h. Play

A huge aspect of me enjoying publishing online these days, is witnessing every single silo out there censor, ban, abuse their customers. The latest case is the insane takedown of a YouTube stream with half a billion views by a Malaysian company. Yes, the stream is back but until when?

52% of YouTube videos live in 2010 have been deleted, by the way.

Twitter is probably the craziest case. People who use this app daily, don’t own anything they’ve spent hundreds of hours on. Some folks have literally tweeted a million times. It’s wild.

Reddit is known for being controlled by a .01% of mods doing whatever they want.

There are countless stories of Google, Apple and Microsoft fumbling people’s cloud drives, making them lose their accounts or getting banned, for x or y reasons. It’s always vague and support is always missing.

Being very dependent on private, huge companies online is not what you want. Convenience is the Bait, do not fall for it or if you do, know what’s going on: you don’t own your stuff anymore. Believe that.

When I post a gif and that I know it’s not going to go anywhere, that all my pictures are mine and not Meta’s, that all my music is mine and not YouTube’s, etc. And that I can backup and export and start over my digital life if I need to.

Well, it feels fucking nice.

Reminder that $44B is 44,000 million dollars.

Reminder that 44,000 million dollars divided by the U.S. population, which is around 331 million folks, would mean that we all get a one-time payment of $132,930.

I think that would alleviate that inflation thingy quite well.

Elon, get your ass on Venmo and start spittin’.

So uh, it’s been a decade of this on y’all’s necks. 27kg is 59 pounds.

Weight on arteries, blood flow slower, which means less oxygen to the brain, which means slower activity.

Simultaneously, it seems like people’s ability to process things has gone down a lot. Like, a lot.

People are constantly in this 30 to 60° position. Hours on end, every day. Everywhere. 10 years of this.

I know, reading books. Well we rarely read them in this position, and phones and social media are a different beast: they stress us out, no matter what the content is, unlike books. It’s excitement, intensity while the weight on our necks and shoulders is pressing those blood vessels. We hold our breath, doom scrolling.

Could this combination of unnatural physical position and mind burn out be making people ultra-confused and unable to think properly? I’m speculating!

But as someone who’s never been on his phone like that, I’m looking at society acting up like

Please put your phone down. Stretch, and raise your head.

It’s super surreal to have 4K pictures of the universe’s old ass, with all those numbers that we can’t comprehend. 13 billion years ago? 13,000 million years? The fuck am I supposed to do with that information? Mind boggling. Those colors, precision and scale? I mean, it’s intense.

This stellar data is harvesting the absolute best of our best scientific brains to process it with love.

Meanwhile half the planet still has to fight for their bodily autonomy, because of some old ass, inaccurate book of stories that people believe.

Just Wow Seriously Though

It’s kind of scary how good at mutation this covid shit is. Wear yo mask, still.

There’s an Uber Files scandal in France, involving the French president.

Ugh.

Uber is this weird thing where I know they’ve been bad but also where I know how much they changed the game for good. They did.

In 2014, not so long ago, Uber was a freaking lifesaver. Taxis would be horrendous to me! I would never get one, or it was killing my bank account, $60 at a time. Uber solved that problem in a second.

I still remember my first driver, on a super-hot day, straight off of the T-Mobile shop, after grabbing my first and last US phone number. He was so happy to drive, and I was so happy to drink water in the back of his SUV.

But then, yeah. Virtually unlimited VC money, Bait & Switch tactics, massive lobbying at every government levels everywhere, and here we are.

I mentioned recently how every good idea turns into terrible business in no time these days, and Uber is probably the best example of this.

For those outside the United States, there’s this Vehicle Registration Renewal that has to be paid every two years. Yup. What for? Just because you own a vehicle, you need to pay a fee every 24 months. It doesn’t do anything.

You also need to renew your driver’s license every four or five years in CA. It could be valid for life, but rent from every single driver every few years, is a good deal for the DMV.

And then, there’s car insurance…smh

I had been trying things out for a couple weeks.

After using the same custom/hacked theme for close to a millennium, I wanted a little coat of fresh paint.

I didn’t change much! I like my dual-tone design. It’s just better for mobile reading now. And a bit fancier (check out the about, son). Still not sure on the background, I made it a little bit lighter, but it might be better darker, making the contrast stronger.

Anyway.

I encourage you to publish online. It’s easier than ever, you know you don’t want to go viral, and it will make you feel good. Also, you’re humbly making history.

I wish I could read a bus driver in LA narrate her stories all year long. Or a valet parking attendant in Silver Lake. Checking out an IT guy’s challenges in Ghana or a session musician in Japan fighting his parents. All of that without the “check me, check me, check me” of social media. Just purity of experience. Just witnessing consistency and persistence.

On the Open Web, as we should. Thank you, open source developers.

I heavily disliked Pixar’s Soul.

Yes, I’m a black man, a musician, and I hate seeing us dead all the time. it’s boring and I don’t relate! I’m alive and enjoying every second of my life—it’s the little things etc—, so the entire movie didn’t do anything to me besides being annoying and making me anxious.

Yes, beautifully rendered but that’s when it is so expected, it’s not even a feature anymore. Very nice sound design as well. As usual.

The Last Dinosaur was weird pace and consistency wise, and Onward’s main characters are quite insufferable. But Soul, due to hitting close and being so lovely when it starts, really made me do a weird face for the rest of the movie.

I also think we’re hitting a “too realistic environment with cartoon characters in it” vibes and it’s on the edge of uncanny valley. Some of the skin in Coco had given me the creeps already.

Now that 3D is perfect, man, I want much more coherent and interesting scenarios and stories, aimed at a curious and grown population. Some not-possible-before shots of romantic escapades, some ultra funny and irreverent weed-related joint (smoke effects y’all!!), I don’t know but, I think we’re all super ready for that.

Maybe I’ll go see LightYear next week.