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A quick word on how I make my websites because my method is:

• Extremely slow,
• Very tedious,
• Not secure at all,
• Unable to share/scale,
• A huge waste of time in my life.

If you want to do the same thing, here's how.

In prehistory, I used to make static HTML / CSS sites. And it was fun. I had learned html during an internship at an internet company and I was having a lot of fun making psychedelic sites where everything moved thanks to carefully placed gifs (now I pronounce "jguif" to agree with everyone).

I should have stopped there.

Then I got into Wordpress. And let's be clear: it's very good, Wordpress. A very mature environment, a solid code base, a very active community around an open source schema with paying options for those who want them. Whatever your business, in 90% of the cases, Wordpress is a good solution.

I should have stopped there.

But when it came time to make a website for my company ChezFilms, I wanted more control. Over the aesthetics, the categories, the navigation. I started with a static html site: simple, sober, fast. Important company info, demo movies, an email address and that's it.

And that's when I messed up. I put my finger in the pie.

I thought to myself, "what if I created a tiny database to enter my movies anyway?" After all, with over 60 films under my belt, it made sense to be able to browse projects by client, by craft, by genre, etc. So I linked my site to this database in php.

But to populate this database and update it, I did need an admin console. So I programmed that, still in php: a quick and adapted way to enter movies, teams, projects. The version 1 was only for the movies. For version 2, I expanded to other types of posts: photos, articles, videos, etc.

And before I knew it, I had programmed a new Wordpress.

In much, much, much worse ways, obviously. But - I have to admit - very suitable for my needs. So that if you go to ChezFilms, it's still my code that runs the site. (The only external library I use is twig.) The console also allows you to manage invoices and quotes.

Then... I got tired of it. Since the beginning of the year, as you know, I've been taking a more content-centric than container-centric approach.

So I started over using Drupal.

It's a framework that allows you to build a site from scratch but more in depth than Wordpress. The architecture is extremely scalable so you can do whatever you want with minimal code. And there are ready-made templates. That's what I used to create this version of Boulengerie and that's what I'll use to create the next version of ChezFilms.

And then, I promise: we'll stop here.

Distance walked this morning: 8.9km

Number of children dropped off at daycare: 1

Desire to work: 0

Diary entries: 1231 words (7287 characters)

Money spent on coffee and drinks: €11.40

Number of very important meetings this afternoon: 2

Number of meetings postponed without date: 1

Number of meetings postponed by one hour: 1

Number of times I told myself that in life you really have to plan for nothing, I mean: yeah, you can plan, but the most important thing is to be able to dance with the chaos when nothing goes as planned: 2

Number of women crossed sobbing in front of the Bataclan: 1

Number of times reading the name of an actress I vaguely know on the poster of a hit play made me think about the importance of growing your network to be successful so much that I read the wikipedia article on graph theory to think more deeply about the connections that bind us and imagine how we could automate the process of finding the people who are right for us: 1

Number of times I felt like I was wasting my time and not doing what I should be doing: 4

Number of times I said to myself "it's OK, I do what I do, stop judging": 3

Number of times it helped: 2

Number of phone calls received while writing this post: 1

Number of meeting postponed without date which now have a date: 1

This morning on a scale from 1 to 10: 10, easily.

Those who have the eye will have noticed that a large part of my posts here are illustrated by images produced by an artificial intelligence, in this case Midjourney.

For input, I compose a short sentence in English to describe what I want, often accompanied by the terms "vector illustration" for a drawing or "photo-realistic" for a photographic result. And the program outputs four breathtaking proposals that I can transform or expand. All for 8 euros per month.

For example, here are the four suggested results for "French Baker shooting films with a camera and a baguette":

Which is not to say that graphic designers have become useless - not at all! They can still bring coffee or do the short ladder to help catch high objects.

Just kidding (embarrassed emoji).

If the images generated by A.I. are always of surprising quality, it is still very difficult to have real control over the result. The machine does what it wants. Not to mention the supernumerary members and other graphic aberrations that we do not fail to notice at second glance. Smart illustrators will therefore make these tools their allies by composing the right requests upstream and making the right corrections downstream in order to create richer works, faster. Or so we hope.

But yes: these jobs are evolving. Along many others. Ask GPT3.

When I post old drawings, it means I'm busy. An other lockdown doodle made in memory of my trip to Scotland and of... Nope, I can't explain the giraffe. It's a mystery.

Didn't post anything this weekend and lots of work on my plate so I searched through my video impros from last year for one I could repost quickly. I was happily surprised to see that one of the most viewed was also one of the most spontaneous.

Another beatnik thing:

One day, I'll have to do a real review of this year of video improv. And change my face on the cover of this video.

There are certain external views that we have internalized.

That of a parent, a teacher, a friend, an idol. Someone who mattered to us at some point - recently or in our childhood - and who has become a permanent filter in the way we see the world. So much so that we no longer realize it.

In every new situation, we react for that person.

We imagine what they would find admirable, ridiculous, welcome, inappropriate and act accordingly. We don't know where they are watching us from, but they are watching us, even (and especially) when we are alone. So we pretend to like something, to hate it, to enjoy it, to be offended by it. We act against our instincts to gain approval from someone who isn't there.

We want to control our thoughts. To justify the ideas that don't go the right way. Those that would not please them.

Sometimes, several views merge into an indistinct mass that no longer has a name. A multiform presence that judges us and ends up being part of us. Because that is the danger: when the genesis of this view disappears and all that remains is a permanent judgment whose origin is unknown. We seek to score points in a game without an opponent that we cannot win.

The first remedy is to realize this.

To recognize those moments when the superego denies the instinct, when the heart says something that the brain reflexively opposes. As if the impulse itself were taboo. Where does this appreciation come from? Is it justified? Is it part of a recurring pattern? Do we feel a presence behind it?

Then remember that these views are internal constructions that no longer have any connection with the people who were the source of them. Judgments that we hold between ourselves and ourselves, unanchored in reality, and which we can choose to get rid of without asking permission.

Here's a great video by exurb1a, a youtuber that I (and a lot of people) follow:

I also recommend this hilarious video on Mars and this poetic philosophical tale.

It's a new genre that I vey much enjoy: mixing stories with personal essays, the main focus being on storytelling rather than on images which only serve as illustration. I find it freeing and I can't wait to try it.

Yes, it's a cliché, but I've recently experienced it in a very personal way.

As of late, I realized that I was much more likely to get angry after long stretches of work on my computer. Because of the bugs? Not at all. Because after a prolonged interaction with a digital slave which reacts to all mouse clicks immediately, which executes my orders without a second thought, without judging, without getting tired, and which also shines by its speed, it's visual harmony and it's round-the-clock availability, I am much less likely to bear the slow pace, the incompetence and the bad faith of everyone else in the real world.

Think about it: when our ancestors were only concerned about the seasons and the land, nothing in their daily lives – nothing! – would respond to their commands in such an immediate way. Everything relied on human, animal or natural energy. Instantaneity didn't exist.

My theory is this: The day man invented the light switch, humanity lost a bit of its cool.

NB: I realize computers also upset my mother but for extactly the opposite reason: complete lack of control of what's going on on the screen. Everytime I see her interact with a computer, it reminds me of this meme:

using microsoft word

*moves an imagage 1mm to the left*

all text and image shift. four new pages appear. (...) in the distance, sirens.

In a hurry, so here's a repost of a short video I made a few months ago from a movie from 1907 called "Eastern Eggs" by Segundo de Chomon found on Internet Archive illustrated with some text from wikipedia.

Soundtrack created with my Prophet Rev 2 synth. I've even made a sequel that you can watch here.

I burst out laughing at this clip from the Netflix documentary The Mask by Olivier Bouchara and Jérôme Pierrat about the Gilbert Chikli phone scams. I hope they don't accuse me of hacking, but I couldn't help but put a screenshot here:

When the journalist retorts that the victims were manipulated, Maître Kaminski's head is priceless. "We must not reverse history," he dares to say. Hats off to the artist.