Author: harold

There’s this car in my neighborhood and its plate is GIRL IDK.

I kind of want to get mine to say GRL SAME now!

There is about 9 million developers making apps for iPhone and Android. It is very hard to get actual numbers but it’s pretty safe to say that about 1,000 are doing very well. The rest? Not so good while they submit their work for which they will give 30% to the mafia by default, and then maybe get it into the store after insane stories about requirements and what not.

It’s absolutely wild how much developers are in an abusive relationship with Apple and Google with their stores and platforms, and how they hate it so much, they cheat every second they can to get what they want.

Meanwhile the duopoly treats them as whiny nuisance and constantly ghosts them. Good vibes.

It’s fascinating because it’s been almost 15 years of this now. It’s just part of the manipulative, algo-heavy, I’m-hiding-behind-my-digital-identity zeitgeist that we are in I guess.

I was there at the start of the thread about Chris Cole being an abuser, by chance. 66 pages later, goddamn.

Meanwhile they just put a new statue of Kobe and his daughter, and all I can think is that this dude raped a woman and got away with it, unscathed.

Fuck. Them. Fuck this toxic dude mentality. Fuck the dying patriarchy. Fuck this complacency. Fuck all the yes-man men in the world.

So much work to do jfc

Let’s see: feeling weird left and right thanks to that latest variant, bitches indeed is weird, France has no government per se and is hosting the world in a week, here one dude gets shot the other dips, snapped my skateboard in half on a weak back lip yesterday, enough!

The vacation I’m too lazy to organize is going to feel real good.

Them:

Why do you spend time designing a house that fits your needs now and in the future, is ultra cost-efficient and off-grid ready, can sustain triple-digit weather, rainstorms, earthquakes, fires, tornadoes and thieves well?

Me, watching the news:

I was running to that sprinter van parked on the bank’s parking lot on Sunset and Vine. It was safe to leave it overnight, as we had a little deal with the security guards, I believe.

I am getting in, turn on the engine and it’s this Hotline Bling bullshit on, again. At that time, you can’t not hear that stupid track if you turn the radio on. If you’re entering a gas station. A restaurant. A restroom. Probably a hospital. It’s everywhere.

I’ve always disliked Drake, his nasal voice and his industry plant (his uncle is goddamn Larry Graham) manners. So seeing him getting demolished by our L.A. lyricist #1 I mean, I’m not mad.

But yeah, I’m disappointed. I’m out here designing shit for a better future. We’re learning about what powerful black men did in the music business in the 2000s and all is appalling, times 100. We’ve had the biggest protests in human history for George Floyd, and that didn’t do a-ny-thing.

Meanwhile I witness two grown millionaires talking shit while people are like “culture!!” over a quickly produced beat that is not good.

It’s annoying. I’m annoying. Let’s focus. OVer and Out.

This is the map after the 1st round the other day. The far-right is in brown, and clearly dominates the landscape.

How did they end up third in the second round? Well, my not very serious guess is that tons of French folks watched football on Friday night. It was France VS Portugal. The French team is 90% black men, and won. That made tons of French citizens feel guilty, and they pulled a switcheroo in the second round over the weekend. I don’t know if that’s very French but it feels like it is.

Far-right vibes are not gone though. They keep growing. Governing this moving forward (tripartite government) is going to be nicely chaotic.

Paul Rudolph’s Green residence:

Built in 1968-72 when the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix and Miles Davis were hot, 3,931 square feet (365 m²). It’s big and still impossibly futuristic in 2024. Those panels above the openings are not solar panels.

In architecture, people see this and are like “I see, Paul was mixing this influence and that knowledge. Interesting.”. I just have a gazillion questions:

• Who are the clients and what’s up with them? How did it feel to live in this house? It’s in Pennsylvania, how did it do through the seasons?
• How did it feel growing up in this house? Which part of the house was the best as a child? The worst?
• Greenhouse, yay! There’s a palm tree in there, how does it feel to have a giant garden inside? How does it smell? Does it create a micro-climate? Bugs? Vegetables? Rodents?
• It was supposed to be prefab in factory and assembled on site. What happened? Why did it go the traditional route?
• How did it pass building code? What where the contentious points?
• How people reacted/react to it? Stories around that incredibly unique house?

Tons of questions. Meanwhile all I can think looking at these pictures is iterating on this design:

• At the very least twice as small. 365 m²? In this economy? Hell no.
• But if I had to keep the size, instead of stairs I’d go with a ramp going through the greenhouse. I’d use it to get some lighting on the plants in the evening.
• Solar panels, obviously. Extremely precise calculation of the sun’s position to determine the angle on the house. I’m sure they did fine, but I’m sure we can do slightly more accurate these days and catch the absolute optimum angle.
• Maybe a couple more skylights. I think I would open the living room to the kitchen, with a screen instead of a wall. Add some built-in benches in the garden, and voilà.
• I’d definitely try to do the prefab, foldable segments type of construction.

It’s a super interesting design which deserves more than being used once. I hope this stunning home is taken care of.

I was homeless and needed my plants to be taken care of. So I dropped them off at a friend’s. One planter, a year later, didn’t look so good:

The middle plant died and the ones on the left and right, were about to give up as well. This is the planter right now, three years later:

I just transferred them to a bigger, nicer one as they are thriving! The scale is off, but that small red spiky thing became this huge green spiky thing. The one on the left was in bloom all spring! They’re juicy, other plants joined them. I’m in love.

I never gave up on them. I kept watering them, once in a while. Sometimes I would forget, and they would look dehydrated. I would double-down on caring, for a short period.

And now they look fabulous.

Something something love, effort, consistency. It works.