Category: Me Myself&I

Anil Dash wrote:

This expectation of pop music’s conversation about race persisted for decades. By the end of the 80s, Janet was pushing forward the boundaries of pop music with Rhythm Nation 1814, with many of its songs explicitly articulating a vision of color-blindness. Even its title track, an all-time classic, opens with a spoken incantation:

We are a nation with no geographic boundaries
Bound together through our beliefs
We are like-minded individuals
Sharing a common vision
Pushing toward a world rid of color lines

Within two years after the release of Rhythm Nation, Michael Jackson would release his single "Black or White", whose chorus repeatedly insists that it doesn’t matter if you’re black or white. The same year, Prince would release his album Diamonds and Pearls, whose bridge enthusiastically promises, "u will be colorblind". The biggest stars of the MTV era had weighed in, and they had found consensus in their lyrics.

Imagine my black ass growing up in a white family, white world, listening to that pop culture, seeing Benetton ads all over Paris. Of course I believed, even with a doubt in my mind.

Imagine my peak color-blindness, not so long ago, with a left-handed black president, me married to a white/Asian woman and the world telling me in every single possible way, how much richer living is in this setting. Even with a doubt in my mind.

It’s 2019 and it feels like I need my black people around me, for well-being and healing purposes. Election polls and workforce statistics don’t lie. Black bodies in caskets don’t lie.

I grew up with a wall falling in Germany and now I’m aging with an idiot trying to build one in Mexico. For my generation, today’s world is really, really not going the way we wanted it to go. I don’t have a doubt in my mind this time.

How much of the internet is fake? Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human.

That is quite surreal when using it everyday to do stuff for decades. But not that surreal when thinking about bots on social media.

Also pictures and videos are so fake now. It used to be relatively good evidence that something happened.  You cannot believe anything without 3 to 4 “trustworthy” sources that will help decipher if something is real or not.

That’s exhausting.

Google et al are responsible. Software developers continue to do shady shit instead of empowering people.

Metrics matter in the real world, not in computers. Views and retweets are vanity bullshit. Quit it, it’s 2019.

Now that I have been using it for over a year at work, I can tell.

The first 9 months, I blocked every single update. Experience, son. Everything was fine. Then the IT department forced updates and changed policies so that now updates are happening constantly.

It freezes the damn machine. It resets settings every single time. Wifi connection issues I’ve never had before, not just on that laptop but on all computers ever. The last time Windows was that bad, it was called Windows ME and we all forgot about it real quick. WTF happened with 10?

Windows 10 interface with that weird mix of black and sad taskbar with thin ass fonts , symbols and colorful, useless tiles is horrendous. The way there are 4 different ways to do anything is too much. Fuck Cortana. It takes 2 good second to display a folder content even with less than a hundred files. It’s embarrassing.

What’s more embarrassing is all the tech “journalists” who said it was fine. Y’all are liars or corrupt to the core or both.

Yes, Windows 8 is the best OS ever. It’s snappy and stable as hell. The super simplified Metro apps are perfect for 95% of people using computers. Any PC software from 1979 to 2019 runs on it. It’s still the shit.

Downgrade, people. Show some spine.

SPOILERZZZ

It was monumental. That Spiderman is like the show Atlanta: we needed that 10-15 years ago. It’s so good. I resent myself watching one trailer, which killed some tension. And sometimes the changes of framerate annoyed me.

Everything else was perfect. As it happens often to me these days, I was having a conversation with my housemate’s nephew in the morning about his relationship with his parents and his uncle and that movie is like, the same.

Also said nephew just looks like Miles. It was eerie and beautiful. He enjoyed the movie thoroughly I believe.

Animation is the best. I only want to see superheroes and spaceship stuff in full CGI now. The freedom offered in terms of shots and editing is impossible to not want every single time after watching Spiderman: into the spiderverse.

Chapeau bas.

H O T D A M N

January starts, I live somewhere and now I live somewhere else, 15 mn away. Sometime that month, for a short period, I make money on the side writing pseudo academic papers for someone. Rough times.

I deal with a black woman being in an abusive relationship the same way that we all often do: too late.

I remember driving another black woman back to Compton, as we were singing over King on a beautiful morning on an empty freeway. Of course I missed the exit. It didn’t matter. She told me I should sing. Maybe I will. I hope she’s well too.

More work. Wood work this time. Paint on weekends, sanding in the morning, staining in between.

I get my bike wheels stolen. I make a video to get hired. I bike with my friend Richard, talking about games for hours. I write to my friend Arthur all the time. We chat over life, as lefty black nerds. Cathartic.

Sometime in July I get a job interview for an outstanding position and it goes well! Best interview of my life. The same weekend a dog bites me in the stomach and I learn that I have 30 days to leave my place. I don’t get the job. I end up getting 60 days to relocate.

I give French lessons to my badass Brooklyn Jew. I receive a letter from my foster family giving me some sad news: conflicts emerged and family members stopped talking to each other. Fuck. I meet this gorgeous and super smart black woman and am low key thinking about impregnating her, that’s how strong she hit me. But then it was like nah, man.

It’s August and KRS-ONE is performing under my window and I run grabbing friends in the streets to go on the roof to smoke and bop heads. I almost open that block party playing a crazy version of the Star Spangled Banner on bass.

I help my homeless black folks hanging at the playground as much as I  can: dollar bills, change, candies, phone calls, leftover pie… I help my black folks at the library as much as I can. I remember going through the motion of sending money to a black woman’s brother in jail somewhere in the midwest. It was wild, convoluted as fuck. I still have my favorite Japanese old woman drive all the way up to see me to help her out with her phone. She’s so adorable.

Gentrification is on some Thanos shit this year, moving relentlessly. My blackity black recreation center is under pressure. My neighbors and I got booted out in a few months. I help to move 3 couches, 2 mattresses, 1 lounge chair and 18 years of random, heavy shit. I haven’t really recovered emotionally.

In October a giant Chinese company wanted to see me to talk sound design, so we met. Although it didn’t go much further than that, it was great for my soul. Luckily, my new place is amazing and I work as much as I can to make it even better: paint jobs, various fixes from the gate to a new router. I can finally not worry too much about food even though I’m still on the Harold’s In The Thick of It Diet (spaghetti for lunch, tuna salad for dinner).

I now bike 20 miles a day and I don’t want to think about it. I miss my white family in France and at the same time, every 2 weeks on Skype, I’m wondering over and over what we have in common, besides sharing a space years ago. Sometimes I feel like I love strangers. Complete strangers. And it’s probably the same for them. It’s super wild.

It’s December. Christmas is very important for my housemate so, everything looks dope as hell. Tree. Fireplace. Lights outside. Stockings, even for my favorite dog that I will have for a few days.

I don’t own shit, but I have access to a lot. It’s intense but I’m thankful. Onward.

My journey as a black man through the world, starting in a small village in France, kept me busy. I worked on myself slowly and relentlessly and now I look at men like, what the fuck have y’all done besides nothing.

Yesterday I had 2 friends swinging by. The woman showed up, texted, brought drinks. The man just ghosted me after sending me a screenshot on Friday that he’d put me in his calendar. It’s totally expected and that’s what’s wrong.

My friend in Paris is being harassed by her ex and a dude in her building. It’s totally expected.

The complete lack of support between dudes. Expected.

The news, obviously. From Offset to Riot. I read Hacker News, full of smart but quite if not full-on sociopathic dudes. Some comments are plain terrifying.

The rate of decent men is too damn low. It’s so disappointing. I don’t understand this race that keeps men going nuts: the race to a number. We don’t need this shit right now. For the next decades we need to chill and make sure to sustain stuff. Not burn down through natural resources or relationships. Sustain. Control. Subtlety. All that.

I often see women wondering “why can’t decent men talk to those idiots”. We did but also, we know that they know. They know what to do. It’s just different from what they think they should do, so they don’t do it.

I’ve never been afraid of acting different to make a difference. Ok, sometimes I did but I nut up and went through it. Like human beings have been doing for thousands of years. Do better my dude. Come on, mane.

First I wake up early to talk to my friend in France for a good hour. It’d been years.

Then I get ready to go to Beverly Hills.

I went back! It’s just. I can’t.

Then back home to get ready to go to South Central to drop off furniture. Maybe a little detour in Inglewood to jam? Not this time.

Back home, Spurs win. Potato salad. Design books. Dreams. Hope.

I started with Netscape because in 98, fuck Microsoft.

Then Netscape Navigator was unstable. So, some IE, which was just a bit less unstable. The web itself wasn’t really stable at that time.

Then AvantBrowser. It’s 2000-ish. TABS. POP-UP BLOCKER. TYPE IN THE ADDRESS BAR TO SEARCH. That was the shit. The biggest browser innovation jump ever.

Then a bit of Opera. Cute. Then all geeks and nerds couldn’t STFU about Firefox. So I tried it. It was alright, except that there were barely any extensions that I was using quite heavily at that time. Then I super-customized my Firefox and it was pretty cool.

Then it auto-updated to Firefox 2, destroying all my settings and preferences. Uncool. Uninstall. I don’t play.

So I switched to Maxthon. Holy shit that was dope. I know, it ran on IE engine but I’ve never cared about Acid3 tests and all that useless shit. Does the browser work with the websites I use? If yes, it’s enough for me and a vast majority of users.

Around the same time, I started to use RSS heavily, unloading my browser’s needs. Maxthon was perfect with the flat theme I applied to it. I used it for years. Stable as hell.

Then it updated to Maxthon 2 and it was unstable as fuck. Extensions were def a problem so I stopped using them all together.

Time for Chrome! I was mad in love with it. I still remember it was September 2008. Reading the comic about javascript on my netbook, grabbing my dick. “Google is really listening and smart!” I said to myself, fapping. The trade-off of giving them my browsing history and behavior wasn’t so bad because I was RSSing a lot.

But it grew on me. While everyone was selling the browser to their grandma, I couldn’t let Google spy on me like that. So I started to use the Chromium forks. One was called ChromePlus and it was pretty dope.

Then it updated to ChromePlus 2 and it was terrible.

By that time it’s 2012 and I’m sick of all that browser bullshit. Win8 comes out. I start using IE11 without excitement and pretty much never looked back. I still use IE11 most of the time. I don’t care. The funniest thing is that sometimes –once a year- a website doesn’t work and I suppose that it’s because of IE. It’s not. It just does the same thing in Vivaldi or Chrome or whatever. I read this year that Safari still had issues displaying favicons and I wanted to let y’all know that this shit has been solved on most Windows browsers circa 2002-2003.

The amount of energy spent on those stupid ass browser battles is staggering. It’s hard to take software developers seriously sometimes. Web developers failed at making HTML5 a true, clean standard. Google took over and made everything not chrome-compliant, “bad”. You guys completely failed the public by letting one company do the thing that you didn’t want the other company to do. And now you’re crying about monoculture and shit. But here’s a truth: there’s pretty much no need for browser innovation anymore! They’re all fast. They’re all stable. They’re all able to handle forms, payment systems. That’s what we mostly do with browsers and there’s no need to reinvent the wheel again. I don’t need my browser to access some VR rig, run some sophisticated synth or stream 8K videos. Jesus. Code for other stuff that might help people, think native and offline. Leave the browser alone. We’re good. Browsers have achieved the Fridge status: they just work, everyone uses one, they all behave the same and no one cares about brands and “mind share” and all that high school shit. Working IT in a public space demonstrated that to me.

Browsers are everything and nothing at the same time. They’re incredibly complex pieces of software that are doing far too many things, like tracking every single thing we do (mouse cursor and all) or accessing your microphone. I just love me some vanilla HTML that renders instantly with today’s available bandwidth and any 2010 and above browser. Straight. To. The. Point. I’m never over a dozen tabs. The whole 70+ tabs nerdcore absurdity was my daily life back in 2005. It’s pretty clear that it’s not healthy for either brain or computer system.

I guess that sells multi-core CPUs though. Sigh.

My team sport is not doing well at all. The West is staked and ruthless so that makes sense.

Seeing Kawhi being Kawhi in the East stings so much omg I had no idea that would cut that deep. It’s the first time I see a player evolve, get outstanding, and leave the team I’m rooting for, over some stupid stuff. It’s not a good feeling. I wanted to see that big 3 of Dejounte/Kawhi/Lamarcus go HAM. A 2-way juggernaut. FUCK.

I’ve always enjoyed Toronto’s team but right now they have a fucking squad. Siakam is super impressive, Leonard is l o c k e d t all the time and everyone is balling. I’m mad and happy for them.

OKC has a squad too. You never know how they will perform in the playoffs but I think PG knows he won’t have many other opportunities. He seems very focused right now. Denver is scary as well.

For the rest, it’s too early to tell. Nothing makes sense. Some teams blow out others without even having their best players on the court. Some win over, on paper, much better teams. Games are pretty random right now and that’s cool.

The 3-point paradigm though. It’s weird to see three tall ass dudes on the perimeter, waiting. It’s not fun to watch basketball if it’s only that all the time. It’s really killing the game, in a way.