What I learned by passing my driving test at 33.

Posted on February 18, 2023 by ldmarchesi

Last week I passed my driving test so I decided it was time, now that the emotion has settled down, it was time to write a wee post about it.

I’d like to give some tips to whoever is about to embark on this adventure as well as giving an insight into my experience because there is a lot to unpack and is not only the materiality to get a car which for many can be the most important aspect of it all. 

Learning to drive has been something that helped me through different aspects of my life and even though the main one is the increase in attention while driving there are other points of view related.

The most important is of course the freedom to know you can go everywhere you want in any moment you want and even though for many years I had been so naive I thought I didn’t need it, I feel way better now mostly because I live in a small town that require lots of determination to be dealt by foot and a car is a life changer in the matter.

But wasn’t only the driving skills, it was the fact that for the first time I had the point of view of the person in the car and since I am a cyclist I always treated the road very poorly but since I was studying to take the license, I have interacted not only with cyclist but even with pedestrians who made me understand how a driver really need to have thousands of eyes in thousands of different places.

By understanding this, it is easier to act accordingly and change the way I walk on the road and even to be a better cyclist on many occasions.

In a couple of occasions I had to ask myself what the hell the guy walking on the pavement was doing walking up and down the road without any chance of going on a straight line, delaying my lessons by some.

But at the end of the story it is as well an accomplishment that you have to be proud of. One year ago, when I passed my theory (which has a very nice anecdote) I thought this day would come in decades and now I am with my little pink card, the best there is.

Theory test anecdote:

It was during the hazard and perception videos and the last one had a motorcyclist who gave me the thumb up since I left him pass.

Since I am speaking like I was the person who was actually driving you can figure out I was very involved in the moment and the environment was so realistic at the moment that I actually… Gave the thumb up back.

Now I want to make a few suggestions to keep in mind during your test and bear in mind that they are not stuff like “keep the left” or “relax”. They are just based on my personal experience.

1) I passed the test on the second shot and the first time I actually didn’t even leave the driving center. So during the test my instructor asked me to do very basic stuff, not even asking me to do the maneuver which she asked me to do back at the center.

The second time I had the same instructor and things went very differently. First of all I was able to leave the training center so the test went extremely differently.

Beyond the fact she asked me to do parallel parking and through the test she asked me to do very peculiar things such as (around the end of the test) asking me to park behind a car very closely.

This means that up until the moment you fail she may or may not ask you to prove your skills in peculiar ways.

2) This may be a shot in the dark but I thought I drove very poorly and yet at the end I have passed with only two minors this means that up until the moment the instructor doesn’t dual control the car, doesn’t help you to drive or verbally tell you how to interact with the road, it doesn’t mean you surely passed, but your chances of passing passed from 0 to more than 0.

If the instructor doesn’t interact with you just keep driving because it could end in a surprise for you.

3) This is the most important of them all but you must approach the test not with the intention to pass it but with the intention of driving.

This is the entirety of my experience in my endeavor for a challenge I thought it was impossible to accomplish for me so… Just do it. And (since I don’t want to open another point just for a wee sentence), Take your time! Is not a run so take your time.

-ldmarchesi

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The power of an external force

Posted on December 26, 2022 by ldmarchesi

Do you know why in every sci-fi space wide big story people from Earth are always able to change the fate of entire planets?

When left unchecked (like in multi seasonal tv shows) this ability that humans have to be seen as saviors can even reach galactic scale but why is that?

I always thought that was the way to create the story. You invent a world that nine times out of ten is just primitive or very futuristic but with a conservative point of view that doesn’t allow them to change so an alien species arrives and is able to erase that conservatorism with some well placed pieces of wisdom or, sometimes, just weapons.

This is, as for the title of the post, the power of an external force. Because the planet you go to visit may have never, or indeed it did not have, a first contact yet. It always lived in its own bubble.

Life and behavior has evolved for billions of years, hundreds of thousands of generations and the status quo quite literally became so stratified that it was impossible to change. Social structures had been generated over time, same as for laws, justice, science, religion.

People become unaware of the origins of everything and it becomes apathetic to change, to a level in which progress is not even taken into consideration.

At this point a starship arrives from the sky or a group of armed explorers comes from a stone ring in the middle of the city and everything changes. Here is the key to everything, an external point of view that shows how similar people are and how they approached problems in different ways.

I am not saying that those visitors are always right because maybe the differences between civilizations can be so profound that an external point of view could be more damaging that helping but is another point of view anyway.

This can be seen on many scales. Visitors from other planets, people from other countries that come to show you that you are not alone on this very same planet, the guy that tells you that there is another and faster route to get to work and let you make this discovery after four years you live in the same place (This is actually the event that made me write this article) or a seagull that force you to find an alternative route.

On the other side of the spectrum there is an example in the movie “The Arrival” in which an alien species actually came to us and made us question fundamental problems.

Are we alone? Surely we are not since they are here but what is the fundamental change that made us see the universe in a different light.

It is the fact that the Heptapods have a language that is actually refractory to time and it can actually be used to communicate within the flow of time.

From another science fiction movie like Contact we have Nazis that unwillingly send a transmission of Hitler opening the olympics across space. An alien species receives this communication and everything that it sees is a mustache guy that is talking gibberish so they use the communication to speak with us unaware of what it is and what it represents for us humans.

I can do thousands of other examples but just keep in mind that other points of view can actually shape the way we see the world and even facilitate progress.

-ldmarchesi

Posts you may like:
Seagulls – The winget menace that defeat insanity

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Holly – A story of youth and independence

Posted on August 12, 2022 by ldmarchesi

I am in need of writing this post because since I read the book a couple of days ago, I am drowning in this tide of emotions that is barely letting my brain concentrate on other topics.

I am writing sci-fi and even though I am a lover of the genre, it is not my favorite at all. I love human stories, stories about people, people’s lives and the encounters they made.

Many of my top 10 books are those and some of them are, for example, The curious incident of the dog in the night time, The wasp factory, The penguin lessons and many others. Those are stories that hook you up from the first page to the last one and this means that they are incredibly good. 

Holly doesn’t do any less of a job in hooking you up through the pages but this won’t be a review simply because the nature of this post doesn’t require it. I could speak about the structure of the book itself but I am not an expert in comics so I’ll leave the job to someone who is more qualified than me.

This post will instead be a diary of all the emotions that the story left me so it will contain a certain amount of spoilers and, as per the nature of the post itself, it will be incredibly personal and absolutely subjective. The only objectivity will be the fact that I am suggesting everybody to read this story.

The protagonist of the story is Holly Grey, a girl living in a remote Scottish Island. She is full of the island and wants to leave to the mainland and during the story she will interact with people and she will need to see the pros and cons of the Island.

I personally never lived on an island but I interacted with people that lived (and some still do) in remote places and feel the urge to go to more accessible areas and beyond this, I passed many summers in this mountain location in Italy and I loved it, I still do, but that a place in which I could not go to live there permanently.

The same thing could be said about remote island around the world, it could be the best possible place but after a while I can understand how it could become a repetitive and grey place not suitable anymore for your desires. And this happened to me almost ten years ago, I moved from Italy to Scotland because I needed more and different experiences, experiences that I couldn’t have in my home city. Because of this I understand Holly very well.

Between family and new friends Holly had to find the way to detach herself from her little world and the bigger obstacle is school. Even though everybody tells her that passing her exams is extremely important since it can be useful for her future she doesn’t think so and this culminates in her failing her exam but at the end as she writes it in a letter to her mum, not everybody is done for school.

Another colossal point in Holly’s story is her mother that, as a parent, loves her so much. Furthermore, as the father is often away she may feel extremely alone and it could feel even more alone if the daughter goes away but this is a monument to the reality that sometimes we need to give space to who we love and find happiness in their happiness. After all the chick will have to leave the nest at a certain point in life.

There is a bit of love too, it is actually more a crush than a friendship is born and maybe some other will end but, at the end, the story culminates in a heartwarming scene at the dock where Holly finally takes her ferry to the mainland making the final encounter of the story.

I am maybe digging too much in the story and maybe Steve Ingram, the author, didn’t made all of this mental travels while writing the book but this is what art is, you can dissect a product how much you want and if it works in giving you different points of view from the pov of the artist it means is well done.

What to say to end this short tide of thoughts? I wish Holly the best possible life on the mainland and I hope she will find her way and future but… Please, come back home and say hello to mummy now and often.

-ldmarchesi

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Unintelligent design

Posted on May 12, 2021 by ldmarchesi

Before starting with the post I’d just like to make you aware that even though this could be seen like a personal stupid hypothesis or even an idea that seems to defeat logic it is not. I don’t believe at all that what I am writing is real, I just got the idea and I’d like to express it just for the sake of philosophy.

The central part of the idea come from a question that is torturing me for a bit now and even though many people could think they have an answer through the simple: “It was God!” I’d like to pose it so that we can all be on the same rail.

“Why my consciousness is on this body, living this life in this exact moment in time?” and we can even go further with the addition of maybe intelligent aliens somewhere so it became: “Why me on this planet? maybe in one of the less advanced or maybe on the more advanced of the galaxy.”

What I am trying to say is that as an atheist I do not believe in an intelligent designer that created all that exist, it seems illogical to me but we are not here to discuss about a being that for its definition is neither provable neither disprovable.

We are here to understand if is possible to be the product of a design that depend not from a mind but from the universe itself.

Is easy to wonder over how grandiose the universe is and why things happen in the way they do.

My idea about the universe stands in the fact that there is no meaning in life beyond the meaning that we give to it, the same mean that come from the bottom and that brings humanity along but really: Why here and why now?

And the answer could be simple: It just happened that I was born on a planet in a desert solar system, at the very edge of one in a billion galaxies and that will be forever my place.

In a universe where the chance was to end up being a scientist on the verge of discovering time travel in a civilization in the constellation of the Lion or a General fighting some significant war across its galaxy, I ended up on Earth being a writer of things that probaly nobody will ever read.

Not even we know the boundaries of life and my consciousness could even be inside a living star or in some quantum scale sentient particle.

Can the universe have a great plan without a designer?

Science fiction often touches on this topic, mostly in time travel-related arguments with the fact that the time fight back, you can’t change it and similar gibberish.

But it is always unclear if there is some intelligent force behind it or it simply happens because of cosmic reasons.

Let’s bring this to the scale of the universe and imagine a singularity that starts expanding into the universe without apparent plan or direction.

This universe starts growing and filling space with the matter, time, stars, planets and particles.

While this process happens four basic forces start pulling matter in a coherent order across this virgin universe.

How this can happen? Mostly the balance of forces that put everything apart even taking into consideration Einstein relativity and the cosmic scale.

But then something happens: life emerges now and then.

At this point all that exists needs directions for this new stranger world that is popping out and this is because it needs to work accordingly to the great scale of things.

Unfortunately none of this have intelligence, neither have a mind behind it so the only way is for some intelligent mind to pop out and put the universe into the rail that the universe needs.

Chaos and order needs to operate together and so it starts making routes for life and non-life to stay together, a cosmic ecosystem that is slowly setting the layers for the universe.

It was at this point that Hydrogen, Oxygen, Phosphorus, Carbon and Nitrogen come together in the basic structure of DNA that became the brick of simple life that will then need billions of years to reach the point in which will be able to set the balances of power in the universe.

The universe is always expanding

This is one of the greater principles in cosmology and this is beyond the control of this unintelligible force, it is within his nature like a human body that jump from a cliff.

You can be as smart as you want but you can’t defeat gravity, you can’t reason with the forces of the universe.

At this point, the great plan has to modify itself accordingly with the fact that the distances are increasing and it needs to operate in order to keep the new outcomes of space in accordance with the older part of the universe.

A dog chasing its own tail forever, the Uroboros (That wasn’t really a dog but hope you will understand).

More problems come now, the universe expands faster than the speed of light but information can’t so this plan is really starting to feel non-coherent, not intelligent, it falls apart on a big scale.

Some philosopher in some golden age of enlightenment on some planet could even start think that some god had fail, we are very luck that this can’t look beyond the observable universe.

Unfortunately that’s how nature works, that’s the inevitability of chaos toward what everything goes, the second law of thermodynamics is now at its absolute peak and we have to live with it.

I would say that even evolution itself can be an analogy and even a great example of this concept, life adapts in various and unrelated ways, but in the end, you have a working planet-size ecosystem of totally different lifeforms that cooperates and it does so both for atheists and believers.

And here we are with a silly, nasty boy in a civilization that is trying to grow up in a time that’s definitely too late to explore its own planet but early to explore the universe.

Maybe I am the result of a master plan that is always changing and adapting to an evolving situation.

Intelligence is unpredictable

This great plan unaware of what is actually happening so it will be really easy for something that is actually aware of the universe (like life) to go around tit and make a mess in all of this.

I’m not speaking about the little monkeys on that little blue planet at the edge of the milky way, trust me I know them really well and they are not able to operate in the universe as they want, they can’t even operate on their planet as they want.

I’m speaking about beings on the top of the Kardashev scale, being that can touch the structure of the universe and make what they want, from bending black holes into wormholes to move stars all around.

This is exactly what we as intelligent beings do: We take the rules that drive the world, we destroy them and we rebuild them according to our need.

This is progress in his simpler definition and I love it.

Writer analogy

I am a writer, I love telling stories and I’m amazed how somehow plots seems to be alive and I already made a post about it but allow me to make an example in order to give the gist of the post.

Imagine you are writing a story in which your spaceship needs to be around a black hole but you don’t have an idea on how they can reach it.

Months later you write another story in which a spaceship reaches a black hole.

Is a different ship, a different crew but you suddenly realize that those stories can be merged into one.

Does this sound like two totally unrelated events that seem to stick together in a greater plan? Yes it does (To me at least)

This can be the final proof that maybe something greater than humanity is out there, something even greater than any god.

Or maybe is everything a cosmic fluke in which we found logic because we were born in it.

-ldmarchesi

Note: I don’t believe in any way that this is true, I wrote this post because it is interesting to evaluate the possibilities, even the stranger ones.

Related posts:
Alone in the whole universe
The secret life of a plot

Posted in Phylosophy | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Short story #4 – Passed away

Posted on April 11, 2021 by ldmarchesi

The idea that I was wrong is consuming me, at the end of everything we can’t always be right, and seems that an afterlife exists.

I passed hours looking at my body being taken out from the debriefs of the bus and it was painful to watch but something different was about me.

It was like being absolutely weightless and without any problem due to the carnal body.

At some level, I felt free from a 23 years old chrysalis and it wasn’t long that I realized that a mere piece of meat wasn’t mine anymore.

There was an old man looking at his body too and he felt happy as well but something was wrong with it.

Religion teaches us that there are glorious stairs or a deep pit and atheist belief is nothing I could never imagine that it was a mix of both.

We were just there and nothing more, no reapers, no angels or demons, just the city.

I was happy to notice that I wasn’t the only confused person or I should better say soul around.

“That’s it?” An old lady asked, she was a Christian I suppose by the crucifix she had on the neck.

I heard somebody laughing and I looked at the girl.

“Wait a second, your body is not in the debris,” I said.

“Nope,” she said and she ran away.

I had to reach her, it was possibly the only answer I had.

She stopped in front of the statue of the great minister.

“Who are you?” I asked with the hope that she simply didn’t escape again.

She wasn’t of this century, maybe not even of the previous one.

“I am Janet McLean,” she answered.

“When did you… When have you…” I didn’t know how to ask the question.

She laughed, probably she was around for so long that it was normal for her to be… Well, dead.

“1689,” she replied with a massive smile.

That was a lot of time, I thought.

“How?” I was so interested that I simply made my questions.

“The glorious revolution,” she replied.

I didn’t have the minimum idea of what she was talking about, history was my worst, I always failed at it.

“So what’s happening now?”

“Now you enjoy your second life that will last thousands of years, just until your consciousness won’t be disintegrated by time and entropy.”

I was bemused by the non-answers she just gave me.

“There is actually nothing?”

“I wouldn’t call it nothing, is a new life and you are free to go everywhere you want, on Mars, on Jupiter, in the constellation of the compass, everywhere you want, free from the meat suit with a whole universe just waiting to be discovered.”

That was cool and it was even cool the quantity of information my brain was processing.

It was like my understanding of the universe was now just free to inflate my ginormous thirst for knowledge.

There were many souls around some darker than others and I soon understood that your thoughts reflect the spark of your soul or consciousness as I understood it was better calling it.

“So what do you do all day?”

“I went to do a bath in the Sun a few weeks ago, it was funny, I saw its core, but my long time project is to enlighten this scientist and to let him open the doors of the quantum physics, he could be able to teleport an apple in a couple of years if I do it carefully and I don’t let him drown in madness.”

I didn’t need a scientist to explain to me that, if you become a cosmic sponge of knowledge you would be able to pass that very knowledge interacting with the world.

I soon understood that ideas travel around the world and allow living people to create progress.

After all, they all need a little push sometimes, they cannot understand everything.

“So there are no rules?”

“Not many no, we live in harmony with each other, here we are helping the livings to live better,” she replied.

Another soul approached, it was really old almost at the edge of death, its structure was in pieces I could see it literally evaporating before my very eyes and it was so admiring to see somebody who lived so long the total span of two entire lifetimes.

“He is Kod, he was one of the first inhabitants of the continent just after the first big migration of the homo sapiens in Europe, he came back years ago from a trip to a star so far away that he almost forgot the way home. Now he is helping a young girl with a sci-fi story.”

I was amused, that was the life after death, that was the glory of humans and allow me to say, it was way cooler than any known religion could define it.

I was in front of the first modern human beings and he was speaking with me in an alien language and it was so cool even though I wasn’t able to understand it.

The universe was now within reach and I didn’t have any intention to make it run away, it was like if the whole knowledge was trying to invade my essence but it wasn’t coming from the universe itself rather from the collective existence of billions of consciousness interlinked.

I was distracted by lots of smaller, really interactive but not really intelligent floating orbs.

“Those are kids and animals,” Janet replied, “They have a really limited comprehension of the universe but still they lived experiences and those are still drops in the ocean,”.

I just realized that we are not properly dead, we are legitimate inhabitants of this universe and nobody will take this out of my mind.

The most amazing thing I learned was that we can interact with the living on an intimate level, we can somehow help them have a major understanding of the universe but just need to be careful.

Too much information cast at once and the limited brain of a human being can become catatonic or fall into madness or becoming a genius so profound that its ideas would be considered too much for the current time.

The information had to be spilled in the mind, they had to be surgically planted, like a spark, a small detail, the right moment on the road.

Being a floating consciousness means being the definition of fate.

I spent weeks looking for somebody to help, I wanted to leave an impression on the world and there I found him, that wee boy that was crying at the station.

Nobody believed in him, nobody understood him so I took him under my wing and I helped him come out of his shell.

One day I made him meet his soul mate, a love that would help him find the way to solve the three-body problem.

It is strange to explain but seeing the kid becoming a man makes me so proud that I felt an overwhelming sea of emotion when he graduated, I felt angry when he wasn’t doing his job and get sad when he flighted with his girlfriend but at the end, I saw him reaching his maximum potential when he won the Nobel prize for his works on the Lagrange point.

At that moment he was recognized by a world that understood his potential and I was the guardian angel that makes that possible.

That was indeed the best day of my existence.

-ldmarchesi

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At the end of the story Thanos won…

Posted on April 10, 2021 by ldmarchesi

I believe that everybody remembers the moment at the end of Avengers: Infinity war where the big bad won the day and erased 50% of all living beings.

It was touching, the heroes lost and the villain won because he was devoted to the greater plan and he was fighting a disunited team of people.

Thanos was in that moment the realization of Lovecraftian cosmic horror, a being that was too much for every human being that came in contact with him.

Nobody had stood against him and in the end, he accomplished the mastodonic plan that he passed years creating and executing.

Each planet had now the chance to grow better because of the reduced population and this was the best characterization that a Marvel villain ever had.

Now, the plan was great and there is not a single MCU fan that hadn’t at some point thought that Thanos deserved to win because it was an idea shared by many.

It was surely better to save the world by being better people but that required time and will, Thanos came with immediate actions, something that would have hit the universe so deeply that at some level he even won.

Flash forward five years and the picture of the planet is somehow like a post-apocalyptic society that found a way to survive but still mourned the people they left behind.

At the end of the final act of the infinity saga, the Avengers brought everybody back and everybody is happy now, Thanos lost… Or did he?

Spiderman: Far from home does nothing to picture the aftermath of three billion people coming back to life.

Wandavision makes a single scene to show us the special effects of the blip but at some level, we know that some people passed some rough time in those five years, but still they went along and found the way to survive.

We had to wait for The falcon and the winter soldier to really understand the scope of what happened to the world.

Five years ago the world was as we know it in real life: capitalism, poverty, hunger, racism, overpopulation, and so on.

Yes, I know that there are even good things but those are the problems that Thanos tried to solve.

Then he came, snapped his finger, and suddenly, at some level, something happened.

People started to live better, borders are not so strong on immigrants, there is lots of food, lots of free houses, the environment gets better.

Human civilization had never been so flourishing ever and for the first time, we realized that Thanos was right all along, after all, he himself said to Gamora that he was the only one that knew what needed to be done.

He saved planets and planets and he didn’t plan to stop, at the end like a god he sat and watched the Sunrise in a grateful universe.

It would be a nasty shame if the mightiest heroes on Earth would decide to come back and reverse what had been done.

They put 3.5 billion people back on the planet without even thinking about the consequences of what they were about to do.

They produced a disaster on so many levels, environmental, social, economic, at the end, they are the villains of the show and they actually doomed humanity to consequences that are already to be seen.

The flag-smashers are nothing but the people whose lives had just been destroyed by the ineptitude of a group of vigilantes that weren’t able to live with their failures.

Thanos had shown humanity its greater strength: Resilience, we were able to rebuild a world from the ashes, for five years they lived without Avengers, without cosmic threats, without world-ending events.

That was the paradise that humanity didn’t have since Tony Stark came out as Iron man and it was thanks to a being who had the courage to stand for the greater good.

There is the last thing to address, many people say that Thanos’ plan was ineffective because the human population doubled in fifty years and this can be a valid point but I don’t think this would be the case.

Is scientifically proven that demographic increase is related to social welfare so happier the place, lower the births, and yet the world was at its best during these five years.

There is no way in which it is possible to see the snap as a world-ending event, Thanos was always meant to be the only savior, the hero we need but the one we deserve.

-ldmarchesi

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Hokkaido’s inferno – Empaty in videogames

Posted on March 19, 2021 by ldmarchesi

I’ll start the post with a question, What is art?

In my opinion, the answer is simple: Any opera can be considered art if it is able to give you emotions.

There are plenty of movies, books, and video games that give you emotions and even paints, songs, nudes, the moon landing, the challenger, the first rover on Mars.

I could go on forever but you get the gist.

I wanna speak today about a really peculiar form of art: Videogames.

I recently finished my first video game even and even if I’m late, I was so proud of myself that when the main campaign ended I discovered after a couple of days that well, it wasn’t finished.

Just for this, it can be considered art thanks to the wide range of emotions and even profanities that I said but deep at the end of the second campaign, something happened (the mission of empathy as I’ll call it) where you had to make very nasty decisions.

The game is Hitman, the 2016 remake and the start of the new trilogy.

I always loved hitman because it is a stealth game by definition and I love stealth, it gave me the best experience in every game that introduces those mechanics.

But coming back in the game, there are only six amazing maps that run over every one of the stories within the game.

The first campaign is a basilar Hitman campaign where you have to kill your targets and reach the exit without being killed.

The second big campaign though is called “Patient zero” and if you, like me, are you living through 2020 and 2021, the plot will let you drop the keyboard out the window hoping you don’t have to play it.

The plot is simple: A deadly virus had to be stopped.

First mission: Killing two guys that plan to release it in the world.

Second mission: The same.

Third mission: here things start going south, you have to kill a bunch of infected people, and is not much problem because they are bad paramilitary soldiers that want to do evil stuff.

Fourth mission: in the masterpiece of the Japanese mountains in Hokkaido, you have to kill the patient zero, the vector of the virus itself.

It starts like a normal mission, going around, collecting things, and finding the route.

I was definitely taking my time because I didn’t know what was about to happen.

Less than a minute in the run I got the notification that one person on the map had just been infected and, in order to avoid the spreading of the virus I had to kill that son of a bitch before he got close to somebody else.

I made all the rounds of the facility and I found the nasty cunt and my heart simply stopped, it was a nurse.

That person, that poor person came to work that morning just to be hugged by a son of a bitch that wanted to destroy the world and she became nothing but a living target.

I followed her keeping my distance because I didn’t want to get infected myself.

She got outside to speak with a guy, just a guard who was doing his job.

He got infected too. I suddenly understood the impact of that moment, I had to contain the apocalypse so I did the only thing I could.

I shot them for the greater good because it was the right thing to do.

Did they have a family? I didn’t know but for the first time in my life, I cared about people made out of code and numbers.

But what if they had families? What if both of them were a family, could be a kid waiting for them?

I thought about what would have happened if that was real life and at the very end I realized that it wasn’t necessary to hire a hitman.

In those dark times, we are the patient zero, any of us can make the difference between life and death.

Any of us can determine the destiny of entire families or simply the life of human beings.

I don’t know why I felt the need to write this post but it happens sometimes that an event is so deep that it gives you the need to share the emotions with the world.

-ldmarchesi

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I am addicted to audiobooks

Posted on February 23, 2021 by ldmarchesi

Audiobooks have exploded in the last years, they are in my opinion the future of storytelling.

Nowadays every writer is required to have their book in three main forms: Paperback, ebook, and audiobook this because you have to accommodate the needs of everybody and because technology is going in a direction in which everything will be digitalized.

This is a great plan at the very least.

Today storytelling is done with a lot of means, there is literature, cinema, music photography and all of them are going digital.

But today I want to speak about audiobooks and the reason they are so amazing.

Movies are great, they have (at least today) amazing CGI, fantastic photography, and (unfortunately not very commonly) a good story, and passing a couple of hours watching one is lovely but you have to stay in front of the screen because the audio is only a small part of the experience.

Again a book is a lovely way to pass the time, but yet you have to stay behind the story, and you have to read it, and this is somehow time-consuming.

Here we arrive at the audiobook: You clean the house, you go for a run, for a walk, you are on the train, you are on the bed in the evening, and yet you are still able to assimilate hours over hours of stories simply playing the audiobook.

I’m not saying that reading is a waste of time, this goes beyond every fiber of my essence but I’m saying that assimilating a story while doing other stuff is an amazing act of time management and, because of this audiobooks are the best weapon that today’s storytelling has in its arsenal.

Plus a good audiobook is generally read by amazing voice actors and, in the very best-case scenario, your favorite actor, I absolutely love them.

The only thing that keeps audiobooks so far away today is the colossal price they have, it is actually expensive to produce one and for expensive I mean that Iain Banks – The algebraist can cost up to 30£ that for a digital product is way too much.

But the ebook providers know this so if you take Kobo that is the one that I use to buy my books and audiobooks gives you a 6£ monthly subscription fee in which you get one credit that you can exchange for a single audiobook and for 20£ you get 3 credits so 3 audiobooks.

Until now I never paid for an audiobook its full price, I always used the credits I earned and bought, and to now it was the best experience of my life.

Buy more audiobooks guys…

-ldmarchesi

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The advantages of using a dictation program

Posted on December 28, 2020 by ldmarchesi

This is my second post about dictation programs and this is because they absolutely changed my life so here I want to appoint all the way in which it changed my life.

These points are based on my personal experience so is highly possible that different people experience it in different ways.

It helps with spoken language

The program is far from perfect and of course, the better is your spoken language the better but I’m not native English so at some level the program does not give me its full potential but like with everything I believe there is a massive advantage.

In order to improve my experience, I have to improve my spoken skills at least until the point that the program will be so good that even a monkey could create the best selling novel of all times.

Words and names

Everybody knows that one of the most difficult parts of writing a novel is coming out with names for people and places so you can imagine my happiness when, while dictating “Coming faster” the result in the program is “Garrett Baker”

The number of profanities exceeds by far the number of saints but the good news is that I found one of the many names that are now part of the long list I sometimes use to pick up in the stories.

Typing speed

The number of words that you can type by dictating is literally the dream of every writer.

Of course, the text has to be massively edited but everything goes smoothly when the whole story is already there just waiting to be corrected for the best.

Versatility

Imagine writing a book while you are walking or trekking or in bed.

The scenarios are uncountable but the final result is that you can write just holding your phone close to you.

Procrastination

You can’t imagine the quantity of time I procrastinate because the road ahead appeared so long that I just give up but when is all faster is easier to start getting the things done.

This was my short list of motives to use a dictation program to write a book in 2020.

-ldmarchesi

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Seagulls: The winged menace that defeat insanity

Posted on August 3, 2020 by ldmarchesi

Do you remember when the villain in Far Cry 3 gave the definition of insanity and it became the best villain after Thanos? Forget it because it was Einstein who initially gave that definition: Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

This sentence is absolute gold and it sums the way humans relate with their own lives.

Now I’m sure you are wondering why I’m telling you this if the post speaks about seagulls, have a little patience.

I live in a small Scottish city called Kirkcaldy and here Seagulls are a massive problem in the summer because generally they just try to steal your food but when they nest they are an absolute nightmare and you have to look for alternative routes if you want to continue to have a life without your heart being continuously challenged.

Fortunately, in the last days, I got to think and I came to a sudden realization that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger or because we are just speaking about annoying birds we can say that not all the bad comes to hurt you.

This experience gets me a new way to see the wee city where I live.

These demoniac animals forced me to change my routine and find alternative routes to make my things and since I work in the same place for almost three years and always took the same road, this was a fresh coming.

And only now that I find peace with them and find this reunion with nature, the nesting time is finished and they are not pissing me anymore and, since I’m a lazy c**t I’ll immediately start to take my usual routine again and I have to wait another year to see if I can cooperate again with them but till then I think I’ll come back to my usual and shorter route to work.

-ldmarchesi

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