Category: Me Myself&I

I was wondering why there’s not a lot of people living in-between countries but now I have my painful answer.

It freezes your brain like a cold axe slaughtering your head.

It fucks my mind so hard. It was the worst week of the year they said. Well I concur.

It’s not really about the shitty weather or Christmas aftershock or more importantly because I miss her so hard. It’s about being stuck between two cultures that are really close and yet fundamentally different.

This in-between is the weirdest psychological thing I have ever experienced. It’s like living in two separate timeline where I have this one where I’m living in the US and this one I live for now here in France. This one I know so bad. This one that makes me think about last year when I started my company and really felt at war and hitting a dead end with France in general.

I was already moving away since a while. 7 years without TV, so less and less french discussion about what’s happening here. Ten years I’m reading most of the time in english, watching shows in english and now it’s been a year I’m writing in english. All my computers, OSes, apps are all in the language of Shakespeare.

So it’s really, really awkward to live in France interacting with my inside world –social medias, music, movies- all in english  and communicate with the outside world in french. Now that I lived in the US it’s even worse. I feel like totally spaced out, stranger in both countries.

And because I’m connected with my Verdell everyday with a 8 hours delay, having a clock widget set on Pacific Time to look at, I’m totally out of time too. In the evening I always have a rush of energy knowing that LA is waking up and getting ready. It makes me want to do things when it’s dinner time and that well, Paris is getting sleepy. And then I feel it too.

Depression. I call that a rollercoaster-you-can’t-get-out-from. It’s funnier this way.

I can’t wait for it to stop though.

Hee

Because it actually started on Twitter, for real. I remember, it was one of those Browse Evening, the kind I have everyday. I clicked on her picture. I guess the green attracted me. I like the green.

It could have not happen. Hell I could have not been tweeting (0,98% of  Twitter users are french in 2010, I started at SXSW 2007) at all and miss that!

And Better Off Dead. C’mon!!! That is crazy.

So if you want the rest which is pretty awesome, stay tuned on har0ld and missRFTC. Or follow the hastag #itstartedontwitter.

You heard about it here first. Or on Twitter.

This CES 2010 was very interesting. There’s something slowing down in the hardware world and that’s a big benefit for us as consumers and content makers.

The content (the oldest one, text is coming back hard) and user experience (free-dom) are driving the trend and that’s good news. HD wagon and 3D are trying to sell themselves like crazy but let’s face it: it doesn’t change things that much (you need a crazy large screen to see the difference, a lot of people don’t see the difference at all and more, 99% of the entire world cinematographic production is not in that format anyway). In that aspect that is no surprise if the SD-Wii launched three years ago is outselling by more than one million units its HD-competitors sales combined in the biggest month of the year in the game industry, last month. Seriously, it does say something.

It’s cool that 3D is coming out but let’s see when we’ll not need glasses which is a couple of years away, maybe much more before it’s affordable. HD’s still not.

HTC slate tablet prototype with Chrome OS

Instead the big trend appears to be about people connecting them, making their lives easier: TV integrating social services, devices streaming everything you want to every devices you want, e-readers allowing you to read stuff without killing your sight on a phone screen or making your knees hurt because of the heat of your laptop.

Instead of using technology to simply beef up the visual in-your-face experience, the trend is to do more overall and use the technology to make life better, more pleasant simply by being smarter on technology use, by being affordable.

Like the DVD upscaling technology. Like reaching your content from anywhere with Boxee Box or any computer set as a streaming machine. Like having a tablet on your couch, browsing the web and commenting your friends activity. Like the GPS and sync options of our smartphones. Like netbooks. Like charging your things wirelessly.

Like the SSD rejuvenating old PCs. Like Linux/Android getting huge because they make all these not-that-last-piece-of-tech you have work better, faster. Freely. For your own pleasure. That’s why Windows7 is good too: they didn’t rely on future technology like they did for Vista or older OS, they just heavily optimized what they had.

Dear slate tablets. Please hurry the fuck up. Game developers need you. 

I mean it’s a huge difference that we don’t go into the “MOAR” but into the “let’s be more efficient”. I know it’s not just to make people happy. Moore’s law is not as fast as in the 00s or 90s and now manufacturers can’t rely on that to scale investment and make a profit. They have to wait and expand their product life cycles.

Efficiency. It’s the first time in my mind that it’s the trend to rule them all, thanks to the mobile phones market driving the tech world today. Because we know it’s ridiculous to buy an entire new tv and entertainment set just to see 200 more lines in movies that don’t require that to be totally, absolutely enjoyable. It’s ridiculous to throw entire dvd collection to buy again some optical slow discs. It’s ridiculous to buy new expensive computers and graphic cards when we spend 90% of our time on the web and do so much on it. Hell my audio PC is just a bi-cpu and I can run more tracks than I can possibly handle. For life.

Despite everything manufacturers say people still have some brain or an empty wallet these days. Sometimes both, which make them search for efficiency even more.

The global economy is going toward better ressource management because we’re going to be short very soon. So does the entertainment and personal home digital business and we still have a lot to do (think about all this electronic trash we’re adding each day). 

Spending more, throwing things that work for a subjective gain is certainly not a good step into the future. Optimizing and saving ressources is a much better bet.

So it seems that the g-spot doesn’t appear to exist after all. I mean, scientifically it does not but subjectively, it does.

So good

Who cares. The important thing is pleasure and the most accurate view of it seems to be that the clitoris is a big organ which can be stimulate on its outside tip or from an inside point.

I find interesting that researchers are still discovering and being not sure about sexual organs functions, exactly like people don’t really know how their bodies work. Women as men, we’re pretty equal on that ignorance.

A lot of women still don’t know how to orgasm, because a lot of them don’t practice masturbation, still. It’s a real issue.

In a 2007 british survey It was found that, between individuals aged 16 to 44, 95% of men and 71% of women masturbated at some point in their lives. 73% of men and 37% of women reported masturbating in the four weeks before their interview, while 53% of men and 18% of women reported masturbating in the previous seven days.

The difference is huge and easily explained by how women can’t reach the status of being normal loving to give themselves pleasure without some severe social backlash if they claim it.

Man’s World.

But men can’t laugh or point that out because we are in the same situation regarding the prostate. When I was a child, my grandfather would say that this is a useless male organ that makes you pee when you’re old so that you’d rather have it removed. I don’t know where I read that but some men are complaining that sex is boring. Sure, if all you do is preventing your cock to ejaculate, staying in this position until you can’t possibly control it exploding in quick fading bursts, you’re in a sad position.

Enter the p-spot, coming with the same backlash as woman masturbation: you can’t really talk about it or even practice it.

We know how it works, it’s common knowledge that it’s giving more pleasure but we refuse to see the prostate massage as nothing more than something pretty fucking gay, especially in Old Europe. In the US, I saw a SNL skit focused on that. Prime time p-spot guys.

Like I said in a long auto-ITW (french), I totally love it. Now that I have a girlfriend it’s no different. It just enlarges sex games scope. Zomg it’s just the beginning baby :)

Anyway when I reach for my p-spot I always feel like I’m touching my cock from the other side. Tip or inside. Hey, it looks like the female stimulation too: tip (clitoris) or inside (g-spot, might be renamed c-spot but who cares). Knowing that male/female orgasm contractions share the same periodicity (0.8 sec rate), knowing that we are only different on ONE gene..

Well everything makes sense. No magic or hidden part here. We share almost the same organs and we have pleasure with these in pretty much the same way. This is some crazy shit man. *sigh*

Instead of playing to be retarded asking ourselves “could it be The Answer to the Mystical Mystery of my Sexual Life?” by reading researchers work, we should encourage ourselves to have fun with our bodies, knowing it much better. Nothing can replace the experience to learn something.

Since the p revelation I feel I totally changed:

• Masturbation lasts way longer and is more enjoyable by not only shacking my sausage but by touching myself around it. A lot. So many nerves around, inside my thighs, under my balls, around my ass.. You’re a fool not playing with it. Let me rephrase that: you are batshit crazy not playing with it. Because you own it you know.
• I have hard-ons I’ve never had before even if I’ve never had any problems on that part.
• Orgasms are just amazing and stronger. Much more than classic intercourses. Just yesterday after feeling that I wanted to stop and then wanting more and then wanting to stop, I had one that made me moaning and hyperventilating for 15 minutes, still feeling the pleasure down there, pumping in my boner. Oh yeah I sleep well after that. Body feels relaxed like you just took a full Lexomil/Xanax tablet.
• I discovered my nipples were giving me pleasure too. I hated it 10 years ago, licking them was a good way to turn me off. I wasn’t receptive. I just thought that sex is all about my penis (not really but you get my point).

I find it unfair that the public opinion is always harassing women on their sexual life while men are giggling in the dark because we believe that we know it all: shake, ejaculate, period.

If you are a man and want to believe that BS, don’t make excuse that you want/need to fuck a lot of pussies, it’s just that you are bored with your narrow view of sex intercourses. You can do better. And it’s free!

So dude if you want to unlock some big rewards, fat ass orgasms, explore your own body first. At your pace. You don’t have to tell anybody. Forget about this g-spot, be selfish. Get rid of that body hair that makes no sense, take care and respect your body. And reach for higher pleasure.
 

Fuck I talk like a 70s pothead hippy sex guru. It’s your fault.

I’m looking at technology trends and all I can see is that users get away from ads and commercials as much as they can while businesses rely more and more on this revenue.

How the hell is this going to end?

Some observations:

• Google Chrome browser just got its own addon system. Most rated and downloaded addons? AdSweep and AdBlock.
• Firefox has gained its huge traction with AdBlock Plus, which is the most popular addon with 695,623 downloads to date.
• Facebook won against MySpace not only on features, but because and foremost IMO for this nice and almost ad-free UI.
• Same for Twitter, ad-free for now.
• Same for Google Search and its clean UI.
• YouTube ads: Google is trying hard but people don’t click a lot. I stream less videos since I have to click a fucking cross button everytime.
• RSS: It’s MEANT to be only the content and the content only. Embedded rss ads are useless, less efficient that web ones which are already not that effective, except for a few giants or as an additional income.
• Main attract of downloading shows on P2P is that there’s no commercials. No 30-40 mn show cut with three commercial breaks.
• Tivo/DirectTV recording so you can skip them.
• etc

Why do we still push advertising so much? Yeah, it was working this way with papers and TV, now the technology is 100% customer-side. If the future is based on niche markets and specific audiences with no brand loyalty reached by word of mouth propagation only, I don’t see the advertising as a solution. Maybe a dying-almost dead one at best. So focusing on it like a lot of tech businesses do seems really silly. 

We finished The Fake Decade, and it’s not that it’s new but these past 10 years have been pretty full of faux everything from Reality TV to Weapons of Mass Destruction. It’s going to be a challenge to do something lamer than that. Please don’t encourage.

It would be good to slow down on the BS or maybe even stop it whenever you see it.

Time goes by so fast when you’re happy. Ten days Christmas and New Year’s Eve with her. If I would have been told that at 30 years old I would be with my California Love in Paris and around France visiting families, I would have been pretty excited I guess. That was fun.

It’s a trap!

Fun, this word I try to replicate, workship, live.

Now it’s not really fun though. I don’t know when team HarVerd will be unified again.

In Vincennes. What’s the name of this town? V-C! V-C! And who’s gonna get on down?

Also I finished a track:

Unicorn by Harold

I’m so late on news and everything, I promess it’s going to be more stable in the future now.

Holy shit, 2010.

In full action 

Dear Santa,I’ve been good. Unfortunately my partner and I have been separated by some obscure stupid things. So dear Santa I’d like you to get her to me as soon as possible. Thanks. Harold

I’m waiting

She’s coming

Dude Claus,

Thanks Santa. Have a seat, have a glass of milk and then you will come and taste my foot in your mouth for being so late. I don’t care that Christmas is December 25th, you should have give me my fantastic gift way earlier! I’m waiting for it for ages now! And all you can do is have this lousy face full of hair. Seriously dude. Hopefully I’ll see her this week but don’t you ever do that again to me you giant dwarf. Actually next time I’ll be with her so don’t bother moving your lazy ass, you can stay home getting drunk. Harold

I didn’t know how hard it would be to just switch and go back and forth on two different western culture and cities.

This is in picture, what is happening to me:

Or in a more detailed version:

It makes me laugh but at some point since I’m back, I look like this. Everyday.

Anyway, I put my finger on what is making me crazy: there’s too much dynamic in Paris. Dynamic in the sense of the difference between things, like in music between the softest sound and the loudest. From top to bottom, moving all the time. Mildness doesn’t exist.

The good part is this amazing social diversity. Rich, less rich, young, old, every kind of body shape, every single color or ethnicity of the world interacting with each others in a little city, packed in the public transport is something I always love to look at in Paris. One time I remember these women, a 1meter 85 (6”1) black woman chatting with this 1m40 (4”9) blonde white one in the train like they are at a pajama party. “Interracial” couples are so common it’s not even a feature. Also adopted children with white parents are quite common. It’s hard to witness that level of social mix in LA. You can easily see it here.

So that is a great result of chaos and diversity in Paris. Everything else makes me want to throw things.

It starts with the sunlight going from bright enough I can’t see my monitor screen to darkness where I need to put the lights on. In 20 minutes. Same with temperature. Outside cold then metro a little warmer then cold in the street then this fucking hot door at the BHV, then super hot in the store and everything back. Whatever you wear at some point you need adjustment because you’re going to feel uncomfortable with a 20°c delta up and down in one hour.

It’s the same with people. From the children yelling and jumping to the elderly going downstairs in the metro creating a big traffic jam because they are slow as hell. From the old white lady who stinks perfume so hard to the black dude smelling like he didn’t take a shower since august, I feel like I’m always fighting some sort of annoyance.

As for services, it can be awfully harsh but sometimes, people are just perfectly doing their job and being nice. You can expect everything from the worse to the good with an emphasis on the worse though. Yeah, it’s boring not to know.

I feel like french people are thinking this way: “I don’t give a shit about what’s going on around me because I have the right to do and exist as I am”. Well yeah technically it’s ok but society-wise, it means chaos. And it is chaos. Just look at any damn sidewalk in Paris, how people behave. Amazingly random and chaotic. Oh, maybe it’s because of dog shit.

No wonder why french can’t agree overall. There’s always a voice, someone to fuck everything up. You know, like this stupid group of drunk people screaming like pigs in the streets and making bars to have serious problems with the police.

Social chaos creates status quo and stagnation which are totally unproductive, as France politics during the last 30 years can demonstrate that. Of course great people, great minds and great things are born from this amazing source of creation but they love to get the hell out of Paris whenever they can. Plus they usually get success outside of this town.

I loved LA for this overall stability. Stability of weather, people behaviors, what you can expect from a service etc It’s so much less stress in the everyday life that you can comfortably focus on your work, especially creative ones. That king of micro stress you don’t even know from where it comes and which makes you want to punch people in the throat after years of having to deal with it like these awful RER strikes, each year. Well I don’t want it anymore.

Interestingly enough if I look at my dad’s generation –50s- virtually no one got out of France. My cousin in its 40s, a little more like a couple of his friends. Me? I can already count a dozen of them going from Germany, Spain, China, Morroco, US/UK, Swiss, Australia, Japan.. We are going to be very different from our parents and older generations, we are going to be the french who moved around the world instead of staying in our little village, pissing and shitting on each other’s back while smiling like it’s no big deal.

So if we ever get back to our country, it’s going to change. In a good way, I hope.

Great.

A week that I’m back in Paris after three months in LA. Going from couple/sun/music/english to alone/rain/nomusic/french is an experience I heavily do not recommend. It’s pretty much driving me nuts to the point where I need to grind my teeths way too often while looping a song 120 times in a day. Yesterday was Patience from Aurra.

*scream*

I feel like comparing and seeing the good and bad of everything between two different lifestyles and of course I’d go for a mix of them at least just to make me feel that there’s room for progress and stuff to do I guess.

It’s exciting. But I have to cool down on difficulties. It’s like everytime I have the choice I choose the hard way. Going around the hill or going through it? I’m taking the steep route. Falling in love? I choose the one 10 000kms away. Computer games industry? I choose the most obscure field, game audio.

When it’s going well it’s so rewarding. the main problem is that it’s exhausting man! But the paradigm for next year is pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty good (Sorry France, Larry David reference).

Also I’m recovering 200 gigs of data from my dying NAS. I think I’ll never go after 500G+ hard drives because it’s too much to keep up with. It’s like when we pass the billion scale (Gb, Ghz, $B) we can’t really follow or enjoy it. So when it goes around one thousand billion.. Even for 90 bucks I don’t want to (1To drives, 10*12 omg).

Ok I’m bored.

PS: Bluuurgh is also a metal band name. “So what are you listening to?”

Under the freeway, LA 2009

USA, CA land of the car lifestyle. You quickly understand that you need one to move around. What struck me:

– Toyota Prius

Third generation

The car is the most fuel efficient car ever produced and has a better reliability that some expensive german cars. Add the built-in technology (the last generation includes a voice-activated touch-screen DVD-based navigation system and an 8-speaker JBL audio system) and you can easily see why this car –at least in LA- is like the R5 in France in the 80s. It’s fucking everywhere.

– Where are the US cars?

*cue More Bounce To The Ounce*

Short answer: nowhere. In the pick-up category, there’s still some. For every other brand new car or old ones, it’s like 90% of them are japanese. Maybe more. Sure some people are still cruising with good old vintage Cadillac Eldorado or of course some ‘68 Ford Mustang but it’s a very narrow percentage.

I don’t know why but seeing this I can’t help but think about Hiroshima. If Germany had bombed France with one of the deadliest weapon ever created, I don’t think we would ever love their car to the point that our national production would be almost dead. US/Japan relation is weird. And yes, we don’t care anymore.

– Traffic lights

*cue drinking in LA"*

I guess it’s a classic one but damn, it makes so much more sense to have it in front of you instead of on your side like in Europe. Because you don’t have to look away from the road and because it’s on the other side of the intersection, you always have time to use the breaks without little panic.

– Driving

Night Life

For my first time driving one hour alone on the freeway and all I was scared as shit. But it’s easy. I mean with a gps it’s easy. Everything is large so you rarely have to do some weird and dangerous stuff to get out from a wrong way. Road signs are not confusing and never too late. People drive safely, I mean I come from France and on a traffic jam people are just bitches. Here I was the bitch, sneaking from lane to lane. I didn’t see a lot of asshole behavior. Around Paris on the Boulevard Périphérique it’s simply war. With a lot of trucks and 2 wheels. In LA there’s almost none of them. It simplifies a lot what to pay attention to. Also people know how to park, I’ve never seen someone doing two or three times the entire process of doing correctly a parallel parking move. It has to do with the wide roads and the car culture.

– Law

”So.. How about sandwiches for diner tonight?”

Man it’s tough. A friend got a 450$ ticket for not stopping long enough at a stop sign. I had a 80$ parking ticket on a saturday morning at 8:03am. Another friend had a 300$ ticket for crossing the street while the pedestrian sign was saying he could not. They don’t mess around. In France every driver would be in jail with laws like that. At least it makes people careful and on the road that’s the priority I guess.

– Parking

 
Ha! Wait.. 

Night-mare. Worse than anything I did in Europe. Frustrating because from my narrow french point of view everything is wide large and fat here so parking spaces should be that way too. Oh boy.

– Relation with the car

Time to nap

I saw so many people hanging in their car. Like this time when I went to the music store, this guy was almost laying down in it, chatting on his phone in this dead and dusty parking. One hour later he was taking a nap. I saw a lot of that, people parked and chatting, having diner etc. In France only workmen are doing that for lunch or students to smoke some pot or make out in winter but otherwise the car is alone, left in the street like an object. Seriously.

– Thoughts

With everybody in cars one thing really cool is that sidewalks are empty. It’s great to walk with no one interfering your path. It never happens in Paris.

LA should have something like Velib and an extended public transport system. The city is lucky enough to provide the best weather ever to bike all year long. If it was easier to move from a side to another one (tons of buses, but for the metro..) cars would be less useful unless you have to carry a bass amp or something. Nobody likes to be stuck in traffic. Everyone hates parking hunting. Public transportation allows you to safely tweet, read, dance and not care about these things. I mean how great is that? How can you be against that?

Next comparative subject, probably services.