Category: Me Myself&I

Michael Cera interview.

Cera is 35 and must be one of the few millennials not to own a smartphone. I fire questions at him about how he survives. Google Maps? “That’s the thing everybody always asks. I just figure it out ahead of time.” 

I swear it’s great for your brain. It’s called planning. You visualize things in advance, and then when those things show up in your life, you’re prepared. It’s amazing.

On the other hand, people addicted to their smartphones have 4 or 5 simultaneous GPS in their cars with maps and they still don’t know in which lane they should be or when to turn, so.

Sometimes he draws a map. 

Visualization, hello! I don’t draw maps, but I’ll write a few lines of 3rd Ave, turn left on Olympic type of stuff on a Post-it. I am never late or lost. I only have random Post-its in my car.

Social media? He doesn’t do it. 

I sure did! And I’m not anymore and it is great. Facebook once a month for extended family. Text, email and eye contact for the rest.

Endless photos? He bought himself a camera while his wife was pregnant and taught himself how to use it, “and now I love that as a hobby”.

What about when he has a spare 30 seconds and desperately needs to save himself from agonizing boredom? “I don’t know. Sometimes I’ll just be bored.” He laughs, as if it’s no big deal. It gives him space to process things, he says. 

It is vital. Oh my god, the fact that people can’t stand being with their own thoughts at all anymore is a massive red flag about where we’re headed.

Checking email? He has a computer at home for that,

That is so real. I have email on my phone and it’s kinda useless? I read it in advance, I guess. I’ll answer at home with a nice, full keyboard and a glass of something or a snack. Delightful.

“and I waste a lot of time playing chess. It’s completely got its tentacles in my brain, but at least I leave it at home.”

I wanted to do that with Go, but I immediately stopped because Go was all I could think about. Not good for productivity and stuff like living.

Anyway. This man is all right.

So Sabrina Ionescu shot 25 of 27 in a 3P contest. That’s the record in both WNBA and NBA. Absolutely disgusting.

Men yell that the ball is smaller, the 3P line is shorter and are incapable of processing the fact that women’s hands and bodies are also smaller, meaning that it’s basically the same performance as a 6’9 motherfucker with big ass hands.

It looks like many men cannot comprehend that women can be better at things than us. Like, it immediately gives them diarrhea. Bro, relax and go shoot 27/27, what’s stopping you? Misogyny is hell.

This was on the front page of Le Monde in France, last week.

Same issues. Same injustice. Same results. Same complacency. Same double standard. Same pain.

Same headlines. Same disrespect. Same violence.

Probably 0 lessons learned and more fuel added to the fire. As usual.

We are in it. People will claim “I’m a news junkie!” or that they’re the biggest fan of this and that. I’m a whale for that game, etc.

People are addicted to notifications to death. Every single time I talk to a friend about that notification life (I turned them all off in 2011), they wince instantly. They explain to me how terrible it is and how they’re stuck in it. Especially with dating apps (I’m not on them at all).

It is wild to see grown folks struggle with mental gymnastics they’re imposing to themselves.

There’s also this “I Deserve” culture of having a service do what you should be doing. For instance, people use services that help them manage web links. People feel the need to pay for an app that “saves” an article for reading later.

Bro, your computer is an insanely great note/bookmark tool, do it yourself? Paste that shit into your notes and call it a day, what the hell? Organize your stuff? Oh, you can afford that service, sure. There’s this “there’s an app market, I must use it otherwise I’m not doing it right” undertone to the smartphone life that is so, so weird because people also understand the privacy issues yet, give up on them all the time. Hence why corporations think that we are dumb fucks.

They might have a point. A bit sad innit.

We’re really doing this to ourselves.

Identifiers, Sensitive Info and “Other Data” smell like “we’re basically collecting everything from you, even your movements inside your kitchen and future stuff you don’t know about lol”.

Laptops and browsers. Emails and RSS. I’m chillin’ and the ad economy can go die in a ditch.

Sleep deprivation is back on the menu for me. Five straight nights with about 4 hours of sleep, due to fan noise bleeding through walls and amplified in my bedroom. I see blood.

I’m also a vegetable today. Happy 4th or whatever.

Today, I was back (yes, I need to recover/update the pictures in that post). Where I sit there? Yeah, pure bliss.

That’s Mr. Lautner. He is indeed, cool.

I have been studying architecture and designing for years very steadily. Between my first visit in 2018 and now, I have seen what feels like millions of “super different”, expensive houses.

Not a one matches this thing. OK, I haven’t tested them all out, but this residence, my friend. There’s joy.

That non-boxy feeling coupled with abundant nature and privacy, is unique and so potent. In my review I describe it as a cluster of dedicated spaces for living. I think this is very much accurate.

It was a hot day (it’s already grey outside, this weathermane), I was hangover (a very rare thing), dehydrated and the burrito back to the crib was phenomenal.

We’ve never actually known what’s going on in Russia, ever?

There’s always so much propaganda from either us the West or them, Russia, that it is difficult to know anything.

Shout out to Russians who are just trying to have a decent life on this planet. Sorry about that y’all.

I’m using GPT regularly and the best thing is asking a few questions after the first one, to refine and tune answers.

This is where there’s no going back to search engines: GPT is much smarter than search, giving me a summary and sources. Can’t get better than that.

The problem for me is how much I give to OpenAI. With Google, they were getting my thoughts.

OpenAI gets my reasoning.

I’m not happy about this. Yet like old days Google, GPT is so good I can’t not use it. For all my design research, it is and has been excellent at helping me out decipher a bunch of stuff. Every week.

Meanwhile I realize that I now basically don’t believe any picture on the internet. Sometimes I do, for twenty seconds when I think “no way” and then I think “Photoshop+AI, right”. 

I barely trust videos and the trend is trusting them less and less. We always say that we’re visual creatures. OK, and we look at fake stuff all the time, online or in real life when we look at SZA. We ain’t right.

It adds to the current strangeness of this (sort of) post-pandemic world.