Author: harold

I see a lot of conversations about social media, blogs, SEO, ads, RSS, etc.

My take is that a blog is meant to be consumed: read the post, gather your thoughts, digest it and make it your own to share with your people around you (or write a comment to the author). That’s what a blog post is for. It’s not about being at the top of search engines lists or being share 1.5K times, blogging is about to make you think, smile, see. Then you share that on your own, with your own friends and coworkers and whatnot. Whenever.

Say I write something about game audio. I don’t need the post to be shared on social media. I’m not trying to get attention, I’m trying to share my experience and reasoning. Take it and maybe in six months a conversation shows up and you think “that dude had a thoughtful post about this, let me paraphrase what he said to those folks here”. That’s being consumed.

And that’s what blogs are for.

Oh, and another thing: you are a grown person. You’re supposed to curate your own stuff. Losing your mind because you’re not getting an automatic, biased and convenient river of links and videos shows that you need to detox from Big Tech.

Yes, so pretty cool. (but as you can see on the link, it’s rather dangerous, and limited)

Now hear me out because I’ve been thinking about this for years now: 3D printed houses with indoor/outdoor skateboarding, hello!

Banks from the couch to outside patio. Quarters from outside patio to concrete benches, aka ledges.

Basically an habitable tiny skate park. When not used to skate those elements become chilling, reading, lazy areas.

The future of cities and communities lays in 3D-printing factories that we would deploy like we do in a RTS game.

Imagine that you’re eleven right now in 2021.

You’re sent to school. No vaccine for you, everyone says “it’s fine!”

You get COVID-19, get a little sick and recover.

You now have lost your sense of smell and taste. At eleven.

Would you trust any adult ever again?

The future we’re building right now? There won’t be enough therapists for sure.

There is no shortage of housing in Los Angeles. If there’s one, it is artificially created by landlords.

All the talks about killing single family housing to build more is real estate talk about profiting more, and nothing else.

BlackRock, a powerful hedge fund, is also buying buildings in Paris. They’re buying everything, everywhere, not to house people —this is what housing is for, mostly— but to make a giant profit or reap the benefits of streams of income. They can buy entire neighborhoods, cash, immediately. That’s unprecedented.

Affordable housing is a red flag at this point. When Ballmer announces $80M dedicated to affordable housing, it’s complete bullshit: developers get the money, build a 50-apartment building with 2 of them being studios and being affordable. Technically, they offer affordable housing.

Parking permits are pure extortion. Etc.

Greed is the most despicable thing on earth. We’ve got to fight this.

(and f the Olympics)

We’re losing so much humanity wearing masks. 50% of our faces’ cues are gone. I prefer to be on a video call than in person with masks on, by far. Yet physical proximity is nice too. After eight months in isolation, it certainly feels great at first. But then half your face is gone and I can’t really “read” you at all.

Also masks make our faces all wrinkly and stuff. Kids are really going to look like this soon.

Growing up in this paradigm, oh my god. I’m sorry y’all.

Apparently the world still loves 1970s detective show Columbo. It’s good! And like the article says, “Whereas series on streaming services often stretch out story arcs over as many episodes as is profitable, with a string of mini-cliff hangers, Columbo shoots its shot immediately: you see the killer, their backstory, motive and the deed itself within 20 minutes, before Columbo even arrives on screen.”

Grandma absolutely loved that show and I got into it with her, back in the days when the reruns were rerunning.

Another thing I hadn’t realized before reading that article is that Columbo happens in Los Angeles! I was watching this from the floor of a French countryside home usually during fall and winter, aka Grey Weather.

And now I remember that actually, sometimes exteriors with the very large, sunny Californian blue sky in the back and our detective in a trench coat sniffing around looked definitely off.

I kind of want to watch many episodes, giggling at murders.

There it is. Considering that there’s no stock as I already have been experiencing it for the past three weeks, it’s just going to be crazy this fall and winter. Oh my god.

The situation doesn’t look better with essentials like coffee and I imagine tea as well.

Bread is up 30%. (it goes without saying, if simple ingredients are hit, complex ones are going to be very, very expensive)

Dear future, uh, wow.

Shout out to my parents for taking care of their parents the way they did.

It’s pretty much impossible to do a better job.

From taking them in for a decade, to taking care of them in a retirement home as close as possible to the house, to visiting them as often as possible, they did it all with minimal bitching and constant attention.

Not an easy thing to do.

I talked to my parents yesterday and they told me that they were going to see grandma daily these days but that she wasn’t communicating anymore. Just nodding a bit and giving a smile.

Last night in the shower I teared up thinking about her, not really knowing exactly why. In the morning my sister’s email gave me the news.

She transitioned in her sleep at near 96, not bad. Not bad at all.

I loved my grandma. She was so sweet.

Wow, so glad this exists, thank you Maya (you can tip her here)!

I always wondered how those movies, which are hard to find even on the outskirts of the internet, would be preserved and I’m stupid because YouTube and one black lady was enough to take care of all of that.

I feel like all those movies should be in one zipped folder and shared to all, if I’m using my freedom of speech. Otherwise, yeah subscribe to everything and stream them all I guess.

Would love to see the 80s and 90s as well. And then expand to the world?