Author: harold

Hey,

I couldn’t write about it last year, when you passed away. I guess I think about you everyday but I don’t even try to count, you are just around in my head, somehow.

I wanted to tell you thank you, my first dad. My first male figure. And I can’t really think about a better one.

You came to Paris to get me. I was assigned to your foster home. A nice, calm baby. I imagine that after raising five white children having a brown one with nappy hair was exciting and cute.

You took me back to your place, in the sweet French countryside. You took care of me like I belonged, as your children and grandchildren. I’m the dash between them.

2 years! 

I remember the sound of your electric razor in the morning, your brown tobacco smell when you licked my face to gross me out and make me giggle, sitting on your lap, I remember playing with my little cars following the rug lines while you were watching Formula One. I remember watching the liquid running through the little rocks and the salads you were watering. I remember following you often, going to your perfectly organized workshop where you would drink "un p’ti ballon d’rouge/d’blanc" with your friends or family or fix some stuff while whistling brilliantly. I remember you teaching me how to ride a bike, challenging me to get rid of the training wheels, and boom! I totally succeeded. I was so in love with you.

Once I did a very bad thing, I threw a metal can in the face of a younger girl. You caught me doing it and before I could enjoy the neatness of my long distance headshot, you were grabbing me and making my bottom taste the leather of your belt. I went to bed, woke up for a cookie, and that was it. You never hurt me before and after that. It was like, perfect, unaltered Justice: you don’t do shit to people you wouldn’t like them to do to you or else, you’ll pay for it. The harder you do, the harder you pay. I pretty much never employed force or physical advantage unless it’s allowed, to win an argument ever again.

You were mad when I had to leave for my now 26 year old family. I didn’t see it but she told me that you wanted to commit suicide, you were probably drunk that time. Thanks to my parents not listening to what the state was saying, I was coming over often. It felt good, the city is so full of shit sometimes it was great to be with you, fucking around and simply enjoying a simple life.

When I have been able to come over on my own, you were the one following me everywhere. Retirement is a bitch. But it was great to see you, chatting about "l’autre enculé de Hongrois", our current president. That time I had the Jaguar and we rode around? You wanted to ride again and again and I would drive you as long as you want now.

Then you got sick. I immediately knew that it would kill you. Your family is a cancer fest and you drank and smoked for decades. I probably do a little of both because of you. I learned to not give a fuck with you, too. I also learn to care and do things, and work hard. My now dad added a layer of the same thing in a different flavor so I guess it’s printed and hard-wired in me.

Cancer took two years to get you. It was hard for everybody but you know my grandfather, Raymond is a vegetable now and it’s just excruciating. I think that it was better this way, though a few more years would have been great. I just wish you didn’t have to suffer so much.

The world is sad. People say that we can all live together despite our differences and we both know that. You did it. We so did it. I was your "petit dernier" and you were asking what I was doing and you were so impressed by this music and computer game thingy. I would ask about how you would fix this thing in the wall and would be as impressed and everything would be all right. People talk. We did. And if today I have identity issues, it’s not our fault. It’s just that the world is too damn slow and dumb and forces me to dream about joining my black and brown people so I can stop feeling awkward. The city is making all of us crazy.

I was with her this week so that she wouldn’t be alone on the first anniversary of her husband’s death and I wanted to have her in my arm all the time but you know how she is, stronger and harder than a rock. She’s doing OK, your dog helps a lot. I wanted to have her in my arm all the time also to say thank you for all she did for me. I wanted to have her in my arm all the time to thank you, as I would have loved to at least once in my life kiss you and say that I love you.

Summer 2009.

I don’t know why but this song really makes me think about the picture below. Sun and fun memories with you. I love you man, thank you again and forever.

 
End 80s.

Paris. Rain. F U.

It’s been a tough and rough year, that’s for sure. Death and pain, pain and death. Surviving between all that and trying to push things forward. Not easy but well, we’re all going to die next year, aren’t we?

Plan for next year: commit to my prototype, expand Chocobeam and stick to the lean, I’m going to need it. /stretches out

Happy New Year 2012, y’all.

December is the month where I usually backup things. I realized that I’ve never lost anything in ten years of heavy computer use. Maybe a couple of hundreds of meg, I’m not even sure. I have things burned on CDs at least five times. I have pretty much my entire email history since the beginning. Same with IM logs (I was saving them because of links in conversations). Every single soundtrack I wrote with .wav and .mp3 included. The thing is I’m never really paying attention to anything, I don’t have any automatic backup, nothing. I’m just really organized and need to drop a couple of folders a year on the burner to save everything. NAS, USB keys are used as quick and dirty backup. I memorize. I work out that bunch of cells. No apps. No reminder.

I am prototyping, finally, my game on Unity. Thanks to code samples, I have a working, first experience. Brings a huge smile. After spending a year defining technical needs and possibilities, Unity seems to be the best choice and provides everything I need. The community is vibrant and the tools are pretty great. I’m excited and stressed out as I soon will be able to see if at the end, it works or not. But I’m pretty confident it will work, as my extended search on my game’s subject is telling me that I’m on something. It’s going to be all about tweaking.

So I was like “end of the year sucks so much to me, why?” and then I looked up on the internet to see how adult adoptees are living this period of the year. We all have a hard time and reading stories, I’m doing fine geez. People are fighting so much, adoption, birth mother or parents, resentment, anger, consent, family reunion it’s scary. My parents and foster parents really did a perfect job when I read some stories. Adopted people feel so guilty to not be like “everybody”. That, I feel it. But I say fuck to that too because I well know how “everybody” is bullshit. I also learned how much my case is a very special case. So unique, it hurts!

Music definitely saves my mind and my soul.

They are needed but they alienate people. They work as long as they are not used as “I’m buying this brand because I want this brand”. But we measure the success through this unit, “as much of a religion a brand can be”. If you are venerate as much as a 2,000 year old sect, you are a winner.

I always thought brands would kind of disappear, actually. Good, generic products were supposed to take over as they bring more collectively than a brand can. A brand maximizes your spending, a generic, standard product does the opposite. They really change the world. Generic drugs, generic hardware… Good enough, widely available, not expensive. Real progress, y’all.

I’m really interested into brands at an individual level or small scale. The Japan game industry, with very strong personalities and names, the skateboard scene and the amazing talent of riders to create small or not that small, powerful brands out of thin air. I like that because somehow I can trust them more, there’s something very direct and very basic: I want a good product/service and the brand works on it. Steam just went so huge by doing that, focusing on providing games and trying stuff like sales. The day they start to be dishonest over their mission is the day they will find competition.

I guess it’s always about being honest. Problem is, tons of brands are not.

Or how an ongoing change of consuming the web forces Google to speed up their will to expand

So yeah, Google Reader sucks. They changed things and killed the sharing feature and they want to feed us with G+ until we can’t go back.

Fuck that. I’m trying other ways to read news without big G on my ass.

I have a much better understanding of why RSS readers are using Google services to synchronize news between devices: it’s really complicated to do that without the Mountain View giant:

It seems like all you have to do is make each copy of your RSS reader read and write three files to Dropbox, one file for each item in the list above.

It seems like each reader could just read the files at startup and write out new files when it quits. Problem solved!

But not even close.

It really is complicated. The solution for Dave Winer is to use web apps, like Tiny Tiny RSS (make the install WordPress like, geez). My problem as a user and designer is that web apps suck balls. Sorry, I’m using RSS since 2004 and I had a native client that was noticeably faster and which wouldn’t make my computer crawl and start up the fan like Google Reader does, even more with the last version.

Today I have 4 times the amount of RAM, 2X the amount of processing power at 2X the speed I had with my old Pentium M and Google Reader lags. Come. On. On the other side native apps, fly. Fluid, beautiful, elegant or intuitive, they always feel clearly superior, even when waiting for cloud data. The fact that web apps get better and better doesn’t matter. So native apps. The gap will stay, as long as we don’t have a badass Wifi signal everywhere and performances matching the best native apps and it’s kind of an impossible task: Google tries really hard to push its web vision, without big success (iPhone Gmail “app”, the Chrome OS  mess, redesign of web services to match native apps’ look&feel, Android’s UI lag, Chrome Native Client so what there’s Steam etc.)

That’s the first nightmare for Google. The browser taking over’s prophecy falls short. The native apps + cloud paradigm is putting them in a really awkward position.

The second nightmare that nobody talks about is this one: if everybody starts to use RSS, feeds, streams, what about the page view business model? Nobody would see ads, or so much less that the entire business model of selling ad space would stop to make sense. I’m guessing that there is much less information to get from a RSS user than a classic web browser user. The maker of the popular Feeddemon app says that you don’t know anything about the user, except that he subscribed to your content. Oops.

That would be a disaster for Google. Which is to me the reason why they jumped on Feedburner before it became huge and pretty much killed it (the API future is uncertain according to Wikipedia). This is why the Google Reader API, despite being used by hundreds of apps is not even freaking official. And it’s a nightmare to use for developers (no documentation FTW). They don’t want to encourage people to use this efficient way of consuming the web because it would hurt them so hard.

Unfortunately, the river of news is everywhere on Facebook or Twitter. Everybody is ready to make the jump to RSS now, people would immediately get it, the concept is totally mainstream and FB knows that very well. RSS still lacks usability like not having a one-click subscription system or syncable apps but it’s on, it’s going to change. A better name would be cool too. Programmers never give a shit about marketing.

So what would push people to embrace RSS instead of streams in silos like FB? Privacy. Privacy is the very strong argument that will push people to follow anything they want on the web through RSS or future standard instead of G+ or FB or Twitter without having to think about a company making money out of this information or inserting ads all over. There will be a backlash and a generation growing up without being on any of these services. There will be a generation that will be unknown from any of today’s internet social networks or search engines.  

These days the cool thing is “let’s go on G+ because FB the mega corporation, has too much information about me fuck yeah I’m so smart”. Why would you trust more Google, for what reason, as they have the same exact business model as Facebook? It doesn’t make sense. Plus G+ has a history of not giving a damn about you, banning users, removing pictures without a single notice, and they get away with it. Which is insane to me.

It’s one of the big problem with open technologies and standards: they are not brands, they can’t be branded and we live in a world where brands sadly, are everything. People worship these bitches.

On the positive side, there’s a massive business opportunity around perfectly executed private “river of streams” apps for desktop and mobile… Just saying.

A 70s book for kids. Kind of philosophical and stuff.

When I was about 6 and freshly adopted, my mom used to read the book “El hombre que lo tenía todo todo todo” to me before sleep. Interestingly, the translation in French wasn’t the correct “The man whom had it all, all, all” but “The man who knew everything, everything, everything”.

This book is pretty complex for a kids book but I didn’t care. Just the title was enough to help me create stories by myself. “If you know everything then what? What kind of adventure would you be able to live?” Exactly. No limit.

I always have been like a sponge, absorbing anything that seemed great. It started by reading the family’s dictionary and pictures descriptions, trying to know everything about dinosaurs and volcanoes and from there, I absorbed anything.  The sense of enjoying life from France, Spain and Italia, the engineering skills and rigorousness from Germany, the creativity and adventureness of the UK/US, the Zen and simplicity from Asia… I don’t give a shit. I mix everything and build my own set of rules. There’s no conflict, only challenges. My mistake was to think that you guys were doing the same. The psychological mechanism of standing up for a side is the strangest thing to me. I don’t take sides. I go through. Back and forth. Ponder. Get the best of both and move on.

Looking back at the past three years and last ten years, I feel like knowing everything now. I mean not in full detail but I got answers to everything I needed to know. I know it sounds like I lost it but seriously, I have a much better view of how things work. Systems, bias, human irrationality and human societies’ inertia, our addiction-driven brains. OK, I get it now.

Now all the dots seem connected. Sometimes I’m really bored at how we -and by we I mean you- just stay there talking about things like “OMG, this president was really awful, it’s all his fault and now I want to cry” when it’s been a while that presidents don’t really matter. They just make obvious moves dictated by systems. The war in Iraq is over? Fucking amazing, after nine years of occupation and an overwhelming support to get soldiers back home since forever. You get the idea.

I feel bored. I can’t have deep conversations with people who lack information, I can have infinite masturbatory conversations with people with extended knowledge (I hate this word, “education”). Both cases make me lean toward boredom. I’ve been able to go on and off with both, balancing out for years, but these days I feel more annoyed than ever to see behaviors looping over and over. I don’t know.

I blame this book. You are damn right ignorance is bliss. Though, I’d love to learn and fly a glider or even crazier, a wingsuit. And of course, I have so much more to do with music, games and computers. This shit is deep.

So Louis CK did it and I can’t stop thinking about the fact that:

– Artists are way too often freaking retards with technology and can’t never see how it would benefit them; I torrented every single Louis’ standup, the two seasons of Louie and that’s how I became a fan and paid right away for his thing. Otherwise, I would have just “stolen” his last show or maybe would not have given a single fuck about this fat, swollen Irish asshole. Artists are like old stinking grandparents in front of their TV being scared by everything news say. P2P is one of the best invention ever, period. Learn it and use it. And hurry the fuck up because liberticide laws are rushing on this freedom like white people to a Kanye West’s show.

– How is that only a handful of artists did this? Are they all screwed by contract or are they really not getting the Internet?

Dave Chappelle (excellent and long 2008 interview here), what the hell man? Chappelle’s Show is one of the highest selling TV-series DVD set of all time, right there with US culture pillars that are The Simpsons and Seinfeld.

You freaked out on celebrity. Fine, I totally get that. You explain it and I would have done the same, probably. But man, you cannot do standup comedy in front of your fridge or your cows or whatever animal or dead object you have in your Ohio farm. Like for Louis, I torrented your ass because I wasn’t aware of Chappelle’s show when it was airing -they’re not big on satire by black comedians in France-, and was tired of reruns with commercials. I cried so many times, laughing. I want more.

Get on the freaking internet, Dave. Do whatever you want (as long as it’s funny and make me think), shove the intertube with it, make people pay, be fair and nice and you’ll be fine. You are a comedian, you need this shit. I mean, the past few years ought to bring jokes and ideas to your brain in the order of hundreds of thousands. Your name is huge. You can take some little risk, you own a fucking farm. You are fine, you can just take your time and make great stuff. Total freedom, total control. Come on, son!

And yes, it makes me think about black people and technology. It’s often in my mind these days.

Isn’t everything weird these days?

People protest about the 1% making so much money but cyber Monday generated $1.2 billion, up 22% from last year. I didn’t buy anything.

I thought we didn’t have any money? Modern Warfare 3 made  over $1 billion in 16 days. Sixteen days, one game. Explain that to me guys. Not just the financial aspect but how a war game can be so widely welcomed, over and over. Zynga’s IPO and market cap is just… I mean they might be near dead in two years, all this money and BS it’s so sick, really.

The NDAA and SOPA shit fed by corporations’ motherfucking greed. Right during the end of the year when no one really wants to bother about anything but eggnog and food. And Skyrim. Goddamn dragons, son. #whitepeopleescapism

Google and Facebook filtering more and more. People disappearing from my timeline because I don’t interact enough with them so FB decides to not show them to me? Google putting my friend’s results first, here and there, like I haven’t noticed. And this condescending tone big G, Twitter and too many high tech services have toward users doesn’t say that they give a fuck. Machines are supposed to be neutral. That’s the great thing about them. At least it was.

It’s like all of that makes sense, in a bad way.