h. Play

I joined Twitter in 2007. It changed my life etc.

I always used third-party clients, because I sort of know what I’m doing with computers.

Twitter has APIs and for third-party folks like me, they let us use the old API, the one without algorithms.

The passive-aggressive thing that Twitter does is that you can’t connect a new third-party client to the old API. You can however use the ones installed before the changes. I have 3 old phones with 3 different old Twitter clients that still totally work. But I couldn’t install a third party client on my last phone.

I was like, fine, I’ll try the “new” (aka algo-filled) Twitter.

Jesus fucking Christ. I almost cried. No shit. I couldn’t recognized my 12 year old feed at all. Like, fuck.

Realizing how manipulating algorithms are, what they do to people who use Twitter like they pump gas in their cars, I just can’t. The interface, the funnels to get you to click, my god. Sure, I can finally read 240 character tweets (another funnel to keep you on the platform). Which are actually rare and not adding anything, really.

The default clients on Windows are those stinky ass web apps. The last interface change is piling up on the funneling. Twitter doesn’t respect its users at all. It uses them like tissues.

The most awesome thing about technology is that it’s impartial: it does what you want it to do, and doesn’t have stakes in what you do. It’s a tool.

Now technology does what it wants you to do for a bunch of dudes in the Bay Area. It’s a goddamn nightmare.

I want to fight @jack on a ring. No fists, just my legs hitting his meditating ass, gourmet food filled body.

It’s great basketball.

It’s happening when the NBA is on vacation so no conflict.

They play hard and congratulate their opponents at the end of every games.

Players follow through their shots, an important thing to do.

Games’ length is perfect. A bit shorter than the NBA (4×10 mn instead of 4×12 mn).

Games are close from start to finish within 5 points usually. Exciting.

I can mutter “this a bad bitch” or yell “GIRL YES” and it’s totally fine.

The mix of legging, short shorts, short short shorts, long shorts, make up no make up, long hair, short hair.

The mix of ladies my size all the way up to giants, playing together.

Every team has lefties. Sometimes 3 of them.

Bill Laimbeer, a 80s Detroit Bad Boy Legend who beat MJ’s Bulls for years, who didn’t like basketball and didn’t give a shit ever, has been coaching WNBA teams for the past 15+ years (and yes he’s good at it with 3 championships and maybe a 4th this year). I want to see the rest of the story.

It’s great basketball.

We’re in the middle of an incredible race when it comes to selling products.

Virality. Everything is using viral channels to grow fast and faster. Netflix, the news, Twitter, Epic Games etc.

Two downsides: it’s a perpetual movement and there is no stopping (prepare for burnout). When it pays off it sure pays off but there’s no way to know for sure if it will (prepare for unemployment).

While we like to believe this is the new order, I think we subconsciously enjoy sustain because it’s the mother of everything: it’s because the earth –as an ecosystem- is stable and sustaining itself that we were able to exist and thrive. It’s when the economy is stable and purring that societies make progress etc.

So we know deep down that we need not to constantly run to have a good life.

Why are we trying to move more and faster, thinking we’re so smart, I don’t know.

Elijah and Sadie in the past ten days. Murdered. Philando Castile was killed three years ago live on Facebook. It was Sandra four years ago. All the Ferguson activists in the past five years. Murdered.

Just plain innocent black folks minding their own business and/or trying to make things better, one day at a time.

Murdered.

The NBA off-season has been nuts this year. In a bad way.

I don’t know what is worse: the amount of money players get or the contracts that mean nothing.

Sure, the league is powerful and teams have been ruthless with players too. Now that it’s the opposite, are we happier?

No. The core thing is that basketball is a team sport won with a bunch of individuals who stick together to win against all of the others, fastest, strongest and smartest teams. Teams win, not players. If you watch games, you know this. What does it even mean to follow a team now? One year you have a bunch of dudes and the next one you have an entirely different bunch of dudes. No legacy, no history, no meaning.

Watching NBA players acting like bitches because wE gETtinG pAiD when they’re all millionaires by default, while we’re all sweating to barely get a season pass or just a ticket, while the WNBA is traveling in coach, is absurd and disrespectful.

I hope the league does something or better, that players come back to the fucking ground.

I am of course, beyond excited for Katsuhiro Otomo’s new projects.

I was definitely disappointed with Steamboy. A new Akira project from Akira’s father can only be amazing. I don’t think cyberpunk gets any better than this masterpiece of a universe.

Now what strikes me is again Japan’s ability to set things up. Here’s the official plot of his new movie called Orbital Era:

The plot takes place in the near-future on a space colony under construction. It is an action-adventure story following the lives of some young boys surviving in this peculiar environment and society as they are tossed around by fate. “The reality found in mankind’s future” will be depicted through their perspective.

Japanese sci-fi loves near-future because it makes it so much more relatable. Without pictures or sound, we can immediately start up our imagination engines.

Space colony is simple, yet genius because it’s not only relatable –we have the ISS- but it makes sense that we create space colonies before going to Mars or further away. It’s just de facto much more coherent than sci-fi that starts somewhere with humans already doing whatever they want on a hostile planet or the very hostile empty space. A space colony setting creates a strong continuation of what we have in the world right now and makes it immediately, again, relatable. Or very interesting.

Under-construction. That is also kind of genius. That theme “modifier” is obviously relatable because everything is under-construction, all the time, everywhere on earth. We constantly build or fix things. But also in the space colony context, it creates beautiful freedom in terms of plot, universe etc.

Are humans happy in those fake metal worlds that are never done? What do you see when you go to the edge of such a colony? What kind of society, what kind of values are driving people in a finite world with probably a lot of restrictions? There’s a sense of care, fragility and nostalgia underlying this setting described in a few sentences. I fucking love this.

Most games and action movies plots are so phony compared to this, it’s embarrassing. They all have the “some bad aliens/relics/resource” trope and think they’re really cool.

This one can go in any direction –drama, comedy, romantic, pure action- and be awesome.

It probably will. Can’t wait. Hopefully not for ten years though, take your time, Katsuhiro Otomo.

I was lucky to partially grow up with those.

When I arrived into my family from my foster family, the house I entered was a ruin. My parents were young but the house was raggedy. Nothing was completed at all. I bathed in a bin for quite a while.

One day, looking at my dad laying down electric cables on the ground where he was supposed to pour concrete for the future house’s floor, I wondered, “the fuck is this?” or something like that.

He explained to me that those cables would heat the floor and be controlled by a “computer” (technically yes, but more like a calculator) that would know what the temperature is outside and warm our feet accordingly. It was 1985-86. That was kind of science-fiction-y and I thought my dad was doing too much.

I’ve pretty much never met anyone who had/has radiant heating floors at home. That shit is brilliant. I just have this memory of myself going down the stairs –wood- to go to the bathroom, dreading the moment I would have to put my feet on the cold tiles because I had forgotten my slippers…Not. The tiles were warm. Meanwhile, it was snowing outside, sometimes around Christmas. I remember thinking, “oh now I totally get it; this is great”.

Sometimes it created mayhem because the electric load would be too heavy and we had to choose between warming up the floor or having clean clothes but hey, shit happens.

If there’s one device I miss from France it’s that one, which I can’t ship to Cali. The floors are cold here too and instead of getting blown hot air in the face, I’d rather have some mild heat coming from the bottom. Much more comfortable and efficient.

So simple yet, so wonderful and underrated. Tragic.

Halftogon House Concept so that you understand.

Are y’all ready for the layout of my beautiful, custom house? Here you go:

First, the Eames elliptical table. It’s two-meter long and should give you a sense of scale. I’m probably off a bit here and there for the rest, but it gives you an idea of what’s going on.

So, you enter from the bottom (lol yeah well). To the left, long corridor with built-in storage and or built-in shelves. To the right, you enter the Big Open Space. That shit has everything: a fireplace, a kitchen with a table for 4 to 8, built-in couch, TIERED SEATING and, looking towards the dashes, unobstructed view to the  outside with floor to ceiling sliding doors (I think six to eight of those to cover the 20 meters).

Why tiered seating? Because it’s super fun to use to work, chill, do things with your partner, watch sports with friends or daydream, laying down. And of course, under the seating: GIANT STORAGE. On the left side of the fireplace, built-in couch with built-in shelves above ala FLW. But instead of having some stupidly small “work space” like he called the kitchen, the kitchen is kind of central here.

Regardless of culture, kitchen and food preparation and hanging out around the fridge is quite universal.

And yes, instead of making it like a shitty bar like every single kitchen island I see, I integrated dining and hanging out. No useless back and forth between the island and the dining table. All in one, bam. I see you picking your nose, I frown and serve you a glass of water, wine, a cocktail or some pasta carbonara, it doesn’t matter. It just works.

On the left side of the house, one bedroom with a tiny shower/sink combo in the closet. This allows independence for the person there (teenager, roommate, ex) while the main bedroom is on the other side because PRIVACY BRUH. This way you can loudly fart or make weird noise in bed without making your guest or kid uncomfortable.

I’m nice af.

The left bedroom can be something else too, like an office space and what not. It is on the east side of the house, I don’t know what it would do (cooler room usually) but I want to be on the other side with the sunrise through the curtains, caressing my sleepy face on the west wing of the house.

Pretty simple concept and layout. Optimized for small family (if family at all), roommate and guest situation and a world that needs to be less stupid about home sizes. Total area: around 147 m². Not super small but not huge either. No stairs means it’s usable for 7 to 177 years old people.You can roll up in this bitch on a skateboard or a wheelchair. Same with the TV: on a custom-made wheeled cart to move from stadium to couch to dining (and can be hidden under the tiered seating). I thought about everything.

Amenities: no AC, green roof with rain harvesting system, some skylights, washer-dryer, cross-ventilation and the top of the top, radiant heating floor. Now I call that living.

And now I need to make an Unreal Engine level…

Okay so now that I have finished those books on spy planes and read this fantastic article on the mother of all demos, I know what happened:

Post WWII innovators had been born at the start of the 19th century and endured all kinds of awful things: Great Depression, wars, deportation, you name it.

After 1945, all had in mind to make a better world or at the very least, minimize the incredible losses of those times.

Everything was open, so they went on and created the tools we’re using today: computers, stealth planes, surveillance, internet, automation etc. Architects were doing the same, using new material and trying to sell the idea of prefab houses, knowing that it’s far more efficient, but in this case, it didn’t work.

From there, Boomers were born. They lived in a world where they enjoyed immense freedom and new tools. They, on purpose or not, locked down everything with thick ass layers of bureaucracy and inertia, making more money than ever.

Sharing, spreading, empowering *as many people as possible* were 60s values dissipating in a sea of dollars.

This is why starting with the 80s, nothing was moving as fast as before. Everything was incremental from then on. Sure, Moore’s law on the computer side made everything go faster. But nothing else was.

Today, we have linked everything up. We have all the knowledge in the world and yet, we’re struggling to apply solutions because of that thick layer of bullshit. People protect their power, bonuses, land, by principle, not because they need them.

We rationalize that a billionaire can’t possibly spend his money in his lifetime yet, everyone wants to be one.

We fucked ourselves with indulgence and we’re too stupid or stubborn to back away. Let’s reassess that.