Ferociously reading. Almost done with all of these. It’s time-consuming? It’s also opening my brain like nothing else does.
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Category: Me Myself&I
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Paupiettes
Paupiettes de veau from the local butcher at the family home back in France. Classic dish, this is his version of it and it s l a p s. Ground meat with cheese wrapped in a veal envelope itself wrapped with lard, which is like bacon but totally not the same at the same time. I’ll explain later. It doesn’t matter. This is delicious beyond my own taste buds.
I kindly asked mom if she could get me some for when I visit, and she didn’t disappoint. They used to be bigger but pandemic-flation, I guess. I should have eaten four of these instead of one.
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Spotify
Look, Spotify is 16 years old. It grew to have 200M paying subscribers.
They were losing 39M euros last year and this year, they’re losing 270M euros. Net income: minus 430 million euros.
This is not even supposed to be possible.
If your company has 200 million people paying you every month and you can’t even turn a tiny profit, your business model is pure trash. Just trash.
Folks! Please buy music on Discogs or Bandcamp, and grab the rest on torrents™. Listen to podcasts for free on Obama’s internet like it’s 2004.
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Architecture and building
Architecture books are insane to read. People spend an absurd amount of energy on what a style encompasses or how to follow a technique or a trend. Dogma everywhere.
Building a home is not about that at all. It is about Quality of Life.
What is Quality of Life (QoL) in a home? There are basically a few parameters:
- Room temperature
- Air quality
- Soundproofing
- Maintenance
Throughout a year and seasons, you want to never be cold or hot, you want to breath clean, healthy air, and you don’t want to hear noises from others. And then, you don’t want to have to spend too much time or effort managing said home. Maintenance needs to be low.
That is, I believe, what every single human being on earth is trying to reach in their homes regardless of background and location.
Those four points are intimately connected: to achieve well-controlled room temperature, you need an airtight building. To get an airtight building that allows healthy air quality, you will end up with a few materials that can do that, and even fewer than also allow good soundproofing. And if you can use green material, even better, but that’s another constraint.
Nonetheless, there are an infinite amount of combination here due to local material availability, local zoning and building codes, local climate, etc. The devil is in the detail, always.
The thing that never changes is that Room Temperature, Air Quality and Soundproofing are the goals.
Maintenance is a side goal but is HUGE. People completely forget about that one when planning their dream home, which is why they end up with far too big houses and unsustainable utility bills. We don’t have to.
By using very old techniques and/or high tech ones, from designs allowing airflow to modern heat pumps, we can reach maintenance-free homes with $200/year utility bills. That is why I want to build new so much! Most people buy a home and are blind to their bills. It might be $90 this month and $356 the next. I don’t want that. I want very predictable bills.
I want Quality of Life. We can all have it. It’s all doable.
It’s beautiful.
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Shifting
Reading furiously, mostly about architecture. I’m onto something.
Recently learned about GFRC, Glass Fiber Reinforced Concrete. Extremely interesting material.
An earthquake hits Turkey and Syria killing 30,000 folks and it seems insane yet COVID has killed 130,000 in the world in the past month alone and we don’t care at all. Japan seems to be getting out of its worst stint right now, which is good.
I see Waymo cars everyday. My emails and chats write, correct themselves. ChatGPT is being tested left and right, which only makes it stronger every single time.
Meanwhile 3D printed homes are a reality and there’s a lot of BS going on around them, which means a lot of curation on my side to get to the actual meat.
At the same time layoffs are running wild, remote work really is transforming cities and automation is really taking over.
It’s hard to see the future.
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Can we get a decade without
Batman.
Titanic.
WWII.
Is that even possible?
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Dilla Time
Reading this phenomenal book about J Dilla. It’s so powerful.
I remember listening to some of his Slum Village tracks back in the early 2000s, thinking “this one was dope but this one is a joke, right?”. I was frustrated by the hype and either great delivery about the hype or very underwhelming content. The book explains why this was like that.
I’ve been listening to Robert Glasper plays J Dilla (with Chris Dave on drums) a lot since last year. A phenomenal live performance (Boiler room in NYC, gone from YouTube but I have my mp3s). Shout out to T3.
I’ve been making beat-heavy music for 20+ years. Playing bass every day for 25+. Always had a drummer playing in my head since I was a kid and heard my first snares, hi hats and kicks live.
Dilla is from Detroit, a city with a French name and tons of French culture artifacts because it was founded by French missionaries.
Detroit is Motor City (the car life in L.A.), Motown (one of the biggest achievement ever in Black America), P-Funk (ever bigger than Motown to me), and Techno (so absolutely massive in 90s Europe, where I was at that time).
He was fascinated by Brazilian music, its polyrhythms, textures and harmonics. Me too (that’s why there’s timbales in my latest below).
He moved to L.A. in Hancock Park. I live a short bicycle ride away from there. He also was in Silver Lake with Stones Throw Records, who’s head is Peanut Butter Wolf who I recognized in the restroom of the Cinerama Dome during the premiere of Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest. Dilla also connected with Madlib and Little Brother, both acts that I adored in the 2000s.
I barely listen to any hip-hop.
The Pharcyde’s Bullshit track is probably the first hip-hop track that I truly loved to death. Labcabincalifornia is one of the best ever (shout out to Booty Brown and Diamond D).
In 2014 I was living next to Delicious Pizza, created by the Delicious Records guys, who produced Labcabincalifornia. I got to chat with the Ross brothers. They had a couple block parties and I got to hear Slimkid3 and Fatlip spitting live from my roof while bopping heads with friends.
I could never stand Jay-Z, Puff and Kanye’s stuff. I was annoyed that they were so huge. I wanted Dilla’s Elastic SoulFunk to dominate.
I wanted Dilla to do more soul. Ain’t nothing wrong with keeping doing something great. All the hard, tech, dirty beats didn’t stand the test of time, all his soulful ones did and are even stronger now.
The insanity of the music business in the early 2000s. The label consolidation really ruined so many careers. Had Dilla been in the Bandcamp era, he would have been eating vegan donuts making beats from his Detroit basement, fully independent, money going straight to his account, the way he wanted it.
The sad because so common tale of a man not caring about much while women take care of EVERYTHING around his ass. smdh.
I waited. I avoided music labels, baby mamas and homies telling you how you should line up your life.
But the connection is deeper than I want to recognize. My head is heavy with creative, musical, undone things that I want to lay down in notes and rhythms.
Many in Dilla Time.
It’s just funny how things float around, sometimes.
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Holistic approach, always
My answer to mass shootings will always be this post I wrote last year.
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Y’all got kids, right?
Question: how do you not freak out about technology right now?
AI passing exams? Coding? Making music? It’s right now, not soon.
Soon, it’ll be so good that it will be enough for us.
The question screaming in my head is:
HOW DO WE SUSTAIN A SOCIETY SO RICH THAT ITS SALARY-BASED SYSTEM IS STRAIGHT UP INVALID? HOW? HOW DO WE COMPETE WITH SOMETHING DOING BETTER THAN US 24/7 AT QUITE EVERYTHING?
After the start of the pandemic, printing money, inflation and AI exploding this conversation should be in every mouth out there, seriously.
It’s so crucial and urgent. And the answer is simple:
Print money (UBI), give it to people, house us in very sustainable and healthy housing (so that we relieve earth from our growth’s impact and sustain ourselves into peaceful communities), and let us work collaboratively with AI (we keep doing what we’re doing with printed money as a constant supplement). No need for competition. No need for cyberpunk fantasy.
Simple. Not easy.
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Tyre Nichols
Rest in Power, brother.