Category: Me Myself&I

Isn’t everything weird these days?

People protest about the 1% making so much money but cyber Monday generated $1.2 billion, up 22% from last year. I didn’t buy anything.

I thought we didn’t have any money? Modern Warfare 3 made  over $1 billion in 16 days. Sixteen days, one game. Explain that to me guys. Not just the financial aspect but how a war game can be so widely welcomed, over and over. Zynga’s IPO and market cap is just… I mean they might be near dead in two years, all this money and BS it’s so sick, really.

The NDAA and SOPA shit fed by corporations’ motherfucking greed. Right during the end of the year when no one really wants to bother about anything but eggnog and food. And Skyrim. Goddamn dragons, son. #whitepeopleescapism

Google and Facebook filtering more and more. People disappearing from my timeline because I don’t interact enough with them so FB decides to not show them to me? Google putting my friend’s results first, here and there, like I haven’t noticed. And this condescending tone big G, Twitter and too many high tech services have toward users doesn’t say that they give a fuck. Machines are supposed to be neutral. That’s the great thing about them. At least it was.

It’s like all of that makes sense, in a bad way.

France Generation-sandwich.

So people born from 1900 to around 1970 in red: basically, it’s no to Europe. Still scared from “Ze Germans” and still think De Gaulle as the Main Man. They don’t speak or read anything but French. They know though, that Europe needs to happen. Once they’ll pass away, because for now those old ass bitches rather go back to the Franc.

The slim orange Yes to Europe? My generations, which started working with the Euro. If I look around me, 80% of us lived or are living or plan to live somewhere else than in France. Some go as far as Australia or California. We’re all kind of reading  and speaking English and we could totally create this federal Europe because we grew up dreaming of and being fed with the American way of Life, freedom and big spaces. But we also know that we’re kind of screwed you know, globalization, fast food and debt culture and all that shit.

The “don’t give a fuck” generation is this generation which doesn’t really feel the need to build anything because they already have so much. They don’t have a conflict with boomers and my generation is translating everything to them, the entire US cultural influence and internet memes included. They’re probably scared to death for the future though. Or maybe not.

So only the smallest slice of 2011 France population is ready right now for this “political Europe”. Politicians, good luck with that.

har0ld’s groove by Harold

I guess I’ll have to decide which service to use in the future but it’s a tough one.

Disclaimer: high thinking ahead.

I was following a Twitter conversation about race, black people and all that. People disagree, some think that race doesn’t exist and some are saying that fuck yeah it does and both are right.  African-Americans and the history of US slavery created a situation where they cannot not see race. But it brings up a lot of problems.

So there’s race from a scientific point of view and race, from a social-cultural point of view. Science says race doesn’t exist, -one “race”, the human race- and science is right. Science tells us that everybody on earth comes from Africa which has a bigger genetic variation than any other place in the world (I still think it’s amazing). Basically, human race started black and mutated, following the environment and nature.

Socially and culturally, race shows that it’s obviously segregated and racially tense. I know the West economy going down doesn’t help but it is tense, from hard right wings raising up in Europe to heavy segregation in the US. or even something as “light” as asking a black president if he’s really American and to prove it with his birth certificate. And him doing it. I’m so mad at that.

BUT! I know we can live together without even bother about cultural differences. It happens here and there, at microscopic scales right, but it happens, more and more. This is to me where Nature filters things out, where people knowing stuff about other cultures, living with them and in no way afraid of them, and naturally go interracial and build solid ground for the future to be less racist. It’s happening right now, there’s no need of politics. There’s just a need of more of that. The more communities, the less it happens.

It’s a mistake wanting to stand by race or not race. Life isn’t static, it’s moving and changing. Things that are very segregated at one point of the day somewhere in the US are totally not somewhere in France at another point of the day, and vice versa.There is no standing in Life, there is moving. We need directions. For that we need a destination which is pretty clear to me: being able to live with whoever the hell you want with nobody having anything to say about it and knowing as much as you can about all the great stuff of as much culture you can absorb. The more people like that, the better right?

Communities have this paradoxical effect of making your outside you stronger and weakening your inner you. That’s why we should not think too much as communities because it automatically creates a frontal friction between cultures and the dominant one will always win, as every statistics about race issues and history, show. When the friction happens at a more atomic scale -one to one in a work environment for example- things go smoother, change happens. There’s no full rejection of the other, there’s discussion because fear isn’t there. I mean, it’s the only way it works, if you demand stuff in a Black Panther way you just get murdered. And worse, nobody gives a shit.

I know it’s hard. In my 1.5-2% black people in the game industry I feel it, it’s an internal battle that triggers so many questions and often makes me want to be part of a supportive black community, all cozy and shit. I’m condemned to have my ass between two chairs, as we say in French. But somehow I think I change things, this way. And learn so much.

So,  I don’t know. I know it’s easier for me to follow an in-between line with these issues. That’s all I know, I learned how to deal with it. I know science is the most stable ground about human differences (straight line) and we are gravitating around it according to history, our beliefs and personal experiences (blue sine). It’s so dumb, somehow.

Adoption, race issue, and many more stuff are occupying my brain these days. Same as in the streets, I try to evict all these motherfuckers with my brain police but they hold tight, they didn’t get the memo to GTFO, apparently. /insert pepper spray pun

I could lay down exactly what I think about all that but I’ll save you some time. The point is, I just have this particular view and I censure myself a lot more these days. Audience, Twitter/FB and the rest don’t help.

I read this week that adopted people had often this problem of being seen as rude, because of the all detached from birth parents thing. So true. Dear friends, I save our relationship by not seeing you. I fight hard to not make the mistake of saying hard cold shit in people’s face. I just deleted a sentence saying that fake smiles and ethnocentrism in the society I live in are a pain in the ass, see? I swear I fight hard, trying to be as diplomat as I can. At the same time, that’s what people always like in me: honesty. Making them laugh or think by dropping the bomb.

I should write stuff for stand up comedians. Getting paid to tell sulfuric, acid, disrespectful stuff like no one else. Hell I even shock myself sometimes, that’s a good sign.

Laughing is such a good therapy.

We’re living in awful, inefficient, costly houses. The more I know about building houses, the more I cringe with what we use. We have the knowledge and mastering to build houses that cost near to nothing /a year, provide excellent comfort and save the environment while costing pretty much the same. People don’t even know that! They think they have to get a big house (Americans have 3X more personal space now than they did fifty years ago) and a huge mortgage or super high rent for which they are working hard, to feel great. What if the working hard part was used for a real change, something that would make you save money and more importantly, make you happy. Healthy. Your kids.

On the side, it’s funny to me that people go from Black Friday consumerism craziness to extreme low-life tiny house weird trend. Can’t we just try to find a fucking balance instead of going all in, all the time?  Shit is exhausting.

I cannot stop thinking about locally produced prefab passive houses for everybody -kind of Ikea/Lego concept but with your house- and encourage people to deploy over the territory instead of having everybody living on the same spot: almost 30% of the population of England lives around London; Los Angeles population density: 3,124/km², Paris: 25,417/km². It’s ridiculous. There is room. How can we not have allergies and shit with this concentration of people and machines and rats. You see the bad spiral we are in? Buy more stuff. More medicine and air purifier and clean cars and fixing services.

Just this business idea would change so much stuff. Create strong local networks of people building a new paradigm. Cleaning up, spreading out our cities, progressively. No centralized architecture around a megalopolis but a peer to peer network around human-sized cities. Increasing Quality of Life, a house at a time. A neighborhood at a time. Disconnecting the amount of money you make and comfort. Because we can, today. I’m so tired of seeing awesome, functional, zero net energy home prototypes at Inhabitat and just prototypes.

What if people stop thinking that they need to be the 1% to be happy? The 99% hate this 1% but would LOVE to be part of it. That’s the biggest issue to me. Building super great inexpensive houses would kill current property value and make a lot of people unhappy. I don’t give a shit. You have been happy paying and financing your giant useless home and now, after you lose some, you’ll be happy again but with more people around happy too. That would be nice, but some people really get off by seeing others not having as much as they own. I don’t have any plan for these assholes.

I bet states would go nuts, too. People getting more independent, almost off the grid? Less power to them, more to people. Homeschooling would probably get bigger. Going to school sucks, anyway.

Change is hard. But I love to make this first domino fall and watch the rest shift, one by one, at least in my mind.

FocusJam by Harold

And also:

Much more to come… Peace.

The process is always the same: play music to forget about this stupid world, closing my eyes and forgetting about things that are on the surface, I’m playing. After a while I am not thinking anymore about anything, I’m in the feel, in the patterns, thinking ahead, getting ready to land my fingers on strings and move them accordingly.

And then after a while in the Zone, somehow, my brain jumps to a memory. Often one that I never or barely thought about before. Some are insanely old, some are insignificant, but always feel real, like the exact feeling of being in a swimming pool around Lyon when I was like 13, the exact feeling of being in this small room to change clothes. Or a stormy weather over my small French village and going back home and eating sautés mushrooms when I hadn’t been even adopted yet.

These portals are only happening when playing music closing my eyes, improvising. Sometimes it’s so disturbing, so real, that it puts me out of the Zone. In some cases I was so amazed to remember something that I had to immediately stop playing, and being like “but… How? How do I remember that right now, how is that so crystal clear?” 

It’s awesome and scary at the same time. Often, it gives me a sense of what I have accomplished or it gives me a sense of “wow, that feeling was so great”, even if it’s just like a memory of making a left turn on Sunset Blvd with the sun reflecting on cars windshield or sitting down in the grass in Vincennes, watching people. It’s the little things and the perspective from them.

Of course, pot enhances that feeling. Sometimes I swear, even smell and odors are almost coming back. Like I can almost get a sense of it. I cut so much information by closing my eyes that everything else gets bigger.

It’s all about spending hundreds of hours listening, I guess. Listening to music, copying notes, listening to my copy/paste play, listening to my own play, listening to my breathing, listening in general, at some point I suppose that my brain kind of gets split up in two with an half being a spectator and the other being like “btw, I have this little super HD 5.1 4K in odorama movie of you being lonely, wanna watch it?” and I’m all like, “shoot”.

But it’s not just that. I can’t count how many times I found solutions to problems by improvising funky bass lines and bam, “Jesus fuck, of course!!”, or “oh smart, I totally need to try that in fact, I’m gonna do this right now”. /puts his bass back on its stand.

Music and non-visual focus are so different from this visually over-saturated world we live in. It feels damn good.

Tod Seelie photography.

I feel that a real gender war is going to happen. Historically, we never really fought over this, women were too busy cooking in the kitchen. This era started to end with my mom’s generation. Gender conflict is the last conflict. It has to happen.

I read all the Kotaku stuff for instance, and here what’s happening: there’s a lot of sexism in computer games, OK. Writers call it out, people react, some people think they are wrong some people think they are right. At the end, the most annoyed crowd -the sexist douchebags- is taking it personally and gets apeshit in the comments section and everywhere on the internet and probably in their lives.

As a side-effect, a lot of guys who didn’t subscribe to sexism nor feminism are feeling that they have to choose a side. They obviously choose the side where there is more bros. Bros before… You get it. They also feel being treated like shit with these serious articles about women representation in the biggest entertainment medium of the after boomer world.

As a feminist dude who doesn’t like religious systems, I never spend time to proselyte guys. If you can’t see by yourself the benefits or try to see what world a much better equality would bring, I will not change your mind and I will not feed your troll attitude. You need to be ready for it, you know, Yoda style and all that. Usually happens when your little boy’s club-bro world goes down.

But anyway, my point is that conflict is def heating up and I feel that it’s going to get ugly, uglier. Here’s why:

-Women are for the most part in the West at work and for many, running a triple job madness: (shitty) job, child job and house job. They are pissed and tired but also ready to rumble. Because they do rumble, right fucking now.

-Men are starting to see the benefits of not working like crazy and enjoying hanging around with a stroller.

-This creates a trend where women work even more than before while still not getting the top spots and benefits, and men work less while maintaining all the privileges they got from decades of a dude-centered economy, like not cleaning anything behind them or not knowing what stuff to buy to sustain the house.

-Therefore families are not traditional families anymore: for the first time, family isn’t the corner stone of society; single mom, a single dad, a gay couple, a grandmother living with her daughter, you name it. Siblings and friends, parents, everything is mixed up now. Everybody can take any “role”. Stability isn’t the norm anymore. No need to shut up, then. Women access rebellion as much as men do.

–Gender selection and imbalance. “These authors report that more girls have been killed in the last 50 years, just because they were girls, than the number of males who were killed in all the wars of the 20th century.” Yes, you read that right.

-Everywhere in the world where women are treated with less respect than a piece of furniture, they are fighting back because enough is enough. When you can be gang raped and set on fire in your own home, just like that, I think you have the right to defend yourself and not trust any men, ever. This shit is happening everyday and now that information flows so fast, women are talking about it more than ever. They are empowering themselves against the insane violence men can inflict to them and it’s changing things, as we speak. Meanwhile they work like crazy, I mean they are slaves for us. All our digital stuff is built by young, amazing Chinese women hands. Someday, they will understand the power they have and it will be payback time.

-Bi and transgender people. They are around, they are getting louder and society hasn’t done anything for them to live without fear and guilt yet. As gay people transformed our society and our views on relationships, bi and trans people will too. They will question our stupid bias and irrational behaviors toward sex. It’s gonna be fun.

All that together, projected in the next few years means more friction. More friction means a higher chance of extremes. Which means war, blood, cut penises, bad behaviors, and so forth.

It’s not that I want to see this to happen, but if we need to go through that so that we can have a better society, let’s do this. Historically, it seems that the only way we make progress is through violence, pain and suffering. We’re that smart.

I was watching Terminator 2 the other day. It’s a good action movie when in the first ten minutes, you know what’s going on and you are totally hooked on “what is going to happen next?”.

But it also reminded me of something that seemed to only touch me, during the 90s when I saw it for the first time.

“Bummer. That’s uh that’s a bummer, man.”

The man responsible for Skynet’s creation, Miles Dyson, is black. The black engineer is the start of a nuclear holocaust that would kill billions of lives.

Watching the scene where Sarah tries to kill Miles in front of his family after he tells his wife how excited he is about this new microprocessor, is kind of painful. I remember being young and feeling so much for the character. “This is so unfair!”. Not just because of the Miles line, “so you’re judging me for something I haven’t done yet, how were we supposed to know?” to which Sarah replies that he’s still fucking guilty but because for ONCE a black man on screen was super smart. For ONCE that black dude wasn’t wearing gold chains or dancing, he was a programmer and allegedly, the best on Earth.

You can’t have a better role model. Except when that guy happens to start Judgement Day and has to die for that.

At that time I had a computer, my own computer. Except one, none of my white friends had one in their house, let alone just for them. It was still so rare in France. I had worked and invested money to buy a sound card for it. I couldn’t grasp the feeling but I remember this all scene left me empty. From there, the movie just wasn’t the same to me.

Terminator 2 is one of the biggest movie of the last 20 years, ranked #84 on the all time worldwide box-office. Impact.

Now I read this excellent article: declining numbers of blacks seen in math, science. Science, Technology, Engineering, Math. STEM. Where some jobs for us humans being replaced by machines, are left. In biological and biomedical sciences:

6,957 PhDs were awarded in 2009. Only 88 went to black men — that’s 1 percent. (176 went to black women.)

Note how gender overrides ethnicity for the better, even if it’s still so bad for women.

It reminds me of this other big 90s movie, Boyz N The Hood. Furious Styles is the true hero of the movie and of course, everybody forgets about him, he’s too deep. Like he says, math is the only thing taught at school that is not compromise by racial issues and ethnicities. I wasn’t good at math at school, but I loved the agnosticism about it. The cold, non biased, maybe not perfect, truth of it. Anyway, the fact that Doughboy the motherfucker with no future became the huge, iconic hero of BNTH is terrible. It’s fucking terrible.

I could write about the weird and patronizing Silicon Valley’s way to deal with minorities, the unbreakable “pattern matching” system that automatically makes things harder or the black dudes cleaning my street while white people “go to work”, but you get the idea.

Looking at the Terminator 2 casting, Joe Morton, the guy playing the black scientist had and has a great career of movies and TV shows. He lives with his wife and their three kids, since 1984. Meanwhile, Arnold, Linda and especially Edward had some chaotic fucked up future waiting for them. Talk about saviors!