Category: Me Myself&I

Fuck the term rape culture like it’s cute and legit what the fuck?

I guess the thing I do about it since I’ve been aware of it for a long time, is to not hang out with dudes only. Because we’re just having fun and talking shit but then we become wolves. Predatory. Dumb.

All men know exactly when things turn wrong in those moments, when respect for women somehow completely disappears. When we turn our brains off and start being dumb beyond reason.

I prefer to be face to face with a friend. At most, two dudes. Even at three including me, after two beers people start talking about hoes. When I’m just talking to one friend, we never go there and it’s the best example of “individuals are smart, people are idiots”. I always preferred to be with a heterogenic group of people, because it’s almost the only case where people are not idiots, where they actually try to be smarter you know? I appreciate that.

Anyway, the consequences are that it can be lonely to avoid groups. But I know we need to drastically change as a society about rape and if I need to stay away from socialization, bars and beers I’m fine with that. Shit. I have too many friends who got raped. France or California, it doesn’t matter. Sometimes I wonder if it’s not half of the women in my life which is fu-cking crazy. It keeps happening. I still see the same excuses and I don’t say shit, I just try to not allow situations where it could happen. Definitely not smiling at your stupid rapey joke.

On the other side of the coin, it is super exhausting to spend time and energy to convince women I’m dating that I’m cool and that I won’t try to hurt/rape/kill them. It’s pretty much the #1 thing I have to do first before thinking about anything else. Of course sometimes I fuck it up, overthinking my moves and then they freak out and it makes me sad because I won’t see them ever again, probably. I understand the situation though.

I wish there was a won’t-do-shit-to-you-unless-you-ask list and that I was on it and that all women were getting the notification. You know, so that we all enjoy our lives faster, them without fearing to end up dead in a ditch because you said no and me knowing that I don’t have to set up all those “cool as fuck, I swear” signs around the diner table.

The truth also, is that most women and men get raped by family and friends. Rape survivors had a whitelist and they got raped anyway, so it’s awful.

Still. Please gentlemen, stop doing this shit. Not even the start of the slippery slope. You’re hurting everyone.

If you get killed or hurt hard in the future because you tried to sexually abuse someone, it will be completely fair.

And you survivors are some badass motherfuckers.

I guess I don’t see myself as a comic book reader but I read a ton man. Basically from 83 to 98 this was me on weekends:

I read a lot about comics these days since Marvel movies and superheroes are so in but I just don’t really connect with that. I’m a child of the European format, bigger and longer than the American one. 40 to 60 pages with a start and an end. Consistent, impeccable drawing quality. And, outstanding diversity:

I loved les petits hommes –the little men- so hard. It’s the story of small humans the size of a glass of water with highly sophisticated technology (as a kid I couldn’t stop starring at all those robots and spaceships etc.) living crazy adventures like this one, where they come back to Earth and everything is white and monochromatic. And weird robots took over. Oh and there’s a version of the hyperloop in this world.

I don’t even remember names or relationships. I just know those stories –a lot influenced by 50s and beyond American cinema mixed with post war European artistic hope- transported me far away. 70s-80s-90s European comics are completely amazing at that.

Papyrus and his cute friend. And giants walking for real.

Bidouille & Violette. 81 to 86. It’s the story of that little chubby guy and his first love in a little town in the north of France. It’s sweet as hell and it was a companion story back way back when. I loved it and at the same time of course as a dude I didn’t want to tell anyone about that. And this unique drawing style. Man.

This one is special to me. I really enjoyed the amount of detail put in the drawings, in the motorcycles, so cool. And then puns after puns after puns after puns. I’ve never read anyone that prolific with stupid puns. See the moto risées title? I can’t even explain, it’s dumb and hilarious at the same time. I think it brought me a sense of wanting to play with language more than any comic book really.

One of my fav. Yoko Tsuno the electric engineer and her crazy ass stories. Phenomenal.

Awesome mecha designs and compelling tech-heavy stories. Drawings you can look at forever. If you love sci-fi you got to try out some of the 27 albums.

The man who shot faster than his own shade. Not only that’s pretty fast but LL didn’t show off. As a kid I wanted him to right? But no he’d be cool and use his talent here and there. Super chill.

There’s a humility and ordinary feel to all those heroes and stories. And yet they transported me. They’re not about how heroes change the world but how the world changes people. A lot of stories where in the end the “bad guys” are not bad, they’re just trying to make it. Some violence and death and sex, but mostly non-violent, “let’s agree to disagree” endings.

I read this one late but, shit. We follow this brunette during the 18th century in the middle of the slave trade. Now nowhere on TV, at school or at the movies people were showing the slave trade like this comic book showed it to me back in the mid 80s. It shows a lot of angles and it was a fascinating read. It’s raw, hard. The kind of read for which you need to turn the music off.

So, when these days I read about comic books and antiheroes and character development I’m lost because I’m about the adventure, the locations, eternal characters that don’t change because they’re just an excuse to travel, a vessel for the mind to build a word around.

More Interstellar than Avengers I guess.

The story comes and goes. You cannot become a fan of something that comes and goes. It’s a healthier relationship to me. American comics immediately create strong feelings when you’ve been following a character for years. I have read some forums, people go apeshit on their cape-wearing bae.

Anyway in the end it makes me feel like, what we try to do and fail often at today in the entertainment industry –inclusivity, strong duos, diversity, stories and themes that touch a lot of different people-, I had that in spades in my parents’ European comic books collection (all albums of all comics above and so much more). I read them all a bunch of times. It was great. It made me push my imagination and let it run, how much you can mix up things and re-invent classics.

In games we constraint ourselves so much on universes and themes, it’s frustrating.

I recommend that EU stuff for inspiration, creative people. And your kids.

Just got an email from some hosting services I’ve been using for a long time. They’re based in Belgium and apparently, because of some European law that passed last year I can’t no longer use their services as I’m not from Belgium. My French citizenship doesn’t allow me to benefit their VAT.

And then EU referendum at the end of the month in the UK, right?

Europe is already kind of no more. It saddens me, man.

Damn OKC.

Well the WarriorsVSCavs is happening but nothing before made sense: Thunder getting rid of my Spurs despite them leading most games, Warriors almost gone, Raptors fighting hard exposing Cleveland…

The game is changing for one thing: 3s. I’m not talking about one or two good shooters behind the arc, I’m talking about having a team shooting 3x3s in a row because that’s almost ten points.

So let’s say it takes your team 2 hard minutes battling to take a 10 point lead, in three possessions and 50 seconds your lead is cut to 1 point. Your opponent is barely sweating offensively and can focus on defense. That’s how the Warriors and other teams too, have been able to recover from being dominated. That’s a massive game changer.

We’ll see how this plays on Thursday but more interestingly, next season. You can be sure that everyone in the NBA is working on those long shots right now.

There’s something very weird being hit with US politics and a wave of superheroes movies at the same time, both being terrifyingly black and white. And how much people are into those narratives, damn.

Guys, we talked about this. The world is grey. The world is a crossfade mixing signals, blurring ideas.

Oh boy.

I drove too much in the past ten weeks. And I also read that article:

About a dozen trucks from major manufacturers like Volvo and Daimler just completed a week of largely autonomous driving across Europe, the first such major exercise on the continent.

I can’t stress enough how hard this is about to change our current state of affair. I can’t stop thinking about it:

– Millions of jobs connected immediately superfluous. Where we needed ten people for logistics we’ll now need maybe two or three? The fact that technology takes care of hard and dangerous tasks is great, now it really asks our society how do we live when jobs get destroyed in a few years? We know how, I just hope autonomous vehicles will spark a serious conversation about that. Right now the media tells the story of the evil Uber that everyone uses, a company who doesn’t compensate its drivers as it should but Uber is already at the next step, guys.

– My fantasy/anime imagination sees fleets of self-driving trucks attacked by old rebels who still know how to drive real cars with real sticks and dirty gas with youngsters hacking those robots through AR. Mad Max meets The Matrix.

– My foster uncle is a veteran truck driver. He drove through Europe for three decades. He connected with other truck drivers. He learned to speak a bit of English, German, Spanish, Polish, Italian. Trucks drivers shared stuff from their countries. We’re going to lose that. We’re going to be even more inside our bubbles and stranger to each other.

– No more tragedy with overworked truck drivers killing people. We put a stop on that on day one autonomous trucks hit the road. I had a big truck drifting on me on the I-5, I moved to the left and I saw the driver being tired as fuck. This needs to never happen.

– Yes the possibility to work, have sex, sleep do weird deals in self-driving cars is going to go up by 45,000%.

– I look at cities like LA and I feel like train is not the answer at all. That road network is perfect for self-driving cars. Peer to Peer. Door to Door.

– Which means biking will be safer than ever, yay.

– It’s going to democratize transportation to the max. My generation will be the first to get old and unable to drive and that will not be a problem at all, we will still be able to go anywhere. I still remember when my grandfather couldn’t navigate around town anymore. Huge hit on the moral, man. No need for grandkids to drive them around!

Overall way less stress. I can’t wait.

Just chilling for five minutes. 15 days to go. Or is it 3 weeks? Damn.