h. Play

I was playing my bass guitar last weekend, as usual. But this time I had a visit from my friend’s son and his little cousins.

When I’m about to play, things get quiet in my mind. No thoughts. Pure focus. Rhythm, I’m holding it. Melody, I’m playing it. Harmony, I’m observing it. I disappear in plain sight, closing my eyes and letting it all out through my fingers while I smile and think about the next 8 bars and hopefully, don’t forget about the break.

The cousins were watching. After my traditional hour of practice, I relax my shoulders and hear a faint and cute “bonjour” outside.

I know it’s them and It’s so I N T E N S E.

Five black children age 5 to 12, in front of me, asking me questions about guitars and Eiffel Towers. The wah pedal leaves them speechless.

What they don’t know is how profound that whole thing is to me. It’s always a challenge to retrieve my speech after playing my instrument. I think music and language are using the same parts of the brain and it takes me a few minutes to get back to actual talk. And, they’re black kids.

I’ve never had black children around me. I was always the only one, and once I was an adult in France, I had white children around me. No more. The default is black now.

They’re standing there smiling and giggling for no reason other than being adorable and I want to grab them one by one, play with them for hours and at some point, hold them hard against me and tell them what I wanted to hear from a black person when I was their age, but never got.

“you’re beautiful” “you’ll be alright” “observe the world” “be good, be nice, be the best you can be” “dude, where’s my car?”

That kind of stupid shit.

Black kids always make me breathe so deeply.

I need to dance. Last time was 2020. Dragged my own ass to Silver Lake on a Sunday night.

Turned out to be amazing. 9pm to midnight, non stop dancing. Then the most tasteful Old Fashioned ever poured with a side of cold water? Bliss. And then another three-four hours of moves on the dance floor. The bouncer had to yell at me “we closing bro!” for me to leave.

Next time will be soon and phenomenal.

I mean, it’s beautiful. It’s rather ingenious. Here’s the pitch:

But then you learn it also has integrated temperature sensors that keep the burners at the precise temperature you want.

And then you learn that the stove has a battery in it, which means that unlike most other induction stoves, it can plug into a standard 120-volt outlet. You don’t have to get a pricy circuit upgrade, or an even pricier electrical panel upgrade, to install it.

And then, your brain explodes when you learn the battery is a smart energy storage device that can charge up when power is cheap in the morning so that you save money when you use it in the evening, when power prices are highest. You can also participate in programs that will pay you to dispatch power from your stove to the grid when demand is high.

Who knew a stove could, or should, do so much?

It’s super dope! I love it. But it’s also overkill. And $5,500.

My Zojirushi heats up 4L of water, twice a day. I never wait on hot water anymore. It’s $200.

A big, 11-in-1 instant pot is $120 and a lot less maintenance that four cooking tops.

Sure, they don’t have a battery. But you could potentially have them connected to one.

I think kitchen are going to massively change. Outside the fridge, big appliances are about to be let go as smaller, more efficient ones populate counters across the world.

The kitchen’s core becomes mostly a surface, a large sink, and a bunch of power strips with rotating devices connected to them.

People keep rewriting the iPhone’s story and keep forgetting that:

It wasn’t the phone.

It wasn’t the brand.

It wasn’t the technology.

What made it successful are cell phone carriers, who desperately needed a vessel to sell data.

Before 2007/08, they had a really hard time selling mobile data as we were all on free WiFi, laughing, buying devices when we needed them.

So phone carriers bought iPhones in bulks at whatever price Apple had for them, subsidizing the crazy upfront cost. They bundled them with LTE data plans to see if that would work.

..Baaang!

What made the iPhone successful is a partnership between companies and a giant opportunity. Not a brand, not a marketing person, not a device. Collaboration did it.

It’s always collaboration that gets shit done. Always.

Human mobility networks reveal increased segregation in large cities | Nature

“This means that, contrary to expectations, residents of large cosmopolitan areas have less exposure to a socioeconomically diverse range of individuals.”

Thank you, real world’s statistics for showing how a lot of people need to be quiet about increasing density in cities. These mfs can’t stop arguing that it brings melting pot vibes! No it doesn’t.

Higher density means higher homogenization of rents, which displaces a lot of folks of a different socio-economic background. High density means worse tolerance from anyone, for anything. The only winners are real estate companies, who don’t need to win anything.

It’s criminal that cities act as if they didn’t know all that. Cities need to do two things in 2024: sprawl so that folks don’t kill each other over a parking spot or a noise issue, and build and rebuild sustainable structures at a decent pace. For the kids! For God! I don’t know, find a good reason y’all.

Someone posted some music. First you need to listen to the song. Then it will make sense.

I can’t help myself.

Just saw OpenAI’s Sora. It’s fucked up.

It kind of single-handedly completely changes film/TV production, right there. The logistics of film location have been transformed. “fuck this”, the Executive Producer will say. “let’s prompt that Mexican beach resort evening shot”, he will giggle.

Film and TV crews are about to shrink faster than a snail in salt.

On the other side, who will have enough imagination to create vibrant, coherent and lovely videos with those brand new tools that are still in beta? I don’t know. But I feel like there will be a shortage of folks able to do that.

We’re living incredibly fast times.

This is absolutely hysterical.

Battling my hosting company which started to charge a subscription for email services, out of nowhere, making everything 400% more expensive.

My email addresses have low traffic, but they’re essential to my digital life since forever. Storage is cheap. I don’t cost them shit.

This was a fine company and they got bought out by a lot bigger company a year ago. The insane price increase started last summer, communicated at the very bottom of a stupid .pdf file in an email talking about “some changes”.

This is why we can’t have nice things, I hate it here, etc.

Fascinating! Let’s look closer at Europe and France.

• France is the only Western Europe country where cannabis is illegal.
• Black and brown people are the main cannabis customers in the world.
• France has the biggest black and brown people population in Europe.
• White French people will tell you that no, it has nothing to do with racism, like at all. Black and brown French people will tell you “exactly! ;) ;) ;)”

How a secular country known, loved and respected internationally for its freedom and intellectual openness can be that fucking dumb about cannabis for that fucking long, I don’t know. Oh wait, I do!

Around 2007 I told my parents that cannabis needed to be legalized because illegal traffic was creating violence and a second economy, which are very much detrimental to our society. They scoffed.

Today Marseille is basically run by gangs. It’s Ciudad Juarez down there now: kidnapping, torture, limbs missing, murders. Good job, French people!

Oh, also probably 90% if not more of all French people born after 1975 have smoked some cannabis and understand that it’s no big deal, including the current president on his second term.

Embarrassing AF. Keep drinking and beating your women to death, my dear old country. Actually, no. Stop lagging and get your fucking shit together, goddamn.