Category: Me Myself&I

Okay, I found this gem of a YouTube channel, about John Lautner’s houses.

The narrator and creator of those videos is a Dutch guy with talent, drawing floor plans and foundations and doing guided tours of the famous architect’s output.

It is fantastic, full of facts and smart assumptions. I knew 90% of it and still learned great things. For instance, I didn’t know that Silvertop was the first house with an infinity pool in the world.

I hadn’t really realized that John Lautner really was into architectural challenges, choosing hard sites to build the most amazing structures.

And how much he broke the box. We live in square boxes and pretty much none of his work resembles anything boxy. You change an angle from 90 to 110 degrees and your brain breathes. So dope.

Always pulling people to Nature, and using technology to alleviate issues and not for the sake of said technology.

That’s a design stance that is quite timeless and that I can follow.

I want non-boxy homes for all. Period.

(I visited the Sheats-Goldstein house a couple times, it’s mine now; The Wolff house too. And Arango, you will be mine at some point as well, I didn’t make the rules)

I’ve been going to the same grocery store for years. Same cashiers for that long.

Janet and Natalia. Absolutely amazingly professional women. The kind of cashier that knows when to open a new line just by looking at how many people are entering the store, not when there’s a line of 20 folks waiting already.

They worked the entire 2020-2022 High Risk pandemic. Every single day. I’ll never forget in the first two months when we didn’t know shit and that people were dropping like flies, they stood up. Never stopped working, never stopped being super professional. I saw their eyes full of tears, still holding, three masks on.

The last times I saw them a couple months ago, I noticed that they were often chatting.

I think they quit over compensation. They probably didn’t get any raise, when they definitely should have gotten a substantial one.

Now it’s definitely not as tight as before in that store and I’m shopping all like

Why not control guns?

We can’t control guns as there are far too many of them to control, and 3D printing exists. Pass all the missing laws. We still don’t control guns.

Why mass shootings happen?

Men are not well, the environment has been sick for a while.

You mean wealth inequality?

Yes. It is at its worse in 50 years.

There’s wealth inequality everywhere.

Trust me when I say as a man who’s lived on three different continents, that American wealth inequality is #1 in democracies by far. Quick reminder that minimum wage in Texas is $7.25/hr and that gas is $5-$6 these days. Meanwhile in Europe or Asia, folks have been getting 80% if not 100% of their salaries since the start of the New Plague.

So what is it, is it our culture?

Yes, in part. America has been on that violent vibe *checks notes* for a while.

Is it our entertainment?

Yes, in part. Entertainment is part of our environment and our entertainment is full of violence. It cannot help, in both sense of the term.

But they play ultra violent games/movies/music outside of the US too!

They have safety nets. We used to have one, cheap gas. They don’t have to hustle like crazy to stay off the streets like people in America. The compounding effects of a violent reality+violent culture divided by this doesn’t have to be insane like that and supercharged with misinformation, are making people snap.

Should we ban violence in entertainment?

That’s not how it works: entertainment is a byproduct of our society, not the cause. To change entertainment, we need to change society first.

How?

By redistributing wealth properly, fairly.

Taxes?

No, those don’t work. All companies and politicians have secured ways to never have to deal with that, for decades. They have a plethora of ways to avoid them. It’s over.

Non-profit?

No, corruption.

Guaranteed Income?

Yessir, that’s a start.

People will get lazy.

I’d rather have that than kids getting killed by another kid, first of all, and then there are tons of people who will still do what they do, only with less anxiety, which is the goal. Don’t worry about laziness at all.

Why do you want to empower people with money? They will buy guns!

People don’t want to shoot others to death like that. You need absolute desperation and if you have money and a decent gig to cover your needs and a guaranteed good & honest life, why would you go on a killing spree? To get killed? Okay, not a great idea is it?

Right, but how do you want people to be housed? How would they stay calm?

Well, most human needs are simple to solve. Good housing, which means inexpensive and healthy, is a solved problem. So if you are in a healthy home with healthy food, and that it looks like it will never end, you don’t get mad and angry like that.

Huh. I guess. But how do we FINANCE this???

With money? Look Mr. Musk is about to buy a social network for $44B. If you divide that amount by the population of the US (326M), that’s $134,969 each.

Maybe that’s a good down payment for a house. Maybe that’s actually enough to 3D-print a whole house and “run” it. And that’s just money that is supposed to buy a gigantic pile of toxic comments in an app.

Money is what we want it to do. We have plenty of money. Far too much, apparently –inflation. Well, let’s build a future of folks growing up in optimal conditions that will allow them to behave properly. /insert priceless joke

But politically though?? How do we get everyone on board?

I mean if the now is not enough to get everyone onboard to correct the course of this country a least a little bit, I don’t know what is. But y’all keep using pettiness and ugly, low level battles to stay away from doing the real things. I’m telling you, this is all possible now. Postpone Mars, Earth. Now.

You said earlier that men are not well, how healthy housing is helping with that?

I mean by default it does help everyone. Men in America have no choice but run, and keep running. There’s almost zero contemplation time in their lives, especially 2000s youth, glued to screens. Questioning and independence are a good combo. Healthy housing would provide time for men to unlearn and unpack a whole lot of things, and for young men to learn from that, and for young kids to understand that the future will be comprehensive.

It is worth iterating on.

James Dyson on being eighteen in 1965: “And then there was the war, which we had not had to experience but whose effects on the national psyche infused everything. Everything became suddenly possible. Children were prized because so many had been killed, and money was poured into education? We felt needed, important, protected, and at the centre of the world.”

James Dyson – Against the Odds: An Autobiography (fascinating and hilarious read)

What a contrast with how we treat children now. Have one, put him/her/they in front of a screen, done.

And then we wonder why they turn feral and are quite bad at making decisions.

SQLite is just a little database. With all computers and digital machines, there’s a need for a database. That’s how machines work; they store things up and retrieve them all the time thus, database.

SQLite is the most efficient and quickest database on earth. It was created in summer 2000.

Two things that I love about that:

– SQLite powers your iPhone, Android, Windows, your favorite browser, some Adobe stuff, tons of services out there. It is absolutely everywhere (it powers my RSS reader too, which is insanely fast).

– Despite its age and hundreds if not thousands of ultra-smart engineers tried to make it better or make their own, it is still the best.

There’s a constant push to upgrade, even radically change things in tech (for the best). But SQLite is like “HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH no”. For twenty years and counting.

I love it.

TikTok Boom | No Mercy

Wonderful article on TikTok kicking ass and stuff.

“The biggest mistake we make in marketing is believing choice is a benefit. No, it’s a tax. Consumers don’t want more choices, they want more confidence in the choices presented. TikTok has taken this to a new level by eliminating the burden of choice entirely. Its content is a continuous stream of videos where the decisions are made for you. Your only choice: what not to watch.”

Yikes. New generations growing up thinking that choices are a difficult thing. Yikes. Wait for when you absolutely have none, you’ll see. Yikes.

“Expect an emerging field of academic research looking at the effects on behavior, and the developing brain, of rapid-fire media.”

I mean, we already know that it’s bad: it destroys the ability to sustain attention, which is essential in any task you want to do in life and obviously, even more crucial when you want to do any task as best as possible. We already live in short-sighted societies, I don’t think this is helping.

“Already, the app appears to be linked with eating disorders and depression, and it may even cause motor and verbal tics among teens.”

Because virality. That’s how you become rich/famous on social media which means doing/saying/singing the most outlandish shit possible. A teen killed 6 driving for a TikTok challenge last weekend, by the way.

Cute and positive at first, now TikTok is full of misinformation and absurdity.

We can’t create culture with 60-second wide lens portrait clips. We need so much more. We are so much more.

It is the afternoon in California and we’re working in the library. Going on our tasks. Helping folks. Little bees in the sunny hive, walking around in silence with little masks on. There was a little party earlier, so everyone is a little full of food and a little slow.

And then we’re randomly checking our devices, news. Uvalde Texas, this time.

The Thousand Yard stare starts. One by one, we get infected. All coping differently, but all with this Thousand Yard stare at one point, way stronger than the one triggered by a lunatic patron. And we’re more frantic in our movements. And we’re quiet. The atmosphere changes.

I personally don’t try to know more, as I already know the bombing of words has already started everywhere.

————————

At home, chilling. I need focused music. A bit sad, not too much, hopeful and steady in the vibe. I see a 18 body count. I’m writing this. I breathe so much better without Twitter.

But I also know that it’s not over at all. I need happy music now.

I always have a FLW book open on my coffee table and I check houses on YouTube from time to time, to see if a new tour is available. Well, the Mossberg house had one I hadn’t seen yet!

It’s great design, filled with a lot of junk y’all (just kidding). That main room is simply wonderful.

At first I disliked FLW forcing small bedrooms but now I get it. You only need that much space to sleep and uh, do things. Otherwise just utilize the super neat common areas. “Use the freaking house, don’t live in your room!” the architect said and acted on. Respect, bro.

“The basic needs (for life, for safety and security, for belongingness and affection, for respect and self-respect, and for self-actualization), the basic human emotions and the basic human capacities are on their face either neutral, pre-moral or positively “good.” Destructiveness, sadism, cruelty, malice, etc., seem so far not intrinsic but rather they seem to be violent reactions against frustration of our intrinsic needs, emotions and capacities.”

Abraham Maslow, in Toward a Psychology of Being (‘happened to be reading it these days)

How do we create a world where people don’t have violent reactions against frustration? By focusing on eliminating said frustration.

The frustration comes down to: these people get that, and I don’t.

This is easy to solve: give enough to everyone so that everyone stays away from frustration.

Do I believe that a UBI system and sustainable, healthy housing would have avoided the Buffalo shooting? Yes, and countless, constant and invisible other violence would be eliminated too.

When intrinsic needs, emotions and capacities are met, hate doesn’t form, doesn’t blossom.

We supremely need that. And we can afford it, that’s without saying.