Category: Me Myself&I

So I learned about Mandingo parties the other day. There’s an obviously nsfw documentary on Vice. You know, it’s the kind of thing I thought was some suburban legend but hell no, it exists.

Well, the documentary covers a Mandingo business in Florida. Florida, man. Giant snails sinkholes and swingers, Florida isn’t about the average.

But I saw that it was not just there. It’s not that a career as a black escort would interest me -though I’d probably do a great one, let’s be real- it’s the women’s psychology, sexual appetite and social construct that interests me.

How does it feel to grow up scared of black men and 30 years later craving for their cocks? Do you feel liberated, finally, or is that a twisted game of white guilt and fantasy? Also, it is well documented that a lot of women’s highest sexual drive happens in their 40s and beyond, how much does it weigh in? What about all these -white- guys with small penises who don’t want that swinger lifestyle, do they get as many plastic tools as possible? How do they deal with that and their maybe past and glorious careers as powerful men?

Is religion and its terrible view on sexuality responsible for people going nuts over sex after decades of denial in their lives?

There are so many things going on, it’s fascinating.

Small tool to write without distraction. It’s free, you can save in .rtf .odt. It’s the best I found.

I made four themes with wallpapers found on the web a while ago:

Nothing fancy, but I thought I would share. Now write these thoughts!

A lot of creative people see the world this way:

Boxes, nice ones. You go there. You’re part of that. Your role is. There are sound effects, music, sound design. There are music genres.

But I mostly see it this way:

There’s a pool. The audio pool, for instance. In it, there’s everything that triggers sound whatever it is. Then I use this whatever it is for a purpose, to convey something. Distinctions between a bass guitar or a 8bit bleep don’t matter as much as we believe they do.

It’s this philosophy that keeps bringing my ass to Japanese animated movies because this is exactly what they do. They don’t care, they use whatever could work and be original. Soderbergh cries out about how we use music in films today and it’s because of seeing things in perfectly marketed boxes, again. Same with the game industry except that there, boxes are titanium-reinforced stainless steel boxes. Hence stagnation, mutation is not encouraged.

And it’s the same with so many, many things. Where are my games with vintage filters rendering, fucked up 2D perspective, fisheye effect and so forth? Where are my giant trackpads for two players or more where people finally don’t need to try to look through their hands to play a touch game? Why can’t we have a contract for gay people that just gives the exact same rights as for marriage but -wait for it- we don’t call it marriage so that old people STFU? “I got our G-union contract, baby. we’re set!”

Are we humans so dumb that we need to put people and things in virtual, non-existing-outside-our-minds boxes even when we know that it’s fundamentally a broken system? Disappointing. Dumb.

It’s from 2009 and I watched it again because you need to be physically ready for the visual explosion. It’s insane, you can pause every single frame and contemplate so many things. The animation is incredible, it’s crazy, full of expression.

Seven years in production, bam. A review says “you haven’t seen animation until you’ve seen this movie” and I agree.

Get it, watch it.

So in one case we have a 33 year old black man, ex police officer who could be legally fired for filing a false police report even if the report was true. He got fired. This man accused the LAPD of excessive force used, fact denied by the same LAPD who shot 100 bullets in a car by mistake, trying to catch the ex cop. This man sends a message stating the whys and hows of this crazy story, kills 4 people injures 3, hides in the mountains where the cops as the radio communications recorded showed "Burn that fucking house down," "Fucking burn this motherfucker," only wanted to smoke him out. Official death is gunshot wound to head.

Crime: Murder, attempted murder.

In another case we have a 19 year old white dude, a stupid ass little fucker who had nothing to do with his life but follow his dumb radicalized brother. He kills 5 people, injures 299 others, plans to do more random damage. He hides in a boat, exchanges gunfire with police and is captured and treated for severe injuries.

Crime: Using and conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction resulting in death; malicious destruction of property resulting in death.

…

It’s murder, you malicious sick fucks.

Also, why the FUCK didn’t they burn that boat down? Don’t even try to answer.

On November 20th, 2011 I started a blog post with these words: I feel that a real gender war is going to happen and finishing with All that together, projected in the next few years means more friction. More friction means a higher chance of extremes.

Femen, almost a week ago.

Go women.

Google announced today that it’s shutting down Google Reader on July 1, 2013. It’s not a big surprise to us as we knew that it was going to happen someday but may be not so soon. Anyways, R.I.P. Google Reader – we loved you and we’ll miss you as developers although you never gave us an official API. ;-)

Spotted on a developer’s website, which is the average developer reaction after Google announced the big change.

Imagine you run a business, some dude connects an audience and builds a business around this, all on his own. You close shop without notice or helping out this business to run without you and the business is thanking you for these good old days full of uncertainty and stress.

Don’t you want to abuse developers when you seen that kind of shit? Developers are crazy. This “as long as I build things I’m happy, even if they’re destroyed or rendered useless” mentality has to stop. Sustain your work, goddamn.

I’m standing in front of the shop, it’s 11 30am (opens at 10am). No one inside, a sign says that I have to knock if there’s no one at the desk. I do.

I wait a couple of minutes wondering if I should knock harder. A dude shows up behind me and looks like he wants to enter the shop. I recognize the shop owner and say hi. I start to explain my bike brake problem and he’s all like “oh yeah, that’s not the good cable” and I’m all like “yeah, this bike stuff is confusing, so many standards” and he’s going all “meh, not really” on me. Bitch.

“how much does it cost?”

“We’re at 50 euros an hour and it’s probably 15 minutes of work.”

“OK so I leave my bike to you and come back later today?”

“No, keep your bike and come back this afternoon.”

“??? OK, what time?”

“After 3pm.”

“??? OK, thanks.”

I don’t fucking understand how this shop is surviving. I don’t get France. Fifteen minutes of work he could have done with me, chatting and my day would have been different, the future would have been bright.

Of course I’d rather do it my fucking self with services like that, no wonder I dived into independence so hard.

It’s things like this.

I’m bragging and writing how I’m the best thing on earth but I kind of need it, it’s never been that hard in my head. I feel like shit.

I desperately need a job in L.A. I always have been able to do without it for now but I can’t anymore. Last job opportunity looked awesome but before I could make a difference it didn’t happened. Meanwhile the game industry is in full restructuration there, is kind of in a hibernation mode in France. I could rent my apartment at crazy Parisian prices but the place needs quite some work done, for which I don’t really have any budget.

It is such a bad time to leave as my parents def need help and my sister is near useless. I was reading Derek’s blog post (you should subscribe) an American living in Singapore these days and he was talking about how there they’re all about family while they’re all about individuals in the US. Well in Europe we’re both and we are indeed, getting fucked.

Add the immigration layer: I am a permanent resident of the US but I spend too much time outside and they don’t like it. Trust me USCIS, if I had been able to import my tiny world and simply settle, work and pay taxes I would have. But it’s a little more complicated like, a lot. Somehow traveling every couple of months makes me neither American or French. I am this weird English French speaking hybrid who knows that there is not perfect place but hey, turns out you have to choose a fucking destination.

I always found solutions but I can’t find a good one for this big, poisoning headache.

I realize that I don’t’ dream anymore -that is, making plans- and I need to but all I can do is get stuck with odd boring jobs, game development problems or difficulties to focus on sound. Shit.

Well. The decade old black security guard at the Monoprix doesn’t have that kind of problems and I should probably shut the fuck up. Damn it feels good to have a blog.

Steubenville rape case. Another one.

Two weeks ago I saw my feminist crew, all awesome. We don’t talk as much about terrible things in the news like rape cases, how media treats them etc as before because we’re sadly, so used to it. Angry, not surprised.

We walked the streets. We had heated debates, we wrote thousands of pages, we met this way. I still remember the feeling of entering a bar 90% full of women and sit down there like “yes, I’d like to know more it’s interesting and I’m totally not overwhelmed and looking weird”. I was in my early twenties and it would change my life.

Learning that women weren’t coming so much with the help of a dick was amazing. Hurting like “oh shit, the power balance I’ve been told doesn’t exist! Tell me more, damn *recalculate*”, learning things that looked rock solid but in fact weren’t. Two big paradigm shifts in my head were the realization of all the work women do in this world and gets unnoticed for. Unbelievable. Massive failure of a system forgetting half of its population. The second one was realizing how much physical harassment women get and how much rape is something spread out and happening most of the time inside close circles. These twos things made me think hard.

That stuff clearly pushed me away from the classic machismo culture. Which is the only one in the game industry. I was sad to be sick of deep sexism -and thus avoiding bromancing/networking- but I was also happy to get that consistency that I love so much in my head. When news like Lara’s controversy, the lack of women in tech or terrible female characters show up I just stare at it and feel that I made the good decision. Happy to see that the message is spreading, slowly through the now classic explanation-men outrage-backlash-little progress loop.

And then there’s Rihanna and Chris. I never fucking want to hear anything about them, ever.

It’s just that sexism/racism are this big thing reducing my enjoyment in this world by a LOT™Louis CK. Like for all of us actually.