Category: Me Myself&I

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.

By steamrolling local taxi operations in cities all over the world and cultivating cheerleaders in the business press and among Silicon Valley libertarians, Uber has managed to create an image of inevitability and invincibility.

Journalism is about trolling 24/7 now. Uber is bad etc but first and foremost, people use that stuff all the time. All the fucking time. That’s how Uber became huge in the first place. It was such a small thing barely 5 years ago. We all made them insanely big because that ride-sharing shit is ultra-convenient. Starting an article about Uber by immediately spitting in their faces by implying that this is all because of lobbying, crazy SF libertarians and such, is not journalism. It’s trash. Boo Uber doesn’t make money. Netflix isn’t either. Tesla just barely started to? But those are for a certain slice of the population. Uber is used by everyone, from the prostitute at the corner of a dark boulevard to teenagers going back home to Bel Air’s heiresses going out.

You can be mad at how much money Uber raised or argue how they will replace drivers with level-5 cars (which is when they’ll be able to make profit) but the service itself? Leave it alone. We needed it.

Also maybe y’all could stop investing in businesses solely based on growth, wins-it-all promises? Maybe.

There was this older man at my day job. I was helping him set up his tablet. I noticed that every time I would open a browser and focus on the address bar, the four letters “milf” would show up.

At some point, I told him: “you know, you can set up your browser in what is called Incognito Mode, that allows you to search for things privately”. His eyes opened large, looking at mine straight into my soul like I had understood him at the deepest level.

I showed him how to do it. He never came back.

I can’t even imagine the amount of filth his tablet’s RAM has processed. I saw him a couple times in the streets since. He looked visibly tired. He’s travelled a lot on the intertubes. I could tell.

I’m sorry.

Me: hey my old man, listen.

Him: hey, you know I’m gone.

Me: yeah I know, we’re all hurting still. But yo, I got to tell you about what’s going on in France.

Him: you ain’t even there, stupid.

Me: right but the PSG tho.

Him: what about it.

Me: well, it’s owned by Qatar now. It’s one of the wealthiest sport club in the world. They only have 3 French players in the default rotation. They have 4 Brazilians. They paid one of them 222 million euros for him to play for the PSG.

Him: godddaaaaamn. Are they winning?

Me: sort of. They won everything in France.

Him: Champions league title?

Me: noooo lol

Him: so they fucking suck. Bums. What the fuck. How much??? What the fuck.

Me: *giggles*

It’s a great article on why restaurants have gotten so loud. Finally, someone is pointing out those super-dumb high ceilings inside buildings. They create awful acoustics and are absolutely the worst in terms of cooling/heating efficiency. But hey, “luxury” right? FOH

Acousticians can be expensive, and many retail designers figure that they can get away without one.

It’s creepy how this race to efficiency and profit kills things we’ve been doing that are so anchored in our habits, like trying to make a space feel good, that we don’t even realize when we break said habits. There’s just a way too big focus on numbers these days. For everything.

Also a bit sad to realize that this article was written by Kate Wagner, from McMansionHell fame, which means that we’re really like two people caring about acoustics and Quality of Life in houses. Mental Five, Kate.

Meanwhile, I worked on the two additions I would build on my future estate: an audio lab (ok, just a cube to make sound and music in it) and a workshop (ok, just a rectangle to build stuff in it). GOALS BRUH