Author: harold

In a sense I’m glad we did our big Europe trip before social networks existed. We checked our email maybe once in every city — if we could find an Internet cafe. For the most part we were on our own. Just one couple amongst a sea of tourists. There was nothing different about the bottle of wine we had in that one Italian restaurant. Except that it was our bottle of wine, and we shared it just with each other. Not with anyone else. It was a whole month of secret moments in public, and we were just… there. We didn’t check in on Foursquare, we didn’t talk about it on Facebook, we didn’t post any photos anywhere. I now look back and appreciate the incredible freedom we had to live before we all got online and got this idea that the value of a moment is directly proportional to the number of likes it receives.

Elezea.

Now, imagine kids growing up with the social network/pictures default world. There’s no way that at some point they will not go dark, all dark and inexistent online.

Funny how for my old ass the internet was freedom and how for younger generations it already is not.

The trick to being truly creative, I’ve always maintained, is to be completely unselfconscious. To resist the urge to self-censor. To not-give-a-shit what anybody thinks. That’s why children are so good at it. And why people with Volkswagens, and mortgages, Personal Equity Plans and matching Louis Vuitton luggage are not.

A short lesson on perspective. He’s talking about the ad industry but it works for any creative business…

To resist the urge to self-censor. I totally do not resist these days and that’s not good.

Why do we have such a need for putting things, people in boxes and then compare them constantly?

It feels right when mapping the unknown, -nature, Mars, DNA- but doing it for stuff that have no secrets to us is kind of moronic. Having a tattoo I guess meant something at some point but today? None. It’s just a drawing with ink on your body, it doesn’t automatically make you cool or means you are a biker. You just have a tattoo, because you wanted one. What consoles/computers mean today when they share pretty much everything, including bugs and patches? Nothing. We just have devices to play on, with different inputs. Notebook/netbook/ultrabook/tablet/smartphone? Oh, you mean computers. Indie, AAA, mobile, social it’s just computer games made with the same tools all around. This stupid segmentation confuses the hell out of people. I know it’s the goal because then they rely on brands and other deity and then it’s fucking irrational and childish. It’s the ??? before profit in this heavy capitalistic world.

I know, things look dead simple and boring without categorization enabling religious and zealous behaviors. But could we please favorite simplicity and fluidity? Long term values, right? Better off this way, wouldn’t we?

*crickets*

After almost two years with a Windows Phone, I’m pretty excited to use Windows 8 and its not-so-new-to-me UI. I’m so over Win7 and any other icon-based experience interface.

This UI/UX is so efficient and relaxing at the same time. Here’s why.

Take the WP home screen for instance. When you look at it notifications appears on tiles, flipping over to display information. There’s nothing to do to get the information. The only thing you have to do is look at your screen. So even in this position of doing nothing, you actually get some minor things done (typically, knowing who liked your comment on FB or RT’d your tweet, email from someone specifically, new item on eBay, you name it).

It’s not only efficient, it’s relaxing. No pop-up, no weird-looking widget, no visual distraction but transition effects. No need of action like pulling a notification list or closing a popup. How many times did I tediously do that on my Android. It made me feel like becoming the machine’s bitch and this new UI frees me. It’s hard to describe but it feels great. I’m back in control being able to know what’s up/communicate in various ways in one instant.

Before, there was noise and confusion and a lot of clicks.

Now you just look, swipe or use. No “app launching”, more like “service launching” more than ever.

Other example, the classic desktop/taskbar/dock. It’s noisy to have that constantly in our view. How many times do we stare at it, searching things or visually wandering for nothing. Icons, pointless and aging concept that aimed at emulating an office desk. That is just not how we function in front of a computer anymore.

More than a decade that we have apps open at all time like email clients or browsers. We now don’t even turn our computer off but simply put them on sleep. And though we often use multiple apps, we don’t need them on sight all the time. Multitasking is BS and we only switch from one app to another. So Windows 8’s focus on full screen apps with easy switching between them makes sense. Again, efficiency and relaxation from the visual noise of a traditional desktop. Too many moving tiles? Turn them off or even better, go away from your machine. When you come back, know everything in one look, one swipe. Powerful, I’d say.

Icons are these weird shortcuts in our digital lives that don’t make so much sense today. Too static, useless and central to the experience. I’m glad they’re slowly going away from the common use of a computer with Windows 8. For work of course, file systems and icons will still be with us for a while.

It’s like the Windows 8 new start menu becomes a classy, modern living room to use everyday apps while the desktop becomes the clean, flattened workshop to create stuff and get complex shit done. All in one OS.

Mama like.

Speaking of seeing things over and over in France, I call sexism and the game industry.

This summer a controversy rose in the French video game press with a terrible article on Tomb Raider, filled with rape jokes.

I just read an article on the state of the game industry by David Cage at it once again. The first time I saw him fight for a stronger French game industry was ten years ago. Nothing changed. Things got worse (less studios than ever).

The first time I had feminist discussions about Tomb Raider was ten years ago. Nothing changed. Things got worse (more morons thinking they are right with their humor argument).

Same things with rape impunity, same thing with DSK, cannabis, work laws…

Is it OK to feel like moving on after a decade watching shit going down despite fighting and spreading the good ideas? France is so resistant to change. I’m so bored witnessing how slow if not inexistent change is. Maybe I’m impatient but a decade feels like a long time for 33-me.

I’ve been using Google and web services in English for about a decade now. At first, I used .fr instead of .com because I’m French but as I couldn’t find information in French and that I’m relentlessly using an online dictionary when I don’t understand a word, I quickly switched to .com/English.

No way to stay in a French online world and fight to find stuff. And in my domains, everything’s in English.

Fast forward a decade.

The French web is… I don’t know what to say. My parents always complain not finding anything on it but discussions going nowhere on boards. I’m not surprised. Some English Wikipedia pages simply have the quadruple or more in terms of quality and quantity, even on French-only things sometimes. You just have to compare Amazon.com and Amazon.fr, the latter is so terrible: no comments or useless ones (“this thing is a piece of shit!” thanks for the info bro), no ratings, bad search, bad sellers… When you are French, you wonder how this company could be that big. And then you have the original one, the .com where even the most obscure music album CD has a 20 lines review, where you have insane deals and where if you’re not happy, they come over your place to take your package back and drop a new one (on Amazon.fr, you have to drop the package somewhere at a post office).

It’s just another world. No wonder my parents generation doesn’t think the internet is that great, they just get pop-ups in the face and terrible websites with fucking roll-over menus and no valuable information in 2012.

The US took over. Popular French websites are US websites with .fr at the end; we have slate.fr, huffingtonpost.fr etc The last one I saw is a copy/paste of 9gag.com called… 9blague.com. Of course, all the US internet memes are translated in French with more or less success, especially less. Oh, the cringing.

As I see things three or four times -once or twice through my US network and same with my French peeps- it creates so much noise in my mind and shows me how pyramidal France is about web culture: a couple of people on top, in Paris, translating American humor and a lot of people writing Frenglish comments they translate from Reddit and then you have a huge amount of people reading articles with sources coming 99% of the time from the US. I just resumed the French internet culture.

At the same time we have great, fast, reliable and cheap internet connections there. It’s super weird.