Category: Me Myself&I

I went to bed with this number, 20 times.

I woke up, thought about it again. 20 times. The median white family in the US has twenty times more wealth than the median black family. I don’t know for you but I can’t even really grasp what it means. Twice as much, I can and it’s already a lot. Four times? I can get it and I”m all grossed out. Twenty times? I still haven’t heard anyone being like “wow if we have riots again I’ll know why amirite” and I didn’t see this document being reblogged and reposted. Gay rights, women rights animal rights whatever but no black people rights. People don’t share this shit. That’s too scary. That’s searching for trouble. Why is that?

If it’s twenty times in the US I can’t even imagine what’s like in France, probably forty? We’ll never know though.

And what the fuck am I hoping for? I don’t know, just jumping through hoops. Feeling sweaty.

It’s still like the jungle and it’s not just sometimes.

After watching a couple of action movies (The Hobbit, Spiderman Dark Knight RIses etc) and animation movies (Madagascar and Ice Age), I wonder when blockbusters will be entirely 3D (comedy, drama and human stuff are better without computers).

Just render the all thing… Facial expressions are not that interesting in action movies anyway.

I thought it would be the case today. There’s no real need of humans anymore. At best it reduces possibilities, at worst it absolutely kills immersion. First Person View is something easy to do in 3D and we’re just starting with that (The Hobbit cave scene and Madagascar’s circus one). The two 3D blockbusters are for kids but the camera work is amazing and smells like freedom compared to the green screen + meat sausages + 3D rendering combo.

How much would it cost to New Zealand if to make a Lord of the Ring movie, you only needed 3D artists and render farms? There’s an entire industry built on top of this franchise there. And Hollywood, oh boy.

But for now VFX companies are taking punches in the face, for the exact same reasons than the game industry: very fast technology evolution, over populated work pool, bad management, high competition and yet huge amount of work. So weird.

Nevertheless, I can’t wait for much more fully computer-generated movies because of the fascinating possibility of blurring lines from extreme realism to 2D cartoons all in the same medium (and same tools!). Same as computer games: absolute creative freedom.

For now this power consumes digital creators, quite literally.

Article on junk food in the US.

Nothing new really but a comment grabbed my attention:

If you are disciplined and motivated, you are, you can go "cold turkey" off junk food in one day. This is not heroin or crystal meth, for goodness sakes.

Well I’m not so sure of that at this point. It’s easy if you have been told, or if you had the luck to grow up at a time when junk food wasn’t so crazy. Try to stop someone used to drink Coke not to do so, it really is like a smoker.  The shit is addictive, if you never had anything else, your taste buds are fat ass junkies and junk food is everywhere. There’s no way you can escape just by being “disciplined and motivated” (and that would be easy for me to say so, cozy in my athletic meat suit).

But the problem starts before intake, it starts with the snack culture as the article shows. So yeah don’t fucking snack, it’s the worst health-wise. Only in the US I hear people saying “I had ice cream and coffee for diner!” and be happy about that. You’re gently fucking your body up I guess it’s cool it’s yours but again, I see the differences with France’s bodies and we don’t ever do that kind of stuff. I mean we used to not to. The snack culture didn’t invade us so much in the 90s but  the 00s? Of course, obesity exploded. So if I look at the chain of events:

Obesity <= Junk food <= Snack culture <= Family workload <= Illuminati (kidding hey what’s this moving red point on the wall)

One thing that I find amazing is the amount of engineering, the incredible amount of data used to hack our diets, our brains, our sensory systems. If only we were using that kind of resources for the benefits of us all…

The core problem with facebook graph and social recommendation in general is that people’s friends are rarely the best source of recommendations for anything. This isn’t high school (or high school’s extension, college). I don’t hang out solely with people who all share the same interests and tastes I do. I have a lot of friends whose taste in food is awful so I don’t really need their restaurant recommendations. I have a lot of friends who have very different taste in music than I do so I don’t really care what they’re listening to.

I join social networks to socialize with my friends, not ask them what products and/or services to use. This all seems to me like the tail wagging the dog. Facebook is trying to create an opportunity for more monetization of friends’ activity without actually enhancing the social aspect of their social network.

No matter how cool graph is or how good the algorithms may become, it still won’t actually be useful.

Dear Mark,

This reader is right. Stop trying. The network you built is too big now you can’t engineer that social stuff, people make no sense remember? Just let people use FB for a fee and leave them alone with ads harassment and what not. 1 billion people, $15 a year bam, 15 billion a year that’s better than your current 7.

I know you try hard, tweaking algorithms, pushing me to “subscribe” and unveil my preferences but there’s nothing you can really do to enhance the social aspect of your social network because after being connected to someone, receiving updates videos and pictures, more socialization means moving my ass and actually see the person.

FB is valuable to me, I’d like to pay a few bucks and be left the fuck alone by corporations and greed. Come on, Mark.

So I guess you read this too (note in the usual way we can’t have nice things, a small bank needed assistance and got it refused) .

If we can just print money and give it to banks, why don’t we give it directly to people to use it?

If less jobs are needed than ever because of massive wealth and machines then why are we fighting for them, to pay taxes to “save” banks while we struggle for no reason?? It’s a damn shame.

You’d better vote for me in 2017, shit is going to change.

So it’s Christmas I’ve been freshly adopted or so. My toys had always been reused ones from other kids I grew up with in my foster family or fixed broken toys. I never felt it was a problem but I felt that it meant some things, that you’re supposed to get more money to be more happy or something along those lines.

In my new family I’m getting new toys here and there. It’s Christmas, I’m on the toy floor of a Paris left bank prestigious store and there’s a lot of kids screaming and stuff going on, I’m not used to the city yet. I’m supposed to choose a present and it’s kind of weird to have all that power all of sudden. I don’t even know what to choose. I think at that time I was really into playing marbles so a bag of those would have been great. Everything’s great! I’m in a toy store how awesome is that. Just the trip is satisfying and exciting. And then, on top of a shelve I see him, the red robot:

I guess my face really lit up but to me it wasn’t even going to be possible. Way too expensive. It was out of reach in my life before but now with grandparents enjoying their grandson and new retirement life, it happened.

“would you like to have this one?” I probably just nodded with my eyes open wide.

The thing is a beauty, huge in my small hands:

It transforms into this:

I wasn’t a Transformer fan, to me it was the perfect copy of Robotech’s Valkyrie mechs. I guess I was right:

Of course I broke one of its arms and felt really bad for like a year. Anyway. It was weird because I was happy but it had been a little too easy. Really? I can just get whatever? That seems wrong. And as awesome the toy was, you know how kids are. After a while it was just another toy, a nice trophy. Lego had a bigger replay value and all that made me think hard about what being happy means, early on. What money does or doesn’t. The sweet spot between enjoying life and becoming money’s slave. Really conflictual in our lives but I know exactly what line I want to follow (even though life is fucking plans up). I guess I got a head start on this.

That’s what my grandma called her husband today, calmly after looking at him. She’s right. I kind of hope that he’ll pass away peacefully this year because it is just unsustainable. I’m sorry.

The dissonance with this crazy ass L.A. story with a black ex-cop killing white people because of their presumed roles in physical abuse and racism in the LAPD -who knew? Oh wait- which in return shot two Asian ladies in a van thinking it was the said ex-cop. Police brutality, race issues, L.A. me playing dozens of songs from Los Angeles based black bands and bam 40 mn an hour of train later my white family, an old man to maneuver around in his wheel chair, my dad and his broken leg, my mom freaking out over stupid little dramas. Me, helping as much as I can. I even tried to fix my mom’s unsupported, old accountant software by hijacking its Access database. It didn’t work. Too old. Terrible software design. Nonchalance: casual lack of concern. I hate when you slap me with that, France.

It’s brutal. I have two house music tracks ready to ship and I can’t even do it, I’m so not in the mood. My brain is filled in. If only there was only that. It’s too much but I can’t look away.

I think I am kind of a zombie too today. Oh shit I forgot, my cooking tops died. Things suck sometimes.

Last weekend at my parents. The usual except for one thing, my dad telling me about his business plan for his passivehaus company he just founded. We talked for hours about everything about it. I might do some marketing for him, he’s so bad at that (dad, you don’t sell with specs you need a story). I’m born in it they say.

It’s great to see him excited, taking risks. It’s a great idea and I can’t help but dream of doing the same in L.A. re-building entire blocks using the most of nature and technology. Damn, I wish I could especially for black people for whom social mobility is being refused. At least have a home that doesn’t make you want to go anywhere else and frankly, that is all  what is missing in beautiful Watts or South L.A.

Anyway.

I’m kind of jealous of him. Sometimes I wish I was a 6’ 2 blonde dude with blue eyes born in the 50s. It’s not even confidence at this point, it’s another world. Like for him mine. I was telling him about Zynga and Notch, how nothing makes sense today from a company born in 2007 valued at $billions and already kind of dead to a dude releasing a non-finished game that made him last year $270 million. It’s scary as fuck. Not the risk taken or the amount of efforts you put into something, but the fact that the outcome is highly unpredictable and rarely positive today. Add corporations agendas and lobbies, governments doing the same and your company dies you barely understood how or why. It’s brutal.

He doesn’t feel that. He never experienced that. He just hears about it, looks at me not knowing what the fuck to think about. I know right? So when I see that he’s investing all his money in his new venture, I’m excited and I try not to delve into the negative aspect of the economic global world today. Right on dad!

He’s already getting enough negative energy in France where an entrepreneur starting something passed 60 is asked “why would you do that? Just chill with your miserable retirement checks until you die in front of your TV”.

I’m proud of him.

It is hard to read that stuff, over and over again.

I’m still in the process of swallowing what I read about Los Angeles and black people. I’m still learning how black lives don’t have any value in this world holy shit it hurts. I’m analyzing, I try to find escape roads, hope but all I can find at the end is anger. I see the system, its evolution. I see how I escaped it by being a lucky ass orphan.

No pressure at all.