Month: April 2014

We don’t know what to do with my grandmother’s house. My grandmother is totally alive, waiting in her retirement home for death to scoop her up and of course, it’s out of question to touch anything in her crib. My mom doesn’t care about that house (my grandmother working, a nanny raised my mom there). I have great memories from there.

The house is aging and starting to cost money –it’s a miracle it didn’t start earlier- and of course, I’m going to have to go sometime this week there to fix some shit. It never ends.

It seems obvious to sell it or rent it. Sell the furniture we don’t want, share the money, that could cover some down payment for some land in California I DON’T KNOW, stuff. Because it’s just property that my grandma will never see again and that we’re dealing with while we don’t care, it’s ridiculous. Of course, we will wait. Morally, ethically and respectfully understandable but terribly inefficient and pointless. 

Property. It’s a weird thing. You will not go away with it. It stays here. So you should share, that’s what I’ll try to remember if I end up in her situation. I’d rather be in the situation of dying in my beloved home, happy, though. Kids would burn my skeleton, sell the house or live in it because it will be the shit, I don’t care. I’ll be gone and free from that madness that property is.

It’s a deep blog post.

#6 is the tough one for me because I haven’t lost and I’m not completely wiped out but damn I feel/felt the heat for the past few years.

#9 is something I use all the time when in a game design mood. Because you can do absolutely everything with your game and so many things can sound cool at first but suck after a month of building them, weeding out all the bad ideas first makes sense. Then you have an idea that whatever you do to it, still works. That’s the one.

#10 is Louis CK’s skit on how older people are smarter. It doesn’t mean they’re always right but they are worth listening and pondering. Which is hard because respect is often not mutual.

#7, I think about it so that I don’t go into a depression loop when I read stats like this and so much more awful reality.

#5 #3 and #4, design principles when producing audio and music.

#2, how I managed my computers through the years. I use Windows, never had any automatic backup and never lost anything so I guess it works. Just copy paste your stuff to another hard drive, those are cheap.

#1 and #8, my life.

It was a weird meeting. Dad, the Paint guy and me. Figuring out what to do and how. It’s tight, the Paint guy is super busy and looking at my room, he told us he would need a week of work. Fair enough.

My dad doesn’t really make any sense in his decisions, says something to me, says the opposite to the Paint guy, I don’t know to which one he lies to, that’s how connected we are. I mean his train of thoughts is not straight when the meeting is simple: how long, how much, when. It doesn’t seem like an insane equation. He freaks the shit out for everything, for no reason. What a drama bitch sometimes.

Anyway. Meanwhile we’re chatting and the Paint guy –that we have known for twenty years- is telling us that he has way too much work, up to next year. And that in the beautiful French way, he only hires when he loses contracts! Why? Because hiring is such a pain in France, it is such a crazy amount of admin shit and heavy taxes that he prefers not to grow his business, he just hires for a couple of months when it’s really needed. He’s lucky to be on a local market because if he had to compete internationally like I have to with the computer game market his business wouldn’t be thriving, trust me.

Then I look at the story of AirBnB, Facebook making so much money, CA friends being in startups and it’s just crazy how much things in France are not exciting you know? It feels like you’ll never go nowhere, don’t dream because that will not happen here. Just enjoy your vacation ten weeks a year, not knowing what to do because wages suck. My design mind kicks in and I’m mad at that terrible design and its opposite cousin in the US (one vacation week a year, buy too much shit). Whatevs.

Sigh. Almost there. All the trees outside are green which is usually a sign that I’ll take off soon, which is quite the case, which is quite fucking crazy. I’m drained and alive.

I remember reading on Steve Jobs, adopted child who having seen his father neatly fix things around became who he was, a psychopath of solving problems forever, in a way that they don’t come back, almost.

It totally made sense to me because adoption means that something crucial is broken –family- from the start so you grow up wishing it wasn’t broken and seeing your dad fixing and building things helps getting that need out. Also, I’m in the same situation. Adopted with dads fixing and building things, lefty. I look at the world and I’m like, “folks, this needs some tweaking”.

Like I would always be more interested in a country challenges than its culture or food. In a very Steve Jobs style I’d say I don’t care about that, I care about finding elegant and efficient solutions. I feel this drive for a better world. I feel this need to build (and by extension, destroy; you learn to minimize) for good 24/7.

It makes me sick when we could but we don’t, you know? It’s the worst feeling to me. It’s going to make me search for a solution until I reach for one that makes sense for as many people as possible, would it be for personal issues or public housing problems. I just love designing for us. I don’t get the “design for yourself, first”. That’s so short-sighted and obvious.

To me it’s better if everyone around is happy too, maybe that makes too much sense I don’t know but I don’t feel like it’s a shared value around and it’s freaking me out a bit sometimes.

I’ll find teams, hopefully. I’ll find people so that maybe I can scale up my projects and build more, following my design from the sound level to the business model.

Sometimes I wish I was a tall, white asshole.

Housing, like health care, is a basic need that is too important to be left completely at the whims of the free market. But an enormous new government housing bureaucracy does not seem like a desirable solution.

Yep. First, “free market” lol. There is no such thing with real estate and housing. But I agree, housing is a basic need. It’s a basic need that we can easily solve. We have all the technology to do a great job and provide sustainable, maintenance-free, zero net housing and buildings.

I was searching for modern small prefab houses and Minecraft was like, “there you go”

We can prefab and raise houses in a couple of days. The biggest obstacle on better and cheaper housing are policies that a lot of people are living out of. Otherwise, we have everything to provide affordable housing, right now. It’s crazy.

You know, when they said that almost half of the world’s wealth is now owned by just one percent of the population it made me realize that we could afford free housing easily. States, countries could provide, mandate that. It is a basic need –I’d say more than health care- and seeing how much people bleed to afford a place that they mostly will use to sleep after hard work, it’s so inefficient, dumb and ridiculous that it makes my skin crawl. I’m looking deep into rent/rentals issues these days and oh boy, it’s depressing as hell.

Imagine growing up knowing that you always will have a roof because your income isn’t indexed to it. You’ll have a roof.
Imagine how different it would have made you and how less anxious you would be.

Ever since Windows Phone was first introduced, I’ve enjoyed being able to glance at Live Tiles and quickly get the information I need. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a full solution to what was actually a much greater problem: How do you look at notifications without having to exit an app or unlock the screen? It’s hard to believe it took Microsoft almost four years to figure it out, but Windows Phone 8.1 finally addresses that oversight with a notification menu, dubbed the Action Center.

Notification centers should die. It’s better not to be harassed and overwhelmed by notifications. the little number in a circle? Way more stressful than a tile turning to show up an update. The design principle is that if you see an important notification you will take action, unlock your phone, reply, whatever. Therefore you don’t need to read all notifications automatically on your lock screen. I don’t want my phone to distract me. it’s opt in design instead of opt out (clearing notifications, forever) and it’s smarter, more elegant. Respectful. Exactly like not giving % for battery life, it’s better for your stress level my friend. It’s by design, you dumb gadget bloggers. Microsoft first aimed at 99% of people who don’t care about that kind of super nerdy detail and now address your whining.

New design, new paradigm invites conflict with what the current trend/opinion is. Look at FLW houses, the famous architect didn’t include attics and basements in his plans because he thought it was useless to keep old stuff. 100 years later, he’s still right. His design principle is still absolutely valid, when you see the amount of shit people have and don’t know where to put, lamenting that they have too much junk/not enough space.

His design principle is saying “whatever room I’ll make, you’ll never have enough” and this is exactly the case. It’s saying “I went to the future for you and I’m telling you right now, just use the things you use everyday and throw away old stuff”. That’s good design and you either trust it or you think that you are smarter. Let it go. Embrace fully first, and then compare.

Good design doesn’t try to exploit your weaknesses. Good design respects you. Good design thinks you are smart because you are. You might have bad habits, though.

The closest people from my personal story are Barack Obama, Mario Balotelli and Frantz Fanon. Black dudes who grew up in a white world without black people around which for some reason, made us anxious as hell and confused.

Barack found peace marrying the blackest, smartest woman he could find. She mentored him, the rest is history. Nicely done, B.

Mario is still searching for peace, got a baby girl without wanting her, still fighting an incredibly crazy world of irrational love when he scores, spits and banana peels when he doesn’t. Hang tight son I’m ten years older and I’m telling you, the rollercoaster has just started.

Frantz is dead. He wrote all his life about how fucked up things are, race wise. It’s incredibly disheartening to witness that a book published sixty motherfucking five years ago still describes accurately what is going on socially: black people, white people and language. Black women and white men. White women and black men. All that stuff is still happening. It’s about survival. It’s still about survival.

Me? Well I have a plan but sure, I’m still searching for inner peace I guess. I read too much. White kids and babies are still really fascinated by my face. They look at me with this intensity, I feel like a Nubian King (“now bow down, little fucker!”). And I still haven’t hold a black baby in my arms. Ever. I will cry and not hear anything around me, no doubt. If that happens.

My relationship with my parents is so surreal now. It’s like they have a son, stripped down from all identity from their point of view. And it doesn’t matter to them because as long as I’m around helping them out they’re happy. I’m not and they don’t really get it. More like they don’t want to, a bit. Sometimes I explain stuff to them, my point of view, throw some numbers and stats and they are crushed, looking down. And I’m like, “exactly!” that’s what I feel too but I can’t stop won’t stop so don’t be sad, just show some support from time to time.

But it’s easier to do like none of that stuff exists. France is world champion hands down on that behavior so I know it’s cultural, not that my parents are mean, though they could be cooler. I mean, even my sister says it. God, it’s so weird. Yet so rich.

I dream of sleeping and waking up in LA everyday. It’s getting closer.