Author: harold

That picture. On the left, that left-handed president with a personal story close to mine. On the right, that dude I’ve been listening to a lot last year, who represents so much Compton, 20 minutes away from my place.

I don’t see change in this picture. Far too many black people dying for no reason in this country to be allowed to be positive and feel good with just a picture of fraternity inside the Temple of Power.

I just enjoy the moment because this never happened before. That’s already big.

Fantastic article describing something much better than I could. How the web sucks because it’s too heavy.

I mean, it’s ridiculous at this point. Why? He explains the situation this way.

So for web programmers and web designers, it’s just cool to work on the next thing because complexity. I think it’s a bit bullshit.

What he calls complexity is just a Look At How Big My Dick Is contest. It’s not to make the web better, it’s to make brogrammers –I mean we had to come up with a term for them- happy because of how smart they are. That’s unhealthy. What it does is that it allows people to solve problems with one skill. Thanks to hardware getting better Brute Force works, basically. But it doesn’t really solve anything that would allow a better experience for all of us. That’s why despite computers vastly superior to what they were ten years ago, websites still load and break browsers. It’s fucking bullshit.

It’s Feature over Fix and it’s an endemic problem from the Web to Windows to everything.

Solving issues of rendering a website in countless formats and rendering engines while making it fast AND profitable is challenging and a complex problem with many more angles and more responsibilities than simply go “let’s code some cool, hard shit”. The funny thing is, in the end it’s actually easier to say “fuck yall use only this, it’s nifty we worked hard to be able to have parallax effects” than go toward more simplicity that works every time for everyone.

Engineers love to do hard and useless shit all the time like run Windows 95 on a 3DS. What the actual fuck.

Which brings me to the second point of why the web has become an obscure creation process: they don’t want you to learn. Designers and programmers don’t want you to make websites easily, that’s their jobs. The more those jobs have become a norm –they didn’t exist 15 years ago- the more complex making a nice website has evolved into. You have to modify a .html a .css and a .js now to do anything, with no consistency whatsoever, libs dependency it’s a nightmare than only people getting paid to do so, do.

I hope it reverses back to what it was. All tech-literate people today know that any text article should load instantly even with shitty connections and a couple pictures.

Engineers and designers reverting back to minimalism –not the fake one we see online these days, actual minimalism- would change things more than buying a bigger data plan or a new phone.

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.

When I feel down, I feel like looking at FLW architecture. It relaxes me and excites me about the future. Maybe at some point we’ll stop being stupid and we’ll look into ways of making people happy by building great, affordable houses.

I love the mystery. You look at this and you wonder what is going on. It’s not playing on weirdness a la Gehry, it’s just low key different and pure. No bullshit. Straight lines and a couple ornaments that’s it.

That was a drawing for a huge house for very rich people. Deemed too mysterious they cancelled it and built a huge, tacky, Italian style house. I look at that drawing and I imagine people living there and how special this would feel, surrounded by nature, kind of not being able to actually visualize the entire house, just moving from room to room.

This shit looks cozy as fuck, I’m sorry but I’d kill a turkey with my bare hands to be able to have Thanksgiving in this living room. FLW had a massive sense of aesthetic. I imagine laughing and being warm in this, just feeling fine.

That one looks like a sanctuary/bunker, ready to tackle any kind of zombie invasion while you’re sipping some nice coffee and working on your computer. Our houses today are boring as hell.

Dat corner glass son. I’m not sure it’s legal anymore but damn it looks just perfect. Who wouldn’t want his home studio to have a view like that. Off the grid house surrounded by nature, that’s all I want and I suspect probably all we need.

I immediately think about prefab that one, maybe even 3D print it. FLW designs and modern construction would work so well. He was wrong on a lot of stuff but what a vision. That design is from 1938. Still looking ultra sharp.

Unbuilt. The sphere was supposed to be the living room. We’re so not used to spherical rooms but the induced relaxation is probably hardwired in our brains because we all come from a rounded belly, that’s how we started. I bet projecting movies on the wall while laying down on a comfy sofa would be kind of the ultimate Netflix & Chill.

I think I saw four different Harold owning a FLW house, maybe I should be the fifth. Maybe I’ll never be able to have one. At least there are some rentals through the US so I shall see.