Category: Me Myself&I

I absolutely cannot imagine what it’s like to not choose your parents like 99.99999% of you. I cannot feel what it’s like to be linked to someone by the mighty Randomness of this Universe, to look like him.This feeling doesn’t exist for me.

I’m born through one of the most tragic freedom in this world, which is abandon your child forever. I am the result of a highly improbable fate that would have been impossible to achieve without people believing and people trusting each other, even if they are fundamentally different and wouldn’t share anything if I wasn’t here. I was in the middle of an amazing flow of respect and will to do good between opposites. Nothing too religious, just people making moral contracts that yeah, they’re going to make this work (guys, thanks again).

This made me very sensitive to randomness in life. I don’t like it. It reminds me of the start of my life. But this is how all of you started. You started by being randomly attached to two people by blood while I started by being attached with my consent to five people by moral contracts and paperwork.That’s quite different.

I can’t stop thinking that the way people are born allows societies to allow inconsistent behaviors and say it’s ok. Because I always feel more annoyed by these than anyone so far. 

My whole life started badly but quickly went really consistent, like maybe too much. But it made me what I am now and I could have been a much worse person at so many stages… 

The most inconsistent thing for me is how you people behave. And I have a hard time to know how to handle it, what to say knowing that my perspective comes from being born in a total chaos followed by an extreme consistency, comes through social barriers inexistent to me but ruling your world… It’s like I understand you very well while I don’t understand you at all at the same time, alternatively.

That makes me socially awkward, silent. Dreamy. Alone.

Exactly. Picture by Cris Dobbins

Me by Verdell at the Hollywood Bowl

September, Earth Wind & Fire

It’s was the final after three weekends full of music, mostly RnB and Funk. Thanks Los Angeles.

Also, Machete.

MACHETE IS KIND OF LIKE @DRUNKHULK

The story of an illegal immigrant. I am myself now fluent with all that ICE, DHS, illegal alien status stuff.

It ain’t pretty.

Pretty much all I (own) need is here. Even the hat.

I’m digging Sean Bonner’s thoughts about things, how they end up to own us, what you really need to be happy etc

I always have been tempted to reduce things. I got this philosophy by starting my home studio in the 2000s. I hadn’t the resources to buy a Fender Rhodes, and a Juno and a Moog or these really expensive bass pedals that you use once in a while.

I always tried to reduce the amount of stuff because I want to be mind-free (fighting the addictiveness of the buying reflex) and not having to deal with a lot of inconveniences of owning things like:

-Room

All that shit takes room, a lot of it.

-Dusting

Dusting is obligatory and I hate it so hard. The less I have things, the easier it is.

-Maintenance

Things can break. Can have to be fixed. Things can be fucking annoying (expensive).

Having less space, more work to do around things I own is not making me happy, it’s making me tired and confused.

So the only things I really want to own are the things I need everyday and other than my music tools reduced to less than a dozen of piece and some funky pants shirts and hats, well I don’t care that much.

I guess I got that from my parents. I grew up watching them invest their money in their business, always. No “little pleasure” like owning a brand new car. My dad has always been using his company’s car as his main vehicle. They always made me aware of inconveniences of ownership. The only thing worth owning for them was a great house to rebuilt and customize. I kind of think the same.

I grew up with libraries in every town with shitload of music movies books to borrow, copy, encode. I quickly learned that access was the important thing. Once you’re in, you’re in. And you can come back anytime you want. Why dusting these things?

Of course I always felt in conflict with the overall feeling that you have to own things and mostly cool things, to shine in social circles. But it wouldn’t matter. If you have access to culture you still can talk about it. You don’t have to own a Picasso to discuss his style do you?

So I’m already at a low level of ownership. What I care more is to live in places feeling good to live in. Moving around or staying at one place is not important –it depends-, but the places you are going to be for some time need to be great!

I wish we would spend more time to make spaces where we live better places. Like how L.A. buildings should all have their rooftops available for residents or how AC should be carefully designed and integrated to reduce noise pollution to the max. Of course moar bikes everywhere. Stuff like that.

Because I don’t want to try to get the best place. I want all of them to be great, like I want to have access to all the culture.

I don’t want to spend time searching for these basics. I’m lazy.

 
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Hasn’t been too productive. Celebrating Verdell’s birthday in Palm Springs was an experience I’ll never forget. My first time in the desert, mid august, reaching some sweet 46°C. My butt look like I did the Tour de France in two days.

Prototype brainstorm. The gameplay is solidifying, the technical feasibility is more a problem. But maybe I want to do too much at the same time, if I lower the features it’s much more doable. Maybe I should do two little games instead of an ambitious one. That could do. But that’d be better in one. I have to try both I guess and make two first version.. More work. *sigh*

I found its name too and that is important to me. A related, snappy, good sounding name.

*Dave Chappelle voice* THATSRIGHT.

Does having children make you unhappy? What if you change the word children with love?

Also, monogamy seems to be unnatural for our sexy species. What is interesting is this: “But when people began living in settled agricultural communities, social reality shifted deeply and irrevocably.” Why property has to transform us so much, often in a bad way, even on deep levels like sexuality?

Can I have some tool that makes it easy to convert databases, a sort of Swiss knife so I can convert mysql to csv to xml to mssql to vdb3 to whatever?

???

I know. WHYYYY???

Sometimes I’m like

LMFA by Harold

But then sometimes I’m like

Alone by Harold

I know. I kind of get stuck on that but it’s utterly bizarre to only see black people around me in my everyday life as hobos and almost nothing else while my news streams are these days full of OldSpice, Lebron James and of course the President of the United States. Again today on my morning ride, the only three black people I saw were three smelly, homeless men and woman, representing 100% of the homeless people of the day. And yet I still hear about the OldSpice guy.

Sometimes it feels so inexplicably awkward to be a black man out there. Sometimes I dream what it would have been if I was a woman: I guess a good-looking pretty smart and fast-learning touch of femininity (meaning, badass black booty) in a men tech world would have play better for me. I’m not saying that I’d have been happier, but the middle class status hunt would have been successful. It’s like women have a glass ceiling but a ladder while black men have no glass ceiling but no ladder either, not even a stool. Wonder why we are usually well sculpted? We need that shit to go up or not sink man.

I don’t feel jealousy or anything going this way, I just feel that on a scale of people you trust in relationship, the black dude is the one with the less input, the one who has to struggle more, would he be seen as a joke or as a predator, it’s never good. It feels a lot unfair. It’s either “you lose” or “you don’t really win wait, you thought you would?”.

Or you win quite nicely. Isaiah Mustafa, 10 million views and counting for an ad with a long take and a kick ass manliness monologue reaching Chuck Norris level of badassness notoriety in a few months. He already has signed a talent deal with NBC. Bill Cosby started with an appearance on NBC’s Tonight Show and was also into sports, 60 years ago. It’s like nothing has changed.

Dude, you forgot to turn off the faucet, water waste hellooo?

Ha! I pretty much look like that out of the shower so these ads are even funnier to me. I quote wikipedia:

The New York Daily News gave the ad a favorable mention, citing Mustafa’s "wildly smug, cool-cat smooth dude persona"

You mean like any successful black dude personality allowed in the white G20? Why are they so rare in real life then? Why am I so alone? Why don’t I see them more here and there in the tech web game world? Why there’s no leverage effect? Where are the mentors?

But the question I know the answer is: “if the world I’m living in was more of the color of my skin, would it feel better, wouldn’t it have been easier?” And my heart just screams “say YES hell yeah say it!!”

Considering my own story.. I swear all that stuff fucks me up. More than I could have ever thought it would.

Hi. gtfo please.

Sometimes I watch the world around me and it’s pretty simple:

There’s the consumerism disease. People will soon blog about opening up the damn plastic around vegetables. It’s all their fucking life, buying stuff and being the first doing so. Here in California, it’s pretty hardcore to say the least.

There’s the racism/you’re-different-and-dark-skinned-you-shall-struggle-a-bit-more disease. And you can’t feel it more than a black man does. These days, between being an immigrant and reading hideous French news and French reactions absolutely full of bigotry about the French team, back from white E3 (except around Madden Football and Def Jam Karaoke) with inexistent black communities where I live –I see 10 times more black people in Paris than in LA- I have it all in my face even if I don’t want to.

There’s the status disease. STATUS, not what you are or who you want to be but who you are FOR people around. People would do crazy shit for that, even if at the end they’re unhappy.

When I contract one of these, I’m sick fast enough to fight the disease and get back to a healthy mental state where I contemplate things and create some or try to. I love to learn.

Nothing makes me happier or more fullfilled. Seriously.

This post was written a few weeks ago but is still totally valid on the feel side.

Following thoughts about what should really make a difference, just quickly:

-Stop being irrational

Maybe the average Joe in the US is not that smart about what is going on in the world but at least he’s not in denial like French people often do about basics of you know, how it works. For example, football players salaries. The French opinion can’t take the fact that players are making clubs (like any other sport), that people are paying to see them play and that it generates a shitload of money going for a part to these people sweating a few years on a field before retirement. What something like that has to do with racists comments, to what French society is about and other fake moral bullshit, I don’t know. French like to mix stuff up and tell stories except that there’s no story and nothing to say about salaries: players get insanely well paid because you people whining about it are paying insane amounts of subscriptions to watch them play, insane amounts of merchandising etc. Stop being crazy. Damn.

-Elites, stop being in denial

Because you still are. Listen to the most open minded people you have in your circles and listen to them good. Then give them your chair and full authority.

-Nigga please

People from bad suburbs, even if you have a lot of problems, France might be the friendliest place on earth to start your life: so much knowledge and culture for free or almost free, just for decency amongst other people out there, you should take advantage of it and stop whining and doing shit. Now that I have a much better sense of what the education system is here in the US, seeing how it’s hard for minorities I’m even more angry about the waste in France on that matter. What a fucking waste.

Now get busy. Happy late 14th of July.

"Excellent article about French racial tensions, the World Cup fiasco etc Here’s something that resonates:

“That the French national team has become a symbol of society’s divisions is particularly unfortunate, given that in 1998, France’s World Cup winning side was eulogized as the fulfillment of the official French policy of racial and ethnic integration.”

When people think that a sport event is just a sport event, think again, especially with a world cup of the most popular game in the world. I was nineteen in 1998, in the streets of Paris celebrating this multicultural team, this multicultural society, this multicultural, positive, winning future that was going to happen. I’ve never been more positive for the future than these days. It was truly magic (and I’m not an avid follower of soccer but look at how we became Europe Champion 2 years later; JesusFUCK that was awesome).

It’s not about the effectiveness of something as trivial as football compared to politics and economics, it’s about believing that it can work if we work together and respect each other. Sometimes a placebo is the only thing that you need.

Unfortunately it hasn’t been enough for ethnic integration because well, France has some problems still unsolved:

France can’t find a Republic model that fits the last big immigration wave, starting mid-70s, that is, the non-white one. Governments all nicely played around it: Mitterrand and Chirac for a total of 26 motherfucking years. I mean basically all my life, the government wasn’t answering the suburbs and immigration questions of black and arab people. I could see that there was a problem. Music, movies were telling that it’s going to explode. And when the government did something about it –I fucking had unexpected tears watching the 2007’s government including black and arab women, BOUT TIME-, it was way too late. The blingbling and ignorance model straight out the Afro-American bad society had took over two or three generations of young French, and then it was 9/11 and the youngsters turned to their traditional roots.

Other deep problem, France doesn’t want to change and accept differences and therefore, made immigrants doing the same. Yes, the business of pot comes from North Africa immigration and became huge since the 70s while wine consumption is down, that’s why France has the more repressive laws about it in all Europe. How can you explain that, except that France is just in denial? France basically fueled the gangster influence by not accepting that its society is evolving and moving on (Europe is too, but other countries are more prone to change), allowing some people to live with drug money, state money and no taxes all together. France encouraged racism toward minorities with this behavior. France doesn’t understand that selling instant chocolate and rice with black and asian people on packaging is wrong. Integrate so few people from minorities into the high levels of society, except for sports of course, was and always has been a mistake and proves that if you come from nowhere, you’re not welcome in the clubs of the Powerful Ones. Sad.

Lastly, France is clumsy. Instead of using laws against the hijab, putting arab women even more on the side of society, stigmatizing them, it would be much better to actually apply laws about women abuses and segregation, wearing a burqa or a g-string or both. You know, the Republican French thing, everybody is the same and all. Of course you can’t rule a country with 65 million people by saying that an outfit is forbidden so the French government ended up on a weird notice that says that “that’s not cool to wear these things”. Which is utterly useless and sort of sends a “I know better than you do, I’m the State and you’re kind of stupid” signal, which is not a good thing to say to empower people and make them feel like a part of the country. A smart part of it, not like a parasite that make people behave like they are parasites.

Because French people from older immigration didn’t find an updated model of the Republic, they failed to integrate the new waves, being unable to explain the rules of something that is still pretty much inexistent on earth: the ultimate diversity of humans, diversified and united at the same time.

We need to try out more. It’s here. It’s almost here.