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Me Myself&I

We suck at capitalism

Here’s how it could have been.

We don’t have a duopoly on mobile phones. We have four players –Microsoft, Apple, Google, RIM and they roughly each have a quarter of the market.

Facebook doesn’t become as big, as the four players tell FB to be quiet with its ad business on mobile. FB can’t side with Google on this and Apple is busy competing instead of making deals with Internet companies. FB would likely have had way less power. Quite possibly, IG stays independent.

Google doesn’t become as obnoxiously big because EVERYONE is competing with Google on everything.  Google can’t force-feed Chrome or make its services run badly on other platforms because, well, competition. Every single happy customer is important.

What we customers gain is likely way less surveillance: it’s a lot harder to make four, very different companies agree on not caring about privacy, especially when the business isn’t about gathering user data but is simply about selling devices and software.

Maybe this way freemium doesn’t become the de-facto business model because tons of developers make a living doing the incredible thing of selling their apps on markets where platforms don’t take 30%, but 10%, maybe less (competition, remember?).

Developers would have to build different versions of their apps, exactly like they’re doing with a duopoly (it’s always been the holy grail: code once, deploy everywhere except that it’s never been the case and probably never will). The difference would be that they would have a lot more independence and would actually own platforms.

What we’d also gain is a slower technological pace: because phones wouldn’t have been subsidized by carriers (remember, this is why the iPhone won), and that they cost so much, we’d be using them on a 5-year average instead of 18 months.

At the scale of the world and billions of devices, it is not hard to see the gains in terms of environmental waste and rare metal mining.

Those four companies would have to work together to make a few things happen smoothly. Like sim card, contact, pictures and videos transfer between devices. Interoperability would be QUEEN and that would be very nice for us, customers. No lock-in. Free.

Instead we’re stuck in two walled gardens which increasingly are trying to make us even more dependent on.

We suck at capitalism.

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Me Myself&I

Closing your eyes

I’m always impressed at how when I close my eyes, my body re-syncs itself automatically.

It immediately gets my nose to reach out for more oxygen. To breathe deeper.

Slowly, muscles relax and reach a comfortable position. Usually with limbs along the body.

If I’m eating with my eyes closed, my body starts slowing the process down. I masticate longer and swallow less air with each bite. Just automatically.

I think kisses are so much more enjoyable to give or receive with your eyes closed. It becomes a moment rather than a thing to do.

Categories
Audio&Games

SFII Audio

Guile looking like he spittin spittin.

Dhalsim about to DROP it.

Chun li playing fat bass lines on her Moog.

Zangief definitely on some Chicago House mix.

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Me Myself&I

One year of pandemic

I keep thinking about how the pandemic should have moved us to a more “we’re together” position and the exact opposite, time A Million, everywhere you look at, happened.

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Music

Appropriation

It’s a great article by Nelson George.

The core audience for most of hip-hop’s first thirty years, both white and black, were in deeply invested in an vision of “keepin’ it real” authenticity that valued a ghettocentric version of American life.

Very true. Which would make me uncomfortable with my white friends in France, so into KRS-ONE and Dr OCTAGON. The complete embrace of Black American Man’s Life lyrics seemed odd to me. True, I was into metal at that time but that’s the thing: I was into the sound, not the lifestyle or trying to be part to it. I was into the heaviness of those guitars and the fact that the more groove in the sound, the better, didn’t make me feel like appropriating. I felt doing my own thing rather than joining a culture. I felt like making up my own hybrid strain through a mix of genres.

In fact some of the most progressive forces in today’s hip-hop are more likely as influenced by Radiohead’s textures than the Bomb Squad’s block rocking beats.

Lyricism is really were things are lacking these days. Although, I really enjoy Kodak Black. He has some rather smart lines. Tyler has become so great at opening up and be who he is now.

Later Prince, Cameo and Jermaine Jackson were amongst the many black ‘80s acts to have hits by adapting the keyboard sounds, melodic ideas, and vocal arrangements of new wave bands. I guess that was all “appropriation” if you wanna make it a negative.

Well the thing is they appropriated a sound, not a genre of music. Early 80s were all about dramatically cut down production to have a very minimal, “cold” sound after the luscious 70s, right? It felt and feels more like an extension than appropriation to me. They built on top of that and created new music, 80s funk music with very distinct flavors. It is also a “going forward” type of appropriation.

The thing about Mars and Silk Sonic is that they sound like something else, and from the past. It feels a little bit more disingenuous.

But Bruno Mars is not stealing “our” music. He wasn’t a parody of R&B or new jack swing. In fact he was one of the only people with a mass audience keeping these styles alive. Putting out a record celebrating funk in 2015 or new jack swing in 2017 were as far from a commercial slam dunk as one could get. Black folks, both as creators and customers crave innovation, invention and the constant shock of the new. It’s why black music has moved like a tractor through the cow pasture otherwise known as American culture. The search for new sounds have driven everything from bebop to trap.

I loved that funk he put out there. I remember driving on the 101, volume up. The 24K Magic single was dope. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I wished someone else was singing. Or that the music wasn’t so predictable. It lacked a little 2010s twist or something. I love 80s music, I can listen to it right now! And that’s where Mars didn’t search for new sounds, he looked for comfort and the labels said “there’s something to tap in here, that nostalgia from a generation and nostalgic envy from that other generation” and that was it. That’s fine. But that’s not innovation.

I heard Silk Sonic for the first time on the radio this morning, and I couldn’t tell from when it was, although .paak’s voice gave me away that this was new. Yet old. It makes the music enjoyable, but doesn’t “wow” you like the first time you hear Cameo’s She’s Strange, Rae Sremmurd’s No Type or King’s The Story (or their entire album). Those truly innovated. Those hit different.

What I’d like is a late 70sFUNK-late 00sTRAP music blend with a duet between a man and a woman, singing and rapping about our current debt life, without name dropping tech brands or celebrities, while being uplifting.

Now, that would be the future to me.

Categories
Me Myself&I

Insecure

Insecure, the show, is about to end with its latest season, season 5.

I think that’s a good run. Five seasons is a good amount.

Season 1 was great, funny, witty, I couldn’t get enough of it.

Season 2 starts great and then I feel like the sex themes were not on part with Issa’s sarcastic and hilarious tone that she has all through the first season. Kelli is funny AF though.

Season 3 goes a little bit in all directions at the same time. The original tone is not there as much, but it’s still enjoyable and cute.

Season 4 was refreshing, with a very nice little arc between Issa and Molly. It’s a calm season and it fit 2020 perfectly, I think.

For season 5 I hope they hose us with creative juice. Fuck it up, Issa. End your show with some animated movie, a bit like in Better Off Dead. Or music video ultra fast cuts in one episode. Girl go surrealist.

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Me Myself&I

Joy & Pain

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.

Categories
Me Myself&I

Architectural style: smh

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?

Categories
Me Myself&I Music

Daft

As a music producer who grew up with their music in France, I have a different relationship with Daft Punk than most.

I thought they were outstanding music geniuses. They’re more likely just good music producers. And that’s fine.

Their first album was super fresh and raw. Like, we had never really heard anything like this before in the way that it was special, unique, yet fitting those eclectic musical times in electronic music: big beat, house, jungle were raging out in Europe. They became the French Touch ambassadors and whatnot.

THEN comes their best work, Discovery. That thing was everything I wanted to make and still is: a full Digital Electro Funk album with anime visuals. I’m still jealous. This shit was absolutely so perfect.

But then as a music producer, I did my research.

I realized that what I thought was the result of them jamming and sampling themselves, like they had mostly done on their first album, wasn’t.

I was particularly blown away by Digital Love and Harder, Better’s samples in the background, thinking Daft Punk had played and recorded that music. They had not, it was a straight forward loop of a George Duke’s intro and Edwin Birdsong’s groove. I felt bamboozled so damn hard.

Their next album Human After All, without the funky sampling, is without question the least inspired. The best track samples Breakwater, an 80s funk band.

Their last album Random Access Memory is clearly the work of Nile Rodgers and other black music producers. And ever since, they haven’t done anything as peculiar and lovely as Discovery. They disbanded last week.

Categories
Me Myself&I

Computers are appliances now

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.