C'è gente che vive in vecchi aerei di linea riadattati ad appartamenti piuttosto sciantosi. E si conoscono e si frequentano.

Money quote: "Although she wasn't the first person to ever live in an airplane, her flawless execution of the project had an inspirational effect. In the late 1990s, Bruce Campbell, an electrical engineer with a private pilot license, was awestruck by her story: "I was driving home and listening to [the radio,] and they had Jo Ann's story, and it was amazing I didn't drive off the road because my focus turned entirely to it. And the next morning I was placing phone calls," he says."

https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/people-living-in-planes/index.html

L'anno in cui è morto James Bond - la mia rubrica su Fumettologica

https://fumettologica.it/2023/03/james-bond-ian-fleming-film-libri/

Il nuovo film di Shazam punta tutto sul divertimento - la mia recensione per Fumettologica

https://fumettologica.it/2023/03/shazam-furia-degli-dei-recensione-film-dc/

L'incredibile storia del fotografo che ha più definito l'immaginario degli ultimi trent'anni di vita pubblica. Il ritrattista dei nostri tempi. In un profilo di vent'anni fa (ma sempre attualissimo).

Signore e signori: Platon

Money quote: "His name is Platon Antoniou but he goes by just Platon, "for simplicity's sake," he explains. It's pronounced in the French manner, but it's a Greek name. Platon, however, is a Brit living in New York, currently in the process of fashioning himself a major U.S. ad reputation with the huge, ongoing and thoroughly winning Motorola "Moto" campaign, from Ogilvy/New York. But Platon, 34, hit the ground running from the get-go. He started with quite the U.K. academic pedigree, studying graphic design at the St. Martins School and going on to a master's in fine art at the Royal College of Art. "It took seven years and by the end of it I just wanted to get out," he laughs. But by that time his career was already in progress. "My professor at the Royal College turned out to be [the late] John Hind, the creative director of British Vogue. He became my mentor and started me off on small jobs. By the time I graduated, I was leading a double life. I was a student drinking cheap beer in the college bar and at the same time I was doing 12-page stories for British Vogue.""

https://archive.is/DNDxX

HSP è una cosa vera o no? Le persone più sensibili degli altri esistono sicuramente, ma questo cosa vuol dire?

Money quote: "According to research by Dr Elaine Aron, who coined the term, 15-20% of the population are HSPs, aka highly sensitive persons, meaning that they feel ‘too deeply’ but often hide their emotions from others. HSPs may feel out of place or uneasy in over-stimulating situations, such as at a busy work meeting or at parties, and tend to seek validation and reassurance more often."

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/highly-sensitive-person-7-reasons-why-being-an-hsp-is-a-strength-according-to-a-neuropsychologist

Spid e CIE, il grande scontro tra visioni del mondo contrapposte, intervista ad Alfonso Fuggetta -il mio articolo per Macity

Money quote: “Faccio sempre un esempio: c’è un video su YouTube con il Presidente della Repubblica che ha scaricato il suo certificato anagrafico. È un video che dimostra che “si può fare”. Ma il punto è: perché devo scaricare un certificato? Un servizio è una cosa che serve: allora, a cosa serve a una persona sapere quando è nata, dove risiede, com’è fatta la sua famiglia? È perché i cittadini hanno bisogno di un momento di autocoscienza?”

https://www.macitynet.it/spid-e-cie-il-grande-scontro-tra-visioni-del-mondo-contrapposte-intervista-ad-alfonso-fuggetta/

Ci sono due modi per raccontare questa storia. Tizi che hanno il secondo lavoro (che da noi suona malissimo perché sa di impiegato pubblico che non fa niente in ufficio e poi ha una sua attività in nero) oppure tipi super imprenditori, che non si accontentano di un lavoro solo. Mah.


Money quote: "If you don’t have to show up at an office every day, the thinking seems to go, what’s to stop you from accepting multiple remote jobs and trying to do them all at once, while you collect multiple salaries? One obvious answer to that question is the workload involved. If a job is supposed to take 40 hours a week or more to do satisfactorily, can you really perform well if you’re doing two simultaneously? And then there are the logistics. Many jobs are meeting-heavy or require you to jump on the phone without much advance notice, which can be tricky if you’re currently in a Zoom meeting for your other job."

https://slate.com/human-interest/2023/02/remote-work-multiple-full-time-jobs-overmployed.html

Un pippone, straordinariamente elaborato, sulla generazione. Risponde alla domanda accessoria "Cosa sono?" ed evita completamente quella più importante: "Chi sono?"

Money quote: "What I most resent about baby boomers is that, technically, I am one. The baby boom is most often defined as encompassing everyone born from 1946 to 1964, but those nineteen years make for an awfully wide and experientially diverse cohort. I was born in 1958, three years past the generational midpoint of 1955. I graduated from high school in 1976, which means I came of age in a very different world from the earliest boomers, most of whom graduated in 1964. When the first boomers were toddlers, TV was a novelty. We, the late boomers, were weaned on “Captain Kangaroo” and “Romper Room.” They were old enough to freak out over the Sputnik; we were young enough to grow bored of moon landings. The soundtrack of their senior year in high school was the early Beatles and Motown; ours was “Frampton Comes Alive!” Rather than Freedom Summer, peace marches, and Woodstock, we second-half baby boomers enjoyed an adolescence of inflation, gas lines, and Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech. We grew up to the background noise of the previous decade, when being young was allegedly more thrilling in every way: the music, the drugs, the clothes, the sense of discovery and the possibility of change, the sense that being young mattered."

https://archive.is/gxxNu

È uscita la nuova puntata di Tilde, il mio podcast con Riccardo. Ci sono cose interessanti! :-)

https://tilde.show

🎙È uscita Tilde ~ 26, la settima puntata della seconda stagione!

Titolo: Preservare il digitale // Il viaggio a Buenos Aires // Chi era Gesù?

"Episodio bello movimentato, anche perché (forse) un po' l'abbiamo accelerato. Ma dopotutto, chi non lo fa?".

→ tilde ~ su Spotify
→ tilde ~ su Apple Podcast
→ tilde ~ su Google Podcast

Potete ascoltare il podcast da Spotify, Google Podcast o Apple Podcast, oppure dal sito: tilde.show. Buon ascolto e buon martedì!

P.S. La cover (Dall-E) è lo specchio della puntata!

Ho trovato pochi argomenti più divisivi di quello che vede opposti gli amanti delle auto tradizionali e quelli delle nuove auto elettriche. Leticano in maniera veramente spettacolare alle volte, e sono – entrambe le fazioni – portatrici di verità assolute. Ebbene, forse il cambiamento è un po' più profondo di quel che sembra, se è vero che i giovani non amano più l'auto, che una volta era il simbolo dell'emancipazione.

Money quote: "Few technologies defined the 20th century more than the car. On the surface, the love affair with the personal automobile continues unabated into this century. The number of drivers on the world’s roads continues to rise almost everywhere. The distance driven by American motorists hit a new peak last year, according to data from the Federal Highway Administration. But there are hints that this is changing. People like Ms Crandall show why. Getting a driving licence was once a nearly universal rite of passage into adulthood. Now it is something that a growing minority of young people either ignore or actively oppose, into their 20s and beyond."

https://www.economist.com/international/2023/02/16/throughout-the-rich-world-the-young-are-falling-out-of-love-with-cars

Cibo. Fumo. Dipendenze varie. Come smetterle? C'è il modo. Anzi, i modi. Qui una collezione di articoli che spiega come fare.

Money quote: "Whether you’re interested in the science of habit change or specific tactics for cutting out sugar or social media, these strategies can help you find meaning in self sacrifice beyond self-improvement."

https://getpocket.com/collections/how-to-quit-almost-anything

Volete sapere una cosa? Il cinema sta diventando una schifezza. Non tanto i film, quanto le proiezioni nelle sale cinematografiche. E il paradosso è che costano sempre di più. Il che, da un punto di vista economico ma anche semplicemente logico non ha semplicemente senso.

Money quote: "I’m watching Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania — in which she plays Ant-Man’s girlfriend’s mom, Janet van Dyne, and he plays time-traveling villain Kang the Conqueror — at the AMC Empire 25 near Times Square. Although a ticket to this matinee costs more than a month’s worth of Netflix’s priciest subnoscription plan, the image onscreen is so dim that it’s hard to make out much of the movie’s action and all of its glamorous stars have been turned dark gray. Next to me is Jack Theakston, a projection specialist who works as a contractor at Dolby Laboratories, who immediately diagnoses the problem: This is a 2-D showing of Ant-Man, but some neglectful employee has forgotten to remove the 3-D filter from the projector.

“It’s a polarized lens that cuts a picture’s brightness by a third,” he says. “They just have to push it to the side when they switch to 2-D, but theaters forget to do it all the time. You can tell when it’s happening because if you look at the port-window glass, instead of a single image, you’ll see two, with one stacked on top of the other.” He points up to the booth behind us, and sure enough, there are two stacked beams."

https://www.vulture.com/2023/03/movie-theater-projector-amc-regal.html

Claudio Villa, uno dei principali disegnatori Bonelli e copertinista di Tex dal 1994, si racconta a Fumettologica in una lunga intervista ricca di passaggi notevoli come questo:

"Mi sono reso conto nel tempo quanta concentrazione e intensità mentale ci vogliano per tenere in piedi una storia a fumetti.

Da fuori, uno legge un fumetto e pensa che il talento naturale basti a risolvere ogni problema. Ma raccontare è un’altra cosa: devi uscire da te stesso, per evitare di proporre qualcosa che potrebbe essere equivocato, ti devi mettere nei panni del lettore, che non conosce la storia, e sottoporti a un fuoco di fila di critiche. Ti devi chiedere il perché di ogni segno che metti sulla carta, perché devi saper giustificare ogni scelta che fai."

👉 https://bit.ly/40seL1h

A quanto pare sempre più aziende stanno tornando a usare dei server interni, anche se configurati come forme di cloud. Il pendolo, insomma, sta andando dalla parte del centro di calcolo locale anziché tutto nella nuvola. È più complicato che non una semplice retromarcia, ma è comunque interessante.

Money quote: "According to a 2022 report by Bessemer Ventures, there has been a significant uptick in the adoption of virtual private clouds. The report suggests that, “it is becoming easier to package SaaS products and deploy them inside a customer’s virtual private cloud (VPC). This is due in part to the standardization around Kubernetes as the operating system of the cloud. This makes it easier for SaaS companies to serve a wider range of customers that may prefer to keep certain sensitive data or applications in a VPC.” "

https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/02/20/are-companies-shifting-away-from-public-clouds/

Per quelli di voi che non sono tecnici (scrivono o gestiscono contenuti) ma sentono il bisogno di imparare Html e Css (e anche un po' di Javanoscript) divertendosi. Un corso video online con gli zombi. Mah.

Money quote: "This video course, Code Isn’t as Scary as Zombies: HTML & CSS for Writers, Editors, and Beginners, will give you an introduction to HTML and CSS so you can understand what they do, how they work, and get your writing looking great on the web. We’ll pull out the baseball bats and start smacking down some zombie problems you’ve struggled with before like the gobbledygook Microsoft Word throws onto your page, how to align photos independently, how to create tables, how to implement responsive design and so much more.

By the end of this course you’ll have knocked the snot out of your coding fears and be armed with practical skills you can take to the bank (or wherever you store your money after the apocalypse)."

https://undead.institute/tired-of-your-online-writing-looking-like-unformatted-zombie-puke/

La fantastica storia del Giappone, del Natale e del Kentucky Fried Chicken. Notevole.

Money quote: "After visiting a KFC test-store in the 1970 World Expo in Osaka, a young entrepreneur named Takeshi Okawara was smitten by the late-stage success of the company’s founder, Harland Sanders. A restless businessman himself, Okawara was humbled by the jovial American who job-hopped into his 60s before hitting the big time with his first KFC. When a recruiter offered Okawara an administrative position, he declined, opting instead to be the in-store manager of Japan’s very first KFC. “By doing that I can learn and study about how to make wonderful fried chicken, by myself, from scratch,” he told Business Insider’s podcast Household Name."

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-japanese-christmas

Spigolature per capire la politica americana in un passaggio storico complesso e difficile da comprendere: un lungo ritratto di Brett Kavanaugh, ineffabile e inaffondabile giudice della Corte Suprema degli Stati Uniti (una posizione di enorme potere, per quanto molto tecnico).

Money quote: "In 1987, Judge Robert Bork, who sat on the DC circuit that Kavanaugh later served on, was the first originalist judge nominated to the Supreme Court. And though the Court was much less conservative than it is now, the Bork nomination and Bork’s philosophy became this flashpoint for conservatives and liberals. And he was ultimately defeated. For the first time, we were debating whether or not nominees’ judicial philosophy was legitimate to take into account –– which is taken as accepted reason now.

Eventually, Anthony Kennedy, another appeals court judge, was named to take his place. That created a much less conservative, much more moderate court than if Bork had been named."

https://longreads.com/2019/12/17/interview-with-ruth-marcus/

Preoccuparsi della propria mortalità come individui e di coppia. La miseria della vita messa in scena ovviamente in un lungo, lunghissimo articolo di quel genere memorialistico che contribuisce a fare del giornalismo americano una eccezione storica e planetaria.

Money quote: "My first husband is a traveling salesman and I live in constant fear he’ll die in a plane crash. It’s an anxiety exacerbated by my mother’s habit of phoning every single time she’s about to board a flight and reciting the same litany of worst-case information: her bank account numbers, who to call to cash out her life insurance policy, which jewelry I can expect to find in her safety deposit box."

https://longreads.com/2018/12/19/losing-the-plot/

A Portland, la città nell'Oregon che sta a metà fra San Francisco e Seattle, c'è la Nike e c'è una vivace scena di baracchini del cibo che sono diventati un fenomeno molto superiore a quello che si trova in una strada a Midtown, a Manhattan, o davanti al Politecnico a Milano. Lettura gustosa.

Money quote: "Over the years, food carts have served as launching pads for some of Portland’s best-known restaurants: Nong’s Khao Man Gai, outlandish sandwich shop Lardo, and the Salt & Straw ice cream behemoth all started as food carts. So it could be that the sandwich you’re eating from a compostable carton or the unexpected fusion dish you’re slurping in a gravel lot might be from the next James Beard Award-winning restaurant."

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/inside-portlands-food-cart-culture

Una delle cose più affascinanti di Medium è l'assoluta medietà complessiva delle cose che vi si trovano. Il sito è costruito per premiare chi tra gli anonimi autori non professionisti (ma a cui piacerebbe molto diventarlo) viene più applaudito dai lettori e quindi non ci si può trovare l'eccellenza quanto la lusinga e la furbizia. In questo caso, un vecchio caso: le ragioni del cuore, in un tentativo di condividere le proprie miserie con le altrui. Ovviamente, nella sua nicchia, funziona. Anche se, bisogna dirlo, per arrivare ai livelli della televisione del pomeriggio, ce ne vuole.

Money quote: "I had left my husband for many reasons, but this man in front of me had been the crow bar I’d finally used to wedge myself out of that annihilating relationship.

I’d been a coward in not leaving years before, in not leaving as soon as I filed for divorce three months before, in waiting to leave until after this man got me alone in his office and pointed to the soft spot below his ear and said, “I love your short hair. It makes me want to touch you right here.”

The heart is an extremely forgiving muscle. It airbrushes defects when we love someone."

https://web.archive.org/web/20191216203332/https://psiloveyou.xyz/what-its-like-to-date-the-person-you-left-your-husband-for-7b5b35e99e41?gi=dd79db9ddaad