h. Play

89% of Hulu users and 42% of Netflix users watch shows & movies directly on computer. http://on.mash.to/ov6L51

That’s huge. Mid 2011, pretty much nobody is watching something on a smartphone or a tablet. And if we do the same charts with games, you can be sure that “classic computers” come far in first (just Facebook and Steam, bam) with consoles and tablets at the bottom. Considering the amount of bullshit we have to eat saying that PCs are so dead blabla, it needs to stop.

The computer, the PC, is going to be a central piece of the house as the fridge is today. A simple commodity (that’s why the all Apple hardware business will be in trouble: do you know your fridge brand? Soon nobody will care either with computers, it’s already happening because they’re all “good enough”). People like to have a machine that does it all and the PC is the one doing everything as good as you can. And it is now dead simple.

Different, smaller devices will connect to it but we will definitely have a computer at home that does a lot of things, like we do today but even more and in a perfect way, not with laptops, noisy towers and DVI-to-HDMI converters. We already have so much power, unused today except for some bad games at very high resolutions. Next step is not to make this technological power fit smaller devices but to distribute it over devices and monitors. Benefits will be greater for everybody (no overheating devices with poor battery life for users, easier for engineers, scalable for suppliers). This, is the beginning.

Imagine that each home has a computer box somewhere in a closet with xx cores and xx GPUs, running the TV, games from anywhere, internet and the AC system. Don’t be afraid, we will certainly have ways to make everything independent so that you can fix a part without breaking another. Don’t be afraid to have a computer taking control over your life, it’s already the case in planes. Imagine that each home at night is using its calculation power for distributed computing, warming the house and channeling the heat for the family’s next morning? How fucking cool would that be? That would be super efficient. Imagine that we cure cancer because your house and millions of others helped the process of understanding protein folding? Now that’s true glocal citizenship my friend.

Tablets and at a least extent smarphones are just accessories to our digital life. Like plates forks and knifes, we use them to consume but the food comes from one place, the fridge, the kitchen. The PC. The issues with the Cloud and privacy show that people are going to LOVE having their personal stuff at home, streaming to their devices around the world.

HomeCloud. It’s happening and the PC is the core.

Hi.

I played a Nintendo DS game which asked me to use the pad and the stylus at the same time. Except that there’s no way to change anything about it, the game controls or my left-handedness. Whatever, the game was awful. 

I got hooked on Gordon Ramsay’s shows. I now know the formula and can’t cook or prepare food without imaginarily hearing “fock me” or “WhatAShame” in my back.

Netflix is cool, unless you have a good TV and that you’re watching an old 1988 movie that just looks like a .rm full screen on your ten year old 21” CRT, buffering excluded (though sometimes, it happens). Not cool then.

I don’t care if Intelligentsia is an expensive hipster place with phonies hanging around, their coffee is good as fuck.

Sometimes I can’t believe how many different things I do with just a laptop and three USB ports.

I haven’t joined Google+ yet and I still can’t keep up with my news stream. So I’m good.

No time to work on my game but HELL, the more the game industry moves, the more I feel on a right track, right project, right angle. I’m just stuck with stupid tech problems but eventually, it will happen.

Also two weeks ago:

‘was awesome.

This isn’t healthy for me to not write. Though I’m quite busy composing for a Facebook game, I have too much shit in my mind. I feel that I learned just so much about myself and the world around in three years. I’d love to share my thoughts and findings and stuff but that would be pretty long. It reinforced everything I believed in though. I guess.

So here’s a picture of one of those sunset that L.A. has and a sound I did a while ago.

I can’t get enough of it.

Interlude by Harold

Dave is right on this one. There is something inherently wrong with the categorization of people: We are complex atoms, moving. Categorization is something simple and static.

When I tried to create lists with circlehack.com I immediately stopped over the obvious one, family. It’s already complicated for this one. I’m connected to so many different people I just can’t categorize them all, at all. Also I feel awkward to arbitrarily say "you, you’re into tech and that’s how we met" because it might not be the essence of our relationship right now. And what will it be in three years? Should I keep a constant look at my lists to match the present? Waste of time (not for Google or Facebook, obviously).

Categorizing people means that you assume you are the one knowing what they like. But maybe they like to read stuff from you because they like you and trust you so they read it. Otherwise they would not read something about this subject because they don’t care "that" much. But because it’s from you, they do. And you don’t know what interests who, it’s probably changing all the time. It’s organic. It can’t be processed with lists or circles. It can’t be processed efficiently with the help of algorithms (not yet at least and I think for a very long time).

I now understand more why Facebook never really got into this filtering, it’s not very human and overly complicated. As a user I’m glad I can just drop an article for everyone, to read. I think it’s richer this way. It’s good that my little cousin can read something about the war on drugs even if he doesn’t give a shit right now. Following him is interesting for me too. More knowledge, more change. As long as I can block some content if I want to –Foursquare’s check-ins-, I’m good. Less headaches (shit, is this dude still in this list I want to share this drunk picture to?).

Whatever happens to social networks, there will never be one and only one. What is more useful to me is how we can automate how we push our content and to what networks we share things.

I think services like ifttt have a great future.

Blue, green, air, simplicity.

Note the water on the right…

I’d live in this mothership forever.

I can’t stop looking at it since a week at least so I’m posting this stuff. Casa en Melides, Spain. Minimalism isn’t just for the sake of it, it’s great because it’s easy to pre-fab, better for the earth and easier to create perfect passive insulation with cubes and rectangles.

Anyway…

I don’t think the world’s leaders have begun to grasp the implications of unstoppable connectivity. Some people are calling this the Age of Behavior: What I do affects what you do, more directly than ever before.

NYT.

Our political vocabulary continues to sustain the illusion of participatory democracy. The Democrats and the Liberal Party in Canada offer minor palliatives and a feel-your-pain language to mask the cruelty and goals of the corporate state. Neofeudalism will be cemented into place whether it is delivered by Democrats and the Liberals, who are pushing us there at 60 miles an hour, or by Republicans and the Conservatives, who are barreling toward it at 100 miles an hour.

Adbusters.

By my second working day in Haiti, I was finding it alarmingly difficult to get out of bed in the morning, already having rape nightmares and, worse, daymares. And that was before one of the upstanding pillars of the Haitian elite, who insisted he was a gentleman because he loses his erection if a woman starts to fight him off, started to stalk me. On the third day, one of my drivers cornered me in an abandoned building, and I had to talk him out of his threats to touch me. On the third night, I got very drunk. That night, and the next nine nights.

Good.is.

I just got back from a small ride around the Silver Lake reservoir after buying some groceries from Trader Joe’s. I guess I fit in with the population out there.

L.A. is great to ride. I don’t know why people think it’s not a city for bikes, IT IS THE BEST ONE. It’s pretty flat (I mean it’s not SF), it’s large (not like NYC) and it rains like 3 days a year. It’s a bike rider’s dream.

One can start a day riding from the beach and end up in snow covered mountains during the same ride. I’m not sure if there are many cities in the world that can make that claim.

It’s great. My best memory of E3 last year was my bike ride. 30 minutes to go DTLA, 1 minute to park, 1 minute to change shirt.

Now I think the brakeless trend is the stupidest shit ever. You can’t complain about cars and how people behave toward bikes if you ride fast and don’t give a damn about being unable to slow down like smart people do, by pressing more and more a lever. You can’t say streets are dangerous for riders if you completely forget about the rules of the road. I mean, seriously.

My problem with that is that it makes cars angry against ALL riders.

I rode Paris so many times. If you are brakeless there and that you go fast, you will die in a week period. Thinking that L.A. is rude because cars don’t pay attention is not true if I compare with France, there are a lot more brakeless riders in SoCal. Here in L.A. for what I rode for now, people are much more attentive of what’s going on around them. How many times I’ve been facing a car door in France, pretty much never here in Silver Lake (last year I was riding every day). People don’t want to get sued here. Even if they can’t see shit in their big ass SUVs, they don’t want any trouble. So if you’re alert –there is no place on this planet where you can afford to not focus on what’s going on on the road while biking- it’s pretty cool.

So to me the main message would be to push people to use their bikes, not to see riders as stupid ass kamikazes. They will stay in their cars if the main “bike culture” is about being suicidal you know?