Category: Me Myself&I

White Privilege Diary Series #1 – White Feminist Privilege in Organizations (via @Nick_Lalone)

More often, however, splits emerge along racial lines — the white women simply aren’t receptive to the core ideas put forward by the women of color.  Those ideas are "too expensive" in money, time or resources.  They’re outside the boundaries of "the purpose of the organization." The white women "don’t think they’ll work" or don’t feel they’re "fair." The donors might object. And so on. White rejection is usually passive aggressive, and resembles the Transactional Analysis game of "Yes, but…"  The women who attempt to bridge are shut down by both communities because the women of color feel that "it’s happening all over again," and the white women experience the list of proposals as some kind of "attack."

I feel that very much (2% of black people in the game industry for the win! Smallest minority in 2005, I don’t think it changed much). At so many levels did I make bridges and it’s a schizophrenic task to defuse white people’s feeling that I’m attacking their views while at the same time trying to push my ideas which are often different because of being a minority. I really like simple things and getting straight to the point so something like that feels like a necessary and complex chore that I’d love to make disappear.

The thing is that there’s no end to that. Once we’re all grown-up we can’t change our views, it’s too late. We hit a strong lack of malleability at some point in our life. Look at how old people today screw us all with no remorse. We are pressured, over-taxed and debt-ridden just to maintain a system that only profits our parents and grand-parents. Fucking selfish humans.

So yeah, I know the situation in interracial relationships will barely change during my lifetime as it’s not even going well in intergenerational relationships. Quite the opposite actually.

I should have been born in the future, I know.

(totally forgot to post this blog post.)

I’m listening. Watching, reading a lot about black people in the US. I’m sort of studying that stuff. Through documentaries, articles, Wikipedia, musician biographies –we are really over-represented in this area-, blogs, everything.

I said earlier this year that I was kind of loosing faith about the situation. Well I guess it didn’t change!

Look at today’s situation for a black dude on earth. Africa has been looted forever and now the continent is a terrible mess with wars, famines and poverty. Middle-east? Arabs and black people are not that much into a friendship. Asia doesn’t know black people  more than what the US are sending as cultural references, basketball players and rappers. For the rest, describing black people as monkeys is pretty OK for them and like everywhere, stupidly, the lighter the skin color, the better.

Australia? It’s considered as one of the most racist country in the world (if you’re white you don’t really notice that I guess). America Latina? Chile? Less than 1% of the population is Afro-Chilean. Argentina? 86.4% of the population self-identify as being of European descent. So yeah there are Black people in Brazil and it’s the country with one of the largest gaps in income distribution in the world with 10% (almost exclusively white) of the population earning 28 times the average income of the bottom 40% (mostly black). Oh, and there’s a trend that shows something; 1835 Brazil black population: 51.4% of the country. 2000: 6.2%.

So there’s Europe and Russia. Both are kind of cold in large parts though. South Europe is not that cool with black people. North Europe is not that cool with black people. France in the middle, has the largest European black population. Makes sense.

And then there are the US.

Let me sum it up: arrived as slaves in the South. Got free, moved to the North, got jobs. Got fired, moved to the West. Got jobs, houses, palm trees and still heavy, grinding segregation. Got fired again, sold crack. During all that time, every single movement trying to change black people’s lives for the better is a failure. Assassinations, murders, black leaders have it all, even the FBI is involved in some cases, like it’s totally OK. Hope’s dead. People are tired, they just want to be happy now, not start a revolution. The 70s/80s are the decades in which a few black stars are going to hide the truth to the world about black America’s actual state.

From there everything goes down, more jobs get axed thanks to technology and under-educated black people, money has to solve everything, start of the crack-cocaine. Black men flowing to prisons, being killed (12 cops spraying an unarmed drunk dude’s car with 100 bullets a few months ago). Generations of black kids growing up in this shit and bam, you have a 50 Cent or a Charles Cosby. This is where I understood the hustling thing. I got it. You have to get your ass out of that hell, you need money for it, you do whatever it takes to get that money. It’s simple, it’s about survival. Nothing personal. It just became cultural. During that time, after ten years of the more-than-white Bush (remember Katrina?), Obama is the new black star like the 70/80/90s ones (The Holy MJ’s). He’s a tree hiding a dead forest (statistics are too awful, I’ll let you wikipedia it).

And that is all one of the freest country in the world with multiple ethnicities from the start, has been able to pull off for black people: a promise that it’s going to suck. It’s like being a lefty! Through history, all across the world it’s never been a good thing to be one, in practice or culturally.

I happened to be both. I’m pretty sane for someone conscious of all that. Or maybe it’s killing me softly.

89% of Hulu users and 42% of Netflix users watch shows & movies directly on computer. http://on.mash.to/ov6L51

That’s huge. Mid 2011, pretty much nobody is watching something on a smartphone or a tablet. And if we do the same charts with games, you can be sure that “classic computers” come far in first (just Facebook and Steam, bam) with consoles and tablets at the bottom. Considering the amount of bullshit we have to eat saying that PCs are so dead blabla, it needs to stop.

The computer, the PC, is going to be a central piece of the house as the fridge is today. A simple commodity (that’s why the all Apple hardware business will be in trouble: do you know your fridge brand? Soon nobody will care either with computers, it’s already happening because they’re all “good enough”). People like to have a machine that does it all and the PC is the one doing everything as good as you can. And it is now dead simple.

Different, smaller devices will connect to it but we will definitely have a computer at home that does a lot of things, like we do today but even more and in a perfect way, not with laptops, noisy towers and DVI-to-HDMI converters. We already have so much power, unused today except for some bad games at very high resolutions. Next step is not to make this technological power fit smaller devices but to distribute it over devices and monitors. Benefits will be greater for everybody (no overheating devices with poor battery life for users, easier for engineers, scalable for suppliers). This, is the beginning.

Imagine that each home has a computer box somewhere in a closet with xx cores and xx GPUs, running the TV, games from anywhere, internet and the AC system. Don’t be afraid, we will certainly have ways to make everything independent so that you can fix a part without breaking another. Don’t be afraid to have a computer taking control over your life, it’s already the case in planes. Imagine that each home at night is using its calculation power for distributed computing, warming the house and channeling the heat for the family’s next morning? How fucking cool would that be? That would be super efficient. Imagine that we cure cancer because your house and millions of others helped the process of understanding protein folding? Now that’s true glocal citizenship my friend.

Tablets and at a least extent smarphones are just accessories to our digital life. Like plates forks and knifes, we use them to consume but the food comes from one place, the fridge, the kitchen. The PC. The issues with the Cloud and privacy show that people are going to LOVE having their personal stuff at home, streaming to their devices around the world.

HomeCloud. It’s happening and the PC is the core.

Hi.

I played a Nintendo DS game which asked me to use the pad and the stylus at the same time. Except that there’s no way to change anything about it, the game controls or my left-handedness. Whatever, the game was awful. 

I got hooked on Gordon Ramsay’s shows. I now know the formula and can’t cook or prepare food without imaginarily hearing “fock me” or “WhatAShame” in my back.

Netflix is cool, unless you have a good TV and that you’re watching an old 1988 movie that just looks like a .rm full screen on your ten year old 21” CRT, buffering excluded (though sometimes, it happens). Not cool then.

I don’t care if Intelligentsia is an expensive hipster place with phonies hanging around, their coffee is good as fuck.

Sometimes I can’t believe how many different things I do with just a laptop and three USB ports.

I haven’t joined Google+ yet and I still can’t keep up with my news stream. So I’m good.

No time to work on my game but HELL, the more the game industry moves, the more I feel on a right track, right project, right angle. I’m just stuck with stupid tech problems but eventually, it will happen.

Also two weeks ago:

‘was awesome.

This isn’t healthy for me to not write. Though I’m quite busy composing for a Facebook game, I have too much shit in my mind. I feel that I learned just so much about myself and the world around in three years. I’d love to share my thoughts and findings and stuff but that would be pretty long. It reinforced everything I believed in though. I guess.

So here’s a picture of one of those sunset that L.A. has and a sound I did a while ago.

I can’t get enough of it.

Interlude by Harold

Dave is right on this one. There is something inherently wrong with the categorization of people: We are complex atoms, moving. Categorization is something simple and static.

When I tried to create lists with circlehack.com I immediately stopped over the obvious one, family. It’s already complicated for this one. I’m connected to so many different people I just can’t categorize them all, at all. Also I feel awkward to arbitrarily say "you, you’re into tech and that’s how we met" because it might not be the essence of our relationship right now. And what will it be in three years? Should I keep a constant look at my lists to match the present? Waste of time (not for Google or Facebook, obviously).

Categorizing people means that you assume you are the one knowing what they like. But maybe they like to read stuff from you because they like you and trust you so they read it. Otherwise they would not read something about this subject because they don’t care "that" much. But because it’s from you, they do. And you don’t know what interests who, it’s probably changing all the time. It’s organic. It can’t be processed with lists or circles. It can’t be processed efficiently with the help of algorithms (not yet at least and I think for a very long time).

I now understand more why Facebook never really got into this filtering, it’s not very human and overly complicated. As a user I’m glad I can just drop an article for everyone, to read. I think it’s richer this way. It’s good that my little cousin can read something about the war on drugs even if he doesn’t give a shit right now. Following him is interesting for me too. More knowledge, more change. As long as I can block some content if I want to –Foursquare’s check-ins-, I’m good. Less headaches (shit, is this dude still in this list I want to share this drunk picture to?).

Whatever happens to social networks, there will never be one and only one. What is more useful to me is how we can automate how we push our content and to what networks we share things.

I think services like ifttt have a great future.

Blue, green, air, simplicity.

Note the water on the right…

I’d live in this mothership forever.

I can’t stop looking at it since a week at least so I’m posting this stuff. Casa en Melides, Spain. Minimalism isn’t just for the sake of it, it’s great because it’s easy to pre-fab, better for the earth and easier to create perfect passive insulation with cubes and rectangles.

Anyway…

I don’t think the world’s leaders have begun to grasp the implications of unstoppable connectivity. Some people are calling this the Age of Behavior: What I do affects what you do, more directly than ever before.

NYT.

Our political vocabulary continues to sustain the illusion of participatory democracy. The Democrats and the Liberal Party in Canada offer minor palliatives and a feel-your-pain language to mask the cruelty and goals of the corporate state. Neofeudalism will be cemented into place whether it is delivered by Democrats and the Liberals, who are pushing us there at 60 miles an hour, or by Republicans and the Conservatives, who are barreling toward it at 100 miles an hour.

Adbusters.

By my second working day in Haiti, I was finding it alarmingly difficult to get out of bed in the morning, already having rape nightmares and, worse, daymares. And that was before one of the upstanding pillars of the Haitian elite, who insisted he was a gentleman because he loses his erection if a woman starts to fight him off, started to stalk me. On the third day, one of my drivers cornered me in an abandoned building, and I had to talk him out of his threats to touch me. On the third night, I got very drunk. That night, and the next nine nights.

Good.is.

I just got back from a small ride around the Silver Lake reservoir after buying some groceries from Trader Joe’s. I guess I fit in with the population out there.

L.A. is great to ride. I don’t know why people think it’s not a city for bikes, IT IS THE BEST ONE. It’s pretty flat (I mean it’s not SF), it’s large (not like NYC) and it rains like 3 days a year. It’s a bike rider’s dream.

One can start a day riding from the beach and end up in snow covered mountains during the same ride. I’m not sure if there are many cities in the world that can make that claim.

It’s great. My best memory of E3 last year was my bike ride. 30 minutes to go DTLA, 1 minute to park, 1 minute to change shirt.

Now I think the brakeless trend is the stupidest shit ever. You can’t complain about cars and how people behave toward bikes if you ride fast and don’t give a damn about being unable to slow down like smart people do, by pressing more and more a lever. You can’t say streets are dangerous for riders if you completely forget about the rules of the road. I mean, seriously.

My problem with that is that it makes cars angry against ALL riders.

I rode Paris so many times. If you are brakeless there and that you go fast, you will die in a week period. Thinking that L.A. is rude because cars don’t pay attention is not true if I compare with France, there are a lot more brakeless riders in SoCal. Here in L.A. for what I rode for now, people are much more attentive of what’s going on around them. How many times I’ve been facing a car door in France, pretty much never here in Silver Lake (last year I was riding every day). People don’t want to get sued here. Even if they can’t see shit in their big ass SUVs, they don’t want any trouble. So if you’re alert –there is no place on this planet where you can afford to not focus on what’s going on on the road while biking- it’s pretty cool.

So to me the main message would be to push people to use their bikes, not to see riders as stupid ass kamikazes. They will stay in their cars if the main “bike culture” is about being suicidal you know?

Every single possibility to say something bad about Microsoft, tech news jump on it. Every single possibility to say something good about GoogApple, tech news jump on it. The distortion is now too obvious. Apple does a bad thing with this tracking thing, denies it and what the press is doing promptly because they can’t argue against the fact that their favorite company is doing something wrong? Quickly demonstrating that MS does the same or that carriers do it anyway. Right. No journalist is going to say “hey to be fair and tell the truth, MS gets a single location and stores it outside the phone while Apple is getting every locations you’ve been to over a year and stores it in an non-encrypted file on your phone, even if you turn location services off, which is totally wrong”. That would just be too kind to Microsoft. Like you know, they have to pay for WinME/IE6/Vista forever.

Headlines are just misleading to a point that it’s outrageous for people working hard and doing good stuff at MS. I’d be mad seriously.

One example. You wouldn’t believe how many articles popped up in my rss folder about Windows phones getting bricked after the NoDo update especially on Samsung devices, how it was a total disaster etc. I have a Samsung and despite knowing that all of that was mostly FUD, I was clearly frowning.

Nothing happened.

The update went totally fine (oh yeah, they said March and it happened first week of April, that is so rude) battery life is great etc Turns out the update didn’t work on a small amount of Samsung phones (with a specific firmware, Samsung’s fault) for two main reasons: people would unplug the cable during the update, or they would have too much apps on their phone and the backup process would stop. Techcrunch is still saying and I quote “The Windows Phone 7 update situation has been a nightmare from the start”. Which is a full blatant lie. It’s been better that what I had to deal with my Android phone. Much better. People complain about this BS in comment sections but the damage is done. It’s ridiculous.

I had to wait months and months with Android, with fake dates and reports and lies, it wasn’t great at all on Google/HTC side for the same stupid update thing. It sucked, hard. People are insanely unfair and crazy toward MS, even people buying their product (get a life guys if you’re so disappointed that you don’t have the last phone’s update right right now). You have to give credit when credit is due and MS delivered two updates to my Samsung phone in three months, flawlessly, in France. And I don’t even feel I needed these because the Windows Phone OS was already very good which wasn’t the case when I had my Android stuck on 1.6 .

As for developers, the religious wars and others personal fights always make me think WTFGUYS. Developers, designers, programmers, you shouldn’t care about who’s side you’re on if you realize that you need to be early in the game, on the market, would it be iPhone Android or Windows phone or the Kindle or anything. You’re the one winning if you can provide polished services/products to any interesting platform or a lot of them. Ignoring a platform without knowing what’s going on on it and what it can do for you is simply unprofessional. The platform meta-game is all about being in the first pack if you haven’t figure that out yet (Ngmoco, ready almost on day one for the Apple Appstore). You have to be in the first wave with good stuff, you will be the first to make money and the first to have control and power against the platform (who is all the time, trying to kill you or make you its milky cow, it’s the game).

You see, it’s just a user/developer experience of someone who was really excited about Android after making a game on iOS. Then I saw the excellent Windows Metro UI and simply wanted to try it out because well, I don’t discriminate (and I had a deal with my carrier). They got it right man, so right that a review wondered how competition was going to make something sleeker, classier and simpler than the Windows phone UX and after months of use, I wonder too. It’s the best mobile experience I ever had. I know, it’s weird to write/read this but if you haven’t tried it you can’t tell about the integration’s tightness and attention to details Microsoft did. They did a really good job, didn’t copy competition and tech news are trying to not talk about it because it’s the bad Seattle giant, the company responsible for Clippy’s birth. MS is good in the long run (the first Xbox? That seemed so dumb. .NET is almost ten years old. Remember Kinect? Fuck I was so wrong on this one, even Linux 3.0 has drivers for it) and with this polished product that is Windows Phone, the best they ever put out IMO, I don’t see why tech news would spend their entire time shitting on it. It doesn’t make sense. Oh sure, it drives traffic and views on articles. Sigh.

Of course MS screws up too. Who doesn’t? MobileMe, Kin, iTunes software, Google Wave, Google Buzz, Zune player etc

Bottom line is, big companies are all trying and doing the same things, nasty or not, your favorite tech company included (Microsoft buys companies, you realize that Apple bought the company that does their perfect trackpad? You guys realize Google bought the company who built Android?). All of these companies with campuses and buses to drive people to their desks. You either don’t support any of them because you think “they’re evil” or you just get over it and treat everybody the same way.  Especially you, not-so-tight-ready-to-sell-your-mom media.

It’s simple:

-If you live only by Apple standards and still think about MS circa 2000, you’re missing out.

-If you live only by Google standards and still think about MS circa 2000, you’re missing out.

-If you live by mixing, trying things out, making your own opinion, avoiding walled garden because they overall inherently suck, you’re right.

-If you are living like Richard Stallman, mad props and you can say that I’m stupid and sold to capitalism.

-If you’re not like Richard and try to give lessons to people using MS products while using another big brand or worshipping it like a bitch, you certainly need to get off your ponycorn.