have been able to do without it for now but I can’t anymore. Last job opportunity looked awesome but before I could make a difference it didn’t happened. Meanwhile the game industry is in full restructuration there, is kind of in a hibernation mode in France. I could rent my apartment at crazy Parisian prices but the place needs quite some work done, for which I don’t really have any budget.

It is such a bad time to leave as my parents def need help and my sister is near useless. I was reading Derek’s blog post (you should subscribe) an American living in Singapore these days and he was talking about how there they’re all about family while they’re all about individuals in the US. Well in Europe we’re both and we are indeed, getting fucked.

Add the immigration layer: I am a permanent resident of the US but I spend too much time outside and they don’t like it. Trust me USCIS, if I had been able to import my tiny world and simply settle, work and pay taxes I would have. But it’s a little more complicated like, a lot. Somehow traveling every couple of months makes me neither American or French. I am this weird English French speaking hybrid who knows that there is not perfect place but hey, turns out you have to choose a fucking destination.

I always found solutions but I can’t find a good one for this big, poisoning headache.

I realize that I don’t’ dream anymore -that is, making plans- and I need to but all I can do is get stuck with odd boring jobs, game development problems or difficulties to focus on sound. Shit.

Well. The decade old black security guard at the Monoprix doesn’t have that kind of problems and I should probably shut the fuck up. Damn it feels good to have a blog.

Steubenville rape case. Another one.

Two weeks ago I saw my feminist crew, all awesome. We don’t talk as much about terrible things in the news like rape cases, how media treats them etc as before because we’re sadly, so used to it. Angry, not surprised.

We walked the streets. We had heated debates, we wrote thousands of pages, we met this way. I still remember the feeling of entering a bar 90% full of women and sit down there like “yes, I’d like to know more it’s interesting and I’m totally not overwhelmed and looking weird”. I was in my early twenties and it would change my life.

Learning that women weren’t coming so much with the help of a dick was amazing. Hurting like “oh shit, the power balance I’ve been told doesn’t exist! Tell me more, damn *recalculate*”, learning things that looked rock solid but in fact weren’t. Two big paradigm shifts in my head were the realization of all the work women do in this world and gets unnoticed for. Unbelievable. Massive failure of a system forgetting half of its population. The second one was realizing how much physical harassment women get and how much rape is something spread out and happening most of the time inside close circles. These twos things made me think hard.

That stuff clearly pushed me away from the classic machismo culture. Which is the only one in the game industry. I was sad to be sick of deep sexism -and thus avoiding bromancing/networking- but I was also happy to get that consistency that I love so much in my head. When news like Lara’s controversy, the lack of women in tech or terrible female characters show up I just stare at it and feel that I made the good decision. Happy to see that the message is spreading, slowly through the now classic explanation-men outrage-backlash-little progress loop.

And then there’s Rihanna and Chris. I never fucking want to hear anything about them, ever.

It’s just that sexism/racism are this big thing reducing my enjoyment in this world by a LOT™Louis CK. Like for all of us actually.

From Wikipedia:

Minimax (sometimes minmax) is a decision rule used in decision theory, game theory, statistics and philosophy for minimizing the possible loss for a worst case (maximum loss) scenario. Alternatively, it can be thought of as maximizing the minimum gain (maximin).

I first heard about the term through Olivier’s blog title and it struck me like lightning: this is what I’m doing and keep doing all the time and if not achieving it, going toward it. Minmax, maxmin all the way, all the time.

Minmax example: staying in shape even slightly underweight for that moment where I’ll indulged myself for a while. It will have less impact on my pants. Keeping my relationships friendly with everyone so that hate or resent doesn’t add up when shit goes down (which will happen, right? Always does). Less furniture, faster cleaning. Reusing things as much as I can. You got it.

Maxmin example: getting the best deal on a precise laptop when I could just get the new laptop du jour. Rarely eat dessert so that when it happens, it’s joyful. Do few light abs exercises everyday instead of a few heavy workouts a month so that back pain from playing bass disappears while my belly could be used in commercials or music videos. Instead of going hard on my body, I smooth it out through small routines for maximum efficiency and minimum hassle. Maximum pleasure, minimum hassle as much as I can.

Even for big events in my life I feel like I did minmax. For instance one of my bullet point to make game audio was that I was minimizing competition (everybody wanted to record music or score movies, almost none did though) and maximizing possibilities (less creative dictatorship and conventions, so much more to explore/get paid for). Sounded good to me, at least to sell it to my skeptical parents.

It’s all good except that this engineered, long term efficiency is not that popular. Actually society is almost entirely going the other way, wasting and being inefficient everywhere it can. On the other side minmaxing leads to OCPD and some kind of fanaticism about things being a certain way. It’s hard for me to witness inconsistency and wasteful behavior, even though I know that nothing’s perfect, that the world is born from chaos etc.

That really creates a tension, socially that I feel everyday a bit more.

2000-2010: the Far-Web

Freedom. Everything was about exploring, searching, finding stuff outside our local possibilities. Connecting with people liking the same stuff as you do. Real sharing and communicating, not for the likes. I’m starting to feel nostalgia for this amazing playground where I learned so much. Damn.

2010-2013: it’s over

Friction. Incompatibilities. People stay in their little web corner checking the five websites everybody is on. People don’t even search anymore. “How am I going to get my news now, advice?” is something I saw a lot with Google retiring Reader. Fake geek and nerd, move your little arm over your touchpad, spend ten minutes to search and find the tool you need to read your own damn news. You know how to search, right? You do it for one-time things but you can’t do it for something you do every single day? What is wrong with you people.

The recording industry -profits up this year- Hollywood know they’re on the verge of winning back their control (never forget how we got milked to death in the 90s with CDs, never forget) pushing their agendas, relentlessly (The Pirate Bay story last news, unbelievable, CISPA back). People cave in, for the sake of convenience (iTunes, Spotify). It’s not that people can’t learn it’s that they won’t (and then complain about the new order). In the digital world they’re used to have someone/something do it for them.

Companies are smiling. “Suggestions” is simply “give up your freedom of choice, now you have nothing without me.”

And now you are a geese, force fed until your bank account dies.

Definitely not something I wanted. It ain’t over.

Me, holding my sister for the first time.

It’s baby time in France. So many of them in a couple of months. I’m afraid for them, their future. But for now when they are babies and discovering the world, being the cutest tyrants literally pooping the weirdest shit with their brand new buttholes, they’re great. You don’t see time go by. I remember that with my lil’ sister. I took that time very seriously, observing how fascinating it is to have a small human grow up. The first laughs and first steps, fucking amazing. The puppy effect.

But that’s the start, the easy part. Then they are twenty and don’t know what to do in life and in the world of today, it’s more dramatic than at any time previously in history.

That early 2010 generation is going to end up hating us so hard when they’ll understand what world we’re leaving them with. "hey it’s the boomers’ fault, those greedy fuckers” would be my answer but that doesn’t solve anything.

I think I would do a pretty good dad. I know too much attention is the worst and I know what damages no attention at all brings in, so I’d be able to balance it out. Thanks to a life filled with great women, I took notes and I’d be good at nurturing her/him. I already have this role business wise. Counseling stuff, I’m good at that.

But maybe I would be the worst a “I’ve been through this you’ll go through this too you little bitch” asshole-ish type. Or maybe I would destroy his hopes and trust because I would tell him how the world is everything but far from being fair.

Whatever. I don’t have kids!

You don’t explain RSS. You show how it works, the person uses it the next day and then it’s done. He/she’s hooked. Things you see on Twitter and Facebook? They most likely come from people using RSS readers to fetch news like mad men.

Google Reader is dead and that’s a good thing.

Now, we’ll be forced to fill the hole that Reader will leave behind, and there’s no immediately obvious alternative. We’re finally likely to see substantial innovation and competition in RSS desktop apps and sync platforms for the first time in almost a decade.

Very true.

Also, YES FINALLY JESUS FUCKING CHRIST. I’m still a bit mad at developers, working with an undocumented API for years without thinking about that day when Google will do whatever they want, as they always do. I don’t understand how developers can be fine with hours and hours of work being ditched forever. Shutting down a service is much worse than making a technology evolve, it’s better to have something broken than non-existent at all. Fixing VS crying.

Now dear developers,

Desktop: I don’t want my news in a browser tab, ever again. I don’t like chilling, reading news and have my machine spin like I’m rendering 3D for LOTR when I know that I can load these feeds really fast with a desktop app. Go desktop. This slow ass web shit has to stop.

OPML: I know it sucks for developers because it makes people able to jump in/out of their apps, it makes them independent the total opposite of what Feedly Flipboard and others are trying to do. Do not lock me in with sign ups. The WEB is the service, you provide SOFTWARE, I take care of the rest thanks.

Otherwise be wild, innovate (Dave Winer is right about the unread items count BS, but I don’t necessarily want a river either). I know sync is a big deal for a lot of users but it’s also a complex problem for developers. I think we can live without it, missing a couple items or reading them again isn’t a big deal when the app is fast (I used GreatNews now Veen Feed Reader and Weave). Keyword being fast.

I dream of being able to click a rss link that would open my rss client and ask me in which category I’d like to put this subscription in. All private. I share through the Windows 8 charm thingy  where/when I want. All neat.

Almost a decade reading RSS everyday. I can’t think of an internet without it.

Another life form alive!

Last weekend I went to my foster home family, catching up with the new baby delivered by my cousin, sister. I don’t know, we grew up together that’s all. See why I hate categories and labels? Always fucked my life up.

I never can do anything there. I’m just back. I’m just there, like I started. I legally have not direct connection, culturally feeling so much wider but staying in the picture. Like she told me “you are here, you are in Paris, Hollywood, you can feel comfortable anywhere!” I guess it’s true, I am a chameleon man. But you need to be a bit invisible to do that well, sometimes it’s weird to be in the background, Bruce Wayne was once again crying on the phone the other day about that.

The thing when I go there is that it’s like playing with the radio, moving through frequencies from left to right. I get to see or go by my past from being a kid in a village, to driving to parties with a girlfriend to a city I used to go to skate all the time, memories jumping in and out let’s move the slider to the right, fast forward to hopes and desires of “making it” in France, the bitter side of realizing that it’s not going to happen because we’re all stupid.

Then I’m back at my parents to park grandpa’s car that I use and which also, contains memories. Then it’s dinner time with them, the kind, sweet and horribly stuck up parents. Then I’m back to the crib, English resumes. And the internet, the world at my fingertips.

Twice a year. It’s fucking amaz-hausting. The dreams I get from all this shit? Priceless.