Joining the Forking Mad list of questions. I love these blogging challenges a lot I have to say!

Do you floss your teeth?

Never ever done. Pointless. Brushing your teeth carefully is more than enough. And it seems to me that a few months ago, or perhaps last year, a study on the subject was published.

Tea, coffee, or water

Espresso!

Footwear preference?

Are there any other brands besides Nike for good shoes?

Favourite dessert?

Crostata all'albicocca, which in English you can translate with apricot tart

The first thing you do when you wake up?

Unfortunately still grabbing my phone, but I'd prefer to say having breakfast is the very first thing I want to do.

Age you'd like to stick to?

That's an interesting question. I don't really have an age in mind. I do say that probably mid 30s is the right one. You are grown up enough and still plenty of time to learn and enjoying the best of your age.

How many hats do you own?

4 I guess. But I don't really like how my head looks with hats. So I wear them just when biking to work and back.

Describe the last photo you took

It's a photo of the venue I am working at. I can't share it here otherwhise would be too big of a spoiler.

Worst TV show

Honestly Game of Thrones and Lost ruined years and years of seasons just with their last episode. I'd say that the worst I've seen lately is Sugar on Apple TV.

As a child, what was your aspiration for adulthood?

Football player for Juventus. Of course. What else?

I haven't been back to New York in about 10 years, so I can't say how much it's changed because I'll mostly be cooped up at the venue where I'm working for an event. I'll only manage to do a bit of exploring next Monday and Tuesday when I take a couple of days off.

But these days, I'm reflecting on how I don't miss this kind of metropolitan vibe at all. The traffic is wild and totally out of control—both the cars and the pedestrians. The city is insanely noisy, and at any hour of the night, something shatters the silence: an open construction site, a cop's whistle, car horns blaring.

From that perspective, I can't say if it's just a Midtown thing where I'm staying, but the stark contrast to where we live in California is unbelievable.

That said, what hit me right away is how much I miss a setup where you can do pretty much anything on foot or by public transit, no car required. Grabbing a decent bite to eat at any hour of the day or night without stressing if this spot or that one's closed for a shift. Just the capital of the world, as it's been for the past few decades.

I'm sitting here staring at all the unread blog posts piling up from the last few weeks. My RSS feed is bursting with stories and content I'd love to dive into, but I just don't have the patience right now. I'm laser-focused on these final weeks of work before the Christmas break, when I'll be hopping coast-to-coast on planes multiple times.

I've reset my phone's home screen. Just one active page now, and I've ditched all the apps I don't need—X is my only social, nothing else. Life feels so much lighter without that phone addiction... And that's where I've been thinking about how my RSS feed doesn't demand constant attention to keep going; the stuff I'm into will just sit there, waiting for me to check it out when I'm ready. The social world, on the other hand? It keeps spinning even if I'm not in it, but to really engage with it fully, I'd have to live and breathe it every single minute. Not worth the trade-off.

Hoping to snag a few more killer shots of New York—fingers crossed I avoid the clichés and nail something truly iconic.

Love the little entry from Carl.

...It’s about recognising that writing online can be quieter, slower, more intentional. I don’t need to publish to perform. I just want to build a body of work that remembers where it came from.

Each entry here is an act of keeping — something read, seen, built, or felt. Some memories are full essays; others are fragments...

Blogs were meant to be a trace of the present, but year after year became a memory lane. A place to come back to and experience how we changed, what shaped us, what kept us interested, engaged.

Never forget about that. All the rest online, contrary to popular belief, disappears fast.

🔗

Finally. Santa Catalina Island had been on my bucket list for a couple of years. Probably because compared to what we're used to seeing on the beaches around Los Angeles, Catalina seems blessed with the same water quality you find on Mediterranean islands. Maybe not quite as warm, but still crystal clear.

The island—first an indigenous settlement, then a retreat for the rich and famous—became a tourist spot in the postwar era and still is today. I don't know why, but it reminded me of La Maddalena in Sardinia; it gave off the same kind of vibes.

We caught the 8:15 ferry from Long Beach and after about 70 minutes, we docked in Avalon, the island's main town. We walked a good half hour to reach the Wrigley Botanical Gardens and its memorial at the top of the hill across the way.

On the way back, we grabbed lunch at The Lobster Trap, which I recommend if you're into fish—or at least that's what Noemi says, since seafood's still a hard no for me 🙂.

After that, we headed to Descanso Beach, where we not only spotted two deer but also squeezed in the last swim of the season before hopping the 6:30 ferry back to the mainland.

The island's pretty big, and to really see it all, you're generally better off renting a golf cart—they're basically the official mode of transport there too. Next time, we'll do that, maybe even staying over for a night or two.

It's been a few weeks since my disastrous fall that ended with me landing on the edge of the bathtub. My healing process is about 80% there, I think—the worst part is at night, as I try to find the right position to fall asleep and end up right in the one that hurts the most.

We're without our little dog Panna right now. We decided to leave her in Italy until Christmas, when we'll head back for the holidays, and while I miss her every single minute, the time without her lets us tackle that list of activities we'd otherwise have to put off.

Next Sunday, we'll be visiting Catalina Island, and I'm really hoping to snap some decent photos to share here once we're back.

The following weekend, I'll be in San Diego for TwitchCon. The weekend of October 24, we'll take a quick getaway to Vancouver—a city I rank among the most beautiful in the world, and one I'm happy to rediscover after nearly 20 years!

After a couple of weeks' break, I'll be in NYC mid-November for work, and Noemi will join me so we can spend a few free days together exploring the city. Or at least, the parts I still have left to discover personally.

For Thanksgiving, we'll do a short tour of the Grand Canyon—since not everything there is dog-friendly—and we'll make one last stop in Florida at the end of December before heading back to Italy for a couple of weeks.

In short, some pretty intense months are coming up, and I haven't even listed all the trips I'll have to squeeze in. It scares me a bit, this upcoming stretch—not so much because of the sheer volume of stuff to do, but because I don't want to hit the end of these three months completely drained. I'll have to pace myself well between the high-energy moments and the rest ones, recharging the batteries whenever I get the chance.

As I write these lines, I've found myself reflecting on the tragic state of social media lately. Just like Manu put it:

One thing that’s fun to observe, though, as a very passive and disinterested spectator, is how some patterns of behaviour seem to be platform agnostic. Which is just a very polite way for me to say that dickheads are omnipresent.

Hordes of people have been jumping from one platform to another, cheering on so-called digital intifadas for all sorts of cultural, political, social reasons, only to land on new shores and face the exact same problems—users disguised by confirmation bias, and above all, those dangerous echo chambers.

It doesn't matter much which platform you choose to use. Unless you're completely clueless, you'll know exactly who to surround yourself with and who you want to interact with. You'll inevitably stay cooped up in your own pen. That's just how it is now—no matter the platform, social media has become a ruthless, brutal place to dump your resentment. The important thing is to win. Win the conversation by any means necessary; it doesn't matter if you argue logically—the point is to win. With satire, with insults, with public shaming. It's me against you. Black against white. On every single topic. An endless loop of barricades where the meeting point doesn't exist, because there can't be dialogue between people who only want to hear their own side.

The truth is that no place is better than another, and no place is safe from any kind of extremist drift. If that's what you're looking for, then start a blog. Because, as of today, no social platform can claim to be better than another, and it never will be.

It makes me sad that it's like this. These days, I only use social media to share gaming stuff and post the little content I create. Everything else is left to this tight-knit circle of the blog. Everything else, you'll always find it right here. I hope more and more.

Rock and Roll will never die:

File rock music under the same bracket as death and taxes – it’s a fact, and a constant of life, albeit a far more joyous one.

🔗

I realized I haven’t posted here since my birthday. That feels like forever, considering how often I used to update my blog. But a lot has happened in the meantime, and I’m going to catch you up:

• Never in a million years would I have imagined calling myself a content creator… Yet, if we’re putting labels on things, I guess that’s what I am now. I started a podcast for fun, in Italian, called Modalità Carriera. It’s about Italians around the world working in the video game industry.

• I didn’t stop there. My passion for eFootball has grown so much, and my X account has exploded because of it, that I decided to start a YouTube channel in English. I just comment on the matches I play online and share some gaming tips every now and then. It’s a ton of fun, even though it takes up almost all my free time.

• We went to Las Vegas in July for a quick weekend and saw Lady Gaga at Levi’s Stadium. We also visited The Sphere, and hands down, it was the most thrilling experience of my life.

• Speaking of concerts, in early September, we went to the Rose Bowl in Pasadena to see Oasis. Definitely the concert of a lifetime!

• I stupidly fractured two ribs after slipping in the bathtub at home. For a whole month, I slept like a mummy, stuck in one position. Only recently have I started getting back to normal.

Now we’ve got a week of “vacation” in Italy coming up. We’re going back for the wedding of two dear friends, but we’ll be back exactly seven days later. The time zone change won’t be easy to manage, but we’ll make the most of it with family, friends, and, of course, tons of food!

I was so busy living that I forgot my usual birthday post a few days ago. My relationship with the internet is gradually deteriorating; I barely open any social media except X. My only focus now is video games, eFootball, and YouTube creators.

Digesting hundreds of posts through my RSS feed is becoming a tiring task rather than a pleasant one, so I’m dedicating less and less time to it. The nice thing, though, is that there’s no rush to consume that kind of content, and I know I can return to it whenever I feel like it or maybe when I have more time to spare.

Last Friday, I took the day off, and we drove north. I attended the Limp Bizkit and Metallica concert at the 49ers stadium. Despite the awful acoustics and the cold Bay Area wind, I had a great time. We explored a bit of Monterey and part of the road leading to Big Sur.

Sunday was supposed to be dedicated to Carmel-by-the-Sea, but Panna started having tremors, so we decided to head back home immediately to take her to Urgent Care.
It seems to be a simple virus treatable with antibiotics, thankfully!

42 years old. When I think about it, I still can’t believe it. Especially because I feel half that age.

I found this post by ava about the parallelism between blogging and romanticism magnificent:

Blogging that’s personal and reflective (and not just how-to’s, portfolios or commercial) does this by offering a medium to express your inner life, thoughts, dreams, and struggles with a sort of intimacy and rawness that traditional publications and social media personalities lack.

Not to mention this subsequent passage where I thought she was talking about me:

Then also, blogging in more minimalist ways (like Bearblog) without ads and popup banners and newsletter modals feels more organic, a kind of original expression not filtered through editorial constraints and SEO optimizations. To me, it could resemble the Romantic longing for authentic, unspoiled experience, for lost innocence, for nature, for the past and a return to the natural and the immediate. I recognize this whenever some people choose to talk about it in terms of returning to a simpler, older web and indulging in nostalgia, even in design.

Apart from X, which I can’t abandon for work reasons, my relationship with social media is heading toward a perpetual sunset. I haven’t closed my accounts, but I’ve deleted many apps from my phone and I’m hardly using any of them. My concept of the Web is what I apply to my blog; I’ve never put any paid content, never included ads, or tried to profit from it, because I’ve always considered it a personal space to reflect who I am, not an intellectual violation.

🔗

For the second year in a row, I attended the opening event of the Summer Game Fest in person at the YouTube Theater in Los Angeles (Inglewood, to be precise).

This year, I must say, the two hours spent in the company of Geoff Keighley were very exciting. Yes, that's the right word: at almost 42 years old, I got goosebumps again for some of the announcements made.

Beyond Resident Evil 9, in my opinion, the ones to keep an eye on are: Chronicles: Medieval, ILL, Mafia: The Old Country, Dying Light: The Beast, Atomic Heart 2, Stranger Than Heaven, Onimusha: Way of the Sword.

What left me quite stunned, considering this is a moment traditionally dedicated to third-party games, was the total lack of support for the Nintendo Switch 2 for practically all the games presented. Only PlayStation 5, Xbox, and PC. If this is really the case, I’d start to worry, and not just a little, for Nintendo’s new console.

Finally, online, many people were outraged about the lack of blockbuster announcements, the absence of Hollow Knight: Silksong, etc., etc. I, on the other hand, believe there was plenty of substance. The problem with the audience’s expectations is that they’re never satisfied.