Category: Me Myself&I

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.

The cardinal rule of technology is simple: It must never, ever, under any circumstances, be boring. The engine that motivates consumers to spend hundreds, if not thousands of dollars on a device that’s not essential to furthering our lives is all down to the excitement it gives us.

HA HA HA. I think you are mistaken about technology and innovation. They are supposed to become boring, that’s when you know that most people have access to it and are benefiting from it. That’s when progress actually happens.

What is going on is that computers are hitting the sweet spot of “common appliance”. Everyone has one in his house, nobody is excited by them and yet they are crucial to our lives today, like this dude:

People were excited to see fridges back between the 1920s and 1950s. After that nobody cared and they are still around more than ever! That’s a good thing when disruptive technology becomes something basic, expected.

We’re entering this space and specs hoes, Brand Fanatics are sad. Computers are sliding through the “good enough, we’re around just chill” phase. We all upgraded some electronic devices in the past few years to see that it didn’t change anything really. A tad faster. A bit clearer. Who gives a shit about fridge specs these days? No one. It is good to reach maturity.

The next big thing would be devices that are more convenient –I still can’t believe that we don’t have washable laptop keyboards the filthiest surface on earth-, that don’t need updates every week, that are not locked down to any silo and are energy efficient and cool (heat created is used in some way, tired of having my hands hot).

Appliances, son.

Forget about the stupidly misleading title this is an article I feel.

Again, my story is more complex than that. I have never felt not-black even with zero black people in my life growing up. One of my earliest memory is my foster family smiling and yelling that those people on TV? They are my people.

It was a bunch of black dudes rotating on their backs, on the floor. Probably NYC around 1983-84. And it was immediately cool and felt right even though from that time to the first black friend I would have, over a decade would pass.

To me it was just like “OK, I see my face in the mirror I’m black, black culture is mine. Now, I’m living with white people. Let’s study this shit”. Which I did. In some ways it was super liberating to go anywhere my mind wanted to go. No boxes.

Of course I was the token black friend too, but I wasn’t actively searching for that. With black people it could go from weird disconnection like Danielle is writing about or it would just feel right.

So pretty fast I thought that black identity was an easy thing: are you black? Yes so you have that identity. The end. What you do with your life ain’t nobody’s business. If only it was that simple, though it is. Anyway.

Society later in life wants you to fit a damn box. Or that at least at some point, you fitted a box. I never fitted one, probably never will. I have read so often about the Nerd VS Jock thing but I was both, launching DOOM.EXE AND working on my fade away jump shots after school. It never occurred to me that you kind of had to choose one activity. I mean no, I kind of saw that but it just didn’t seem smart. I wanted it all. Carpe Diem, YOLO all that shit.

The thing is, social relationships happen in a much more efficient way when you are sharing completely an experience. I see it with work all the time, the core element in game development is to have been the nerd at school, shy and getting abused. I wasn’t the bullied nerd and I wasn’t the jock bullying either. I was shy but I could make the entire classroom laugh too. I was enjoying everything I could, avoiding negative bullshit.

And now I’m a unicorn trying to be low key, getting people like “the fuck is this guy about is he real?”. Of course I am.

Maybe I should write a book. The older I get the more I see how unique my point of view is. Like, damn unique.

From my friend’s newsletter:

Follow up: The vast majority of the women in the Ashley Madison Database never used the site, and were most likely fake accounts. So it’s possible people are killing themselves because they were sexting with a bot.

And by people we’re talking about dudes. Unfaithful, weak, stupid dudes.

The biggest take to me is that it proves my point that women don’t search for dicks like all those borderline fake ass stories about male escorts are trying to make it look like. Women are cool. They masturbate if they want to come. Dudes can’t just do that they have to stick it somewhere, that’s our dumb culture. Most dudes still have the belief that fucking is some kind of territorial business whereas women just help themselves to sleep, they don’t need to colonize dicks (which doesn’t mean they don’t like the D you idiot).

Thank you Ashley for giving us data points on this.

So this article has been going around this weekend. Gawker had a lot of articles about Amazon’s workers conditions for the past few years. It is also how most tech companies work: commitment must be way up there. All of that is not new.

• It’s not wrong to work your ass off for a company.
• It’s not wrong for a company to use data to get the best of its employees.

What is wrong is having people being deeply dependent on a salary to have a decent life. Yeah, I question that. There’s too much wealth on this planet or in the US to just close my eyes and be like “this is fine just fuck me up”. 1% owning 99%, don’t forget. Never forget, that’s key in changing how society functions.

Like I tweeted Quality of Life shouldn’t be indexed to work. The good news is we can afford it, the bad news is most people can’t grasp that it’s possible. Jeff Bezos “made” $7B in 45 minutes when Amazon stocks jumped a hundred bucks a few days ago. Do you know how many things you can solve with seven billion dollars? Let me help you: a fucking shit ton.

If those Amazon people didn’t have to think about paying rent –being on average half of what we make right?-, they still would work as hard –I think even harder- but they would be freed from pressure if something happens in their lives it wouldn’t be a big deal, just a change of pace. And maybe they would come back to the hard tech world once they feel like they can again.

Failure costs would be at a minimum instead of a maximum: bankruptcy, guilt, feelings of being worthless etc.  All that, gone. Maybe that job wasn’t for you. Maybe you just needed a break!

We need to stop putting all the pressure on people, that’s why people break not because they work hard. We have wealth and we need to redistribute far more efficiently than the way we’re doing it today which is to sprinkle some money on the poor, allow stupid amounts of taxes to not be collected from a stupidly wealthy crowd and ask the middle to do everything more and harder. That’s imploding right now in our faces.

One more thing: Amazon is huge but Amazon is not profitable. You can’t say that you’re that successful if you’re continuously in the red for 15 years. So maybe if pressure comes off people shoulders they will start working on things that are actually making a nice profit for the retail giant and make customers happier. Just sayin’