Author: harold

So it’s Christmas I’ve been freshly adopted or so. My toys had always been reused ones from other kids I grew up with in my foster family or fixed broken toys. I never felt it was a problem but I felt that it meant some things, that you’re supposed to get more money to be more happy or something along those lines.

In my new family I’m getting new toys here and there. It’s Christmas, I’m on the toy floor of a Paris left bank prestigious store and there’s a lot of kids screaming and stuff going on, I’m not used to the city yet. I’m supposed to choose a present and it’s kind of weird to have all that power all of sudden. I don’t even know what to choose. I think at that time I was really into playing marbles so a bag of those would have been great. Everything’s great! I’m in a toy store how awesome is that. Just the trip is satisfying and exciting. And then, on top of a shelve I see him, the red robot:

I guess my face really lit up but to me it wasn’t even going to be possible. Way too expensive. It was out of reach in my life before but now with grandparents enjoying their grandson and new retirement life, it happened.

“would you like to have this one?” I probably just nodded with my eyes open wide.

The thing is a beauty, huge in my small hands:

It transforms into this:

I wasn’t a Transformer fan, to me it was the perfect copy of Robotech’s Valkyrie mechs. I guess I was right:

Of course I broke one of its arms and felt really bad for like a year. Anyway. It was weird because I was happy but it had been a little too easy. Really? I can just get whatever? That seems wrong. And as awesome the toy was, you know how kids are. After a while it was just another toy, a nice trophy. Lego had a bigger replay value and all that made me think hard about what being happy means, early on. What money does or doesn’t. The sweet spot between enjoying life and becoming money’s slave. Really conflictual in our lives but I know exactly what line I want to follow (even though life is fucking plans up). I guess I got a head start on this.

That’s what my grandma called her husband today, calmly after looking at him. She’s right. I kind of hope that he’ll pass away peacefully this year because it is just unsustainable. I’m sorry.

The dissonance with this crazy ass L.A. story with a black ex-cop killing white people because of their presumed roles in physical abuse and racism in the LAPD -who knew? Oh wait- which in return shot two Asian ladies in a van thinking it was the said ex-cop. Police brutality, race issues, L.A. me playing dozens of songs from Los Angeles based black bands and bam 40 mn an hour of train later my white family, an old man to maneuver around in his wheel chair, my dad and his broken leg, my mom freaking out over stupid little dramas. Me, helping as much as I can. I even tried to fix my mom’s unsupported, old accountant software by hijacking its Access database. It didn’t work. Too old. Terrible software design. Nonchalance: casual lack of concern. I hate when you slap me with that, France.

It’s brutal. I have two house music tracks ready to ship and I can’t even do it, I’m so not in the mood. My brain is filled in. If only there was only that. It’s too much but I can’t look away.

I think I am kind of a zombie too today. Oh shit I forgot, my cooking tops died. Things suck sometimes.

Last weekend at my parents. The usual except for one thing, my dad telling me about his business plan for his passivehaus company he just founded. We talked for hours about everything about it. I might do some marketing for him, he’s so bad at that (dad, you don’t sell with specs you need a story). I’m born in it they say.

It’s great to see him excited, taking risks. It’s a great idea and I can’t help but dream of doing the same in L.A. re-building entire blocks using the most of nature and technology. Damn, I wish I could especially for black people for whom social mobility is being refused. At least have a home that doesn’t make you want to go anywhere else and frankly, that is all  what is missing in beautiful Watts or South L.A.

Anyway.

I’m kind of jealous of him. Sometimes I wish I was a 6’ 2 blonde dude with blue eyes born in the 50s. It’s not even confidence at this point, it’s another world. Like for him mine. I was telling him about Zynga and Notch, how nothing makes sense today from a company born in 2007 valued at $billions and already kind of dead to a dude releasing a non-finished game that made him last year $270 million. It’s scary as fuck. Not the risk taken or the amount of efforts you put into something, but the fact that the outcome is highly unpredictable and rarely positive today. Add corporations agendas and lobbies, governments doing the same and your company dies you barely understood how or why. It’s brutal.

He doesn’t feel that. He never experienced that. He just hears about it, looks at me not knowing what the fuck to think about. I know right? So when I see that he’s investing all his money in his new venture, I’m excited and I try not to delve into the negative aspect of the economic global world today. Right on dad!

He’s already getting enough negative energy in France where an entrepreneur starting something passed 60 is asked “why would you do that? Just chill with your miserable retirement checks until you die in front of your TV”.

I’m proud of him.

It is hard to read that stuff, over and over again.

I’m still in the process of swallowing what I read about Los Angeles and black people. I’m still learning how black lives don’t have any value in this world holy shit it hurts. I’m analyzing, I try to find escape roads, hope but all I can find at the end is anger. I see the system, its evolution. I see how I escaped it by being a lucky ass orphan.

No pressure at all.

Back to Paris. The sun was here and it really helped. Today is hard. Re-figuring out how to do things, while wondering if the past four months really happened. Jet lag’s charm. You frown upon your own thoughts like “was that real?”. Yes it was, is.

Thermal shock, time zone shock, culture shock, personal shock, I kind of feel knocked out but also quarantined. I have a bit more than a dozen tracks I made on my laptop in LA to mix and finish on my big beast @ Chocobeam Sound Lab. I got some assets to create for my game prototype, quite a lot to experiment on.

Also.

Here’s my a bit over a week Windows 8 start menu. I use it on a 12” laptop with trackpad and mouse. It’s great. No, really.

It’s a lot of change too. I like change now. When I was a kid, I did not. I remember seeing Windows 3.1 and being like, “this is lame. What’s the point. Command line or GTFO”. I grew up and I no longer hate something right before really trying whatever I read hear see. In my experience the big changes with Win8 are:

– Focus on full screen

Very destabilizing for someone used to have 20+ tabs open and a dozen apps running front and back. I know it’s not healthy or that efficient. I know I procrastinate a lot with all these windows, one click away from a lot of distraction. The focus on full screen is just that, killing this procrastination of wandering between icons, browsing between apps. In Windows 8, you do what the app launched does and then you press the win key to go back to the start screen, open another and do something else. There’s an implacable efficiency, no “dead time” in the way you move around these tiles with information/full screen apps. Very weird but good. It feels less stressful. No “notification hamster” feeling.

– Horizontal scrolling

After years and years of reading lists like in our browsers, it is awkward. Lists are great to scan rapidly and I excel at that so when apps push for horizontal scrolling a lot, I’m no big fan. It might be better with a touch screen though. The interesting part is that I take more time to read this way and if I’m not in search mode it’s more pleasant, no doubt. Like reading a magazine. But when searching for immediate info, I’m too used to lists (I’m using ClassicRSS for a reason). No biggie though, there are apps for all tastes. I expect different apps to aim at trackpad/mouse and touch.

– Internet Explorer 10

I swear, I used Chrome from day one when it came out and never looked back (well, I did use another Chromium based one with no Google tracking). So many habits and shortcuts. Well IE 10 is good enough to make me want to open links in it. with the charm bar, sharing is easier and more fluid than ever. IE 10 is indeed fast and the rendering has something, not that Chrome’s rendering is bad but IE has a little something more, sharper. I’m still switching on/off with my desktop one but IE 10 is gaining on me. Proof is I installed some ad blocking rules and can’t wait for an AdBlock add-on. A webkit, non-tracking my ass browser in the store would be nice though. Let’s keep the competition on.

– Apps

They kind of replace web sites a lot. To search something on Wikipedia I was used to open a new tab and directly use Wikipedia’s search engine with a shortcut. Extremely efficient. Now I can go back to the start screen, click on the Wikipedia app and use win + q to search within. Not as fast but not slow, definitely more “natural”, less “program-y” I don’t know. With Reddit though, way better to use an app (dark theme, fetching faster than in one of way too many Chrome tabs). The look and feel in apps are usually awesome and slick. Sometimes it’s too much. There’s a lot of design work to be done in win 8 apps and it’s exciting. The so called modern UI is three years old now and still feels like the future more than anything I’ve seen around. So readable and clean.

There are some stupid things like not having a consistent “going back” esc button experience. It drives me crazy. Or the new file explorer with its weird arrow to go up the hierarchy, which does the same thing than clicking on the folder’s name but it made a lot of people happy because it’s “like XP”.

It must be really hard to make something to both attract people ready to change and get better workflows and people who don’t want to change, even if it was making their lives a little better/easier.

I think Microsoft did well looking at the challenge’s size. Also, Surface -even RT- makes a lot, a lot more sense to me now. I can’t wait for these Win8 20” tablets and my favorite audio apps on them. My almost carpal tunnel’d right wrist using the mouse would appreciate.

TL;DR: Get it while it’s cheap, at least for performance enhancements if learning new, cool ways to do things is like punching yourself in the crotch area.

Reading a book on black Los Angeles, seeing how segregation built up and created this city in detail. In East Hollywood, Latinos are a majority, followed by white people through gentrification. If in four years I’ve seen a dozen black people in Silver Lake, that would be the max.

In Paris, that would happen in four minutes. It’s heavy on my mind. It’s disturbing to me.

Even more so with the fact that I don’t experience segregation like history shows me how it exists and founded interracial relationship in the USA.

But when I get a flat tire on my bike, a pretty old white dude riding his bike on the other side of the street stops and asks me “need some tubes or anything?” That would never fucking happen in Paris.

It is so destabilizing. I feel like being in a dream, living things no black people live.

It’s 26°C today and in a week I go back to 0°C winter, my white family and its ethnocentrism.

Sometimes I’m proud of how I handle what I have to put up with.