Category: Me Myself&I

Back in the 90s, at least in France they were pretty rare. My dad bought a huge one in Canada in ‘91 and I would totally use it a few years later because it’s great when it rains and in Paris, it rains often. I still have this hoodie and still use it to skateboard.

Hoodies are much better than any umbrella, especially on crowded sidewalks. I think a tight hoodie is super sexy on women.

But anyway, I was walking in the suburbs of Paris, in Champs sur marne (East Paris, a bit shady, projects around etc). Winter, rainy, 6 or 6:30pm. Dark. I’m wearing this hoodie and I remember thinking how neat the sound is inside the hood and how when rain is fat like it was, water was going through the hood like it was a piece of paper. I was a little lost and I needed the time.

I approached this woman who is trying to enter her car. Nobody around but me and her. I already feel tension as I’m getting closer. She tries to speed up. I try to get there before she jumps in and can’t hear me. I use my best white voice possible, avoiding the scary “HEY!” and ask her “excuse me madame, what time is it, please?” and she freaks the shit out of her before I end my sentence.

She’s scared, she’s a middle aged white woman who doesn’t know what time it is, she gradually sees a creepy black dude under a hood. She’s not surprised and going on with her life, she’s fucking scared. Frozen until I leave.

That day, I sadly understood that wearing a hoodie and being a black dude was socially incorrect, unstable. Annoying because I loved me some hoodie. Especially with no hair. It feels so good. But as it’s also used by thugs to hide, I’m screwed. Can’t wear them. I realized later that whatever I wear, I’ll be suspicious. A suit will make me suspicious. A hoodie too. But a suit is better.

This year, I bought my first two hoodies ever. Everybody is wearing some so I figured fuck it, I’m doing it too. I’m a musician/developer, not a criminal.

And then Trayvon.

Now I look at them and I kind of want to cry. Anger. Desperation.

The only constant between me scaring this woman with a hoodie 15 years ago and Trayvon Martin is the stigmatized young black man who’s simply wearing something convenient. Yes, at the end appearances are deceptive.

Meanwhile the shooter is free, and defended to death . Oh god, the anger.

“Mr. Sarkozy may think it is smart politics to pander to racism and xenophobia. He has done it before. And, sadly, his harsh new tone has given him a quick boost in the polls.”

The quick boost means that French people agree and are kind of pretty racist in general. That’s much more scarier. Sarkozy knows he can use this angle. Just visit France and listen to discussions outside Paris. It’s pretty clear.

“Times are tough in France, but Mr. Sarkozy could have run a more elevated campaign. He has domestic achievements (pension reform) and international achievements (Libya). His main opponent, Mr. Hollande, has vague ideas and unrealistic economic proposals.”

But French don’t care about achievements. They never really do. It’s like normal, somehow. Sarkozy also knows he can’t really play on that because French culture is not about celebrating victories and the dude is on everybody’s nerves so all he can have is play on xenophobia and racism, knowing that there’s demand for that. Mr Hollande, I don’t even fucking know what he’s doing here. A snail is more fascinating than he is.

Don’t take it too seriously. We’ll go through it.

NYTimes.

It’s terrifying. Race is everywhere. Race is everywhere. It jumps in my face, constantly. Freezes me. I try to punch it in the face, throwing angry bears and frustrated black mambas at it but it doesn’t work. I’m still frozen, and angry.

They talk over and over about same sex marriage? I go crazy and want to talk about weed and the ridiculous amount of black men in prison for this shit since decades. Where are all the white liberals on that? They all smoke weed, eat pot cookies and can’t shut the fuck up about gay marriage. Less than 4% of the US population is gay. 12% is black.

The ESA releases a paper on 2011 US computer game market demographics and guess what, they don’t say anything about race because they know that it’s going to be like 70% white, 10% Asian and all the darker skins in the rest. They always release that kind of information. They are very reluctant to do so for the computer industry. But the worst is Jesse Schell’s quote: “There are games now for pretty much every age, every demographic.” No, Jesse (love him, watch this). And you know exactly why, it’s because there are no freaking diversity whatsoever in the game industry. Seriously, how the fuck can we have games for every demographic when the vast majority of them are made by a single one demographic? It’s the elephant in the room and everybody is ignoring it.

Google “Skyrim black people” and enjoy Humanity with the first four links. Nothing fucking changes.

I’m now pretty convinced that shows like Mad Men, Downton Abbey or the other thing with dragons and raw sex are here to satisfy white people with fantasy worlds without black people, now that black people are everywhere (same goes with sexism, women gaining access to everything and shows broadcasting the idea that women should stay in the kitchen, avoiding trouble).

I’m sometimes pretty convinced that people can’t stop joining new “private clubs” on the internet like Path or more obscure shit just to feel this little edge over others, like all these retarded black people on Twitter. Same cities/suburbs mechanics that we witness in real life.

The Race In Western Societies In The Early Twenty First Century system is a system that I can’t escape. I’m in the non-weeee! category. I’m also part of this demographic called “black dudes”, this demographic that invents the hip and cool since the USA are born. The world copies black men from the West, they can’t stop: music, vocabulary, bad English, pants, groove, bling, style. Everything. Meanwhile black people struggle to integrate a white-dominated world and especially black men are pointed at for doing bad things. Yes Chris Brown is fucking terrible, so are all the non black people beating their girlfriend or wife in silence. Everyone prefers to focus on and on an angry and violent black man rather than on the perverted and abusive white religious uncle.

What really freezes my brain to absolute zero I think, is the fact that all the smart black people I know are making a career or setting a big milestone in their lives around race issues. Would it be through a book, music or a blog or stand-up comedy, smart black people are talking about it. It’s in our faces all the time how could we even not think and build something on it? It’s also cathartic.

Should I too and make a “career” or a name at showing how the game industry is absolutely not diverse and never got diverse in the ten years I have been involved with it? I don’t really want to do that. I’d rather move on.

I need to. I’ll try not to write about race in the next months and will try to solve it through other outputs than text.

Listening, thinking. Riding.

Amazing ride to the Watts towers last weekend, thanks to the no less amazing Will. From Jelly Roll Morton, to the first black person to be honored with the Nobel Peace Prize, to the Black Panther, to Sanford & son to the ‘65 Watts riots to Eula Love (Stop N° 7) to Rodney King twenty years ago already, the history of L.A. is built on race conflict, mostly white and black people.

South L.A. For the first time, I saw black people in Los Angeles. Not just here and there, entire neighborhoods. People nod, smile, wave at us. Everywhere. Some neighborhoods supposedly “bad” aren’t bad at all. They might have been. Segregation is so strong. I felt bad sometimes, like I’m in some sort of safari with 25 white people despite the fact that I wanted to hang out for a while with every black person seen there. Always confronted to the same thing: I’m in the middle, on the edge crushed and quartered by how society works today.

Deep and profound experience. I was more tired from emotions than from riding 50 km.

But it was good.

They’re all so awesome 

Enjoying the sun in L.A. and reading a lot of black stuff, apparently. I could write so much. I’ll need to write a book someday. Or you might just read this blog until I’m 100 year old. I’m trying to do this.

<3

I’m not going to talk about SOPA ACTA and all (of course, please act against them). I’m just going to say that I read in the book “The Sounds Of Star Wars” that Ben Burtt, sorry Ben “I invented the light saber sound and so many others stuff you heard to death” Burtt was pirating drive-in movies by connecting “wires into the speaker that you get in your car and make direct recordings”. He was a teenager and today, he would definitely use The Pirate Bay too.

At that time, nobody gave a shit about a dude copying movies “illegally”. Today you can be extradited to the United States for running a website posting links to pirated TV shows and films, despite significant doubts over whether such sites break any UK laws.

At that time we let an individual grow his passion and become a founder of modern sound design. Today, we fuck an individual over as hard and as fast as we can, with no Justice at all.

All I’ll say is this:

:3

 
Red robe and big package. You should be afraid, computer.

My first tower back in ‘91. You can see that I was pretty happy. I think I already had the parts so I could start building it. I still had hair but the thing is, I look at kids today and I understand why they don’t have a brain in ebullition: they click, double tap, buy, consume and don’t know shit. Knowledge is everywhere and useless at the same time for them. Everything is as easy as pressing a thumb on glass. You get everything you want like that. But life doesn’t always work this way.

At first I was looking at circuit boards as if they were little boring cities, while my dad would use his legendary screwdriver skills and built PCs. Going from cold printed circuit boards in boxes to weird CGA games I would try on screen, from hardware to software was fantastic. And made me understand three gazillion things. Or not. Anyway, it was magic.

It gave me a sense of patience and thoroughness of action. Understanding problems. Solving issues before they show up was part of the game -IRQ available? what about DMA channel-, thinking ahead was part of the fun “I’m outsmarting this bitch!” and checking things ala airplane -three times- was the routine. Now kids whine and give up because Facebook doesn’t load and they have such a lack of knowledge and patience… I wouldn’t like to be their future offspring.

Today if you want to hook up a kid on computers, don’t buy a tablet. Don’t listen to your kid (I wanted a console like all my friends on that picture, but a computer was great too I guessed). Build a PC with him/her and trust me, he/she’s going to love it, firing up a great game a few hours after opening boxes. He/she will love it when you finish your first Arduino project. He/she might even want to learn more. Maybe program stuff. Maybe manage the house network. Maybe run a small cluster of graphic cards to calculate stuff for the cloud. Possibilities are endless, why stop at Angry Birds and Instagram?

Your kid will not be an annoying brat who can’t sit still unless he’s in front of mind-crushing YouTube videos of stupid cats and that will be a good thing for him, his environment and the future of creativity.

Bam.

Dave Winer talks about it for the web, and I think the same is happening on the hardware side.

When I came back in September in Paris, I powered back on my network drive and nothing happened. Not a single light, no spinnin’. I thought “oh yeah, those shitty power supply, I guess I’ll have to change it”. Changed it, nothing. At that point I had two options:

– send the network drive to LaCie to fix it.

– open the damn enclosure to see if the standard hard-drive inside is working or if the enclosure died.

I knew about the second option because I’m used to computer technology but searching the web 20 minutes gives you the answer too. FYI.

The -terrible- support tells me that I have to send my network drive back and that they will fix it. However, all my data will be erased. Because they simply format the disc and change the enclosure. They don’t even bother.

Ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha. No.

I guess I will not hear your dead ass anymore, blue HAL.

I opened the enclosure with my legendary screwdriver skills (four or five screws to unscrew, insane), put the hard-drive in a 20 bucks SATA enclosure which is as hard as putting two bricks of Lego together. It’s so hard and complex to do that an 8 year old could do it.  I switched on the all thing, the hard-drive is fine. The network enclosure somehow had died.

I wasn’t that pissed because I wasn’t going to loose anything really important or a massive amount of data (maybe 100 Gb with 40% already backed up). I was pissed that the “service” from the company was to erase my data and not give a shit about me. Guys, we don’t buy storage to have storage, we buy storage to put stuff in it. So you need to care about it too.

Of course, opening the enclosure voided the guaranty but I had all my data back and that’s what I wanted.

I hate this trend where “they take care of you” which means that you just get so stupidly scared that you don’t even do something as simple as opening with a screwdriver a fucking box. Don’t you ever tell me you are a geek or a nerd if the only thing you do in front of defective computer stuff is to go whine to a store with your “broken” device.

It makes people believe that computers are stuff made of Angel’s sweat and powered by God’s blood. So here’s the truth: COMPUTERS ARE DUMB MACHINES WITH SCREWS AND ARE VERY STURDY AS LONG AS YOU DON’T IMMERGE THEM IN THE WATER OR JUMP ON THEM.

It’s so easy today. It’s never been that easy to change parts on computers, thanks to solid standards like USB or SATA and something that we don’t talk about: the incredible Taiwan’s engineer’s work of unification, security and simplification of motherboards, chipsets etc. Mad props to these men and women. So much has been done for us.

20 years ago you had to read a shitty English translation of instructions to move a damn jumper on a motherboard from J1 to J3 to just be able to use a hard-drive on another machine. And maybe it wasn’t J1 because the 1 was actually a badly written 2.

It is so easy now and yet, all-in-one computers are spreading, where if a single thing goes wrong or that you simply want to update a part, you have to go to the middleman and get on your knees. “Oh lord, please save him!!!! PLEASE”. Well, no.

People often compare that with cars and garages. You never fix your car yourself today, you go to a garage. It’s not even an option these days. But what people miss is that a car is not a computer. It’s big, dirty, inconvenient to operate, you need special tools. Here, I’m talking about a simple box with four effing screws. Opening it and taking care of it saved my data, which was the goal. No car has your photos or anything personal. If your library in the living room needed some fixing you wouldn’t ship the all thing. You would fix it or put your books on the side and buy new furniture if the wood is that rotten.

It’s not about saving money -I had to buy another network drive at the end- it’s about freedom and trusting yourself. Doing it instead of waiting for it, avoiding responsibilities and complaining about support.

In the computer and hardware world, we’re giving up on being adults at an alarming rate.

Hey,

I couldn’t write about it last year, when you passed away. I guess I think about you everyday but I don’t even try to count, you are just around in my head, somehow.

I wanted to tell you thank you, my first dad. My first male figure. And I can’t really think about a better one.

You came to Paris to get me. I was assigned to your foster home. A nice, calm baby. I imagine that after raising five white children having a brown one with nappy hair was exciting and cute.

You took me back to your place, in the sweet French countryside. You took care of me like I belonged, as your children and grandchildren. I’m the dash between them.

2 years! 

I remember the sound of your electric razor in the morning, your brown tobacco smell when you licked my face to gross me out and make me giggle, sitting on your lap, I remember playing with my little cars following the rug lines while you were watching Formula One. I remember watching the liquid running through the little rocks and the salads you were watering. I remember following you often, going to your perfectly organized workshop where you would drink "un p’ti ballon d’rouge/d’blanc" with your friends or family or fix some stuff while whistling brilliantly. I remember you teaching me how to ride a bike, challenging me to get rid of the training wheels, and boom! I totally succeeded. I was so in love with you.

Once I did a very bad thing, I threw a metal can in the face of a younger girl. You caught me doing it and before I could enjoy the neatness of my long distance headshot, you were grabbing me and making my bottom taste the leather of your belt. I went to bed, woke up for a cookie, and that was it. You never hurt me before and after that. It was like, perfect, unaltered Justice: you don’t do shit to people you wouldn’t like them to do to you or else, you’ll pay for it. The harder you do, the harder you pay. I pretty much never employed force or physical advantage unless it’s allowed, to win an argument ever again.

You were mad when I had to leave for my now 26 year old family. I didn’t see it but she told me that you wanted to commit suicide, you were probably drunk that time. Thanks to my parents not listening to what the state was saying, I was coming over often. It felt good, the city is so full of shit sometimes it was great to be with you, fucking around and simply enjoying a simple life.

When I have been able to come over on my own, you were the one following me everywhere. Retirement is a bitch. But it was great to see you, chatting about "l’autre enculé de Hongrois", our current president. That time I had the Jaguar and we rode around? You wanted to ride again and again and I would drive you as long as you want now.

Then you got sick. I immediately knew that it would kill you. Your family is a cancer fest and you drank and smoked for decades. I probably do a little of both because of you. I learned to not give a fuck with you, too. I also learn to care and do things, and work hard. My now dad added a layer of the same thing in a different flavor so I guess it’s printed and hard-wired in me.

Cancer took two years to get you. It was hard for everybody but you know my grandfather, Raymond is a vegetable now and it’s just excruciating. I think that it was better this way, though a few more years would have been great. I just wish you didn’t have to suffer so much.

The world is sad. People say that we can all live together despite our differences and we both know that. You did it. We so did it. I was your "petit dernier" and you were asking what I was doing and you were so impressed by this music and computer game thingy. I would ask about how you would fix this thing in the wall and would be as impressed and everything would be all right. People talk. We did. And if today I have identity issues, it’s not our fault. It’s just that the world is too damn slow and dumb and forces me to dream about joining my black and brown people so I can stop feeling awkward. The city is making all of us crazy.

I was with her this week so that she wouldn’t be alone on the first anniversary of her husband’s death and I wanted to have her in my arm all the time but you know how she is, stronger and harder than a rock. She’s doing OK, your dog helps a lot. I wanted to have her in my arm all the time also to say thank you for all she did for me. I wanted to have her in my arm all the time to thank you, as I would have loved to at least once in my life kiss you and say that I love you.

Summer 2009.

I don’t know why but this song really makes me think about the picture below. Sun and fun memories with you. I love you man, thank you again and forever.

 
End 80s.

Paris. Rain. F U.

It’s been a tough and rough year, that’s for sure. Death and pain, pain and death. Surviving between all that and trying to push things forward. Not easy but well, we’re all going to die next year, aren’t we?

Plan for next year: commit to my prototype, expand Chocobeam and stick to the lean, I’m going to need it. /stretches out

Happy New Year 2012, y’all.