Category: Me Myself&I

This election is disheartening. It seems pretty easy to identify what needs to change. But even a political couple can’t agree on which candidate to support. Look, Rosario is right to vote for Bernie and she’s also my celebrity crush so she’s totally right x100.

Cory is playing the political game and believes that Joe would win, thanks to him being behind one of the most beloved president for 8 years.

I think Cory is wrong. The game has been hacked, bro. Vote for policies and laws, not a smile and a good story.
How does all this play in the bedroom? It must be awkward. Vaguely intense, silent resentment while cuddling, watching Elizabeth Warren flipping the switch on SNL? Uncomfortable AF.

Power on laptop

Connect to the wifi

Accept the terms of said wifi

Search for edit keyboard options

Start typing fran to reach français only to be forced to scroll down to Français (France) because it doesn’t show up first

Add FR keyboard, switch keyboard from US to FR

Search for touchpad settings

Select new scrolling

Search for update

Select advanced options and pause the fuck outta updates

Start effing Chrome

Type chrome://flags and disable tabs-hover-whatever the fuck this shit is for

RELAUNCH THE BROWSER BECAUSE THAT’S HOW WE ROLL IN 2020

Select new search engine because Chrome refuses to remember anything

Log in to Outlook.com

Go to online document and click on the link to go to Classic Outlook.com

I have arrived. Until the next reboot. Which could happen anytime. I got more BSOD with Win10 on a 2017 laptop than any previous Windows combined.

It used to be, you set up your stuff and unless you re-install the entire OS, you are good to go. No more.

The computer experience these days is horrendous. I have no control. Absolutely no control.

I am no expert of course.

But looking at the numbers, 57 cases in the US seems very low and very much underreported. It, statistically, can’t be that low in a giant country like that.

The economic impact is unfolding right now. Business meetings and agreements are being cancelled or postponed all over the world. It almost feels like everyone is lingering, so that they can blame the virus for everything going wrong economically. Cute.

I just hope it won’t mess with my plans of visiting family in France. It might.

As I quickly bragged on Twitter, I’m one of the many producer of Hair Love, an Oscar-winning short animated movie about black hair. Most likely, Kickstarter backers were just polling money to attract a real investor and producer like Sony Animation is. The money collected probably wasn’t enough to produce the movie, which is how and why Sony stepped in.

Nonetheless, this movie won an Oscar and I didn’t even dream of that to happen. I remember seeing the Kickstarter campaign. I immediately put some money in and volunteered to do the sound design, of course. At that time, the campaign had a third of the money asked, Matthew A Cherry the creator had not much of a following on social media. I hit him up and as the sound budget was pretty small, he said he was interested.

But then social media took over. Big black names started talking about the project and in no time the campaign exceeded all expectations, going from raising $25,000 at that time to $284,058 when $75,000 was the goal. Even that money isn’t enough to produce a short animated movie though. Then things got quiet on the production side. Matthew blossomed into a social media beast, gathering a huge amount of clout while Hair Love updates were rare and not very exciting.

This is where Kickstarter dreams usually stop. The campaign is successful, producing the project isn’t. Not with Hair Love.

Just like that, the movie was done. Issa Rae had given her voice (for what I hear, through a voice message), the movie had also spawned a book, which had spawned a book tour around the country with Matthew and Vashti Harrison, Hair Love’s visual designer. During that time I had made a little sound design teaser to showcase what I envisioned but Sony had already stepped in. I really wanted to do this and record all the black kids I have around me in my life these days. Next time!

Black hair is such a massive thing. I remember my first time at the hair salon in France. White hair stylists had never done anything with black hair. They were giggling at that thick mass of curly black little trees. I cried when they hurt me. They gave up immediately, couldn’t do anything. Later on my grandmother learned to manipulate the clipper to do a decent job. I wanted a flat top so bad. I think I got it like once, thanks to a hairdresser who was willing to learn. I wanted cornrows so bad. There was not even a person who actually knew how to make that hair style in a 30 miles radius. So I started to buzz cut my early balding skull and never looked back. I still fantasize of sitting down between legs and having someone work that hair, and work it, and make it look good while music flows in the background.

Hair Love is real.

I never gave a fuck about Kobe at first. He was a brat copying/pasting MJ far too much and who had the chance to have a once in a lifetime basketball center recovering his misses.

Then, the trial. I felt like that was on par with the brat personality.

Now I live in LA and Kobe is finishing up his career, kind of killing the Lakers chances of landing good players because of his contract. I read more about him. The good things he does, how his loyalty to the Los Angeles Lakers is perceived. His impeccable work ethic.

It’s a whole mess. I can’t forget what he did and I can’t condemn kids looking up to him. It’s a whole mess. We have Diddy, Kevin Hart and Jay Z talking about “to us” like they’re damn role models. They are, for too many black men. It’s a whole mess. Terry Crews completely turning his back on black women in one little TV segment like wtf. It’s a whole mess. The need for black role models is excruciating. Charlamagne, Kanye, Drake? Please. It’s never been that bad. I miss you Prince. It’s a whole mess.

So losing one of the less-worse role model hurts. It also hurts to see how few good examples there are for black men out there. Kobe’s tragic death highlights this with the brightness of a 6,000 kW-powered LED.

Then, there’s the eerie fate, the weird karma of super-rich people who don’t give a fuck about doing what nobody else can do that is, be at different places in “not possible” time, thanks to ludicrous amount of gas being burned (have you been close to an helicopter landing? Nasty fuel smell a hundred meters away). Extremely wealthy people thinking that they’re smart flying in a capsule propelled by rotors going really fast, in a fog thicker than mashed potatoes.

A week later, the sky is blue as hell.

I think I was tipsy twice in 2019 and that was it. I basically didn’t drink last year. A first in my adult life.

It’s something that happened just like that, I didn’t call it. Being overworked has perks I guess.

Anyway the last time I did get a bit inebriated, I was noticing something that I had completely forgotten about drinking: it’s how much you want to see shit go down. To go to eleven. You want that nasty drama.

It doesn’t matter what. An argument? You want the other to be mean as hell in the response. Sound? LOUDER. Sports? I want some BLOOD on this field. Someone falls, you kind of hope that person to hit it hard or harder. You want a chain of bad stuff to happen. Being part of it or not doesn’t really matter. It needs to go down. When drunk there’s a huge high from witnessing chaos. It’s just there and it’s pretty universal.

But you have to stop drinking, let your body clean itself out from any trace of alcohol  to realize it. It takes months. In our drinking societies, most people have forgotten. Forever.

Which leads me to television. TV analyses its customers and they realized that most people have drinks at night. Especially the increasingly single, adult population from the past twenty years, right? A glass of wine (it’s never just one, as we all know) in front of the TV has become standard. Which means TV executives can go ahead with the sociopaths, zombies and other “whatever it takes” type of shows where, as you are under influence, will be entertained. You don’t drink and all of those shows look quite harsh if not psychopathic. You do drink and you’re amused: this person had to die, too bad! This one will go on a revenge tour and I’m all for IT.

The interaction between what we do and consumer offering. It fascinates me.

(That previous post took me months to write, probably the hardest one to publish)

Anyway, I really enjoyed that movie. Shout out to my man Daewon for the cameo.

Housing is everything. I keep going back to this idea. Whatever kind of people are around you, if you have shelter you can help yourself out. If you don’t, you lose your mind.

The story of a skateboarding black man who’s determined to own his house is something I can relate to. I want this so much. Build what I’m imagining and tracing on my computer.

Once that’s done, I just want to produce music and sound without caring about anything. Collect CDs, finally buying the HD version after years of not-so-great mp3 files. And live simply, ready to sit, relax, and watch another sunset. ‘Nother one. Bliss.

For the first time in my life, I just lived a full year without a single white person around me.

For the first time in my life, I didn’t share any kind of personal space with a white person. First time, ever.

It’s been very easy to deal with. You could say that I Got Out. And no, I haven’t seen the movie, that shit looked good and far too close to my life. Ex-life.

I didn’t plan all this at all, it just happened. The racial climate in this country and this world just kind of nudged me into this situation.

An insane storm of powerful things have been happening to me. There are many, many things to ponder on.

For instance I’ve always wondered why I never was attracted to D&D, a giant pillar in the world of games.

It’s because I’d been performing my whole life without realizing it. It felt vain to act on another layer. I just didn’t know why I felt like not wanting *at all* to pretend to be a paladin or a rogue. It’s clear as hell now.

It goes deep. My absurd resilience and discipline come from living in a world 99.9% white for a very long time. A world that corrodes and doesn’t care about me, ultimately. My tech career is filled with terrible stories. After decades through a dozen game companies, I have yet to work directly with someone looking like me. My current day job happened because a black woman trusted me. I exceeded all her expectations. It’s been wonderful, except for the reality of getting paid what a black man in America is getting paid. Resilience, blending with self-care when necessary. Black poverty, black upper middle class, white elitism. I’m visiting them everyday. So many layers. Constant code-switching. Learning. Paying attention. Deciphering. My roots running in opposite directions with no one really grasping the entirety of who I am. There’s no time to explain.

Black love —brotherhood, sisterhood— showed up. It makes me feel like I didn’t know that love could be so real. So real and smiling. So instant. It’s prodigious. You have no idea.

It’s very painful yet I’m blossoming. No time to play the “what if” in my head. I already know it’d be different.

This new paradigm makes me a lot more sensitive about gentrification. Not only I see it happening with tremendous detail by biking every day on the same streets for years, but because of my personal story, it feels like… A hunt. Can white people just relax and stop obsessing about growth, I fucking wish.

I’m grateful to know good white people though. They helped me out. You guys are far too rare, that’s for sure.

It’s also not the same. I don’t overcompensate either. I know bad people are everywhere. But black life is enveloping me like a thick bath robe after a burning hot shower following a rough day and it feels so good.

It feels so good.

Great article at The Atlantic on the subject.

What the longtime sportswriter Robert Lipsyte calls “jock culture” (or what the boys I talked with more often referred to as “bro culture”) is the dark underbelly of male-dominated enclaves, whether or not they formally involve athletics: all-boys’ schools, fraternity houses, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, the military. Even as such groups promote bonding, even as they preach honor, pride, and integrity, they tend to condition young men to treat anyone who is not “on the team” as the enemy

That thing is so universal and it always bothered me because it’s bizarre. Why the animosity? Why groups of dudes always end up hating others so much, on sight? I don’t know but this is why I’ve never been in bigger groups than two or three bros. That’s the limit. Bigger and things become wild and stupid.

I didn’t spend much time in locker rooms when I was younger. A few years while playing basketball and I didn’t like that stuff. I was in and out, bored at the bravado. Walking back home musty, it didn’t matter.

That’s the thing: growing up, it wasn’t much about validation from others. It was more like I do my thing and if you don’t like it, fuck all of y’all. The concept of masculinity was dead. Prince, Michael Jackson and others had destroyed it.

There was no bragging, just doing. I remember casually telling my best friend that I had done it. Then we’d hung out listening to some music while I explained how it had happened and so forth. Just a conversation. Bragging was/is weak. It means you can’t control yourself, from staying humble. Bragging triggers jealousy and a whole lot of bad shit usually spawns from that. Humility is great. One might even say that bitches love humility. I didn’t write that. Back to the article:

Then she took off her pants. “And that,” he said, “was the first time I ever saw a vagina. I did not know what to do with it.”

Eat it, you dumb fuck. Give, stupid. Because if you do and try your best, she’ll do the same with you. You have the internet in your pocket, thousands of pages of women talking about what they want and like with intimacy and you don’t even pay attention. You’re a bum with no curiosity nor focus whatsoever.

I feel like sex needs to happen early, when hormones are starting to make you lose your mind. Nobody’s fast, Nature tells you you want it. Do it —as clean and soft as possible, no alcohol, no pressure— and move on. Then you can focus on what’s next in your life. Sex isn’t about power and tearing her shit up. It’s teamwork and smiles, feeling that skin. Smelling. You shouldn’t think about anything.

So much work I can’t even.

52 things I learned in 2019. Number 3:

Emojis are starting to appear in evidence in court cases, and lawyers are worried: “When emoji symbols are strung together, we don’t have a reliable way of interpreting their meaning.”

Why the fuck do you think hieroglyphs never came back? Symbols are vague and are not good at stating things. Another example: Uber. They paid a graphic designer to design a logo that nobody gave a shit about. They reversed to plain old letters and a “Uber” sign in 2018 because people can read. Reading is potent.

Twitter really is hypnotoad. And so are symbols and icons.

Links are disappearing and it’s all your fault.

An Antidote to Dissatisfaction. I get what this video is saying and I’m grateful most of the time which does the things the video says (feeling good about yourself, not caving to depression). But it’s still some bullshit. The dire pace of incremental progress is fucking with me. Am I grateful that change is that slow? Fuck no. Am I grateful to the state of the world where money is so central to personal development, when I know and understand that money’s made out of thin air and not fairly shared? Fuck to the no.

I’m reading Paul Beatty’s The Sellout and it’s hilariously brilliant. Loving it. It needs to be an animated movie like Mind Game for which I would direct the sound. It would be the best thing ever made by two black men since 2 Nigs United 4 West Compton.