Author: harold

Monday night I was in the NoHo Art District, listening to some French Opera, watching a magician, short movies and beautiful pictures.

Tuesday morning, making my lungs feel like cardboard walking through melting downtown Burbank.Tuesday night I was out eating ridiculously good Juicy Pork dumplings at Din Tai Fung. Thank you so much, Jim.

Wednesday morning I was hiking. In the afternoon I had an interview. Wednesday night after some lovely Vietnamese food I was on the move again. Daniel and Melanie, I love you so much.

Thursday morning I was showing my one time German roommate Sandra Silver Lake. Thursday afternoon, shopping the area before chilling in Griffith Park. 40°C. Thursday night Banh Mi in Atwater looking at this wonderful sky. Also, 1st quarter of NBA playoffs.

Friday morning, on the move. You’re the man, Brandon. Bye Burbank, hi Metrolink, hello downtown LA. Hello homeless people, 90% of you being black. I’m sitting at Union Station, pondering over and over.

Saturday morning. in Silver Lake to contemplate Neutra’s VDL house, very inspiring. Saturday afternoon oh god very soul and heart crushing.

I wish somebody was dead and somebody else wasn’t, it would have changed everything about my now. Maybe her brother would have had the words to convince her to wait a bit, maybe I could have told him. Maybe everything would be different. For the life of me I can’t see how I could have done what I did and am doing differently trying to make shit work with insane patience and control, costing me near everything. I can’t get over that fact and being ice burned to the inner core emotionally really, really doesn’t help.

Time for anger.

I was listening to that song when I embarked my SuperShuttle at 10:20pm, after 11 hours in the sky.

We leave LAX, I look at the buildings, Square Enix, DirecTV. We hit the famous ramp that makes you overlook downtown. I smile, closing my eyes and feeling the cool breeze from the open window. Hi, convention center! Now we are heading to the North, we pass that bridge that I did so many times on my bike, looking down at the freeway. Dodger Stadium, 2 miles. On my way to Burbank/Glendale. Modern architecture here and there, my eyes catching them as much as I can while the woman in the back wonders “’the fuck is he looking at outside?”. A young couple is kissing on a bench in front of a Del Taco. 24 hour CVS drive thru pharmacy, Ha! I have arrived. My host is so good to me. I can’t sleep, I much prefer landing in the afternoon, my body doesn’t have the time to understand that it just spent half a day in the air.

My body is hard. I literally moved tons and tons over the past six months. Last week alone, took my old mattress down, got the new one up, alone. Moved my parents’ kitchen to my grandma’s house, mostly alone. Unmounted my home studio, moved all the heavy bags of dirt from the attic. When I take my heavy suitcase in the car mom is like, “you’re out of breath!” and I kind of wanted to tell her, “bitch, when was the last time you did any heavy lifting on your own?” but that’s rude. I know she didn’t mean anything. That’s my weird family, three days before leaving mom didn’t know that dad couldn’t give me a lift. They all live in the same house but I swear, it’s like they aren’t. Meanwhile I make sure to do as much as I can to help them out, like waking up early on Sundays to paint some stuff because they can only complain about it, even though my sister, dad or mom could have done it. Now it’s done, BAM thanks Harold. I love fixing stuff. I just love tightness. I love caring and see that everything in my reach is all right and if not, that I can change that.

I’m dreaming of going to LAX in a couple of years and pick up anyone who would come to visit me and say to them, “It’s so good to see you! Welcome to Los Angeles”.

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.