Mostly, I Write

Spassoso sul web Money quote: "Bigger Than You Think is a choice-based interactive narrative. Every few paragraphs, you will have the opportunity to decide what happens next in the story. Type one of the boldface words (or click on it) to select an option." https://eblong.com/zarf/zweb/btyt/

Per quelli ai quali serve un editor minimalista pixel by pixel, ecco qua Money quote: "rx is an extensible, modern and minimalist pixel editor and animator implemented in rust[0]. It's designed to have as little UI as possible, and instead takes inspiration from vi's[1] modal nature and command mode. Compared to other pixel editors, rx aims to be smaller yet more configurable and extendable. rx takes a different approach when it comes to animation as well, which is done with *strips*." https://cloudhead.io/rx/

Si stava meglio quando si stava flash Money quote: "These days, our web browsers—whether on mobile or desktop—are highly functional and can do all sorts of things that we could only dream of a decade prior. But despite that, one could argue that the web has actually gotten less creative over time, not more. This interpretation of events is a key underpinning of Web Design: The Evolution of the Digital World 1990-Today (Taschen, $50), a new visual-heavy book from author Rob Ford and editor Julius Wiedemann that does something that hasn’t been done on the broader internet in quite a long time: It praises the use of Flash as a creative tool, rather than a bloated malware vessel, and laments the ways that visual convention, technical shifts, and walled gardens have started to rein in much of this unvarnished creativity." https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/d3awk7/flash-is-responsible-for-the-internets-most-creative-era

Magari non ve ne frega niente, ma i piani di conquista del mondo di Jeff Bezos hanno fatto un altro piccolo passo in avanti Money quote: "AWS said that Amazon's consumer business has decommissioned its final Oracle database and migrated 75 petabytes of data in nearly 7,500 Oracle databases to multiple AWS database services." https://www.zdnet.com/article/amazons-consumer-business-says-bye-bye-to-oracle-databases-moves-to-aws/

Nel mio piccolo ho maltrattato ‘Thor: Love and Thunder’. A quanto pare non sono il solo. Money quote: “Love and Thunder is a fractured affair that tries to combine an immortal superhero’s millennia-in-the-making battle with arrested development with a woman’s encroaching death. It feels like a testament to how demented this massive franchise has gotten when stage-four cancer becomes just another learning tool to guide a divine himbo one step closer toward growing up.” https://www.vulture.com/2022/07/thor-love-and-thunder-makes-you-wonder-if-marvels-okay.html

La singolare storia del letto, che diamo per scontato e al tempo stesso pensiamo sia una cosa moderna. E invece... Money quote: "I certainly didn’t think much about beds until I found myself talking about their history with the executives of a mattress company. These humble artifacts, I learned, had a big story to tell—one that’s 77,000 years old." https://qz.com/quartzy/1714155/the-bizarre-77000-year-history-of-beds/

Nello spot della Apple più citato dopo "1984", cioè "Think Different", c'è un passaggio iniziale che fa riferimento ai "round pegs in the square holes" (in Italia è stato tradotto con "tutti coloro che vedono le cose in modo diverso"). Però poi i misfits, i rebels, i troublemakers, insomma i crazy ones, sono personaggi AA+, sono questi: Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King, Richard Branson, John Lennon, R. Buckminster Fuller, Thomas Edison, Muhammad Ali, Ted Turner, Maria Callas, Mahatma Gandhi, Amelia Earhart, Alfred Hitchcock, Martha Graham, Jim Henson, Frank Lloyd Wright, Picasso e Dr. Sun Yat-sen (e poi la ragazzina del finale che apre gli occhi). Ci pensavo prima leggendo questa storia-sfogo di Laura Jayne Martin, che mi sa che non è né un genio né un atleta né una creatura speciale per la nostra società, ma un individuo che cerca di vivere la sua dimensione non binaria in un mondo fatto di ipotesi precostituite e approvate a priori, non a posteriori. È difficile vivere. Money quote: "So I’m queer, nonbinary, and underachieving. Surprisingly, my wallet isn’t empty because I got a graduate degree in something stupid (although it’s true that I did). It is because I show up to job interviews in a suit and my resume still has a woman’s name on it. I’ve been unemployed or underemployed for 15 years. This probably isn’t your fault. A lot of people have it worse, much worse — please do not include me in any kind of sympathy competition." https://humanparts.medium.com/is-my-suit-making-you-uncomfortable-367b44d43dac

Cosa cosa cosa? Scusate un attimo: 25mila dollari al mese? Alla faccia del minimalismo... Money quote: "As a result, I gained a focus that I’d never experienced before, and have since achieved things that I never thought possible. I’ve been able to find more time to write, work four days a week, earn more than $25,000 a month, and most importantly, experience more of what life has to offer." https://forge.medium.com/a-guide-to-minimalism-in-the-real-world-2366d4bec8ee

"Thor: Love and Thunder" è un film sgangherato ed estenuante - la mia stroncatura per Fumettologica https://fumettologica.it/2022/07/thor-love-and-thunder-recensione/

Da un lato è notevole che ci siano storie come queste da raccogliere e ricordare, oltre che raccontare. Dall'altro, mi chiedo anche quanto sia funzionale alla costruzione della retorica di una parte politica e sociale. Money quote: "Adams, who died on June 6, 1859, had led a remarkable life. Over her 93 years, she escaped slavery three times—once in Maryland and twice in Connecticut—before settling in Uxbridge, Massachusetts, where she lived as a free woman for the last 21 years of her life. Her long-forgotten grave was rediscovered 37 years ago, but it’s just been during the last several years that the town of Uxbridge has worked to have her grave site accepted to the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom, operated by the National Park Service. Earlier this month, it was accepted—immortalizing it among 650 sites critical to the history of resistance and escape, according to Diane Miller, the national program manager of the Network to Freedom. “Even if she escaped one time, we would have included her grave site,” Miller says. “But it’s remarkable that she had to escape three times.”" https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/nancy-adams-underground-railroad-massachusetts

Il Budda, questo sconosciuto. Cioè, conosciuto tramite la retorica della sette in cui è divisa la sua filosofia religiosa. Per quelli di noi non iniziati è quello di qualche film, magari quello di Bertolucci, o chissà. Invece, il lato storico è ancora più inquietante di quello religioso (che era già bello inquietante di per sé). Money quote: "Only the bare details of this account stand up to historical scrutiny. According to contemporary academic opinion, the Buddha lived in the 5th century BCE (c480-400 BCE). But the failure to identify Kapilavatthu implies that he was not a prince who lived in a grand palace. The most likely sites are the Nepalese site of Tilaurakot, an old market town about 10 km north of the Indian border, and the Indian district of Piprahwa, to the south of Tilaurakot and just over the Indian border. But the brick remains at both places are a few centuries later than the Buddha, which at least agrees with the oldest literary sources: according to the Pali canon – the only complete collection of Buddhist literature from ancient India ­– the Buddha’s world generally lacked bricks, and Kapilavatthu’s only building of note was a tribal ‘meeting hall’ (santhāgāra), an open-sided, thatched hut (sālā)." https://aeon.co/essays/was-the-buddha-an-awakened-prince-or-a-humble-itinerant

Avete bisogno di creare una macchina virtuale con dentro macOS? Non è esattamente consentito dalla licenza d'uso del sistema operativo di Apple, però facciamo finta che la virtualizzazione avvenga su un Mac: questo scritp fa tutto da solo in tempi record. (Serve VirtualBox, gratuita e disponibile su vari sistemi operativi). Money quote: "macos-guest-virtualbox.sh is a Bash script that creates a macOS virtual machine guest on VirtualBox with unmodified macOS installation files downloaded directly from Apple servers. Tested on Cygwin. Works on macOS, Windows Subsystem for Linux, and centOS 7. Should work on most modern Linux distros. A default install only requires the user to sit patiently and, less than ten times, press enter when prompted by the script, without interacting with the virtual machine." https://github.com/myspaghetti/macos-virtualbox

Lo smart work e le altre forme di lavoro a distanza sono diverse da quelle in ufficio perché manca l'interazione faccia a faccia. E non è una tonnellata di zoom a risolvere il problema: meglio scrivere. Money quote: "The remote work environment is different from the office. Different environments call for different communication systems. A communication system that is adapted to the remote work reality can unlock amazing benefits: (even) better productivity, a competitive advantage in the long run and much a better work-life balance on top of it all. Asynchronous written communication is the tool best suited for remote work. We are so used to talking to each other in the office, expecting immediate responses in work chat, and having meetings all day, that we tried to replicate that at home with zoom and slack." https://snir.dev/blog/remote-async-communication

Slow, slow. Piano, piano. Bisogna rallentare, dicono. Ma questo vuol dire invertire una tendenza che ha costruito la nostra società oltre al modo con il quale lavoriamo. Esplicitarlo (così come esplicitare temi come il reddito di cittadinanza) porta a confronti e attriti molto forti. Qui c'è una buona traccia del perché bisognerebbe rallentare. Degli interessi in gioco si parlerà un'altra volta. Money quote: "Reducing the total number of hours that office workers toil each week seems an obvious solution to the problem of burnout caused by overwork. Indeed, it’s a solution that’s been offered before. The journalist Carl Honoré, in his 2004 book, “In Praise of Slowness,” depicts the rise of various “slow” movements around the world. The phenomenon started in the nineteen-eighties with Slow Food, when a group of local activists reacted to the planned opening of a McDonald’s near the Spanish Steps in Rome. A subsequent manifesto rejected the “fast life,” personified by fast food, and called for a revolution in slowing down that would begin in the kitchen. “Let us rediscover the rich varieties and aromas of local cuisine,” the manifesto declared. As Honoré documents, this pushback against speed soon moved beyond food. He describes similar movements focussed on a variety of topics, from Slow Cities to Slow Medicine and Slow Parenting. Not surprisingly, Honoré dedicates an entire chapter to the part of our lives where too much speed is arguably the most overwhelming: our jobs." https://www.newyorker.com/culture/office-space/its-time-to-embrace-slow-productivity

La prossima volta che ci sarà una strage in una scuola americana e vi chiederete come mai, potreste sempre ripescare questo articolo che denota chiaramente una mentalità e una direzione. Questi sono decisamente fuori di testa. Money quote: "Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine signed a bill on Monday allowing teachers to carry guns in class after 24 hours of training, over opposition from teachers and a police group." https://www.npr.org/2022/06/13/1104570419/ohio-dewine-guns-teachers

Grazie tante per le recensioni positive alla puntata di ieri. Siamo al 21° posto su Apple Podcast; abbiamo superato pure Montemagno (!!!). E forse si potrebbe fare di meglio, no?

Montemagno down, 20 to go! (ma già Montemagno down è tanta roba! Grazie anche da parte mia)

MAI VOLARE IN BUSINESS CLASS - British Airways Club World recensione https://youtu.be/S6kGUmkYSEY

Per i cultori della materia: in quel viaggio c'ero anch'io (e ogni tanto mi si vede pure...)

Dopo il covid adesso a milioni di americani viene chiesto di restare dentro casa per via delle ondate di caldo terrificante che si stanno abbattendo in questi giorni sul Paese. Secondo me il momento di cercare un posto fuori mano e fresco dove vivere è arrivato. Money quote: "More than 100 million Americans are being warned to stay indoors if possible as high temperatures and humidity settle in over states stretching through parts of the Gulf Coast to the Great Lakes and east to the Carolinas. The National Weather Service Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland, said Monday 107.5 million people will be affected by combination of heat advisories, excessive heat warnings and excessive heat watches through Wednesday." https://www.yahoo.com/news/excessive-heat-rolls-east-bakes-213740252.html