Se n'è andato Donald Sutherland, star di ‘M*A*S*H’ e molti altri film. Aveva 88 anni.

- The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/20/movies/donald-sutherland-dead.html

Dev'essere stato veramente un personaggio difficile, Stanley Kubrik. Il libro che non volle far uscire si chiama "The Magic Eye: The Cinema of Stanley Kubrick" di Neil Hornick. Questa è la storia di quella battaglia di quasi mezzo secolo fa.

Money quote: "Stanley Kubrick, the relentless perfectionist who directed some of cinema’s greatest classics, was so sensitive to criticism that, in 1970, he threatened legal action to block publication of a book which dared to discuss flaws in his films.

The director of Spartacus and 2001: A Space Odyssey, warned the book’s author and publisher that he would fight “tooth and nail” and “use every legal means at his disposal” to prevent its publication – and he did.

Now, 25 years after his death, the book Kubrick did not want anyone to read is being published, more than half a century late."

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/apr/21/stanley-kubrick-director-book-block-flaws-films-published

C'è un'area di sovrapposizione nella nostra mente tra il dolore fisico e il dolore sociale. Essere tagliati fuori dal gruppo, sentirsi esclusi, è veramente un problema, non è una "fisima per femminucce". Ci sono studi ed esperimenti, come quello che segue.

Money quote: "The premise is simple: Participants play a virtual game of ball toss with (supposedly) two or more other players. In reality, they’re using a program designed to include or exclude them to various degrees. Researchers have manipulated different variables across experiments, from the number of players to the length of the game—and the lesson of Cyberball across the board? It doesn’t matter if it’s as low stakes as throwing around a fake ball with strangers we’ll never meet—we hate feeling left out.

Like, really hate it. According to Dr. Williams, he and his team have even rigged the game so people earned money when they were excluded. “But even if they were left with the reward, it still made them feel just as bad,” he says."

https://www.self.com/story/feeling-left-out-tips

Un articolo illuminante sulle malattie mentali, dalla depressione al bipolare. La psicologa clinica e autrice Kay Redfield Jamison esplora i disturbi dell'umore dall'antichità a oggi, mescolando scienza, storia e memorie personali. Notevolissimo, se posso dire.

Money quote: "The physicians of antiquity knew depression, mania, and psychosis well. Thousands of years ago, they described these conditions in their patients and instructed their students in how best to diagnose and treat them.2 One medical historian states that manic and depressive psychoses are the “scarlet threads” most clearly discernable throughout the “twisted strands of history.”3 Long before the time of Hippocrates, 500 years before Christ, physicians and priests in Egypt, China, India, and Persia described patients with melancholy, who slept poorly, ruminated ceaselessly on death, obsessed about their unworthiness, lacked will and the energy to act, were irritable, confused, and wished only to die. Their manic patients, on the other hand, needed little sleep and were grandiose and psychotic; in their exaltation, they believed themselves to be gods, kings, or prophets, and thought themselves to be invincible, at one with the universe. They were irrational and uninhibited; they talked, ran, approached others indiscriminately, and danced without restraint. They were indefatigable, quick to rage, impulsive, suspicious, and at times violent; their thoughts and words sped in all directions."

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/in-their-own-words-narratives-of-mania-and-depression/

Questa settimana su Mostly Weekly
~277 qualche consiglio utile: ricordatevi di scrivere la mattina presto, andare a letto sempre alla stessa ora, imparare nuove parole e ascoltare sempre tutti.

https://antoniodini.com/weekly/277/

L'intervista che è stata fatta un po' di mesi fa al numero uno di Rolex, Jean-Frédéric Dufour. È molto raro che si faccia intervistare, quindi anche se è un po' vecchia fatevela durare ancora un bel po'.

Money quote: "Question: Two or three years ago, watches were seen more as an investment than a dream. Cryptocurrency millionaires, for example, converted some of their money into real assets.

Dufour: I don’t like it when people compare watches to stocks. It sends the wrong message and is dangerous. We make products, not investments."

https://www.nzz.ch/english/watches-and-wonders-2024-rolex-ceo-on-cooling-markets-and-the-idea-behind-the-watch-fair-ld.1825387

Prendetela con un po' di spirito. L'idea è che siamo tutti devastati dall'eccesso di interruzioni e micro-cose da fare (cose di "manutenzione") e non si riesce più a trovare il tempo per concentrarsi e fare le cose che servono veramente e che richiedono parecchia attenzione: il cosiddetto "Deep Work". Ecco, questo articolo cerca di affrontare questo problema suggerendo alcune soluzioni. La chiave di lettura secondo me è che non siamo solo noi a essere nelle peste: è un fenomeno reale ed è diventato epidemico: è davvero difficile lavorare sul serio.

Money quote: "Accessing that kind of deep work zone can feel nearly impossible. If you’re busy with multiple tasks, finding a solid chunk of time for uninterrupted productivity may be utterly unrealistic. Fortunately, there are methods to optimise the limited ‘deep work’ time we have, plan for interruptions and produce meaningful work despite competing demands for our attention."

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how-the-busiest-people-get-deep-work-done

Il modo in cui sono fatti i complessi per appartamenti di New York è sempre la stessa minestra sciapa e priva di personalità. Magari la facciata (qualche volta) è interessante, ma dentro no, sono sempre cubi su cubi su cubi collegati da porte. Fino ad ora, perlomeno. Perché c'è chi cerca di fare le case diversamente.

Money quote: "I don’t know whether this hodgepodge of references was conscious, but it’s surely not coincidental. SO-IL has been working for years to deconstruct a building’s mass to make it seem less like a monolith and more like a town. If that still qualifies as a radical move, it’s because the typical New York apartment building is a closed box crisscrossed by hollow passages. Even architecturally ambitious towers, like those by Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, and David Adjaye, work essentially the same way before the surfaces go on, reserving innovation for the final fit-out."

https://www.curbed.com/article/architecture-review-so-il-brooklyn-chapel-warren-vanderbilt.html

Stanisław Lem è un autore notevolissimo e molto celebrato tra chi ama la buona letteratura. Trascende il genere della fantascienza, anche se non ne fuoriesce completamente. Forse per questo alcune delle sue traduzioni in italiano sono problematiche?

Money quote: "Qualcuno potrebbe pensare che questa mia postilla alle prefazioni/postfazioni italiane di Solaris nasca da una petulante pignoleria filologica più o meno fine a sé stessa, quindi di natura nevrotico-masturbatoria. Ma non è così, perché purtroppo la stessa storia delle traduzioni italiane di Solaris si rivela teatro di inesattezze, per non dir peggio, francamente inaccettabili."

https://www.indiscreto.org/storia-indiscreta-di-solaris-in-italia/

Chi ha dato il volto a James Bond? È il tema della mia rubrica per Fumettologica.

https://fumettologica.it/2024/06/james-bond-volto-fumetti/

Lo sapevate che fine ha fatto la città dei pirati per definizione, cioè Porth Royal? Io no. Ma qui l'ho scoperto. E vorrei andarla a vedere, un giorno.

Money quote: "Located on the southeast coast of Jamaica, the natural harbor at Port Royal became the center of English life in Jamaica. By the late 1600s it had become one of the largest European cities in the new world, second only to Boston. It had also become the infamous home of pirates, sex workers, and Englishmen on the make. Far from home, they made their livings off of the slave trade, slave labor in plantations, and the money that the pirates brought in from their looting forays against the Spanish."

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/sunken-pirate-stronghold-at-port-royal

Il dietro le quinte dell'ultimo special project per il primo di aprile di xkcd: The Machine

Money quote: "This is the story of how we built Machine in 3 weeks, and what I learned along the way."

https://chromakode.com/post/xkcd-machine/

E ovviamente The Machine:

https://xkcd.com/2916/

(Se volete farvi divorare la ram del computer da una singola pagina web, non c'è niente di meglio).

Letture per la domenica.

I piccoli leggono, leggono tantissimo. Poi, tutto a un tratto, fra gli 8 e i 9 anni, smettono. Alcune riflessioni e dati che aiutano a capire un fenomeno più complesso di quel che sembra.

Money quote: "Most alarmingly, kids in third and fourth grade are beginning to stop reading for fun. It’s called the “Decline by 9,” and it’s reaching a crisis point for publishers and educators. According to research by the children’s publishers Scholastic, at age 8, 57 percent of kids say they read books for fun most days; at age 9, only 35 percent do. This trend started before the pandemic, experts say, but the pandemic accelerated things."

https://slate.com/culture/2024/05/kids-reading-fun-books-decline-by-nine-crisis.html

Il Decline by 9 spiegato bene:

https://www.scholastic.com/readingreport/navigate-the-world.html

Le cose che devi sapere per fare un buon viaggio e altre amenità: Mostly Weekly è appena uscita.

https://antoniodini.com/weekly/278/

I Raspberry Pi sono piccoli e utilissimi, sia per progetti specifici che per fare amicizia con Linux. Si usano con una molteplicità di distribuzioni (io uso DietPI, per tenerli leggeri). Ma volendo si può usare anche il sistema operativo sviluppato da Arm, l'azienda che ha progettato i processori omonimi: il RiscOS.

Money quote: "RISC OS 5.30 is the latest release of Acorn's original native operating system for its Arm processors. Original, but not first: As Acornsoft project lead Paul Fellows told the Reg in 2022, what was then called "Arthur" supplanted a far more ambitious project called ARX, which never shipped. ROS 5.30 is the first stable release from the RISC OS Open (aka ROOL) project since version 5.28 in 2020. (If you have that, you can upgrade in place.)"

https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/02/rool_530_is_here/

La storia del design di Braun, e dei suoi eroi come Dieter Rams e adesso Oliver Grabes, è cosa nota. Che ci sia una mini fiera per appassionati e collezionisti, la Braun+Design Börse, molto meno.

Money quote: "Because of this, since 1982, there has been an annual event at the Braun HQ (Kronberg, Germany) for these people to come together. Initially, it was held multiple times per year, but it was later decided that once per year was better."

https://arslan.io/2024/05/05/braun-borse-2024/

Una chicca su Grabes:

https://www.untappedjournal.com/issues/issue-7/oliver-grabes-braun-design-philosophy

Il design è un modo intelligente di esplorare il mondo e la nostra realtà, quando è fatto bene. In questo caso chiedersi quanto debbano durare le cose è una domanda di ricerca molto interessante.

Money quote: "My recent research has been looking into the issue of longevity and how long objects in our material world should last. I want to understand our disposable consumer culture better, but also try to define what techniques and materials suit which application. 'Conditional Longevity' is a project that maps out the gains and losses of strategies that designers use to extend or shorten the life of the physical items that furnish our lives. In equal parts, research into this longevity is both reassuring and bewildering. It proves that solutions to our problems are diverse and imperfect. Every object we bring into the world has a contextual backdrop, and every design decision is a compromise. The challenge is finding which compromises are the best to make."

https://www.core77.com/posts/132088/Fantastic-Industrial-Design-Student-Work-How-Long-Should-Objects-Last

Qualche giorno fa ho rivisto al cinema Lupin III - La pietra della saggezza , il primo film del ladro creato da Monkey Punch. La mia retro-recensione per Fumettologica

https://fumettologica.it/2024/07/lupin-iii-la-pietra-della-saggezza-film-recensione/

La memoria cos'è? A me, che ne ho pochissima, la questione affascina molto. In quest'epoca di continue interruzioni sembra che abbiamo tutti la mente come un budino, anche quelli che ricordavano tutto. Io a scuola ero una frana nell'imparare a memoria ma ho sempre avuto una discreta presenza mentale ("nel momento"). Sono meccanismi complicati, sto mescolando cose diverse.

Tuttavia, la fascinazione di chi era capace di imparare tutta la Divina Commedia a memoria non è mai venuta meno. Come facevano? Dovevano viverla.

Money quote: "This same process of learning and remembering lines by deep understanding enabled a septuagenarian actor to recite all 10,565 lines of Milton’s epic poem, “Paradise Lost.” At the age of 58, John Basinger began studying this poem as a form of mental activity to accompany his physical activity at the gym, each time adding more lines to what he had already learned. Eight years later, he had committed the entire poem to memory, reciting it over three days. When I tested him at age 74, giving him randomly drawn couplets from the poem and asking him to recite the next ten lines, his recall was nearly flawless. Yet, he did not accomplish this feat through mindless repetition. In the course of studying the poem, he came to a deep understanding of Milton."

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/how-actors-remember-their-lines/

Ci sono il Deck di Steam e poi il Rog Ally di Asus. E poi c'è questo Claw di MSI che pare sia una ciofeca epoca. Tant'è vero che è stato stroncato da The Verge. Non capita spessissimo.

Money quote: "I didn’t start my MSI Claw journey by running benchmarks. My expectations were already at rock bottom, so I began with an easier test: making the Claw my daily driver for the not-particularly-intensive games I’d already been playing on other handhelds. I fired up the PC port of Studio Ghibli’s Ni No Kuni, Dave the Diver, and Fallout New Vegas — a game that’s nearly 14 years old.

Every one of them runs smoothly on a $549 Steam Deck OLED. Not one ran smoothly on the $749 MSI Claw."

https://www.theverge.com/24105991/msi-claw-review