Category: Me Myself&I

Me, holding my sister for the first time.

It’s baby time in France. So many of them in a couple of months. I’m afraid for them, their future. But for now when they are babies and discovering the world, being the cutest tyrants literally pooping the weirdest shit with their brand new buttholes, they’re great. You don’t see time go by. I remember that with my lil’ sister. I took that time very seriously, observing how fascinating it is to have a small human grow up. The first laughs and first steps, fucking amazing. The puppy effect.

But that’s the start, the easy part. Then they are twenty and don’t know what to do in life and in the world of today, it’s more dramatic than at any time previously in history.

That early 2010 generation is going to end up hating us so hard when they’ll understand what world we’re leaving them with. "hey it’s the boomers’ fault, those greedy fuckers” would be my answer but that doesn’t solve anything.

I think I would do a pretty good dad. I know too much attention is the worst and I know what damages no attention at all brings in, so I’d be able to balance it out. Thanks to a life filled with great women, I took notes and I’d be good at nurturing her/him. I already have this role business wise. Counseling stuff, I’m good at that.

But maybe I would be the worst a “I’ve been through this you’ll go through this too you little bitch” asshole-ish type. Or maybe I would destroy his hopes and trust because I would tell him how the world is everything but far from being fair.

Whatever. I don’t have kids!

You don’t explain RSS. You show how it works, the person uses it the next day and then it’s done. He/she’s hooked. Things you see on Twitter and Facebook? They most likely come from people using RSS readers to fetch news like mad men.

Google Reader is dead and that’s a good thing.

Now, we’ll be forced to fill the hole that Reader will leave behind, and there’s no immediately obvious alternative. We’re finally likely to see substantial innovation and competition in RSS desktop apps and sync platforms for the first time in almost a decade.

Very true.

Also, YES FINALLY JESUS FUCKING CHRIST. I’m still a bit mad at developers, working with an undocumented API for years without thinking about that day when Google will do whatever they want, as they always do. I don’t understand how developers can be fine with hours and hours of work being ditched forever. Shutting down a service is much worse than making a technology evolve, it’s better to have something broken than non-existent at all. Fixing VS crying.

Now dear developers,

Desktop: I don’t want my news in a browser tab, ever again. I don’t like chilling, reading news and have my machine spin like I’m rendering 3D for LOTR when I know that I can load these feeds really fast with a desktop app. Go desktop. This slow ass web shit has to stop.

OPML: I know it sucks for developers because it makes people able to jump in/out of their apps, it makes them independent the total opposite of what Feedly Flipboard and others are trying to do. Do not lock me in with sign ups. The WEB is the service, you provide SOFTWARE, I take care of the rest thanks.

Otherwise be wild, innovate (Dave Winer is right about the unread items count BS, but I don’t necessarily want a river either). I know sync is a big deal for a lot of users but it’s also a complex problem for developers. I think we can live without it, missing a couple items or reading them again isn’t a big deal when the app is fast (I used GreatNews now Veen Feed Reader and Weave). Keyword being fast.

I dream of being able to click a rss link that would open my rss client and ask me in which category I’d like to put this subscription in. All private. I share through the Windows 8 charm thingy  where/when I want. All neat.

Almost a decade reading RSS everyday. I can’t think of an internet without it.

Another life form alive!

Last weekend I went to my foster home family, catching up with the new baby delivered by my cousin, sister. I don’t know, we grew up together that’s all. See why I hate categories and labels? Always fucked my life up.

I never can do anything there. I’m just back. I’m just there, like I started. I legally have not direct connection, culturally feeling so much wider but staying in the picture. Like she told me “you are here, you are in Paris, Hollywood, you can feel comfortable anywhere!” I guess it’s true, I am a chameleon man. But you need to be a bit invisible to do that well, sometimes it’s weird to be in the background, Bruce Wayne was once again crying on the phone the other day about that.

The thing when I go there is that it’s like playing with the radio, moving through frequencies from left to right. I get to see or go by my past from being a kid in a village, to driving to parties with a girlfriend to a city I used to go to skate all the time, memories jumping in and out let’s move the slider to the right, fast forward to hopes and desires of “making it” in France, the bitter side of realizing that it’s not going to happen because we’re all stupid.

Then I’m back at my parents to park grandpa’s car that I use and which also, contains memories. Then it’s dinner time with them, the kind, sweet and horribly stuck up parents. Then I’m back to the crib, English resumes. And the internet, the world at my fingertips.

Twice a year. It’s fucking amaz-hausting. The dreams I get from all this shit? Priceless.

It’s going to be a theme this year I guess, I’m going to look back a bit. Ten years that I’ve been living in the same place -a bit less the past few years- and ten years that I’ve been blogging. Next year right but I was already blogging in 2003 on my friend’s site so you shut up.

It’s like all of sudden I realized that I had archives! I have never really spent any time reading back. But hey, let’s look at March 2006, seven years ago. BAM, mind blown: I was already crazy about games and developers, watching documentaries, taking care of my grandparents, complaining about France’s stupid ass work laws, scrapping the surface of the black planet and its struggle, high fiving feminists… And sex. Which I don’t write about anymore though it is kind of central in my life these past few years.

But for the rest, same. Consistent as fuck. Seven years later I can say that gamedev has lost some magic, the world is fucked as dozens of documentaries showed me since then, the grandparents are still a concern but it really feels like it’s not going to be for long…

Also it’s the little things but stuff that I was dreaming of having well, I have them. My fanless computer and Fender Stratocaster are standing there on my left. It’s really enjoyable to read back on your fantasy and dreams, and realize that some happened. All right, that’s like really small ass dreams but I didn’t dream of living in LA, experimenting some epic moments there and yet it totally happened so suck on thisss. It’s the thing to me these days, I realize I’m part of this extremely small number of totally free black men in the world, I’m part of the 0.0001%.

So I’m really asking myself where to go from there, besides nowhere. Pondering. I need to stop watering down my intensity. I need to fuel it into something that grows. More work is always a good answer, amirite.

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.