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My first scientific paper is OUT NOW!

My first scientific paper is OUT NOW! in the Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation, published by the American Chemical Society. Many thanks to my co-authors and PhD supervisors Daniele Varsano, Alice Ruini and Andrea Ferretti. A great deal of effort went into turning this manuscript into reality. Hidden among the thousands of pages of a computational chemistry journal is now a testimony of my presence on this planet.

Top 3 2020 videogames which are not from 2020

Buonasera! Il previsto programma "Top 10 videogiochi del 2020", con Michele Poggi, Simone Albrigi e Hidetaka Miyazaki, per problemi tecnici... non andrà in onda. Al suo posto, "Top 3 videogiochi del 2020 che sarebbe voluta essere top 10 ma chi ce l'ha oggigiorno il tempo di giocare a più di 10 videogiochi all'anno, i quali poi nemmeno sono del 2020 perché chi se ne frega delle mode e del mercato mannaggia al capitalismo fate più retrogaming", con Simone Vacondio.

Please pardon this silly tribute of mine to this year's critically acclaimed Italian TV show "Una pezza di Lundini". Now, here's a quick review of the 3 best games I've played this year. Hopefully more in-depth analyses will follow in the future. The images are clickable, so that you can experience a tiny bit of the sheer beauty and the witty dialogue of these games.

3rd place: Paper Mario and The Origami King (2020)

Little cardboard worlds and their paper-crafted denizens are disfigured by coloured pencils, scissors, staplers and other kinds of stationery. And, as the game's title suggests, by the art of origami, capable of folding, reshaping and recreating. The destructive and generative force of agents which can act on the very fabric of reality has a Lovecraftian quality, conveying the same horror that helpless humans experience when exploring the non-euclidean spaces where Cthulhu dwells. If we consider that these colourful and cheerful worlds we are talking about seem to be taken from a children's book, we can easily conclude that the effect is potentially even more unsettling. Overall, the scheumorphic art perfected in Yoshi's Crafted World is re-envisioned through the lens of the horror genre in this delightful game that came out this year, the only proper 2020 title in this 2020 top 3.

2nd place: Deadly Premonition (2010)

A seeming Twin Peaks rip-off, it being a murder mystery set in a small town of the American province, this game actually goes down a more personal path after the initial segments. Nonetheless, the language this game speaks is largely, albeit not completely, the one of American cinema. The fact that this game tries so hard to mimic cinema makes it a deconstruction of the filmic medium itself: after dismantling it into pieces, only some elements of cinema are retained, such as the use of film editing, the employment of professional voice actors, and the writing of a screenplay worthy of a decent TV series; on the other hand, the audiovisual compartment is directly inherited from the PS2 era, consisting of low-budget animations recycled over and over, an excellent but comically intrusive soundtrack, and low-res textures. The aesthetic of Final Fantasy X (the one that was accidentally achieved due to the technical limitations of the time) is daringly transplanted into American cinema, generating a new form of cinema that embraces low-fidelity. The approximations of the PS2 visual aesthetic are no lonoger a limitation, but now a feature. It is a similar process to the one that brought pixel art to become a thing (although some may argue that pixel art is generally more visually pleasing; however the mainstream perception of the good-looking may change in the years to come).

On the "videogames history" side, the game may come off more trivially as a visual tribute to the games of the PS2 era. However, less trivially, it also tries to build a self-contained and living world based on the characters' routines, similarly to that found in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. One is invited to deviate from the main quest and follow their curiosity to discover new little details involving the townspeople, and even autonomously formulate a reconstruction of the suspicious doings that occur in town with no hand-holding from the game. Perhaps the realization of an alive and breathing world sustained by complex characters' dynamics, one Holy Grail that Hidetaka Suehiro has been chasing throughout all his career, will finally come to life with The Good Life, set to be released in 2021.

Some individual aspects through which this game truly shines are also worth mentioning: the macabre beauty of the crime scenes that are investigated throughout the main plot; the final plot twist, which uses psychoanalysis to reveal the unreliability of the narrator, and simultaneously severes the player's ties to the game by depriving them of the identity they were assumingly assigned (the one of Zach); and the disdain for the Resident Evil 3rd person shooting mechanics imposed by the game's publisher, which the developers made abhorrently boring on purpose, making this game a little bit of a Metal Machine Music of videogames.

1st place: Earthbound (1994)

An idol is passed on from person to person causing all kinds of oddities around the world, from the emergence of a cult of worshippers of the colour blue, to the creation of lysergic parallel dimensions. After you destroy it, you find it regenerated in your likeness in the depths of your dreams. As is usual in this kind of Japanese fictional works (Evangelion being the most popular example), the coming of age story of a bunch of kids and the spiritual challenge of facing one's own internal demons intertwine with the fate of the world, now in the hands of a multitude of adults possessed by an occult force. All of this occurs in a setting exuding American culture (Stephen King's The Body, Charles M. Schulz's Peanuts, Stephen Spielberg's E.T.) as filtrated through an Eastern gaze.

This is hands down one of the best videogames I've ever played. Every moment spent with it is a good moment, because this is what the game is precisely about: adventuring with your friends, living the moment, and every now and then look back and see how far you've gone. Together with Undertale, it made me want to resume playing JRPGs, which I was afraid of because of all the hours and effort I poured into them as a child.

Then we may also discuss on all its other timeless qualities: the way it conjures the occult and the uncanny (i.e. Shigesato Itoi's poetics), its sweet psychedelia, the contemporary setting and its graphical rendition through pixel art, its soundtrack that still sounds like it comes from the future... But this will have to be the subject of a more detailed review. As for now, do yourself a favour and play it.

Dan Howell's coming out

I've been a fan of Dan Howell and Phil Lester since 2016. I was following some people on Twitter who would occasionaly tweet about these two guys' videos and I was like: "Ok, here we go again, yet another useless couple of YouTubers". But I would soon find out that they really are of a different kind. As I started watching their videos, I got immediately captured by their "Britishness". I love their humour and how they use editing to deliver it. Mastering the art of editing is something very common nowadays among YouTubers, but, again, not only are Dan and Phil pioneers in the field (they've been doing this for more than ten years now, back in a time when the figure of the YouTuber didn't even exist), I think they also deliver a unique kind of entertainment. As a matter of fact, their "Philisnotonfire" format, which I consider to be the pinnacle of their production, is something not many YouTubers can afford, because few YouTuber couples can boast such a special chemistry.

Other than that, I personally sympathize so much with Dan. A distinctive trait of his personality that emerges from his videos is the so-called "existential crisis", a state of mind that induces the inability to carry on with your daily activities due to suddenly recognizing that you are not living life at its fullest, you are not on the path you think you should be on, and one day you'll end up an elder full of doubts and regrets. This state of mind is the product of the clash between one's true being and the expectations society loads them with. As a result, one can easily end up trapped in a life they didn't choose, in spite of belonging to the privileged minority living in the "civilized" West that, as we are repeatedly told by capitalists, is given the possiblity to choose. Overall, most of the humour that Dan's videos are packed with, but even Phil's to some extent (even though he relies more on nonsense and clumsiness), stems from the failure in living up to society's expectations. Having been myself a person torn between the others' expectations and my own dreams during most of my university years, when I discovered Dan's YouTube channel I felt that there was someone out there living the same experience. More in general, I think I share many similarities with Dan when it comes to personality, and following his channel helped me feel less alone during some really tough times.

Now, Dan is known to be one that likes to take his time and put a lot of care into making videos, and that explains his proverbial inconsistency in uploading them. But his recent one-year absence was starting to get a bit worrying. Had he given up YouTube? Was depression, which he is known to suffer from, preventing him to keep his YouTuber career going? It turns out, he has been working on a 45-minute coming out video for a year and - boi - was it worth the wait! Packed with his intrusive self-deprecating humour, spicy memes and articulate writing, the video unravels Dan's story as a queer person from childhood to nowadays. By doing so, it covers a plethora of topics: heteronormativty, bullying, (gender) identity, labels, language, public image and even suicide. Moreover, it addresses so many under-represented identities in the queer community, including trangender, pansexual, bisexual and asexual people. This gives the video an encyclopedic quality: by telling his story and his reflections on embracing a queer identity, Dan managed to take a snapshot of what it is like to be queer today, what has gotten better compared to the past (the comment section of his channel for sure) and what is yet to be done (many minorities are still marginalized, just think of the existence of TERFs). I think everyone in the queer spectrum, each with or without their own label, will find something to relate to in Dan's telling. Labels can be hard to fit into - you don't always find the one which makes you go "wow, dat me" as Dan put it - and may create division, yet all queer pepole should be open to each other and united in recognizing what they have in common: being a minority oppressed on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation (and, dare I say, even sexual preferences).

Being concerned with all the identities that populate the queer spectrum implicitly shows how caring and accepting Dan is. Or has become: as sad as it sounds, I think his troubled past had a role in making him so. After so much suffering, his genuine telling and subsequent coming out are a formidable success, which will hopefully be inspirational to many other queer people. And, of course, all his insecurities deserve to be wiped out by an amount of acceptance in no way inferior to the one he is displaying. May we not fail in making that happen, for him and for all the queer community.

Finished Dark Souls

After beating the game, not without a great deal of effort which took over 83 hours of gameplay, and digging a bit into the lore to discover all the things I missed during my first playthrough, I can say Dark Souls is one of the best gaming experiences of my life. Maybe even better than Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which I have also recently played. It ranks somewhere near the first Legend of Zelda, which I consider to be the best videogame ever made to date (for objective reasons; if I had to name my personal favourite, that would be Super Mario 64). However, I don't think it surpasses it, for it still owes so much to it: there would be no Dark Souls without The Legend of Zelda.

I would gladly spend another considerable amount of hours on this game to discover new things by myself and re-shape my progression through it (in the sense of triggering events I missed in my first run or change the order of those I already triggered), but I have work to do and videogames just take so much time, especially the good ones like Dark Souls. For now, to pay homage to this beautiful game, here are some pictures taken in the later part of my playthrough. Somewhere in the future I also plan to write a review.

Website updates and remarks on Instagram

I completed some of the tasks I gave myself in the last blog post, most notably transferring with a few edits all the pictures and captions I had in my now defunct Instagram (with the tag [LEGACY]). The remaining goals will be reached somewhere in the future, for the moment I am very happy with being able to host a visual blog of my everyday life in the home page.

"So why not just use Instagram?" you may ask me. There's a number of reasons. First, I really like Instagram's original concept of hosting a visual blog. However, I like my website to be self-contained, so that you can easiliy reach within few links what I consider being of interest about me: my photos, my art, my opinions etc. All without being sent to multiple websites. Of course I still rely on some social media (see the links in the About section), but truth is, all the important things will be mirrored to this website. I already did this for my art, and I will probably do it for many pics on my @mehriopics Twitter account. Conversely, I won't do that for my last.fm analytics, beacause it would be too complicated and... it isn't actually that important how many times I listen to a song as it is my opinion on it, which I may or may not write on this website depending on how I value it.

Second reason, I've had quite some fun coming up with a Perl script generating HTML code (inspired by John C. Vernaleo's work) through which I manage my home page. The pagination and the addition of new pictures and related pages is all automated thanks to it, meaning I don't have to manually edit HTML.

Third and maybe most important reason on a personal level, I had Instagram but I quit using it. I realized I was spending too much time scrolling through people's photos and Instagram stories. It was mostly people I didn't even know personally, and with whom I never had even a virtual exchange. People that didn't care at all about me. Concerning people I know, I prefer being told what's going on in their life by them rather than discovering it via their stories, which ultimately make the process trivial and uninteresting. Finally, I somehow reclaim the right to forget about people's birthdays: being reminded of them via a notification on social media is like cheating! Still you will feel compelled to wish them "Happy birthday" even though those people are gradually becoming unimportant to you with time, to the point that you don't even remember their birthday.

Fourth and maybe most important thing on a political level, Instagram is part of a program of mass surveillance. Richard Stallman and other people you will find by reading his notes will tell you more about this. This program is becoming more and more aggressive with time. I recently tried to re-join Facebook, which is part of the Zuckerverse, for purely practical reasons. I submitted information that couldn't lead to my real identity (Tor, pseudonyms, non-Gmail e-mail...) and the sign up procedure wouldn't let me proceed without giving my phone number. This is the most aggressive a subscription procedure can be, and worrying too. Thus, I will try as hard as I can not to use these tools, and so should you.

Hello, world!

Hello, world! Site has been online for a few days but I got to write this blog post only now. I'm very happy to have finally managed to put this all online after a three-month work, and I'm looking forward to adding more. For the time being I'm planning to:

• add RSS support to the blog;
• tune the date appearence in blog posts;
• add captions to the photos in my Instagram-like home page;
• add captions to my selected artworks in the Art page;
• complete the Stuff I Make page;
• start uploading some Writings on videogames;
• start adding some photos to my Photos page, which I will do with the aid of the awesome script by John C. Vernaleo;
• finish off other minor things (About, About my art etc...).

Also, a shout-out to my therapist: I promised her I would put my website online soon, but the time never seemed to come due to me being such a perfectionist and a procrastinator. But here we are now, at last!