Category: Me Myself&I

If you have a smartphone your main screen probably looks like this these days:

This is mine:

It’s kind of perfect, seriously. Notifications happen in a discrete way. It’s zen. It’s elegant. Those iOS/Android home screens with red dots of FOMO just will never look appealing to me and always feel childish. People discard shit all the time on their phones, I glide through mine. I use my coworkers’ phones from time to time, it’s horrifyingly cluttered and full of options you will never use or maybe once just because you can. This is one of the worst trend in tech: over-designing and over-engineering. Always happens when they want to sell more to you and are not (PSVita, WiiU, Galaxy VR whatever).

I don’t plan to update anything and actually haven’t in years. Still using 8 and not 8.1. There was a crazy fuzz for those personal assistants but all I can see is that no one talks to their phones to ask something, besides setting up an alarm. It’s anti-social and weird. Last apps or games? All the good ones come to the platform at some point and we all know that we’re using a handful of them. I have already all the social “loose your damn time/eat your bandwidth” media I use connected to my phone. So I don’t feel like missing anything out. Especially when I look at people’s screens in real life: FB, FB, FB and FB. It doesn’t matter how recent your phone is. FB.

It is a 5 year old interface designed by Microsoft but I regularly get some “oh wow what is dis” when people look at/use my phone. MS likes telemetry too much, they didn’t factor in that it would take a bit of time for people to get use to the biggest change they ever made. So they backed up like little bitches.

It’s funny that in terms of memories I’ll have this interface in mind for the 2010s, instead of the obnoxious grid of icons. Regardless after what, eight years of tech race and multiple devices and installing apps and taking pictures and sharing, I think we’ve hit the good-enough paradigm in the mobile space.

Unless you break your phone, you don’t need to upgrade these days.

Last year, on a hike in Vasquez. Smiling like everything was fine. It’s better now.

Never thought an old white dude would be the candidate you should vote for after a (relatively) young black man was in the white house but you can’t possibly vote for anyone else. Please vote Bernie Sanders, and forget about words like socialism, you don’t know exactly what it is anyway.

It’s hard being an atheist. It feels like all the answers are here and I’m still looking at a society that doesn’t want to give up on deities when people blow themselves up for those. Like look, they just did don’t you think it’s time to tone praying down a bit? Hell no says society clenching religions like an old lady does with her purse on the sidewalk.

Whatever. It’s just time-consuming and I wish to see things change quite way faster than they are.

Another day on earth.

When I feel down, I feel like looking at FLW architecture. It relaxes me and excites me about the future. Maybe at some point we’ll stop being stupid and we’ll look into ways of making people happy by building great, affordable houses.

I love the mystery. You look at this and you wonder what is going on. It’s not playing on weirdness a la Gehry, it’s just low key different and pure. No bullshit. Straight lines and a couple ornaments that’s it.

That was a drawing for a huge house for very rich people. Deemed too mysterious they cancelled it and built a huge, tacky, Italian style house. I look at that drawing and I imagine people living there and how special this would feel, surrounded by nature, kind of not being able to actually visualize the entire house, just moving from room to room.

This shit looks cozy as fuck, I’m sorry but I’d kill a turkey with my bare hands to be able to have Thanksgiving in this living room. FLW had a massive sense of aesthetic. I imagine laughing and being warm in this, just feeling fine.

That one looks like a sanctuary/bunker, ready to tackle any kind of zombie invasion while you’re sipping some nice coffee and working on your computer. Our houses today are boring as hell.

Dat corner glass son. I’m not sure it’s legal anymore but damn it looks just perfect. Who wouldn’t want his home studio to have a view like that. Off the grid house surrounded by nature, that’s all I want and I suspect probably all we need.

I immediately think about prefab that one, maybe even 3D print it. FLW designs and modern construction would work so well. He was wrong on a lot of stuff but what a vision. That design is from 1938. Still looking ultra sharp.

Unbuilt. The sphere was supposed to be the living room. We’re so not used to spherical rooms but the induced relaxation is probably hardwired in our brains because we all come from a rounded belly, that’s how we started. I bet projecting movies on the wall while laying down on a comfy sofa would be kind of the ultimate Netflix & Chill.

I think I saw four different Harold owning a FLW house, maybe I should be the fifth. Maybe I’ll never be able to have one. At least there are some rentals through the US so I shall see.

“Well I’m kind of glad to be the fuck away from all this” At some point I thought that, on that Friday 13th. After texting family and friends. I can’t even imagine what I would witness in Paris as a dude who could be considered one of them but isn’t.

I have seen enough in thirty years. I have seen how white people in France never liked arabs pretty much ever, how arabs grew sick of it, how they made white people even more not liking them etc. Being an outsider I have the privilege to have people speak their minds on this from both sides. It’s a trip to be accepted by white people and arabs, listening to them trash each other. Maybe around 1998-2000 when France was unified around a soccer ball, maybe at that time some progress could have been made ethnicity wise. Maybe France could have started to create a real Republic where we unify on the fact that we are stronger together and that diversity allows us to be smart in a way a monoculture can’t, not because of some antic artifacts like religion and secular BS. But it didn’t happen, 9/11 and fear did. France went hard with laws against muslims that were knee jerk reactions and unfair. It’s a spiral that ended with 90s born French citizens who pretty much have nothing to do with Islam, committing suicide in the worst way possible.

It’s not about Syria. At all. That’s a scapegoat for politics and international affairs. But everyone buys it, it’s so much easier than focus on what France and only France knows and needs to tackle since forever: its weird ass racism hidden in plain sight.

There’s a say in my country, “arab’s work”. It means shitty ass job. Doing some arab’s work means you’re doing the worst kind of work. You would think that this say would have gotten out of fashion through immigration, it didn’t. Way too many white people in France believe this, I’m not exaggerating. Then I will always remember that mid day news about that highly educated arab who couldn’t find a job in France because of his name and had found one in the UK. And it’s like, shit happens. Like it’s not a HUGE issue that needs to be fixed because what kind of fucking hope can you have if the best of the best is judged, stigmatized and stuck in a spiral of unemployment and incomprehension in the country he is born in. It’s just asking for anger/desperation to grow as much as it can for all the people who are not even in this favorable situation. And it did. Radical religious assholes only have to scoop them up. Those kids are craving for respect and purpose and they get that in spades with religion, it’s not rocket science.

France is this great place that encourages you to the “joie de vivre” and independence of thoughts but hasn’t been able to materialize that unless you’re white, drink wine and tolerate Jesus. France is this country that was absolutely right in not wanting to attack Iraq after 9/11 but bombed Syria 24 hours after local terrorism happened.

France can lead the West in hypocrisy, It’s painful to see. You were supposed to be better than that.

Within a 50 meters/100 feet radius of my place

None of that existed a year ago. The elephant is already gone as there is a big ass Magneto instead.

I finished my online portfolio:

Which finally sports a sound design demo, check it out here it’s the first video: http://harold.la

Man, so much work is going on. Physically in shape more than ever, just in need of some right shoulder massage (bass killing me…). I might post more pictures of my face, trying to get a window in the present for my future self. That’s what’s up bruh.

I don’t know, Barack. Invoking “sickness of the mind” sounds so terribly middle age-ish and ignorant. Plenty of not so bright people don’t go on killing rampage like that. They might throw hands at you while drunk, that’s it.

B, I think the problem is in the culture. The environment is making people sick. That’s the constant.

You don’t need gun laws because of those constant shootings and dead bodies, you need gun laws because it just makes sense to heavily regulate something that is designed to kill in a modern society. But that will not change the environment.

I can see the cocktail: heavy religion mixed with bullying culture, heavy binary world where you’re either good or bad, add some incomprehensible student debt and some of those kids reaching their 20s lose it. Boomers still don’t get the massive shift we have been going through and I’m not downplaying the effects on people starting their lives in this mess.

Gun laws won’t stop kids to feel desperate and angry, B. I think those shootings also make us numb because a lot of us know the huge task that is to redirect a culture that has always been very content with brutality and death.

I see them kids running in the Baldwin Hills with the US ARMY shirt, being yelled at, it breaks my heart. I see new Virtual Reality technology coming out soon and one of the big demo from last month involves holding guns and shooting at people. And of course culturally I’m supposed to WOOHOO this hard and ignore potential impact on people living in sick environments that is, tons of people.

There’s a lot of shifting to do.

So there’s this big mess about ads and iOS9 and how Apple is going to make money and screw so many people etc.

Web 1.0 was full of pop up ads, it was terrible. Web 2.0 was supposed to be the clean web for which we subscribe to (Flickr being the poster child). But Google happened and people wanted everything for free, and everything for free has a price: the web we have today, full of scripts, tracking, hidden ads etc.

It doesn’t matter so much to me. I have always found that most of the best content online is not from websites running ads and in need of revenue. It’s from people writing good stuff, for free. Because they are real.

It is a constant to me.

So many articles trying to make it like they are real, deep reflections on subjects but they just look like so scholar and empty in the end. It makes sense, those writers are getting paid. Headlines are all about money.

Full RSS subscription has been the absolute best to me. Pure content, nothing else. It’s probably the best thing that ever happened to the web.

Back in 2011 I made this and it’s still fucking relevant. 

People just gave up choice and privacy completely to brands like Google and Apple, and I’m not talking just about devices and services but also ads (basically Google distributes all the ads on the internet) and hosting (Apple’s 30% cut on anything, all the time, forever). That’s gallons of Kool-aid.

People don’t realize that for example they go to Gamasutra to read an article from Warren Spector on a page serving ads, when the article has been available on that dude’s blog through RSS without ads, a day or two prior.

For the big news, they are everywhere for free outside the web! Yes, paid by ads but their nature is different: ads in a magazine or on TV are not making my hands or TV choke, nor do they track me all around.

People are forgetting that we actually can have a fast, clean, relatively private internet. You just need to fight for it. Never stop to create either. Your think piece/rant might be far more influential than you think.

The last technology we need is super easy micropayment to bypass tech and news giants, then we’ll be good.