2025-10-15 00:17:00
Last Sunday I went to a small town in the foot of the italian Alps called Civiasco, with my wife and my brother. Last week we saw a poster for an event that was going to happen there while going out for a walk, and it looked interesting. It was called “Colma D’Autunno”, which in my understanding means “Peak of Autumn”.
My wife and I always loved autumn, but the yellow and red leaves were not that common back in Brazil, so we never experienced the autumn aesthetic in real life. It was only an hour away from where we are so we figured it’d be cool.
As we arrived there, they were serving polenta with cheese and a sauce with donkey meat (!) called Tapelucco, which I’d never had before. The polenta and cheese were good as always, but I didn’t enjoy the meat that much. Sadly, I forgot to take a pic of the plate, but the portion was very generous.
After lunch, we went for a guided tour around the woods, going up the mountain a bit. Even though it took a while (the “guided” part was mostly a biology class on plants), it was fun to walk around in that environment. It’s the kind of woods we’ve always seen in movies but had never been to before.
One of the most common trees in these woods is the Castagno, or Chestnut tree. Which means the ground was full of chestnuts! We had a couple of them raw (which I only later learned you shouldn’t eat raw…), and after the walk they started serving Castagnata (roasted chestnuts) for free for everyone. We had it with some Vin Brulé.
After the walk, we stayed for around 40min for a concert by a guy named Nick Hart, from the UK. He sang old English folksongs and it was a pretty cool experience!
2025-10-12 20:00:00
No Mans Sky
2016, Hello Games
My rating: Loved it!
I’ve played this game on and off since 2021, and surprisingly never stopped to give it a review.
It’s a dream come true, honestly. Space exploration at its finest, exploring worlds is always fun, there’s so much to do and still the best thing to do is nothing. I love just walking around a pretty planet and taking screenshots of the amazing views. Whatever problems it has just fade away in the vastness of space.
I absolutely adore the dialogues, too. So many existential quotes that just hit the right spot.
2025-10-12 20:00:00
EA Sports FC 25
2024, Electronic Arts
My rating: I like it
I know, I know. It’s EA. But I love football and there’s enough good here to let me live the fantasy of a career mode.
The menus are a complete mess and half of them don’t work most of the time, but the gameplay is cool. I’ve founded Polenta FC and have had a blast managing the club.
2025-09-30 16:09:53
Hi there! As of today, Cool Links has been officially written from both sides of the Atlantic! Last month I mentioned how tired my wife and I were of packing and now we’re still tired, but we’re finally in Italy!
This move has been a huge undertaking and honestly we still haven’t gotten used to it. We’re staying at my brother’s and looking for a place of our own. Hopefully, we’ll find one soon!
This doesn’t mean I couldn’t grab some cool stuff from around the web, though. I even discovered Chris Ferdinandi’s blog which is amazing. There’s 3 links from him here and I had to try real hard to not put even more. Definitely worth a follow/subscription/whatever if you like what he writes!
🌟 Every Noise at Once, by Glenn McDonald
Grab your headphones and get ready to lose some hours. This website compiles every subgenre of music and algorithmically sorts them out in relation to one another. It’s great to learn about new genres you might like or to find something similar to what you already know!
Adrift is a quiet space where doubts become paper boats and drift together across a shared sea.
What a neat lil’ website. You can write your own doubts or self-care notes and let them float out in a virtual sea, alongside the notes of many others. There’s some background music too.
The meaning of life…, by Chris Ferdinandi
… is just to be alive.
Beautiful reminder of why chasing goals and meaning only leads us away from them. A bit related to my longterm goals post from last year.
Means of Production, by Chris Ferdinandi
One of capitalism’s greatest successes is that it’s robbed us of imagination. (…) We struggle to imagine what life could look like under a different system. How it would be better. How it would be worse. How it would be different. (…) Utopias don’t exist. They never will. But I refuse to accept this system we toil under—while better than monarchies and fiefdoms—is as good as it gets.
Wallet voting, by Cory Doctorow
Make individual choices that make your life better. Take collective action to make society better.
Cory has such a nice way with words — he can express complex thoughts so simply.
This one is a banger. It’s both encouragement to do more against evil and reassurance for when you feel like giving up.
Accented, by Pavel Pomerantsev
This tool looks pretty cool! It’s a two-liner solution for web apps that automatically highlights accessibility issues on whatever you’re working on.
I haven’t tested it myself yet (busy month), but will definitely look into it soon.
npm: How did we get here?, by Kevin Roleke
I think it’s widely known that the JS dev community relies too much on dependencies, especially through npm packages, and that it’s really hard to avoid this problem (I use as few packages as possible, but each dependency has its own hundreds of dependencies which also have hundreds more…).
But I think I never stopped to think of how easy it is to publish a package there. Which also means, it’s too easy to publish a malicious or compromised package, that gets downloaded and executed on our computers with no proper vetting. Scary.
Why I still prefer ems over rems, by Chris Ferdinandi
Neat short article that goes over a bit of the differences between ems and rems in CSS, with nice examples.
Thanks for reading it all the way here! Hope to see you next month as well! ;)
2025-09-26 02:04:41
[!info] The ramblings below are from my personal journal where I jot down whatever’s going through my mind. I felt like this one could resonate with other people so I’m sharing it here with some minor edits.
I’m thinking of trying out Craft as my note-taking/second brain app again.
Truth is, Obsidian resonates so much with me on a lot of things. Principles, extendability, markdown, the file-over-app philosophy, and all the geekiness of it.
It is also truth that Obsidian is not convenient at all.
It’s hard to jot things down quickly — except maybe on the laptop, where I can have the daily note open and just jot things on the Scratch Pad section of daily notes.
But on the phone it’s just cumbersome — I feel like I actively try to avoid opening Obsidian on the phone altogether. And most of it comes from the fact that ==dealing with text on a phone just plainly sucks==. It was the main problem of Notion too.
Craft excels at it (at least I haven’t seen anything as good) because it doesn’t assume you’re trying to select text, and is instead dealing with paragraphs/whatever as blocks. This just makes it easier to work with on the phone.
There’s plenty of downsides too. Treating everything as a block and not as text is good on mobile, but not so much on a laptop. There’s some bugs here and there (example: I can’t apply the Daily Note Template reliably, it always glitches out with a different outcome).
Plus, Obsidian has a lot of qualities too. The wikilinks are amazing, and the network you can build with them is great. Being able to link to terms even if their pages don’t exist yet, for example, is a fantastic example of the philosophy behind Obsidian — links, everywhere. You don’t have to know in advance what will be important, you just do some basic prepping (that honestly becomes second nature after a while) and, if those things eventually become important, you’ll already have a network of mentions to that thing.
And then there’s the last thing, which is quite major: migrating things from my Obsidian vault to Craft. Looks like that’s a pain. While Markdown gets converted automatically, wikilinks conversion is not reliable. And without wikilinks, the whole structure falls apart.
This piece started as a quick way to jot down what I was doing, but it eventually became the whole reasoning as to why I think Obsidian is still the right choice for me, mobile difficulties and all. There’s some things I wish it had though; and probably there are ways to do it, I just need to do some research:
2025-09-09 20:00:00
Mother!
2017, Darren Aronofsky
My rating: Loved it!
Watching this movie feels like a nightmare. Things happen and you really don’t have much say in it, then they start spiraling out of control and you’re completely unable to do anything. You can’t run, yell or fight.
The religious allegories are quite obvious and are great, but that nightmarish feeling was really something I hadn’t felt with a movie before.
