Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai


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Headphones

Sometimes being short of money brings some interesting developments.
Case in point: last week I broke my headphones.
This is a minor tragedy because my 6 euro headphones with mic were indispensable for videoconferencing, and for everything else: I share the home library with my brother, and we have our PCs five feet from one another. It’s impossible to listen to some music while writing, or enjoy a movie after hours, without a pair of headphones.

Just like a good keyboard or a good screen, a good pair of headphones helps making long hours of work more comfortable.
I mentioned already that I often work with a soundtrack for my stories.
Add to that my online courses and the videos I use for research, and the fact that my next work-for-hire involves listening to a few hours of lecturing… breaking my headphones was a minor disaster, that delayed my schedule for the whole weekend.

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The pinball effect

On the 19th of October 1903, at the Princess Theater in Manchester (UK), Ellen Terry opened as Beatrice in Bill Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing, that happens to be one of my two favorite Shakespearean plays, but this is another story.
Admittedly, a Beatrice somewhat long in the tooth, considering that Terry was born in 1847 and was therefore 56 years old at the time.

This bit of information is particularly interesting because I am writing a story – called The Adventure of the Manchester Mummies – set (also) in Manchester in the late autumn of 1903 – and knowing that Ellen Terry was in town with a Shakespeare play has absolutely nothing to do with the story I am writing, and I doubt I will ever use the information, but is the sort of strange fact that surfaces while one is looking for something completely different – train timetables, in this case.

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Damn aristos!

Today I found a hole in Wikipedia. Nothing major, but enough to derail my research work for the better part of this morning. I had to dig out old books and cross-reference information to determine not only what the hole was about, but also what should have been in place of the nothing the hole represented.

I’ve been commissioned a short historical article about two women that lived in Turin in the 17th and 19th century respectively. They belonged to the same family, and lived in the same building, but were extremely different for personality and personal history. So I was looking for historical detail to define their actual relationship and to build some kind of bridge between the two. I needed something that could fit two paragraphs and join the two personal histories.

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April the 25th

On the 25th of April my country celebrates the Day of Liberation – also known as the Anniversary of the Liberation. On the 25th of April 1945, the CLN (National Liberation Committee, that represented the various partisan forces fighting in Italy) officially proclaimed the insurgency in a radio announcement. On the following day my hometown of Turin was liberated from Nazi occupying forces and their Fascist supporters.

It’s a pretty straightforward thing: there was a fascist regime that had got us involved in a disastrous war and had actively deported our own fellow citizens for extermination.
Our grandfathers kicked them out, and their Nazi allies.
Today we celebrate.

History is never so straightforward, of course, and it would be naive (or dishonest) to think it otherwise – but today we celebrate.
We have another 364 days to discuss, study, explore, dissect the events.
But today we celebrate.

Incidentally, my grandfather – my mother’s father – was one of the guys that contributed to liberating the city of Turin on that 26th of April 1945.

Less than half an hour ago, a contact on Facebook told me these celebrations should be banned, because they are basically Communist propaganda.
Which simply means this day of celebration is sorely needed.

And no, I will not block the guy.
Not yet.


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Rat-men in the sewers

I dug out my old copy of the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying Game, the other day, while I was trying – not very successfully – to put some order on my shelves.
I have two copies of this one – the Italian translation published by Nexus in 1994 and the Hogshead version of the first edition published in 1995. Before that there were photocopies, and notes, and pages clipped from White Dwarf magazine and what else.
And I thought, why not write something about it.
And by the way, yes, I am old.

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