Author: harold

It is quite far. It is pretty awesome. I didn’t need no GPS. That’s how much I’ve had it in mind.

Looking at the site and thinking about tackling construction of a home feels daunting. But also very much exciting. Especially if pre-fab and assembled onsite as I plan to do. Let’s Fucking Go!!!

So I’ve been mentally imagining life over there for the past couple days. Commute. Logistics. Potential worst case scenarios.

Some caveats. But some long-term benefits too.

It is a privilege. A pilgrimage for me at this point. It goes like this:

It is very, very quiet. No cars. Just the sound of the wind. I am walking.

Extremely luscious jungle on a hill at the end of a very sinuous road. First you enter the courtyard and there’s that:

A perfect hoop within a perfect jungle. Next to it is a small, low-rise structure, the house itself:

You enter by the intriguing, diagonally cut wall on the left by the white car (note the diagonal continues in metal in the ground and joins a water drainage grille not on the picture.). And then you meet him, John Lautner:

A statue by a French artist. Perfect landscaping, always. Then you walk over a koi pond and you either see the dining/kitchen to the right:

Or you go straight and sit down in the quite famous living room:

No air conditioning. No fan. Gentle breeze from open glass doors. Perfect temperature. Birds and soft sound of water running from the fountain feeding the pond. The living room continues outside:

The sun is warm. The view is this:

Just breeze, silence and soft chatter in the back. No right angles, just diagonals, home comfort and luxuriant nature. There’s something so liberating yet so anchoring. It’s absurdly powerful to me. Flowing between rooms and spaces that are not square? You have to experience it to understand. It feels so good.

This is the second pool built recently and there’s a new sculpture garden going on down the jungle on the steep side of the hill.

The point is not that this house is outstanding, it is that outside of a few fancy things it’s just a matter of good design and taste. Plenty of custom things (diagonal wood flooring following the slope, for instance) can be done by owners themselves. Actually, the few hundreds mini-skylights on the concrete roof were made by one of the owner’s children! Planting plants and watering them is something anyone can do.

Built-ins and minimalism work well together, stand the test of time and this house is the best representation of that. The original house is small by today’s “standards” but it is a perfect size for human life.

I am fortunate to be in the city where this home exists and that I know some people. This house is still inspiring me and I’ll be back as many times as I can. Because every single time, I see new detail and under breath I’m like “gatdaaamn they carefully thought about this didn’t they”

I was watching the Galaxy Rangers lately (sick intro) and there are 65 episodes, which is a lot!

Again, those 80s anime shows had amazing quality. Dozens of characters, hundreds of props and locations. No repeat.

In the DVD extras, they say that they produced those sixty-five episodes in eleven months.

Like, that’s unreal. I worked on a animated show in 2007. If we could get contractors to produce one episode a month, that was the best we could do. It might have been even worse than that.

Possible explanations:

• This is the heydays of animation’s money investment: millions of dollars are pouring in companies and production. Teams are huge and keep growing (200+).
• Shows are made left and right, competition is high,  so are quality and creativity as a result.
• Lots of affordable cocaine.
• This is the first generation of people making a living working in animation showing that it can be a viable career. Just like the first generations of people doing well making games, their passion had absolutely no limits. They worked ultra hard.

TMS Entertainment, the Japanese company which made the episodes and a couple other shows if you look at their credits, is one of the most underrated company in the world.

They influenced the imagination of hundreds of millions of kids.

Here’s an example:

When I was a kid, people talked about putting your seatbelt on to save lives. Adults had grown up without them but now, they were enforcing them. Safety first. That made sense.

Today adults will tell their kids safety first and roll through a traffic light while looking at their phones. They grew up without them. That’s not safety first. And that does not make sense.

Kids are cooked today because they can’t get a solid, trustworthy foundation in relationships to the world. If safety first in the real world is complete bullshit, then anything goes.

The whole society is fostering psychopaths since the 2010s.

Not so good news from the fam in France. Cancer resurgence, my foster mom in the hospital and my childhood friend not doing so good.

That sinking feeling that FB is only going to be algo BS churn and bad news from now on. Doesn’t feel like logging in. Yet I’ll have to, from time to time.

When I jingle my keys, I still think of my dude. I picture him waking up abruptly from his nap like “We going? You? Where?”. Or he would already be ready, doing some horsy shit and get by the door, wagging his tail even if he wasn’t going anywhere and I was just going down the street to pick up some lattes.

Best dog ever. Seriously.

I still have in mind all those Latinos and Mexicans with their Trump flags and shirts, walking around and driving their trucks all proud and shit south the 10 before the elections.

Seeing them a few months later tagging FUCK ICE on walls and all over DTLA, I’m like

I think that’s the legacy of this orange fucker: people trying to see what they can get away with. All the time, at all levels of society.

It feels like everyone is coasting as nefariously as possible. Or straight up do the opposite of what they said they were supporting a few months ago. Adults.

It is wild.

In 2023, I wrote:

The most impressive new guy by far this season has been Tyrese Haliburton. This man is something else.

Last night I was watching the NBA Finals highlights and for some reason, it just made sense that OKC would win. They’re at home, they’re leading the whole game, they have 14 steals, the MVP is MVP-ing. It’s a wrap.

But then I see Indiana hit shot after shot and I snap out of it and realize, “they might come back oh shit I forgot, they always come back these days omg omg.”

“They can’t keep getting away with this” meme. Tyrese, man.

I yelled, clapped my hands again last night. As I did when they erased the Cavs and Knicks in games that didn’t look their way, at all. They’re amazing. An absolutely amazing team. Shout out to Myles and TJ. I always wanted them to join the Spurs.

The NBA might be scripted (that NYC game loss was sus as fuck; many people made betting money there and Tyrese was smiling and then they beat the Knicks by 20 the next time they played). It’s just not the way you want it.

It’s going to be interesting to see how OKC bounces back, but for Indiana, you couldn’t dream of a better way to start a series. Confidence boosted x100 thanks to a 10,000 megaton missile from midrange, by Tyrese the terrorist. Ball is love.

I needed to install some software on Ubuntu.

So I sudo’d updated and upgraded. Nothing.

I enabled more repositories, including one called “universe”. Nothing.

So I had to compile this fucker from source. Sigh.

I clone that bitch and go ./autogen.sh

And sure enough, I need autoconf installed. So I install it to compile the fucker aforementioned.

To compile, you need to type make. Shit doesn’t work because no makefile has been found. Because make needs fucking dependencies that I should have because I keep updating and upgrading that Linux hoe. But I don’t have them.

So I type ./configure which is a script to let me know which dependencies I need to use make to compile the library I need to run some software. By the way, do you know that it is 2025?

So ./configure is all like “syntax error unexpected token gtk+ 2.0 hello I’m shittin’ the bed ‘gain”.

So I try to install gtk+ 2.0 with pkg-config and guess what? Pkg-config needs some dependencies as well! This is so much fun.

Gtk+ 2.0 (sorry, 2.24.33) is well installed but pkg-config can’t find its ass. So I go into the fucking config.log to look at the abyss.

I try again to make some software and this time, guess what, I’m missing something called yacc, and the solution is to install something called bison and byacc. I am totally serious.

I try again to make. Failure. Something is missing again (remember, I update and upgrade everything I can all the time in between).

Now I need to install something called flex. I do. Still won’t work.

Now I need to install something called makeinfo, which is installed by sudoing texinfo (not a typo)! I’m having a wonderful time.

I make the software and now I can actually install the actual software that relies on that one.

All of that to open a fucking GUI on Ubuntu 24.04 (both native and wsl, same craziness).

Half assed GUI and CLI. Linux might be the worst.