Category: Me Myself&I

November ‘19 to April ‘20 is kind of a big blur before I re-emerged, missing someone heavy without noticing it at first but then facing it clearly.

I haven’t seen that person ever since, basically.

A new building on Venice Blvd. Look at those balconies, and I apologize for the picture quality:

Like, there’s room for either furniture OR you and your boo. One does not simply fit both. If you try, –rent will make you believe things– thanks to the sliding door breathing down your shoulder, you can only have one elbow sort of at a normal angle, if 90° is, sitting on the railing. While the other is near your crotch.

This sounds voluptuously comfortable.

I mean, balconies are either outdoor attics or displays of “what it could be”, right?

This is a fantastic in-depth article about computers.

We show each of the three parts of the fragmentation cycle are already underway: there has been a dramatic and ever-growing slowdown in the improvement rate of universal processors; the economic trade-off between buying universal and specialized processors has shifted dramatically toward specialized processors; and the rising fixed costs of building ever-better processors can no longer be covered by market growth rates.

And it is just fine. Computers are amazingly resilient. My “main” machine is a 2012 mid-range laptop in which I immediately put a SSD in. It’s been working like a charm ever since, 16 hours a day. Buying a newer machine and gaining 1s on booting a browser is not progress. It’s being anal.

Computers are amazingly powerful and we use a tiny fraction of their power. The same 2012 laptop allows me to run 50 tracks and 27 subgroups in my audio software. That is huge. For comparison, most 60s and 70s music uses 16, maybe 32 tracks at the very best. It’s still wonderful music. We know quality isn’t tied to numbers per se.

Sure, I could probably run 200 tracks on a 2021 laptop but I don’t need it and probably never will. Computers already cover 99% of what we need them for. We don’t even need them to be smaller, they have been human-sized for a while now: they can fit in a tiny room, a tiny pocket. I would say, they need to become fanless and silent. It’s happening too.

The computer paradigm made us addicted to numbers, making us very excited when those numbers keep going up. But numbers are not everything, at all. We’re humans. We’re not numbers. Call of Duty needs more than 500 GB now but it’s still a FPS with most of its gameplay being exactly the same as a 500 MB –one order of magnitude smaller–  Call of Duty game.

I can see myself buying older machines for the rest of my life. Like I buy old appliances on Etsy right now.

After many years, I’m leaving Flickr. It was fantastic, and went down from there.

Flickr certainly changed my life, as this is where I connected with my first US friends, which led me to my first trip to California three years later, and the rest is history. The internet was still mostly about connecting with interesting strangers, and we did just that. We’re still friends and caring about each other in this new 2020s life.

Flickr the service, was ahead of its time. I really wish Automattic had acquired this incredible source of inspiration, and made it a serious competitor to the rising Instagram at the start of the 2010s.

There’s something extremely freeing about packing my stuff and not having to worry about numbers (views, favs, tags) and anxiety-inducing feeds. Also, no more payments (it was $25 for 2 years, it’s now $70 for a year).

Thank you, creators of Flickr.

For her part, Lawton went along with the story because she loved her father. But as she notes: “Ideas from our parents about who we are form the backbone of our identities, the bedrock to personal truths that we can recite and remember like prayers from church or poems from school.” And hers was rooted in a denial of how the rest of the world saw her. “Race was dogged in its desperate pursuit of me,” she writes. “And as much as I tried to brush it off, as much as I tried to believe what I was told, race attached itself to me, a little more, year on year.” This dissonance, a “dull roar in the background” of her childhood, grew into “a persistent buzz” at the back of her brain by the time she was a teenager.

Yup. I experienced that as well. And this is what I tell most people about it: race, racism, cultural differences are not something we look after. It finds us and tells us that we’re deemed inferior. So we fight back.

Shortly after her father died of cancer in 2015, Lawton learned through DNA testing that she wasn’t his biological child. In fact, she was 43 percent Nigerian. The revelation inspires Lawton to live in Black communities in Brooklyn, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic and Cuba, only to bump up against the same European beauty standards that she tried and failed to adhere to growing up in her white English village.

It’s interesting. It’s similar yet different from my own path on this. The lack of black folks around me pushed me to be curious and go live in a blacker community, for sure. The way my white friends dismissed Trayvon’s murder and so many things compounded to lead me to get some Black Air, you know? I needed it.

The European beauty standards never hit me because well I’m a dude, it’s very low pressure compared to women. I never rated European beauty standards over others, though. 90s supermodels? Well Naomi was killing everyone even when my friends were telling me she wasn’t. They were simply wrong. I’ve always had strong resilience to peer pressure, I put that on France’s values (at that time) and my own internal, constant questioning.

I can’t wait to work on my book and have y’all read it. The draft is still good when I peruse it, and there’s SO much more than I can add. It’s going to be amazing.

Homes are not built by people intending to live in them. Instead, they are built by builders, who mostly want to flash-form 60 “units” overnight out of sticks and drywall. Everything from sun positioning to doorknobs becomes not just an afterthought, but a no-thought. The major architectural decision is how to maximize square-footage, over all else, in order to maximize sale price, because at some point in the past consumers wanted more space, and space (considered as square-footage) was an easily legible metric to aim for.

SAY IT. (part 2)

We need passive and efficient homes more than ever.

Texas is waking up realizing that 8-bedroom homes with high ceilings are not it, at all. You freeze in there or, you spend thousands to not freeze in there. We can do a whole lot better, technically speaking. We can make houses that sustain that kind of temperature drop or temperature pendulum (it’s back to being warm right now). It’s doable, now and yesterday.

It frustrates me to no end how bad we are at building the structures we live in. There’s so much more to do here than in Bitcoin or stocks.

Focus on building your own house. What you need. The maintenance costs. Question everything about your habits. Ponder. Study. Think long term (yeah, those stairs to the bedroom when you’ll be 70 lol).

It’s a great mind game.

My sister got into a car accident and was extremely lucky. Ice on the freeway, she skid off and did a 180. No one was hurt. She was able to reverse and keep going. She stopped at the next exit and ran for 15mn in the snow.

Meanwhile it is now official pandemic rule, I can’t visit France but for a bunch of reasons I don’t qualify for.

Meanwhile, the vaccine rollout is terrible over there as well. I’m afraid for my parents.

And so it dawns on me that the odds of never seeing them in person ever again –or for a very long time have increased by a lot right now.

I dislike not having control over things. It is what it is.

Check out my friend’s website we worked on for mental health. It’s called Mental Health in the Hood and it is live on the internet!

You can watch the Mental Health Show, which started its season 3, and we have Zoom meetings sharing knowledge and inspiration, every month!

Spread the word and take care!

We change the climate.

We average around 100,000 flights in the world, everyday. Imagine the amount of fuel dispersed in the sky. Every day.

We order stuff online, thinking that we’re slick not using our cars to go to the store. Shipping is using those absolutely insane boats called container ships. They run on bunker fuel. You know what bunker fuel is? It is the dirtiest fuel you can possibly get. A cargo ship has the equivalent of 300,000 15-gallon tank cars. A typical container ship burns 80+ tons of fuel PER DAY (up to 16 tons PER HOUR). Thousands of ships. Every day. All the time.

Gains in fuel efficiency you think? Yeah, we kill those with the increase in annual shipping and due to the pandemic, it probably went WAY up. It also already doubled in twenty years. Doubled.

So why am I adamant about enjoying local life, planting trees and using a bicycle as much as I can?

I don’t know, man. Just a feeling.