Blumudus

Afrika, the nonviolent game (oh, poor animals)

A note about animal lovers, starting with an interview with Phil Harrison, the bald president of the Sony game development branch. He says that the upcoming PS3 video game Afrika will be something like a virtual photographic safari (zzzzz), so no big caliber rifles for us: “It’s not about killing and it’s not about running around the environment shooting elephants and hippopotamuses — that would be awful.” Aww, sure! Poor savannah animals! I’m wondering what Harrison is going to say the day they launch the next Grand Theft Auto… :D Apparently in the virtual world a drug dealer roaming around town, stealing cars and killing old wives is ok, while…

Discovering who we are (Section: Humans)

One of the most easily misunderstood expressions: “human nature”. If you didn’t live under a rock in the last 25 years, you know there’s a new (old) deity in town: Mother Nature. Therefore it’s normal that, with this obsession for ecologism besieging our minds since school age, when we catch a phrase containing “nature”, our vision turns green. But human nature is something else. It’s how we are made. What we really are, inside, as human beings. It’s our psychology that is at stake. We must explore our inner self to avoid self-deception. Just to pick up a random example: it’s pointless to put forward a social experiment like the…

What really matters (Section: God)

How did we develop our vision about life? “This is what really matters!” is a phrase I used often jokingly, for instance during the traditional Christmas Night Risiko (board game) with friends, when I and Mario (truly a character, but not the Nintendo one) let the dice decide who will have the privilege to use the red plastic army… then who cares about winning, the important thing is – i say to myself- being the Red! My “over thirty” generation has a natural sense of humor, a perception of the disjunction, breaking traditional schemes: so the player fakes a disproportionate interest in trivial things, precisely because he can taste the…

What this blog is meant to be (presentation)

The original concept for this site, including the theme and most of the ideas, dates back to 1998, a long time before people even started blabbing about blogs. Then, you know… my laziness, the immature times… I delayed the project until now, when I am starting from scratch. I’m still a little concerned about calling Blumudus a “blog”, since it was conceived as a “personal site” with a slightly different internal logic. My motive is that of giving visibility to out-of-the-schemes ideas, therefore in this site you’ll find reasoned assertions you’d hardly find anywhere else; I’m not interested in rehashing news or in coming up with something to post just…