h. Play

There’s something super exciting about the future of architecture.

Architecture has always been dependent on structural questions: to build a living room with large windows, you will need a system to hold those heavy glass panes, probably a load-bearing wall nearby, etc.

Whatever you think about in terms of architecture and interior design will be controlled and given to you by the structural quality of the building.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a 1956 rare, custom, complex mid-century home in the desert or a produced en masse apartment building from 2007 in Florida. Same structural questions that will answer your living questions, always. We are limited by the frame.

Until now!!!

3D printing means that we do not care about structure anymore. Because everything is made through a printing process, everything stands on its own, like a shell. No more calculations to know if that steel frame can hold and support this and that. We print, y’all! It’ll hold and support by default.

How much it liberates our minds, it’s pure magic. I was re-reading the famous Case Study Houses book and most of the challenges were about structure and cost. Those architects were structure’s bitches.

Not anymore!!!

It’s not the end of math: there are other calculations and numbers to take care of with 3D printing, but the all “is it possible to..?” crucial question doesn’t exist anymore.

It is so freeing, I cannot.

I will 3D-print my custom house. It will probably be concrete (or maybe rammed earth if possible) and hemp, two natural and extremely strong materials. Of course, that also means near zero-waste construction and pre-build homes, which means assembled in a matter of weeks.

This is so exciting. OMG

My dad’s face when I waved that little book on Skype one hour ago, y’all. He looked so young. Smiling, and full of excitement. Goddamn, it was beautiful.

The road to this picture. Eight straight years of intense focus. Thoughts about Iran, Ukraine, Venezuela, Ethiopia. The arbitrary-ness of where you are born and how it controls your life before you even started it. My somehow botched childhood that led me to having the possibility to choose where I want to live.

I’m Harold, a France-born American designer, producer and musician. Welcome.

Now that both the comic and the show are gone, I wish I’d seen:

• Dogs and cats being central to survival
• Bicycles being key in a powerless world
• People seeking batteries for memory/nostalgia purposes to the point of offering everything they have for them
• The cure being real but still under development and failing like 75% of the time
• Beige computers, 90s tech and solar panels
• Less feudalism and more going through every warehouse around with funny stock management stories
• Matriarchies
• Less emphasis on abuse as the entire world is being abused by zombies already

Instead we got the same scenario over and over and over. A bit sad, innit.

Nothing. It feels like nothing. It’s boring.

You see dispensaries here and there. You recognize them because of the usually large hemp visuals and pretty large security dudes posted up on a high chair or under an umbrella.

People coming out of those otherwise-looking-just-like-other-shops shops, carrying little Duro 6 bags. It could be weed, edibles, oil. Whatever.

If you visit you will experience the standard, particular and classic skunk smell at any hour, at any location in LA. 6am at a traffic light, the smell and then if you scan around, maybe a little smoke coming from some car, in the sea of metal.

It could be at 2pm in a luscious backyard on a Tuesday, outside work between buildings at midnight, it doesn’t matter. It always happens. The Smell.

Never really in public public though. People don’t show off about smoking, nor talk about it. It’s around without being around, you know what I mean?

What about cannabis-intoxicated people in public? Well I guess it slows everything down a little bit. Decisions. Maneuvers. Everything takes a bit longer than without it. People craving junk food, maybe that’s the worst aspect of it? I’m not sure, it’s not really an issue.

Like I said, it’s boring. It’s awesome.

There are two, hot tools used by capitalism right now: exclusivity and subscription.

Exclusivity works for a while, until it doesn’t. If you’re successful or wildly successful with exclusive content, people will either copy, steal or offer more for said exclusivity. It doesn’t scale at all. We see this a lot in video games these days; games are far too expensive to make to be exclusive to one platform. It goes back to simple economics: it is good to sell something to a lot of people, rather than less.

Subscription sounds like the ultimate capitalist tool: you will pay for the rest of your life with contract renewals (adding more and more bullet points, mmhmm). But subscription hits two very hard obstacles. First, on the consumer side: we can’t subscribe to everything, that’s unsustainable as hell! I saw the other day Mercedes talking about $1200 annual subscription to get software improvements on electric vehicles, what kind of landlord BS is that? Unsustainable.

But the part that most people forget about subscription that really sucks, is on the producer side: you need to produce quality, constantly. You can’t never rest. You have to get that content out there (otherwise you lose income instantly), and that’s massive anxiety. The relationship between producer and customer becomes quite abusive. I know Patreon creators feel me on that one. It doesn’t work well with intellectual and creative work, which is often born from accidents and progress through iteration. So you start adding water to your lemonade and now people are resentful and either give you nasty feedback, leave, or both.

Conclusion: UBI, baby! Because nothing else works.

A few key points from the article:

• The rate of those deaths has been increasing every year for 20 years by +7% or less; it was +26% in 2020, with the highest rate in 40 years.
• It is estimated that more than half the alcohol sold in the US is used for binge drinking.
• +42% of alcohol-related death for women ages 35 to 44.
• Those deaths are directly related to alcohol consumption and don’t include drunk driving or alcohol-fueled violence.

If we include those, we’re talking about 140,000 deaths per year. We’re losing about 10K folks to COVID every month (120,000 a year). So alcohol in the US right now is more deadly than this stupid virus.

This is not good?

Put another way, it’s better to look at the housing crisis as a policy issue, not a technological one.

It is both simultaneously, dear journalist. Imagine that. It’s a policy issue, for not wanting to house people in empty buildings right now. It’s a technological one for the way we completely suck at building good, sustainable, healthy housing.

This makes me so happy. Not just because they 3D-printed a house, which is how we should be building homes from now on (most efficient way to build, period), but because the shape is very reminiscent of my house prototype: one-story, monocoque, yessir!

Billionaires are not doing anything valuable, y’all. Dear Mr. Bezos, give up your wealth right now and install a giant 3D-printer in every city of America. People would sing your praise for the rest of humanity’s existence.

They sell those giant 86” TVs for under a grand now.

Kids 3 years old and younger growing up with those in front of their eyeballs, will probably be adults who will want VR and not think twice about it. So twenty years from now, in 2043.

Mark Zuckerberg might have been off by twenty years, just like Bill Gates; in 2000, he wanted young people to use touchscreens and digital pens. Well, in 2023 it is a common reality.

It’s hard to predict markets!

But also bringing natural, human elements to computing was and is a noble goal. Doing the opposite, folding humans into the digital, emotionless online world is a different thing.

I don’t do those often. I went to my favorite Fatburger joint in Inglewood, and ordered a King meal. It took 30mn for the very understaffed staff to bring my burger through the deserted sitting area but MAYNE, was it good. Crispy skinny fries and a juicy, tasty burger with everything on it, Marvin and Bar-Kays on the radio and my back in the sun.

Bliss.

My immune system microdosing on Omicron/B.Q.1.2.3.4 injected in my body through a bivalent vaccine shot I got yesterday like,

(Pfizer I)
(Pfizer II)
(Pfizer III)