“Black Panther”, la recensione. Andiamo tutti a Wakanda, per sempre - la mia recensione per Fumettologica

http://www.fumettologica.it/2018/02/black-panther-recensione-film-marvel/

L’ultimo film di Clint Eastwood pare che non sia granché.

Money quote: “I’m here to report what seems like a serious inaccuracy in the advertising of The 15:17 to Paris. According to the film’s poster, it was directed by Clint Eastwood, but I’m pretty sure the drama I watched was made by Tommy Wiseau—the eccentric artist behind the “so bad it’s good,” cult-classic movie The Room. How else to explain the halting dialogue, the way entire scenes have absolutely no bearing on the larger plot, and the ensemble of actors who have never been in a motion picture before? Watching The 15:17 to Paris summoned the kind of strange, unsettled feeling that only a true master like Wiseau can usually conjure”

https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/552773/

Io questo Ciccio Rigoli non ho idea di chi sia ma dice cose sacrosante.

Money quote: “Non ci sistemeremo, fatevene una ragione, non per ribellione ma perché è impossibile fare quello che avete fatto voi negli ultimi anni del Novecento. Purtroppo o per fortuna, non è dato saperlo.”

https://medium.com/@cicciorigoli/come-hanno-fottuto-i-trenta-quarantenni-51c295050a6c

Ad abundantiam, anche il Sole 24 Ore

http://www.alleyoop.ilsole24ore.com/2018/02/07/la-generazione-dei-30-40-e-sotto-scacco-un-costo-economico-per-litalia/

La storia bella e un po' triste di Alphasmart, la piccola azienda fondata da ex gente di Apple che aveva capito (quasi) tutto e creato la tastiera perfetta per la scuola

Money quote: "Unlike today’s education technology startups that rush to obtain venture capital at the first inkling of an idea, AlphaSmart was largely bootstrapped. (The company’s original name was Intelligent Peripheral Devices.) The team tried, but failed, to obtain an SBA loan. They pooled all their savings, kept their day jobs, and recruited Ketan Kothari’s brother, Manish, to head up marketing efforts, working out of Ketan’s spare bedroom – one of ed-tech’s few “garage” origin stories. After several points when the company almost folded due to financial and production issues, AlphaSmart started shipping in the fall of 1993. It couldn’t build a lot of inventory simply because it had little capital. However the devices were in high demand, and within six months, AlphaSmart found itself cash-flow positive (again, unlike today’s education technology startups, even if they’ve raised venture capital)."

http://hackeducation.com/2015/07/25/alphasmart

A New York si andrà a lezione di igiene mentale. Che, se ci pensate, è una cosa molto bella ma anche assai triste

Money quote: “That's why the introduction of mental health literacy in New York schools this coming fall is such a big deal, Verga said. For as long as anyone can remember, schools have taught children about physical health — food and nutrition, accidents and disease, mood-altering substances — but conspicuously absent has been the role mental health plays in a person's overall well-being.

"I think my students can identify when they're feeling stress or anxiety or something else, but I don't think they understand how to cope with it," he said. "They don't know that, just like you might need to rest if you're sick with the flu, you might need to take care of yourself if you're not feeling right mentally."”

https://www.timesunion.com/local/article/After-long-battle-mental-health-will-be-part-of-12531279.php

Ho finito di leggere da poco l’ultimo libro di John McPhee, classe 1931, il giornalista del New Yorker che ha creato buona parte della struttura e dello stile della Creative nonfiction. Il libro si intitola “Draft No. 4” ed è la raccolta di otto articoli sull’arte di scrivere articoli (e libri) di non-fiction già pubblicati dal New Yorker negli anni passati. È in inglese, lo consiglio vivamente a chi vuole deprimersi (se fa il giornalista) e a chi vuole vedere come funziona la macchina nella testa di John McPhee, che peraltro insegna giornalismo da una vita a Princeton e quindi ha influenzato una buona percentuale dei giornalisti “buoni” negli Stati Uniti

Un assaggio dal capitolo-articolo sulla struttura:

Money quote: “The picnic-table crisis came along toward the end of my second year as a New Yorker staff writer (a euphemistic term that means unsalaried freelance close to the magazine). In some twenty months, I had submitted half a dozen pieces, short and long, and the editor, William Shawn, had bought them all. You would think that by then I would have developed some confidence in writing a new story, but I hadn’t, and never would. To lack confidence at the outset seems rational to me. It doesn’t matter that something you’ve done before worked out well. Your last piece is never going to write your next one for you.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/01/14/structure

Pagare le tasse. Pagarne più di quante se ne debbano pagare: impossibile al giorno d’oggi, dato che viviamo in una cultura che, all’opposto, stimola a pagarne quante meno legalmente possibile. Eppure l’antica Grecia ci insegna che, se lasciati alla libertà delle persone, i contributi fiscali diventano abbondanti. Insomma, che pagare su base volontaria sia meglio, come la legalizzazione per diminuire il consumo di droghe: è controintuitivo ma forse…

Money quote: “The rationale was that the rich should shoulder the expenses of the city, given the unequal share of the community’s wealth they enjoyed. Any contribution was not enforced by law or bureaucracy, but by tradition and public sentiment. The motivation of the liturgist was benevolence, a sense of public duty and – significantly – the reward of honour and prestige. If an assignment was carried out well, the patron’s standing among his fellow elites, as well as ordinary people, would rise. While in early ancient Greece only warriors could become ‘heroes’, later, liturgists could earn heroic status by acting in the public interest for the welfare of others. The result was that many gave more than was expected, as much as three or four times, a far cry from today’s culture of paying as little as legally possible.“

https://aeon.co/ideas/voluntary-taxation-a-lesson-from-the-ancient-greeks

Una nuova traduzione del Vangelo di San Paolo porta con sé - in inglese - una serie di cambiamenti anche importanti rispetto alle precendeti vulgate. Rileggerlo oggi, nell'ottica della singolarità, del momento in cui ibridare la mente biochimico-elettrica con la macchina digitale, nei giorni di Altered Carbon, diventa un divertentee scherzoso esercizio di stile.

Money quote: "The new age, moreover – when creation will be glorified and transformed into God’s kingdom – will be an age of ‘spirit’ rather than ‘flesh’. For Paul, these are two antithetical principles of creaturely existence, though most translations misrepresent the antithesis as a mere contrast between God’s ‘spirit’ and human perversity. But Paul is quite explicit: ‘Flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom.’ Neither can psychē, ‘soul’, the life-principle or anima that gives life to perishable flesh. In the age to come, the ‘psychical body’, the ‘ensouled’ or ‘animal’ way of life, will be replaced by a ‘spiritual body’, beyond the reach of death – though, again, conventional translations usually obscure this by speaking of the former, vaguely, as a ‘natural body’."

https://aeon.co/ideas/the-gospels-of-paul-dont-say-what-you-think-they-say

Nel fantastico mondo in cui da alcuni anni tutti viviamo, c'è il termine "disruption" che non ha pietà per nessuno. Adesso, neanche per la consulenza

Money quote: "An industry becomes susceptible to disruption when it becomes entrenched in its longstanding solutions and financial structure. Disruptive innovations provide simpler or more elegant solutions to existing problems, enabled by new technology and often at a lower cost. Think portable calculators versus computers, Amazon versus bookstores, Netflix versus Blockbuster, or digital cameras versus film.

Management consulting is not immune to the dynamics of disruption."

https://www.inc.com/soren-kaplan/the-business-consulting-industry-is-booming-and-it.html

Forse non lo sapevate (io non lo sapevo) ma c'è una ricca tradizione contemporanea di fantascienza e fantasy nel mondo islamico. Dopo le Mille e una notte, voglio dire.

Money quote: "By the early 20th century, speculative fiction from the Muslim world emerged as a form of resistance to the forces of Western colonialism. For example, Muhammadu Bello Kagara, a Nigerian Hausa author, wrote Ganďoki (1934), a novel set in an alternative West Africa; in the story, the natives are involved in a struggle against British colonialism, but in a world populated by jinns and other mystical creatures. In the following decades, as Western empires began to crumble, the theme of political utopia was often laced with a certain political cynicism. The Moroccan author Muhammad Aziz Lahbabi’s novel The Elixir of Life (Iksir al-Hayat) (1974), for example, centres on the discovery of an elixir that can bestow immortality. But instead of filling society with hope and joy, it foments class divisions, riots, and the unravelling of the social fabric.

An even darker brand of fiction has emerged from Muslim cultures today. Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013) reimagines Frankenstein in modern-day Iraq, among the fallout from the 2001 invasion. In this retelling, the monster is created from body parts of different people who have died because of ethnic and religious violence – and eventually goes on a rampage of its own. In the process, the novel becomes an exploration of the senselessness of war and the deaths of innocent bystanders."

https://aeon.co/ideas/think-sci-fi-doesnt-belong-in-the-muslim-world-think-again

Un progetto fotografico epico, decennale, che documenta culture (inglesi) che sopravvivono nonostante tutto e nonostante tutti. Un viaggio nei nostri immaginari culturali

Money quote: “‘Mod’ is an abbreviation for modernism, an umbrella term coined in the late 1950s to cover a set of intertwined subcultures – fashion, music, scooters, dancing – that carried an air of exclusivity. But it was also just a way for people to look like a million quid on the weekend, even if their bank balance didn’t necessarily reflect that”

http://www.huckmagazine.com/art-and-culture/photography-2/subcultures-mods-skins-lowriders-owen-harvey-photography/

Letture domenicali: una delle ultime interviste a Zygmunt Bauman fatta da ElPais. Social media, politica, relazioni. Un capolavoro.

Money quote: “We could describe what is going on at the moment as a crisis of democracy, the collapse of trust: the belief that our leaders are not just corrupt or stupid, but inept. Action requires power, to be able to do things, and we need politics, which is the ability to decide what needs to be done. But that marriage between power and politics in the hands of the nation state has ended. Power has been globalized, but politics is as local as before. Politics has had its hands cut off. People no longer believe in the democratic system because it doesn’t keep its promises. We see this, for example, with the migration crisis: it’s a global phenomenon, but we still act parochially. Our democratic institutions were not designed for dealing with situations of interdependence. The current crisis of democracy is a crisis of democratic institutions.”

https://elpais.com/elpais/2016/01/19/inenglish/1453208692_424660.html

Recensione della batteria Anker 26800 PD con Usb-C, la migliore del momento - il mio articolo per Macity

https://www.macitynet.it/la-prova-della-batteria-anker-26800-pd-usb-c/

Nei paesi anglosassoni il problema delle dinastie politiche, soprattutto a sinistra, sta diventando piuttosto serio per l'opinione pubblica

Money quote: “But there’s also another issue, and one that Hillary Clinton encountered. While sometimes name recognition helps when it comes to running for office, it can have the opposite effect. Fear and resentment of elites is increasingly prevalent as we enter a protracted stage of political instability. Clinton was rejected by many people on the right and left, as well as swing voters, for seeming to expect the presidency: as though she deserved it, and she viewed power as something handed between elites. Similarly, the selection of the sons and daughters of MPs can stick in the craw of many, seeming nepotistic and presumptuous, taking power and representation for granted”

http://www.huckmagazine.com/perspectives/opinion-perspectives/clinton-benn-kinnock-political-dynasties/

Ve lo ricordate Winamp? Morto e sepolto, ma ancora vitale: tra i vari porting quello più interessante è in Html5 e Javanoscript. Il player funziona nelal finestra del browser e, se ci si trascina sopra la musica, funziona come se fosse ancora ieri.

Hiptesr digitali

https://jordaneldredge.com/projects/winamp2-js/

Se volete giuastarvi il lunedì, e il resto della settimana, e ci a voi la storia che racconta cosa sta per succedere. Dopo le fake news si prepara la “infocalypse”: teoria e tecnica degl assalti digitali.

Money quote: “Another scenario, which Ovadya dubs “polity simulation,” is a dystopian combination of political botnets and astroturfing, where political movements are manipulated by fake grassroots campaigns. In Ovadya’s envisioning, increasingly believable AI-powered bots will be able to effectively compete with real humans for legislator and regulator attention because it will be too difficult to tell the difference. Building upon previous iterations, where public discourse is manipulated, it may soon be possible to directly jam congressional switchboards with heartfelt, believable algorithmically-generated pleas. Similarly, Senators' inboxes could be flooded with messages from constituents that were cobbled together by machine-learning programs working off stitched-together content culled from text, audio, and social media profiles”

https://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/the-terrifying-future-of-fake-news

Mancano solo le caprette che fanno ciao ciao: il tono è quello. Però il viaggio psicoanalitico nella distruzione del proprio io digitale per recuperare la vita vera in questo momento storico è estremamente attraente: è diventato un pezzo importante del discorso sociale

Money quote: "Meanwhile, we’re finding out now that the gamification of social media — the likes, the comments, the hearts, the claps, the friends, the followers — makes it dangerously addictive and is destroying the fabric of society. It’s why everyone’s Instagram looks vaguely the same, and why now everyone visits the walls of restaurants instead of the restaurants themselves.
We’ve become distorted, homogenized, airbrushed, photoshopped, Instagrammed approximations of our ideal selves. Our real names and real pictures now stand in as avatars for a certain aesthetic. We’ve all become Human Highlight Films — and the better the highlights, the better the human."

https://medium.com/personal-growth/why-i-quit-social-media-4d97e9a81951

Anni fa, insegnando alla scuola di giornalismo della Cattolica di Milano, avevo una classe piuttosto reattiva. In particolare, uno studente, che aveva già fatto un master un Gran Bretagna, era polemico su varie cose tra le quali il fatto che, secondo lui, i giornalisti fossero più che autorizzati a fare interviste a tradimento (senza dire all’intervistato di essere giornalisti e che la conversazione sarebbe stata editata e pubblicata) e altre forme di “undercover journalism” come metodo normale di lavoro, neanche come metodo eccezionale.

Non ero d’accordo e non lo sono adesso: riguardo alla discussione piuttosto polemica con il mio studente di allora non penso sia una questione di chi ha ragione o chi no, però quando stamani ho trovato questo articolo, anni e anni dopo, mi ha fatto tornare in mente tutta la discussione.

Money quote: “All reputable news media – including the AP– agree that journalists should inform their sources of their real identity and avoid deceit in their reporting. In The Society of Professional Journalists Codes of Ethics, it states “Avoid undercover or other surreptitious methods of gathering information unless traditional, open methods will not yield information vital to the public.”

News is based on trust – which in the current media ecosystem is rare, fragile, and must be preserved for the future of journalism to thrive”

http://ethicaljournalismnetwork.org/the-ethics-of-undercover-journalism-where-the-police-and-journalists-divide

L'autore di "Her Story" sta lavorando a un altro videogioco ispirato da "War Games". Devo dire la verità, leggendo quel che trapela della storia non è che mi sembri poi così fedele al film del 1983 con Matthew Broderick

Money quote "His next project is a reboot of the 1983 film WarGames, created in collaboration with interactive video studio Eko. And Barlow is again merging passive viewing and interactive play in fascinating ways. Like the original movie, WarGames will center around the concept of hacking. But instead of Matthew Broderick trying to stop World War III, it’s about a group of young people navigating the thorny world of hacker-led societal change, deciding how and when to use their skills for the betterment of society at large. For Barlow, it’s a chance to expand on what he built with Her Story, while pushing even harder towards the “watching” part of the spectrum."

https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/9/16992840/wargames-interactive-tv-show-sam-barlow

Il punto è semplice: l'informatica è una cosa molto, molto diversa da quello che la gente comunemente pensa. E il cambiamento, il superamento del gap passa attraverso la formazione prima di tutto dei formatori, cioè dei docenti. Non attraverso l'insegnamento di un fantomatico linguaggio di programmazione come se fosse un'altra lingua tipo l'inglese o il francese. Magari, sarebbe tutto molto più facile.

Ogni tanto però anche da noi qualcuno dice cose sensate.

Money quote: "Se si sostiene questo, si sia coerenti e si dica che il succitato Aristotele è stato il campione dello svilimento dell’intelligenza, visto che la prima imponente parte della sua opera, il cosiddetto Organon, è un’informatica ante litteram e la fondazione della logica formale."

https://www.agendadigitale.eu/scuola-digitale/linformatica-va-insegnata-tre-equivoci-superare/

Storia un po' sintetica ma molto sentita di Radio Popolare

Money quote: "Già, quarantenne, perché Radio Popolare e io siamo coetanei: ha cominciato a trasmettere nel 1976, nel pieno dell’incredibile periodo anarchico delle radio libere, sotto la guida di Piero Scaramucci, raccontando per tutto questo tempo ciò che succedeva nella sterminata galassia della sinistra italiana, e ovviamente nel resto del mondo, perché l’attenzione a ciò che succede fuori da casa nostra è sempre stata un elemento caratteristico, nella sua carta d’identità"

http://www.yanezmagazine.com/quarantanni-di-radio-popolare/