“I stopped using Facebook to be happier”, gnagna, etc

Every 6 month I read an erudite article about this : “Facebook makes people unhappy“.

Globally it’s for one reason. It’s because you watch people-you-know’s lives and you notice than they seem happier. At least, happier than you!

Okey.

So in a way it’d bring jealousy and sadness : “People swim in happiness and here I am, swimming in nothing at all”. Booooo. And sob sob.

In fact, Facebook knows better : when people are happy (for example when they fall in love), they… disappear from Facebook!

So the first thing you learn with experience, indeed, it this :

The more people post about their “big happiness” on social medias, the less happy they are in reality. It’s almost embarrassing, at times.

But I wrote about his already :

• What happens off screen on Instagram
• #happybutter #hashtags are #terrible

 

But well…

I know that our disease, all of us, is that we want to be loved. Therefore I’m amazed by the genius of the button “Like” on FB. It’s genius! We all want to be “liked”!

I use Facebook in another way. I follow people who like to share. Not their “life” (travels, barbecues, babies, love bliss), which is INDEED really boring, but what they found : Art, Movies, Lectures, YouTubes, Exhibitions, Paintings…

Thus, most of people I follow on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or Pinterest are… unknown. I, most of the time, don’t even know their face! They are photographers or Italian Art fans, or American Paintings Finders… They dig and they share : that’s GREAT!

If you use Facebook this way, you’re not “sad”. You’re happy because you find great things everyday! Or, OK, lolcats…

Thanks for reading!

JP

 

 

The problem with Google…

My first Internet connexion? 1993. At this time, no Chrome, no Firefox, no Google, and a VERY slow modem (my first was a 33.6 kbit/s, with its delicious Krooooiiiii noise at the beginning).

What we call the “Web” was a big mess, Netscape (the browser) was crashing every twelve seconds, and to try to find things, you had to use Lycos or AltaVista. Both were pretty inaccurate. One great source of informations was the Usenet Newsgroups.

Google appeared in 1998 with a simple and great idea, which I just found in the wiki page :

While conventional search engines ranked results by counting how many times the search terms appeared on the page, the two theorized about a better system that analyzed the relationships among websites. They called this new technology PageRank; it determined a website’s relevance by the number of pages, and the importance of those pages that linked back to the original site.

Well, therefore, everybody used Google, which is very easy to understand : if you wanted to find the best page about canoes in California BEFORE Google, good luck! Results were a total mess, and the one you needed was lost in dozens of other things…

 

But AltaVista and Lycos had this : the ability to LOSE you in the web, on little hiking paths. You were constantly discovering little diaries, unknown collectors, fascinating people gathering infos on many subjects, smart web pages… Almost all searches were adventures… because, precisely, or thanks, to the “no ranking”.

This leads to a well known dial :

 Tout gain s’accompagne d’une perte – Every gain involves loss

 

Today, with Google and Facebook, we all navigate on highways. Most of the time, if you want to navigate on unbeaten tracks, you have to jump out off Google and find links pages, forums or… newsgroups (who use them today?).

 

Or this great answer to this little question : “How to discover new websites?”

https://www.stumbleupon.com/

 

Thanks for reading!

 

Letters and Boxes – Hashtag “Old Times”

You write an email, it goes to Japan in one second. You can text people all around the world, you can call them, or even see them on your screen now, and talk. For HOURS. It’s free. It’s called Internet.

I was born in 1966, so when I was a young adult, say in 1986, there was no Internet. If you wanted to write to someone, you had to WRITE it, on paper, you had to POST it (should I say “ship”?). Stamp. Envelope. Write the address. You could put something in the envelope. You could perfume it. Yes you could, and you can.

Like Ernst Jünger says, “Tout gain s’accompagne d’une perte” – Every gain involves loss. At the age of Internet, we lost something about mail.

We lost the wait. The DELICIOUS and painful and exciting wait of a letter. All this implied so many things! You could write pages before you got the letter (of your lover, silly!), you could add words when you got a response, you could send a letter before you got one, inventing a double-ping-pong. It was exciting. It was BLISS.

Tools : 

Every gain involves loss. Never forget this. Apply and think to anything you find a “progress”. What did you lose, dear?

You CAN go back to old times. You love someone? As a friend? A lover? Send her a LETTER. Send a box. Send an object. A card. A symbol. Written words. Paper. Perfumed. Colored papers. Write. Draw. Add little objects. Stamps. Images. Symbols. Treasures. A petal. Do it! It’s old school? Perfect.

Think. When someone ships you something, it means something. It’s an object. It’s real. It’s life. It’s a choice. It’s out of virtuality. It’s important.

Thanks for reading!

Marguerite #Duras – L’Amant. Made with @instaquoteapp #instaquote

#bw #architecture #lines

#Repost @zabelita ??? When. ??

Why I talk to my exes

One day I found an interesting key in the diary of a French writer called Claude Roy. Something tricky which put a smile on my face, a bit like :

Try to choose someone you will love when you don’t love him/her anymore

You can interpret this in many ways, of course. One can be the sense of marriage, and how to find your second wind after a long time together (finding you “second love”).

The other one is the subject of this little article. It begins with a question :

Do you need to be friend with your lover ?

I think it depends on personalities. I do. I’m not attracted, really, to a woman I’m not friend with. I need to weave words and a bond before I can love someone ! That’s not original, right ?

So I am always surprised to see broken couples becoming enemies. Love is broken, good. Where’s the friendship, then ?

Of couuuurse everybody will say the contrary. “Don’t talk to your ex !”. Google this and have fun : “Ex Girlfriend Quotes”. Drama Drama !

I do talk to my exes, almost everyone of them. Why ? Because they ARE good persons ! An interesting mind stays  interesting and passionnante, even out of your bed !…

I don’t see why, after a break up, somebody would become somebody else… “I don’t love you anymore, good : let’s talk”.

Exes are the best friends, because the seduction process is behind you both. You have a new life, and what’s left is the most delicious bond of friendship. After all, maybe this bliss was the whole purpose of your meeting ?

 

c’est d’aimer de préférence qui on aimera toujours lorsqu’on ne l’aimera plus

Don’t think about the color “Blue” for a minute…

ONE

Let’s imagine I dislike George Michael. I hate his music. So here I am building a web page about that : “I hate GM !”. I write daily articles about everything I hate, his nose, his voice, his life, etc.

Until I realize I hate George Michael and I’m thinking about him all day long. I harvest things for my blog. I hunt. I spit words. I am obsessed by someone I don’t want to think about. Smart !

TWO

Don’t think about the color “Blue” for a minute…

Mmmhhh ?…

THREE

As I’m constantly reading slices of books, I one day read something in my sofa, from Nietzsche, and two hours later, in triangles of sun (see picture below), from André Suares (I will find the quotes soon and put it there). Both were talking about people banning sex from their life. They were both noticing that when you do that, you have like a black hole in the center of your brain, thinking about sex constantly.

Work for a Temperance Movement, become an activist : you will be in a position where you talk about… alcohol and sex constantly !

Tool :

If you hate George, just don’t pay attention to him. Breathe. If you want to think about the color blue, think of it, it’s not that dramatic. If you want to have a drink, just relax and have a glass of wine. If you need peace, don’t build a block castle : listen to some Royksopp and dance with what’s around. Dialog. Or not. Solemn drama or dolphin casualness ?

I suggest Coming Home.

The Flight Excites the Hunter

 

 

The Photographs of John Vachon

Wikipedia : John Vachon (May 19, 1914 – April 20, 1975)

He’s known for his black & white rural poor people photographs. What I want to show you here are his color and cities photographs. You’ll find more in Pinterest, or course (for example here).

Here are three of them. The rainy color one is colorised (and wow !).

(my Pinterest : https://fr.pinterest.com/jrobocatwaldgan/

 

 

 

WhatsApp Quiet PingPong Images

WhatsApp is a perfect App, so elegant that more than a billion people on Earth use it. I loved it the first minute it was on my phone. I was floored by everything in this App : clean, elegant, simple.

More : Internet, Facebook and some Apps on our smartphones allow us to meet people all around the world.

There is a great exercise you can make with someone living in another country. I call it WhatsApp Ping Pong.

You send a picture to this person, and you wait for the answer. It can be ten seconds later, or ten hours, or ten days. The purpose, to maintain a good pace, is to wait for the image-answer before you send another one.

Your books, the sky, a church, walls, houses, streets : EVERYTHING is interesting, when you watch it from another culture. Voilà.

And if you want, if you’re shy, you don’t need a single word, you ping pong images, only images. This App is such a great tool. That’s sharing. That’s humanity !

#labo #renault #vintage #garage

#architecture #building #architexture #city #buildings #skyscraper #urban #cities #town #architecturelovers #abstract #lines #beautiful #archilovers #architectureporn #lookingup #archidaily #composition #geometry #perspective #geometric #pattern

#shadowonthewood

Trailers Blackout

OK I’m french. My english is a frenglish, it’s rusty and wobbly, et voilà. Try me, though. I’ll do my best. I promise. If sometimes it’s too bad, just laugh at me or roll your eyes.

Some movies are… well, you cravewait for them ! And then trailers come. YouTube. Theaters. TV. Pretty well done. Spectacular ! You watch them. Woah. OK, they spoil the movie. They show too many things. C’est complètement stupide, but we are accustomed to stupidity, no ? So there…

It’s difficult to avoid trailers. But one day, try. You resist. You’re strong. You DON’T click. In theaters, you close your eyes and index your ears. TV-Go-Pee. Fermez les écoutilles !

Then, well : discover the pleasure to discover a movie the day you watch it. Incroyable mais vrai. Bim.

 

 

Tout gain s’accompagne d’une perte – Every gain involves loss

OK I’m french. My english is a frenglish, it’s rusty and wobbly, et voilà. Try me, though. I’ll do my best. I promise. If sometimes it’s too bad, just laugh at me or roll you eyes.

Every gain involves loss ?

Ça pourrait être : Economy. Or some Levi Strauss. Or Beckett maybe ?

Peut-être…

When I was a student, I read something about Prokofiev. It was before the Internet, so I walked in the city (the mood of the sky ? See picture below – I remember it), entered the library, found a Deutsch Grammophon CD – Ozawa ! – borrowed it and I brought it home.

I read the booklet, and listened to the 2 CDs for two weeks. Many, many times. I explored it. It was precious ! Of course, as a 20 years old young man, I was moved by the Montagues And Capulets strange modulations zigzagguing music.

What about today ? Que se passe-t-il, aujourd’hui ?

A young female student hears that music in a movie, ohhhh ! She just writes “Prokofiev” in YouTube and get 408.000 results. If she’s smart, she tries the Russian way to write it : “Прокофьев“, to get… 42.100 more movies.

See me coming, don’t you ? The whole thing is just here. But… do we focus the same way, when the choice is that big ? No ! No no no, and no. Every gain involves loss. You just wander into the océan of the musique de Prokofiev, et voilà pour vous.

This “dial/lever/tool” text is not about scale of knowledge and the blissfull possibilité to get lost in it. I should write another one, un autre jour.

Dial/Lever/Tool : Observe what you have. Imagine you’re 30 years before. How would it be, then ? What if you put something aside ? What if you close some possibilities ? What if, as a photographer, you get back to film ? If every gain involves loss, what have you lost, then, with the vast “new thing” ? What will you do to recover that ? What if you had to keep 100 books in your shelves.

Is “Every loss involves gain” right ?

And what is the way to link this concept to the Wrong Way Up ?