Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai

Category Archives: Media


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The comfort of strangers

It’s been rough going these last two months, and it’s not over yet.
I’m pushing myself to keep writing and putting together ideas, because it’s either keep moving or die, and yet I’m once again going through one of my bouts of black moods.

In particular, I’m somewhat tired of failing repeatedly in learning from past errors, especially where evaluating other people comes into play.
If I were as good at picking the right horses as I am in trusting the wrong people, I could make a living at the racetrack.

And yet there is an up side, and it’s the fact that in these two months, as people took a bad turn for a number of reasons and old friends and connections vanished or turned out to be more than willing to move to Cold Shoulder County, I was also treated, again and again at the kindness of strangers, receiving a helpful hand from distant acquaintances.

So I can’t really say I’m losing my faith in humanity – I am not, because humanity is great as always. Maybe it’s the slice of humanity I kept close that’s not that great.

Anyway – I’m wasting a lot of time, and I should be working on a thousand different projects.
But we’ll get out of this pit yet.

Meanwhile, some good music to close this dreary Sunday.


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Radio Karavansara #5: Work in progress

Yesterday I shared a few photos from the documentation phase of my current work in progress – and I said I was also patching together a sort of soundtrack, as I usually do when writing my major projects.
And considering today’s been a good day, I was able to take two hours off around lunchtime (who needs to eat anyway) to put together a proper soundtrack as an episode of Radio Karavansara…

As the book will be set in New York’s Greenwich Village in the early ’50s (unless the publisher asks me to move it to San Francisco in the 60s, of course, or whatever), this is mostly classic jazz, with a few modern things thrown in for variety.
But this reflects the mood of the story I have in mind, and also the personality of a few of the characters.
I hope you’ll like it.


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Learning how to do a better podcast

I’ve just been through the first unit of an online course I will be following in the next weeks, about digital audio storytelling and voice technologies – basically about how to tell stories using a podcast.
This is quite interesting, both because it will hopefully give me some new idea to improve Paura & Delirio, and because as a writer any new insight on the subject of storytelling is a welcome addition to my toolbox.

The course is hosted by the Knight’s Center for Journalism in the Americas, and it’s not the first of their online courses I take.
Indeed, I have now a nice portfolio of journalism courses in my CV.

This course is both useful and fun, and meeting my fellow students was a humbling experience – here in Italy we are still in the caves, when podcasts are concerned, and discovering the variety and quality of the work other people out there are doing – usually people much younger than me – had a sobering effect.

But after all, when you are in the wilderness, you have ample opportunities – unless of course you are in a wilderness because they are so impervious to change your opportunities are dead before they are born.


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Translations, monitors, contracts and a long walk

It’s been a long rainy day. I started this morning working on a translation (a screenplay for an animation series), then had to go and dig out an old monitor from storage when my brother’s monitor died, then finally got the counter-signed contract I had been waiting for … now the wait for the advance to arrive (and it will be never too soon … we need to buy a new monitor).

So, all in all, it’s been a busy day, waiting for tonight when we’ll start playing my new campaign.
Also, our regional governor decided we need a curfew, so no circulation between 11 pm and 5 am – and so our plans for a last dinner at Casablanca’s with our friends fizzed.

BUT, despite all that’s been going on, I was still able to catch a movie, and the good news is, you can watch it too, on Youtube.
Here is the trailer…

I watched it at lunch break, and it was a beautiful – if sometimes dramatic – experience.

More things tomorrow.
Now I’m off to dinner, and then to polishing my dice…


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Radio Karavansara # 4: Aeon Trinity

In about 24 hours I will start a new roleplaying campaign, playing online a game of Trinity – the science fiction RPG originally published in 1997 by White Wolf as Aeon. The game was just re-issued with a new engine as part of the Trinity Continuum by Onyx Path, but we’ll be playing the old ruleset and universe.

And as I have always done with Trinity, I’ve been sketching the campaign while listen to some music – and so I decided to prepare a sort of soundtrack, and put it up on Mixcloud.
Will my players (and my readers) appreciate it?
I do not know.
In case you are interested, it’s here…

And now, off to draw some pre-rolled characters.


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Old comics and DIY censorship

In the past week, what with being forced to stay at home in isolation and all that, I decided to put some order in the growing pile of books, magazines and other papers that are slowly but steadily taking possession of my house.
We have been on a permanent state of warfare with a rat, in the last few weeks, and piled-up paper is not a good thing.

And in this way, while digging on a long-forgotten shelf, I found a few re-issues of old volumes of L’Eternauta, an Italian magazine that in the 1980s published color and black and white comics by Argentine and other Spanish-language artists and the occasional American or French story. It was built along the same lines of Metal Hurlant/Heavy Metal, and it was the gateway for many long-standing passions of mine – first of all for artists such as Carlos Trillo or Juan Jimenez, or Vicente Segrelles.

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Back from Lovecraft Country

So last night I saw the last episode of Lovecraft Country, the HBO series based on Matt Ruff’s book. And while I found some episodes to be below par, all in all I must say it was a nicely satisfactory adventure.

Granted, I believe “Lovecraft purists” (whatever that means) will find the series objectionable because it is not “properly Lovecraftian” (whatever that means), the same criticism that is usually leveraged at the scenarios for The Call of Cthulhu, the roleplaying game. And it’s a fair criticism, and a few episodes of the series do feel like write-ups of someone’s Call of Cthulhu games. But hey, they certainly were good games I’d have loved to sit through.

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