"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.

books and literature

Il Detective Kindaichi e la Filastrocca del Diavolo

Mi sono avvicinata qualche tempo fa alla serie di gialli giapponesi che vedono come protagonista Kindaichi Kōsuke, scritti da Seishi Yokomizo ed editi in Italia da Sellerio, e devo dire che ho sentimenti contrastanti nei confronti della serie. Da una parte, l’approccio al romanzo giallo

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books and literature

Byung-Chul Han’s “Saving Beauty”

Saving Beauty (La Salvezza del Bello in Italian) is a short philosophical book (original German title: Schönheit retten) by cultural theorist Byung‑Chul Han, and it focuses on a critique of contemporary, consumerist notions of beauty, delving of course with the impact of digital technologies on

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architecture, engineering and construction

The Saturday Nobody Asked For

Introduction: the question from LinkedIn A friend of mine posted recently about an engineer on their team who had, without being asked, put in an enormous amount of work over a weekend. The post asked a good question: once you’ve seen someone operate at that

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Il Detective Kindaichi e la Filastrocca del Diavolo

Mi sono avvicinata qualche tempo fa alla serie di gialli giapponesi che vedono come protagonista Kindaichi Kōsuke, scritti da Seishi Yokomizo ed editi in Italia da Sellerio, e devo dire che ho sentimenti contrastanti nei confronti della serie. Da una parte, l’approccio al romanzo giallo

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