Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai


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Christmas before time

You guys know this has been a hard year for me and my brother. We lost our father in May and our lives shifted and rotated and changed. We had to face bureaucracy, expenses, problems. Solitude, sometimes.
We found ourselves broke and in a mortgaged house, lost at the bottom of a depressed rural area, with the economic crisis raging and no job in sight. And finally we faced hell and high water when the rivers flooded the countryside.
But we managed, and if the end of the tunnel is still a long way off, we keep going in the right direction.

And it’s not always bad news and hard work. Thanks to the Black Friday and associated things, we sort of celebrated Christmas one month earlier this year. Continue reading →


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Joe Dever, 1956-2016

I just got the news of the death of Joe Dever, a legend in the gaming world, passed away this morning at the age of sixty.

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A former musician, Dever was the creator of the long and successful Lone Wolf series of choose your own adventure game books, that later evolved into novels, comics and a roleplaying game.
517c7raq9wl-_sy344_bo1204203200_His work is part of the culture and life story of many of us that play or create games.

I still remember the day I went to one of the best bookstores in Turin1, to order the first two Lone Wolf books I wanted to give my brother as gifts. It was, I think, 1986, and I had to explain what a choose your own adventure book was to the nice lady there. She was intrigued and delighted.

He was often a guest at the Lucca Comics and Games convention, and he will be sorely missed2

  1. Libreria Druetto, a wonderful bookstore, that’s been closed these last fifteen years at least, and replaced by a casual apparel chain-store. ↩
  2. This year is turning into one long funeral wake, and in all honesty I am a little tired of reporting deaths. And yet… ↩


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Still High & Dry (thanks goodness)

The emergency is now under control.
The Belbo river remained in its argins this time, and it’s not raining anymore.
And we have enough supplies to last a week without going to the supermarket (that’s five miles away).
The weather did hit hard both north and south of where we live – there were no victims, but lots of damage. People were evacuated from towns, areas were flooded, and in the very center of Turin we lost two river boats that used to do the tourist run in summer.

As a side note, the line of submerged lamp-posts at round minute 2:10 in the video is a place where I used to go walking with my girlfriend at the time of university.

Anyway, situation almost back to normal, there’s a lot of work to be done because in the past two days we had other things keeping us busy (like, taking books and electronics upstairs just in case – and today back to the ground floor again).


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Waiting for the river

It’s a bad moment for being stranded in Astigianistan, along the course of the Belbo river.
The recent rains are wreaking havoc with the Piedmontese river system1.

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Vast areas are already under water, and the Belbo, roughly 100 yards from where we live, has a long history of disasters and floods.
Our house went under in 1948, when the water here in Castelnuovo Belbo reached almost six feet in depth on the town hall square (which is fifteen feet higher than this house) and again in 1968. In 1994 the water stopped something like 20 yards from our front gate.

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What can we do?
We wait, and first thing tomorrow we make certain that the house insurance is still alive. Then we start moving all the stuff upstairs.

I’ll keep you posted.

  1. this, despite the many opinionated f*cks that keep saying there is no ongoing climate change because they have air conditioning. ↩