h. Play

I hadn’t cried like that in a long time.

I hadn’t felt that powerless in maybe forever.

There is no need for a billion dollar fund for police training to understand common sense that is to not kill a citizen when he’s cooperating. It’s basic. Keep your billion Hillary and please disappear.

There is no justice. I kept thinking of that murderer who got to get into a police car to get a last burger I mean you guys don’t even know how much pride and pain we have to swallow. There are nothing you can tell to make us feel better. Nothing.

The more I think and the more I want an off-the-grid, passive house not to be smart or feel fancy, but just to guarantee a life that will make sense. To be away from that bullshit, as much as possible.

It’s a good article on Brexit.

After the market-venerating radicalism of Reagan and Thatcher, he said, “the center left” — Blair and Clinton and various European parties — “managed to regain political office but failed to reimagine the mission and purpose of social democracy, which ­became empty and obsolete.”

French, slow ass, condescending and pointless 90s socialism definitely played a role in suffocating Europe’s institutions. But it’s bigger than that.

We as societies just can’t seem to make real stances and we pay for it.

The EU. The UK shouldn’t have been able to negotiate their position: you either go all in with us and you put the £ in the museum, or you don’t join the EU. Had they integrated the EU and be our equals, they wouldn’t have privatized their economy like crazy for the past 15 years, killing their own citizens’ QoL. And migrants wouldn’t try so hard to go over there, they would spread out in Western Europe. The UK with the € flavor probably would have added more dynamism and maybe a cog needed between France and Germany. I don’t know, something better than having one foot in and being weird.

We forgot that the EU wasn’t just signing papers and have a new fancy blue flag. We –mostly Boomers- have been lazy fucks.

Over four decades of immigration from Africa and Eastern Europe and the EU rings the alarm once people starve in Calais, once it’s too late. Decisions should have been made in the 80s or early 90s about immigration to have a chance to be controlled and dealt with in an efficient way. But it’s bigger than that.

Let’s face it: Europe adores the Universal Talk, how we’re All in This Together the We Invented Democracy. But Europe is the most colonialist area on earth! Just four of its countries have conquered the entire fucking world at a time when you couldn’t just fly with your army to Iraq. It transpires for centuries. Europeans are kind of proud of this past grip on the planet. Europe never really realized that it was going to drastically change with its post WWII immigration.

Let’s face it: if elites acknowledged mistakes and flaws and tried to fix them, they would not be considered elites anymore (not that I agree with that but that’s how things go, still). And those European elites have been clear with migrating African population: Yes we invaded you early 1900s, yes we fucked up your countries from that point on, no we won’t apologize and yes, if you don’t feel like you’re welcome here it’s because you’re not really! Nothing good could happen from that. It actually went pretty smooth for over 30 years thanks to economic growth. Now that it’s been stagnating for decades, people look at each other.

Let’s face it: the middle class used to be powerful enough to change institutions, to be smart enough to not go populist on election days. To fine tune democracy, to curve those elites’ obnoxious disregard. The problem is the middle class doesn’t exist anymore. The “middle” class is so dependent from elites that it shuts the fuck up. It’s a byproduct of global, super capitalism now.

Meanwhile people further down the economy ladder who are eating shit at an irrational rate are mad and ready to vote for whoever says the craziest shit because they’re pissed off, rightfully so.

The solution is always and has always been a more direct democracy. I mean at least we should try it. But no one has the incentive –the powerful- or the power –the powerless- to make it happen.

The opportunity is still there though. Damn we’re slow.

Did you read that article on Ev and Medium?

Ev Williams became a billionaire by helping to create the free and open web. Now, he’s betting against it.

The Atlantic writes a perfect definition of the open web:

the open web describes an internet where people mostly publish their writing (or music, or photos, or films) to servers that they own or rent, accessible via their own personal domain names, in formats that are themselves free or unrestricted. It is the web because the pages are written in HTML and CSS; it is open because anyone can access almost all of it, without special privileges, expenditures, or a user account. Above all, the open web is free—free like language is free, like consciousness is free. Freedom not so much as a right, but as a technical and inalienable fact.

It is the web we’re still trying to use between silos. OG web. But yeah it’s tedious to set up RSS, it’s tedious to manage favorites, it’s even more tedious to create the pipeline to publish (from installing local apps to connect to diverse sources and understand the concept of client/server).

But when I read this:

Medium seeks to replicate the web’s old, chaotic hubbub on a single, ordered site—because, ultimately, Ev values the chaos.

I’m like, this is bullshit. Sorry, this is pure antinomy. That makes no sense and I don’t want it. If you value the chaos, just leave it alone.

I understand WordPress is out of reach for non-tech people and I understand that Medium wants to be the FB of thoughts or whatever. We have to find something better. Another interesting quote though:

Railroad, electricity, cable, telephone—all followed this similar pattern toward closedness and monopoly, and government regulated or not, it tends to happen because of the power of network effects and the economies of scale

Keyword it tends to. Monopoly and closedness are fine when they don’t own shit but the pipes. Railroad companies didn’t own people’s suitcases. Medium does. Inside your brain will reside on their servers and we absolutely don’t have to. Monopolies tend to vastly abuse our collective asses, let’s not forget that.

Where closedness and more monopolies should happen is probably around hosting companies. It’s still the wild wild west and they don’t understand how to provide the next step of web services. I’ve been using a few in 16 years, they all are pretty terrible if not appalling. So here are a few ideas:

– The entire process of creating a personal website online space and being able to publish stuff on it should be as easy as signing up for a new phone line. One payment, One email, One password. You download an app. You publish 5mn later. You pay your host a fee. Storage and bandwidth should be limitless.

I mean in 2016 this simple thing doesn’t exist. The closest to that, Squarespace, is still talking about templates and “building” websites. Girl, that’s the past. Empower people, don’t scare them with technical shenanigans. The geekiness is not appealing to most people.

– Second, following and blocking should be as easy as on Twitter. Maybe in your app you have one tab with your content and then tabs for your groups, crews, posses, friends, followers etc. on/off toggles for options.

– Tertiomundo, I think there should be a limit in how many times you can post a day. Maybe just twice a day, under a 1,000 words each. I want people to write their thoughts, to discuss them, not to spam and take over just through shear output.

– Fourth, a micropayment solution perfectly integrated to allow people to pay each other. The hosting company takes a cut.

In a perfect world this framework would be open source and installed en masse by hosting companies trying to enlarge their markets.

I don’t believe in Ev’s vision of providing content to people. Not providing actually, force-feeding. “You might also like”  is wrong. Time spent reading is a weak ass metric. Publishing isn’t just about audience. FB’s algos are so wrong I always always feel like a lab rat on it, it’s gross. People need to make decisions, to reach for something. They need to want to read someone’s experience that’s how you grow, that’s how you actually profit from it. Did you know that your body processes food much better when you focus on it instead of watching some screen? Yup, same for thoughts. And as for food, it’s great to change and get something different any time you want. No “recommendation engine” can do that for you. You are your own chaos.

I’ll finish with this quote from Idle Words’ brilliant talks:

But the real world is a stubborn place. It is complex in ways that resist abstraction and modeling. It notices and reacts to our attempts to affect it. Nor can we hope to examine it objectively from the outside, any more than we can step out of our own skin.

Chaos is already here. Don’t try to reinvent it, incrementally make it more useful.

Shouldn’t have happened and yet it did and went Cleveland’s way.

I’m just reflecting on the game with a team, the Warriors, believing that it’s pretty much done while the other team is still grinding and determined.

I’m looking at Curry’s faith and terrible decisions in a final game and it’s like, I think he thought he was the Chosen One except that no one is, it’s just sports. Ultimately it’s going to come down to skills and physics. And in a game of basketball, the paint is going to be important no matter what.

Once they were up 3-1 the Warriors just stopped looking for blood, while the Cavs were harnessing super Sayan powers. The Warriors acted as if they firmly believed they deserved the title, that the 73-9 was some kind of a free pass to a back to back championship. Like Lebron wouldn’t try to block them on fast point breaks (he always does I don’t know how Curry and Iggy expected otherwise).

The irony to lose in the last 50 seconds on a three, that weapon that you’ve been using all year at a rate never seen before…

Respect to the East, see you next year. I want my Spurs with KL and KD to get the trophy back to the West.

Fuck the term rape culture like it’s cute and legit what the fuck?

I guess the thing I do about it since I’ve been aware of it for a long time, is to not hang out with dudes only. Because we’re just having fun and talking shit but then we become wolves. Predatory. Dumb.

All men know exactly when things turn wrong in those moments, when respect for women somehow completely disappears. When we turn our brains off and start being dumb beyond reason.

I prefer to be face to face with a friend. At most, two dudes. Even at three including me, after two beers people start talking about hoes. When I’m just talking to one friend, we never go there and it’s the best example of “individuals are smart, people are idiots”. I always preferred to be with a heterogenic group of people, because it’s almost the only case where people are not idiots, where they actually try to be smarter you know? I appreciate that.

Anyway, the consequences are that it can be lonely to avoid groups. But I know we need to drastically change as a society about rape and if I need to stay away from socialization, bars and beers I’m fine with that. Shit. I have too many friends who got raped. France or California, it doesn’t matter. Sometimes I wonder if it’s not half of the women in my life which is fu-cking crazy. It keeps happening. I still see the same excuses and I don’t say shit, I just try to not allow situations where it could happen. Definitely not smiling at your stupid rapey joke.

On the other side of the coin, it is super exhausting to spend time and energy to convince women I’m dating that I’m cool and that I won’t try to hurt/rape/kill them. It’s pretty much the #1 thing I have to do first before thinking about anything else. Of course sometimes I fuck it up, overthinking my moves and then they freak out and it makes me sad because I won’t see them ever again, probably. I understand the situation though.

I wish there was a won’t-do-shit-to-you-unless-you-ask list and that I was on it and that all women were getting the notification. You know, so that we all enjoy our lives faster, them without fearing to end up dead in a ditch because you said no and me knowing that I don’t have to set up all those “cool as fuck, I swear” signs around the diner table.

The truth also, is that most women and men get raped by family and friends. Rape survivors had a whitelist and they got raped anyway, so it’s awful.

Still. Please gentlemen, stop doing this shit. Not even the start of the slippery slope. You’re hurting everyone.

If you get killed or hurt hard in the future because you tried to sexually abuse someone, it will be completely fair.

And you survivors are some badass motherfuckers.

I guess I don’t see myself as a comic book reader but I read a ton man. Basically from 83 to 98 this was me on weekends:

I read a lot about comics these days since Marvel movies and superheroes are so in but I just don’t really connect with that. I’m a child of the European format, bigger and longer than the American one. 40 to 60 pages with a start and an end. Consistent, impeccable drawing quality. And, outstanding diversity:

I loved les petits hommes –the little men- so hard. It’s the story of small humans the size of a glass of water with highly sophisticated technology (as a kid I couldn’t stop starring at all those robots and spaceships etc.) living crazy adventures like this one, where they come back to Earth and everything is white and monochromatic. And weird robots took over. Oh and there’s a version of the hyperloop in this world.

I don’t even remember names or relationships. I just know those stories –a lot influenced by 50s and beyond American cinema mixed with post war European artistic hope- transported me far away. 70s-80s-90s European comics are completely amazing at that.

Papyrus and his cute friend. And giants walking for real.

Bidouille & Violette. 81 to 86. It’s the story of that little chubby guy and his first love in a little town in the north of France. It’s sweet as hell and it was a companion story back way back when. I loved it and at the same time of course as a dude I didn’t want to tell anyone about that. And this unique drawing style. Man.

This one is special to me. I really enjoyed the amount of detail put in the drawings, in the motorcycles, so cool. And then puns after puns after puns after puns. I’ve never read anyone that prolific with stupid puns. See the moto risées title? I can’t even explain, it’s dumb and hilarious at the same time. I think it brought me a sense of wanting to play with language more than any comic book really.

One of my fav. Yoko Tsuno the electric engineer and her crazy ass stories. Phenomenal.

Awesome mecha designs and compelling tech-heavy stories. Drawings you can look at forever. If you love sci-fi you got to try out some of the 27 albums.

The man who shot faster than his own shade. Not only that’s pretty fast but LL didn’t show off. As a kid I wanted him to right? But no he’d be cool and use his talent here and there. Super chill.

There’s a humility and ordinary feel to all those heroes and stories. And yet they transported me. They’re not about how heroes change the world but how the world changes people. A lot of stories where in the end the “bad guys” are not bad, they’re just trying to make it. Some violence and death and sex, but mostly non-violent, “let’s agree to disagree” endings.

I read this one late but, shit. We follow this brunette during the 18th century in the middle of the slave trade. Now nowhere on TV, at school or at the movies people were showing the slave trade like this comic book showed it to me back in the mid 80s. It shows a lot of angles and it was a fascinating read. It’s raw, hard. The kind of read for which you need to turn the music off.

So, when these days I read about comic books and antiheroes and character development I’m lost because I’m about the adventure, the locations, eternal characters that don’t change because they’re just an excuse to travel, a vessel for the mind to build a word around.

More Interstellar than Avengers I guess.

The story comes and goes. You cannot become a fan of something that comes and goes. It’s a healthier relationship to me. American comics immediately create strong feelings when you’ve been following a character for years. I have read some forums, people go apeshit on their cape-wearing bae.

Anyway in the end it makes me feel like, what we try to do and fail often at today in the entertainment industry –inclusivity, strong duos, diversity, stories and themes that touch a lot of different people-, I had that in spades in my parents’ European comic books collection (all albums of all comics above and so much more). I read them all a bunch of times. It was great. It made me push my imagination and let it run, how much you can mix up things and re-invent classics.

In games we constraint ourselves so much on universes and themes, it’s frustrating.

I recommend that EU stuff for inspiration, creative people. And your kids.