Si tratta di un vero e proprio evento per l’editoria italiana.

https://www.fumettologica.it/2021/09/one-piece-libro-piu-venduto-manga/

La ~131 della mia newsletter Mostly Weekly è online. Si parla di tag sbagliate, orologi e livelle, Potete leggerla da qui, ma vi consiglio di abbonarvi, tanto è gratuito e così non perdete nessun numero

https://antoniodini.com/weekly/131/

Certo che sarebbe bello se anziché cazzeggiare ogni tanto qualcuno parlasse del nostro Risorgimento come se fosse una cosa notevole, perché lo è stato. È stato incredibile, come incredibili erano i suoi personaggi. Solo che non è piaciuto a Hollywood e noi ne disprezziamo la retorica datata. Folli.

Prendete Giuseppe Garibaldi, ad esempio.

Money quote: "The man himself was a cocktail of paradoxes: inscrutable but heroic, restrained but inspiring, “the kind of man who has brown eyes but everyone thinks they are blue”, as one observer put it. In 1849, aged 42, he cut an eccentric pose in his gaucho’s poncho and sombrero. So too did his accomplices and followers, known as the garibaldini, in their motley attire. There was Anita, his fearless, pregnant Brazilian wife; Gustav von Hoffstetter, his idealist Bavarian aide-de-camp; the illiterate but genius populist Ciceruacchio; and the diligent 13-year-old Gaetano Sacchi; not to mention the wider band of patriots, thrill-seekers and ne’er-do-wells who accompanied their march from Rome."

https://www.newstatesman.com/tim-parks-garibaldi-heros-way-walking-review

È un po' di tempo che mi chiedo perché la smart home non ha avuto il successo che le aziende ritengono debba avere. Una parte della risposta potrebbe essere in questo articolo: fa schifo.

Money quote: "The CTA says its stagnant forecast is merely a function of competition, as an influx of device makers drive down the cost of hardware. But as someone who’s been living with various smart home gadgets for several years now, I have a different theory: They’re just not worth a big investment unless you have a limitless supply of time and patience."

https://www.fastcompany.com/90660570/the-smart-home-is-flailing-as-a-concept-because-it-sucks

Usare i "device" rende più stupidi del dovuto? A quanto pare, no: non è colpa della tecnologia bensì un talento innato.

Money quote: "Many articles in the popular and academic press assert that digital technology is to blame. Some experts, including those recently featured in stories by major news outlets, state that excessive use of digital technology is clearly linked to psychological distress in young people. To deny this connection, according to a prominent proponent of the link, is akin to denying the link between human activity and climate change."

https://theconversation.com/flawed-data-led-to-findings-of-a-connection-between-time-spent-on-devices-and-mental-health-problems-new-research-162585

Una chicca di più di un secolo fa, però sempre valida

A quanto pare tutti i giochi gestionali ambientati nel Medio Evo sono decisamente sbagliati.

Money quote: "Any gameplay loop that tells a story of linear settlement growth is incongruent with how a medieval economy worked (see Foussier 2004). Medieval villagers were often living on the edge of subsistence. Agricultural surpluses were skimmed by the church and the feudal lords. Bad harvests, banditry, warfare and disease might decimate a village community at any time. For this very reason, the demography of many European villages remained relatively stable between the twelfth and the eighteenth century. It may therefore be clear that the gameplay loop of city builders pivots around the concept of doing the historically exceptional (i.e. growing a settlement to a town) and thereby strays far from what actually happened in the lives of our medieval forebears."

https://www.leidenmedievalistsblog.nl/articles/why-medieval-city-builder-video-games-are-historically-inaccurate

È ora di merenda; Git & cookie… Enjoy!

Vivere il sogno!

Money quote: "I take a lot of vacation. I find it more enjoyable than working.

That's not to say that I don't like working. I write software for a living, which is crazy fun in and of itself. If you'd have told little 14 year old Jason, writing games on his Commodore 64, that he'd one day have a job doing basically the same thing, he'd have been pretty stoked.

But over the years I've found a lot of other stuff that I like doing even more than programming computers. I like to climb rocks, surf and travel through interesting parts of the world, and always found it hard to do that for, say, most of the year every year when I had to work for other people. So I set out to build a business with the heuristic of "Maximize Jason's Vacation Time".

This is a rather long and drawn out account of how I did that (and how you can probably do that too.)"

https://www.expatsoftware.com/Articles/guy-on-the-beach-with-a-laptop.html

Grandi classici:

«I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one».

Henry D.Thoreau, Walden; or, Life In The Woods.

Altri grandi classici: ho forti aspettative per il prossimo Natale. The Matrix Resurrections

https://youtu.be/9ix7TUGVYIo

“Lo sapete, no, se c’è una cosa che contraddistingue il paradiso, è che a un certo punto smette di essere tale, tutti ne veniamo scacciati, presto o tardi”

Il "tremendo problema" della procrastinazione nell'era degli strumenti e delle metodologie digitali automatiche

Money quote: "Another thing that might feel familiar: The things that IDoneThis users actually did accomplish, they did very quickly. Half of completed to-do items were done within a day of writing them down. These weren’t longer-term, complex tasks. Ten percent were done within a minute. It was almost like people were writing them down just so they had something to check off. A nice psychological boost, to be sure, but it somewhat defeated the purpose of a to-do list."

https://www.wired.com/story/to-do-apps-failed-productivity-tools/

Il lavoro remoto è la norma per i programmatori (lo dice l'Economist!)

Money quote: "On the first weekday of every month, a thread called “Who is hiring” is posted on Hacker News, a news-aggregation website popular with programmers. Hundreds of companies, from one-person operations to trillion-dollar corporations, submit listings. Most of them are based in America, although startup hubs such as Berlin or London are popular as well. According to an analysis by The Economist, only 13% of the jobs posted in the thread in 2011 mentioned remote work. In 2021, more than 75% do"

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/08/11/for-programmers-remote-working-is-becoming-the-norm

A proposito di lavoro remoto: sto finendo mostly weekly, la mia newsletter che esce domani. Vi potete iscrivere qua. La nuova versione è sempre gratuita

https://antoniodini.com/iscrizione/

Editore USA abbandona la carta e offre iPad a migliaia di abbonati https://www.macitynet.it/chattanooga-times-abbandona-la-carta-e-offre-ipad-a-migliaia-di-abbonati/

Ci lamentiamo più del dovuto del lavoro che viene fatto in Italia, particolarmente a Roma ma anche nel resto del Paese, per trovare e preservare i resti archeologici di un tempo perduto. Guardate la terribile bellezza della situazione di Istambul.

Money quote: "Throughout Istanbul, there are clues to how residents of the Byzantine capital lived, worked in and built their city. These blend in with the current surroundings: The ruins of an ancient Roman bathhouse frame the boiler room of a modern office building. A 6th century cistern with blinding-white columns serves as a jewelers' workshop, with machinery to etch out silver necklaces and rings. ("The ventilation isn't great," says the owner, "but it stays warm in the winter and cool in the summer.") And the shell of a small church — reachable by ladder — sits beneath the basement of a hookah bar.

After Ozgumus completed a 13-year archeological survey of Istanbul's historic peninsula in 2010, younger scholars have continued his work, adding hundreds of sites to the public record."

https://www.npr.org/2021/07/23/1016814868/beneath-istanbul-archaeologists-explore-an-ancient-citys-byzantine-basements

I migliori libri su Dante Alighieri e la Divina Commedia https://www.macitynet.it/i-migliori-libri-su-dante-alighieri-e-la-divina-commedia/

Raccontare la storia di Alvy Ray Smith vuol dire raccontare la storia di Pixar ma anche quella dell'invenzione della grafica, del video e delle animazioni digitali. Vuol dire raccontare la storia di un modo di vedere.

Money quote: "Call it restraint. “As far as history goes, I feel like he got shafted, both in Pixar history and in computer graphics history in general,” says Pam Kerwin, a former Pixar colleague. “Everything that you currently use in Photoshop right now basically came from Alvy.” Even self-­driving cars and augmented reality, “which are all about image processing, machine vision ... Alvy and his colleagues brought all that stuff into the world.”"

https://www.wired.com/story/pixar-animation-alvy-ray-smith-pixel/

Sette libri per conoscere meglio Dante - il mio articolo per Anobii

https://blog.anobii.com/it/2021/09/14/sette-libri-per-conoscere-meglio-dante/