Hugh Howey, l'autore dei libri da cui è tratta Silo, la serie di Apple Tv, fa un ragionamento interessante sulla carriera di uno scrittore di genere. In pratica, a parità di talento e determinazione, la fortuna del periodo storico. Lui ha iniziato quando scrivere era ancora difficile ma pubblicare e vendere era diventato facile (Amazon con il self publishing), e ha fatto il suo prima dell'arrivo dell'AI che sta rendendo facile anche scrivere.

Senza stigmatizzare l'uso delle AI per scrivere, fa anche delle previsioni sul futuro (molto interessanti, vi lascio leggere l'articolo e non le spoilero).

Money quote: "I’ve always felt bad for authors who lived and worked before 2007. The choices unavailable to them made life harder than it needed to be. Getting their work out into the world was brutal. After KDP, that brutality became a choice, not a necessity.

I now feel awful for anyone who wants to tell a story post-2026. You will forever be doubted. If you love an em dash the way I do, or you like flowy run-on sentences like I do, if you grew up reading Proust to let the words flow over you in all their glory, if you memorized sonnets so the iambic pentameter would soak into your bones, you’re gonna sound like a fucking bot.

Less than 20 years. More like 10, honestly. You can argue that 2014-ish was when self-publishing became legit and 2024-ish was when the tools made AI writing viable. A decade where it was easy in the ways it should be and hard in the ways it should be. That’s insane. Ten years across the one-hundred-thousand years of language."

https://hughhowey.com/the-end-of-an-era/

Ma quali vacanze! Ecco Mostly Weekly 389: fa caldo, i ragazzini giocano e i computer diventano sempre più piccoli. Poi James Bond, il doppio in letteratura, la differenza tra teorico e teoretico, l'AI locale e Ceuta. Tanta roba, insomma, anche a Ferragosto

https://antoniodini.com/weekly/389/

Letture per la domenica

Parte come un articolo di tecnologia media, una provocazione intellettuale stimolante e un po' nerd, ma dopo un attimo si trasforma in un paper di ingegneria creativa del software. Tanta roba.

Money quote: "Let's design the successor to email on top of HTTP, fixing the design flaws SMTP has been dragging along for 40 years. Piece by piece. The goal is not to replace the current mail system, heaven forbid!, but to learn, have fun and discover current technologies to swap out every element: sending, receiving, gateway, keys, and so on. The system will never talk to Gmail or any classic email provider: it only talks to itself. The only thing we are going to keep is the shape of the addresses, user@domain. Everything else gets reinvented."

https://en.andros.dev/blog/d7ed8b07/modern-email-can-be-built-from-borrowed-parts/

Le parodie Disney, il cinema di Nolan e la fortuna dei classici - alcune cose che ho scritto per Fumettologica

https://fumettologica.it/2026/08/parodie-disney-odissea/

I punti di vista nella narrazione. E varie altre considerazioni. Interessante.

Money quote: "When I teach intro to literature classes to undergraduates, I open the first class going over the five types of POV. (This may seem overly basic, but most of my students are not humanities majors and are unfamiliar with such things.) Each time I teach the traditional POV taxonomy, I feel it isn’t the most useful one from a fiction writing, uh, point of view.

Here’s a quick refresher. The alleged five forms of POV are as follows: First-person (“I do this”), second-person (“you do that”), and third-person (“he/she/they/it do the other thing”). However, third-person POV is broken down into three types: third-person objective (no interiority), third-person limited (one character’s interiority and perspective), third-person omniscient (unlimited interiority and perspective). Those are your five."

https://countercraft.substack.com/p/there-are-more-than-five-povs

Giochini alternativi

Money quote: "I always felt a little bad for the ghosts in Pac-Man. They patrol the maze, they corner the guy, and then he eats a glowing pellet and suddenly they're the ones running for their lives. So I built a small game where you finally get to play the other side.

Pac-Man has its own AI, and your job is to catch him before he clears the maze. The twist is the same one that always ruined my day as a ghost: if he eats a power pellet, the tables flip and he hunts you for a few seconds. Then you run."

https://garrit.xyz/posts/2026-06-13-pac-man-but-you-re-the-ghost

E se, anziché di "felicità" parlassimo più semplicemente di "gratificazione"? Cioè di una forma di contentezza derivata dalle esperienze sensoriali nella vita quotidiana, al contrario i sensazioni ben più sfuggenti e basate su un territorio impossibile da dominare?

Money quote: "My hippy ex-boyfriend used to call that "taking a picture with your heart". We made fun of it then, but I find myself taking pictures with my heart all the time: some of it's trying to root myself in the present, but it's also often about trying to feel the world around me: the smell, the touch, the sounds, all the little stuff that makes a moment gratifying."

https://www.patreon.com/CultureStudy/posts/how-to-fall-back-164373561