"All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered."

A game of… Queens?

You might be familiar with the fact that in the original versions of chess — the Persian hatranj and the Indian chaturanga — the overpowered omnipotent Queen was respectively the ferz, the counsellor, and the mantri, the general. Go figure, you might think.
What you might be less familiar with is that originally all the queens we didn’t have in chess were poured into checkers.

It’s what we’re looking at today on my Patreon, as two of my main characters are playing this game back in 1522.

music and theatre

Suzanne Vega in Milan

Yesterday, we went to see Suzanne Vega, one of the greatest artists and musicians of all times whom occupies a special place in my heart next to Tori Amos. It was a packed house at Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi here in Milan, with people belonging to

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books and literature

Isaac Asimov’s Gold (and other stories)

It’s unfortunate that I’m coming to this after the very unsatisfactory collection of “fantasy” stories (Asimov never wrote fantasy: he wrote satire), because this was another disappointment. The book is half short stories and half non-fiction, for random reasons, and the non-fiction half is random writings

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books and literature

The Murderbot Diaries: Rogue Protocol + Exit Strategy

I’m not crying: a piece of some murdering bot must have gotten in my eye. Rogue Protocol is the third novella in the Murderbot Diaries, and deals with the titular character going deep undercover to figure out what happened in the “mining incident” that was

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Suzanne Vega in Milan

Yesterday, we went to see Suzanne Vega, one of the greatest artists and musicians of all times whom occupies a special place in my heart next to Tori Amos. It was a packed house at Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi here in Milan, with people belonging to

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