A short meaningless report: yesterday we passed the 35.000 views this year on Karavansara.
Which is a lot or not much, depending on your politics, but most of all is the total of views for the year 2015.
We reached last year’s result with 54 days still to go.
And this, despite the last months having been anomalous for many reasons.
Which means the blog is growing, and I’ll do all in my power to push Karavansara forward in these seven remaining weeks.
Because numbers and stats are meaningless – but it’s good to know the blog is appreciated.
So thank you everybody, for motivating me to do better.
Category Archives: Other
Great interview on Women of Badassery for one of my favourite writers of all time
Author Interview Series: C.J. Cherryh
Second-hand bad dreams
Last night my subconscious decided to treat me – for the second time in a week – to one of my recurrent bad dreams, and I dreamed about being called up for my compulsory military service, despite having already served my country twenty years ago.
A sad, boring dream – not really a nightmare because it was not scary, but simply exasperating – in which I spent my time running around carrying a thick folder of documents roving that I had already served – to no avail. I ended up in a uniform, surrounded by people much younger than me, in a strange air base somewhere1.
It usually happens when I am under stress – either I get recalled in the armed forces, or I have to take my high school graduation exam once again.
Which is funny, because I don’t dream about my B.Sc. or my Ph.D. exams – but the high school exam gets a rerun at least once a year… in my dreams.
Or maybe it’s because I sleep with my windows open.
And it turns out that doing the military service all over again, or taking the high school finals again are the two most common bad dreams/nightmares for most males in the Western World – only, those countries that have no compulsory military service get more reruns of the high-school finals.
Which I find interesting, because I always thought of my high school graduation exam as a sort of rite of passage – not a true exam, not a true test of my knowledge, but just a final act of bullying to see if I could stand it.
I could.
But still get bad dreams.
Weird, uh?
Andthey are not even good enough to use as inspiration for a story.
- incidentally, I saw it happen: a guy that had been in the Air Force three years, and was a Lieutenant, received the call for his compulsory service. he presented himself in uniform at the preliminary visit, causing some embarrassment. ↩
Vintage space-travel posters from NASA
Just a quick heads-up: the 14 beautiful, retro-style travel posters produced by NASA are now available for download on their site, for free and with printing-grade quality.
Check them out.
Lost and Found
And then I found my missing camera handbook.
It was in a wooden chest, pinched between The Scientific American Book of Dinosaurs and Eric Anderson’s The Space Tourist’s Handbook.
Which sort of makes sense, in its silly, twisted way.
And I took a leisurely morning off, walking around in Nizza Monferrato, and shooting photographs with my old Canon.
It’s August, I’m on vacation four hours a day.
I also enjoyed a wonderful slice of focaccia for breakfast.
Nice
I don’t do “political” posts, usually.
But the fact is, last night we got home after the movie and heard about the Nice killings. Both my brother and I are very fond of Nice, we love the town, the people, the sea. We try and spend at least one day there every year.
We have friends there – and we spent part of the night messaging them to make sure they were all right. Which feels terribly selfish in the face of all the dead and injured. Our friends are fine – many others are not.
As usual, they hit a celebration – happy people having a good time.
The DAESH is trying to force us to become like them, to become radicalized – a joyless people that only thinks in dualities: black/white, right/wrong, them/us, friends/enemies. But the real world is not like that, and we know.
They need an enemy because without an enemy they are nothing.
They need a Crusade against them to justify their existence.
We won’t fall for such a ploy.
We are better than that.
We are part of a civilization and we paid our dues in terms of wars, tragedies, and age-old hatreds to get where we are – we’ve been there, done that, and saw it doesn’t work.
And yet do you see, how easy it is to slip into that them/us duality?
Because there are a lot of other civilizations and peoples and histories and religions and political stances – and they all are better than this small core of deranged losers killing people as a form of throwing a tantrum.
My thoughts go to the victims and their families.
Karavansara 