Month: December 2015

So this year I just responded “Merry Christmas to you” you know, let it be. I am a compadre now.

When it’s the end of the year and people are getting excited for NYE and you just want to chill:

2014 was so bad it made 2015 look almost fantastic. But it wasn’t that great. My home country is burning and here well, it’s a clusterfuck of bad news and hope I guess between Sandra Bland and Tamir Rice a black Jedi and feminism awareness rising up all around. It feels like people see things more and more in shades instead of 0/1 and that’s really, really good. I mean, it’s under a ton of horseshit like congress or Republicans but it’s here.

I wish you all good stuff to come, super interesting things to do, personal growth, financial stability, a dash of love here and there, an Ikea chair, a foot massage, the entire thing. And stop playing dumb, it’s time-consuming.

Let’s do this.

If you have a smartphone your main screen probably looks like this these days:

This is mine:

It’s kind of perfect, seriously. Notifications happen in a discrete way. It’s zen. It’s elegant. Those iOS/Android home screens with red dots of FOMO just will never look appealing to me and always feel childish. People discard shit all the time on their phones, I glide through mine. I use my coworkers’ phones from time to time, it’s horrifyingly cluttered and full of options you will never use or maybe once just because you can. This is one of the worst trend in tech: over-designing and over-engineering. Always happens when they want to sell more to you and are not (PSVita, WiiU, Galaxy VR whatever).

I don’t plan to update anything and actually haven’t in years. Still using 8 and not 8.1. There was a crazy fuzz for those personal assistants but all I can see is that no one talks to their phones to ask something, besides setting up an alarm. It’s anti-social and weird. Last apps or games? All the good ones come to the platform at some point and we all know that we’re using a handful of them. I have already all the social “loose your damn time/eat your bandwidth” media I use connected to my phone. So I don’t feel like missing anything out. Especially when I look at people’s screens in real life: FB, FB, FB and FB. It doesn’t matter how recent your phone is. FB.

It is a 5 year old interface designed by Microsoft but I regularly get some “oh wow what is dis” when people look at/use my phone. MS likes telemetry too much, they didn’t factor in that it would take a bit of time for people to get use to the biggest change they ever made. So they backed up like little bitches.

It’s funny that in terms of memories I’ll have this interface in mind for the 2010s, instead of the obnoxious grid of icons. Regardless after what, eight years of tech race and multiple devices and installing apps and taking pictures and sharing, I think we’ve hit the good-enough paradigm in the mobile space.

Unless you break your phone, you don’t need to upgrade these days.

Last year, on a hike in Vasquez. Smiling like everything was fine. It’s better now.

Never thought an old white dude would be the candidate you should vote for after a (relatively) young black man was in the white house but you can’t possibly vote for anyone else. Please vote Bernie Sanders, and forget about words like socialism, you don’t know exactly what it is anyway.

It’s hard being an atheist. It feels like all the answers are here and I’m still looking at a society that doesn’t want to give up on deities when people blow themselves up for those. Like look, they just did don’t you think it’s time to tone praying down a bit? Hell no says society clenching religions like an old lady does with her purse on the sidewalk.

Whatever. It’s just time-consuming and I wish to see things change quite way faster than they are.

Another day on earth.