Cosa vuol dire scrivere la colonna sonora di un film di James Bond (soprattutto la canzone che fa da tema al film). Tanta roba.

Money quote: "At the same time it had to be modern, distinctive and original: not just resurrecting Bonds of the past, but moving him into the future. “Bond songs are a sort of genre into themselves: part film score, part pop song,” says Charlie Harding, a musicologist and co-host of the podcast Switched On Pop, which recorded a “spycraft sound” episode on Bond last year. For all the diversity of the original songs – from the Y2K, almost cyborg Bond of Madonna’s “Die Another Day” to Tom Jones’ bombastic, symphonic “Thunderball” – there are commonalities."

https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/article/how-to-write-a-bond-theme-song

Le immagini in formato GIF stanno praticamente scomparendo. Chi è che le ha uccise?

Money quote: "GIFs—particularly “reaction GIFs,” such as Michael Jackson chomping on popcorn and Mariah Carey muttering “I don’t know her”—were a lingua franca of the internet and significant enough culturally that in 2014, the Museum of the Moving Image in New York even put on an exhibit of reaction GIFs (noscriptd “Moving Image as Gesture”). “This is the file format of the internet generation,” Tumblr’s then-head of creative strategy, David Hayes, told Mashable in 2016, while more than 23 million GIF-based posts were being uploaded to the site he worked for each day. As the GIF’s star rose, GIF-searching features were added to Facebook, Twitter, and iMessage, making it even easier to find a GIF to express whatever emotion you wanted to convey without words."

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/10/using-reaction-gifs-over-tumblr-giphy/671680/

Ho guardato i primi due episodi di Inverso e sto preparando la recensione. Intento, un paio di anni fa avevo parlato dei libri.

https://antoniodini.com/william-gibson-stub/

I filippini vanno in tutto il mondo a fare i lavori più umili, soprattutto nell'ambito dell'assistenza alla casa. Questo saggio straordinario fa leva su Hong Kong, l'ultimo posto al quale pensereste per questo tipo di indagine, e mostra cosa succede ai lavoratori che si trasferiscono prima da soli e poi con tutte le loro famiglie.

Money quote: "Nella maggior parte dei casi, il mercato globale dell'assistenza inizia da qualche parte nelle Filippine, un Paese da cui più di dieci milioni di persone lavorano all'estero e dove il denaro rimesso dai lavoratori d'oltremare costituisce circa il nove per cento del prodotto nazionale lordo. La maggior parte delle donne filippine impiegate all'estero lavora come collaboratrici domestiche, cameriere o aiutanti. Il processo labirintico e spesso casuale con cui una donna viene trapiantata da un villaggio rurale delle Filippine a un lavoro come domestica o aiutante in una determinata casa a Hong Kong, Singapore, in Medio Oriente, in Nord America o nel Sud-Est asiatico è facilitato dalle agenzie di collocamento, che svolgono il lavoro di reclutamento, contrattazione, elaborazione dei visti, vendita, trasporto, logistica."

https://kenyonreview.org/journal/sept-oct-2022/selections/departures/

Ma tu perché nel 2022 scatti ancora con una Leica a pellicola?

Money quote: “Cambiare piano, uscire dalla zona di comfort degli smartphone con sensori da 200 milioni di pixel e le fotocamere digitali autonome come un Roomba, ed entrare in un altro mondo dove serve tecnica, stile ed empatia per creare una fotografia che colga l’attimo decisivo, anche se leggermente sfocato”.

https://www.macitynet.it/lobiettivo-impossibile-di-leica-e-altre-storie-da-wetzlar/

La grande fuga russa a Cipro

Money quote: "Cyprus, a small, sunny island in the Mediterranean divided by its own historical territorial dispute between Turks and Greeks, remains one of the last few havens for Russians running away from the uncertainty and doom Putin’s war in Ukraine has created back home.

As the E.U.’s most easterly member, Cyprus has long been a go-to destination for Russian companies and wealthy individuals due to its relatively easy immigration process, low taxes, and openness to attracting as much foreign business as possible. Its beaches are also a plus.

So after the tanks rolled into Ukraine, a significant part of Russia’s highly educated, middle- to upper-class workforce — mostly IT workers — flocked to Cyprus, triggering a new migration wave."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/23/cyprus-russian-expat-tech-workers/

Mercoledì esce il nuovo iPad di decima generazione. Tante le novità. A me è piaciuta molto la tastiera e la videocamera anteriore sul lato lungo. Meno la Pencil 1 e la solita incompatibilità degli accessori. Comunque, lo racconto qui:

https://www.wired.it/review/recensione-ipad-2022/

Procrastinare non è pigrizia, è emotività, dice la BBC (in realtà uno degli editor di Aeon).

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200121-why-procrastination-is-about-managing-emotions-not-time

Però si può gestire. Anche con dei trucchetti:

https://www.deprocrastination.co/blog/3-tricks-to-start-working-despite-not-feeling-like-it

Money quote: "Experts like Tim Pychyl at Carleton University in Canada and his collaborator Fuschia Sirois at the University of Sheffield in the UK have proposed that procrastination is an issue with managing our emotions, not our time. The task we’re putting off is making us feel bad – perhaps it’s boring, too difficult or we’re worried about failing – and to make ourselves feel better in the moment, we start doing something else, like watching videos."

Avete presente wikiHow? Allora avete presente le sue illustrazioni, folli, lunari, surreali. E misteriose? Sono decine di migliaia. Chi le produce? Finalmente ci siamo riusciti. Capirlo è interessante anche perché getta la luce su come funziona il modello di business di una organizzazione for profit che fa cose non profit. Un "modello ibrido" dicono loro.

Money quote: "A 2015 Gawker article mentions wikiHow’s “famously stilted illustrations,” but doesn’t say how they are created. A 2019 feature in Wired calls the art “part of what has made Wikihow famous online” and notes “the idea to use illustrators” happened in 2011, but does not mention the process by which those commissioned drawings are made. Just a few months ago, wikiHow founder Jack Herrick himself addressed the odd visuals in an interview with The Atlantic, saying, “we’re probably the largest illustrator on the web at this point.” Though the piece noted that “millions upon millions of illustrations” had been “made by thousands of contributors,” no details were offered about who those “thousands” were."

https://onezero.medium.com/we-finally-figured-out-who-makes-wikihows-bizarre-art-6c5d69b71347

Il gran finale dello scontro tra Tex e Mefisto - il capitolo finale delle mie recensioni sulla serie epica scritta da Mauro Boselli su Fumettologica

https://fumettologica.it/2022/10/tex-744-il-trionfo-di-mefisto/

Cosa vuol dire non provare dolore? Cosa succede se una persona è diversa dalle altre? Come diventa la sua vita? Altro che supereroi mutanti della Marvel che vivono in mezzo a noi, la storia è ben diversa.

Money quote: "“I know the word ‘pain,’ and I know people are in pain, because you can see it,” Joanne Cameron, a seventy-two-year-old retired teacher, told me, in the cluttered kitchen of her century-old stone cottage in the Scottish Highlands. Cameron has never experienced the extremes of rage, dread, grief, anxiety, or fear. She handed a cup of tea to Jim, her husband of twenty-five years, with whom she’s never had a fight. “I see stress,” she continued, “and I’ve seen pain, what it does, but I’m talking about an abstract thing.”"

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/13/a-world-without-pain

"Inverso - The Peripheral": viviamo in uno stub - la mia recensione della serie tv su Prime basata sui romanzi di William Gibson per Fumettologica

https://fumettologica.it/2022/10/inverso-the-peripheral-serie-tv-amazon-prime-video/

Un tizio un po' di tempo fa ha rifatto la mappa della metropolitana di New York, ispirandosi largamente alla versione di Vignelli. E non è una cosa che va bene alla MTA, che lo sta portando in tribunale.

Money quote: "Berman created this particular version of the subway map after—what else?—a frustrating experience with the subway. He had just moved to New York and was waiting on the platform on a weekend for the B train for half an hour. This was how Berman learned the B only runs on weekdays. So he decided to make a subway map of his own, one that, among other things, clearly marked which trains do not run on late nights or weekends."

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qjd8j3/the-mta-is-going-after-an-etsy-artist-over-a-new-york-subway-map-it-didnt-make

"Dampyr" ci prova ma non ce la fa - la mia recensione per Fumettologica

https://fumettologica.it/2022/10/dampyr-film-recensione/

The Far Side è la serie di comics da quotidiano più bella e intrigante degli anni Ottanta. È ancora viva, anche se solo come repliche.

Money quote: "“The Far Side” became a cultural phenomenon after it appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle on Jan. 1, 1980. The single-panel comic, which ran until Larson, now 69, retired in 1995, featured men, women, children, animals and insects in often offbeat and sometimes inscrutable situations. One installment, “Cow Tools,” featured a bovine in front of a worktable with an odd assortment of implements. The image was described on Reddit as the comic’s most “notoriously confusing cartoon.” There were also occasional controversies: A chimp once described Jane Goodall as a tramp, though she later wrote the foreword for a collected edition of the series. One scientist even named an insect after Larson."

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/17/arts/far-side-gary-larson.html

Cos'è l'amore incondizionato? E come funziona, matematicamente parlando?

Money quote: "I do not mean to suggest that one type of love is more worthy than the other – after all, we value processes that are reasonable, yet we also aim for the extreme. The evidence-based approach of conditional love is at least more controllable, and as the analogy to Bayesian theory goes, is more rational. But can this reasonable process of conditional love grow rationally to the extreme of unconditional love? Can it develop through reason to reach the equivalent of credence 1? If not, then in loving ‘because’ of certain reasons you limit yourself to never achieving the dizzying height of unconditional love – the love that is as complete and certain and unmovable as credence 1."

https://aeon.co/ideas/beyond-reason-the-mathematical-equation-for-unconditional-love

GTA. Cioè Grand Theft Auto. Uno dei miti del mondo dei videogiochi. Per la prima volta, la storia di tutte le versioni

Money quote: "After the success of GTA 1, a sequel was a natural move and GTA 2 was born. Gameplay style was similar to GTA 1 in that this was also a top-down, bird's eye view camera and a two-dimensional action adventure game. The PC version of the game allowed players to play in two different modes called Noon and Dusk. The quality of graphics improved in Dusk mode."

https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/grand-theft-auto

Un corso rapido sulla differenza tra rapporti causali e quelli di semplice correlazione.

Money quote: "“Correlation is not causation.”

Though true and important, the warning has hardened into the familiarity of a cliché. Stock examples of so-called spurious correlations are now a dime a dozen. As one example goes, a Pacific island tribe believed flea infestations to be good for one’s health because they observed that healthy people had fleas while sick people did not. The correlation is real and robust, but fleas do not cause health, of course: they merely indicate it. Fleas on a fevered body abandon ship and seek a healthier host. One should not seek out and encourage fleas in the quest to ward off sickness."

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/tim-maudlin-you-are-smarter-your-data/

Chi ha visto solo il film non credo sia molto entusiasta, ma per il lettori della serie di romanzi, soprattutto i primi due, del ciclo di Dune di Frank Herbert, questa è una piccola miniera di informazioni. Almeno, per me è stato così.

Money quote: "Anyone who has obsessed over the mythology of Dune will immediately recognize the language Herbert borrowed from Blanch’s work. Chakobsa, a Caucasian hunting language, becomes the language of a galactic diaspora in Herbert’s universe. Kanly, from a word for blood feud among the Islamic tribes of the Caucasus, signifies a vendetta between Dune’s great spacefaring dynasties. Kindjal, the personal weapon of the region’s Islamic warriors, becomes a knife favored by Herbert’s techno-aristocrats. As Blanch writes, “No Caucasian man was properly dressed without his kindjal.”"

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-secret-history-of-dune

Uno di quegli articoli che mai più senza: perché i bambini finlandesi da 75 anni dormono in scatole di cartone

Money quote: "For 75 years, Finland's expectant mothers have been given a box by the state. It's like a starter kit of clothes, sheets and toys that can even be used as a bed. And some say it helped Finland achieve one of the world's lowest infant mortality rates."

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-22751415