doismiu - dispatches from the infernal archive

I Record Every Game I Play. So I Built Grifone.

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0200

As I already showed in another post, the one where I build an automatic curation system for my Steam library, I like playing games, mostly on Valve’s platform. Since I stopped playing Diablo III somewhere around the end of 2018, my relationship with games has been that of someone who likes having a catalog to reach for at any moment. Add to that the fact that I’m past 30, and you get a problem I’ve been trying to solve for years: forgetting what I actually played.

Getting Heroes of Might and Magic III Complete to Run on Arch Linux

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0200

Heroes of Might and Magic III is one of those games I keep going back to. It is from 1999, it is turn-based, the graphics are hand-drawn 2D, and it is still better than most strategy games released since. Twenty-seven years later nobody has replaced it, and honestly, I have stopped waiting for anyone to try.

The GOG version, Heroes of Might and Magic III: Complete, bundles the base game with both expansions and is supposed to be the easy way to play it today. On Windows, it mostly is. On Linux, running through Heroic Games Launcher with GE-Proton, it very much was not.

Streaming is Broken: Ultimate Guide

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0200

Nine months ago I published a series of six posts about building a home server. I called it Streaming is Broken, and I stand by every word of the first one. Streaming is still broken. It got worse, actually, which I didn’t think was technically possible.

What did change is the server. When I wrote that series in December 2025, I was describing a thing I had just built. Describing something you built last Tuesday is easy, because nothing has had time to go wrong yet. Nine months of uninterrupted uptime later, I can tell you exactly which parts of that original design survived contact with reality and which parts I quietly took out the back and shot.

"Previously On..." - What I've watched so far

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0200

For exactly ten months, I’ve been watching shows on the multimedia home server I built and discussed in an earlier series of posts. In that time, I’ve made my way through a wide range of films and series. Some were weekly appointments, some became unexpected discoveries, and others were shows I deliberately took my time with because I didn’t want them to end.

I plan to turn this into a monthly series of posts so I’ll have a place to keep track of the shows I’ve watched. Well, that and the fact that I’m over 30 with a kid, and if I don’t write these things down I genuinely cannot tell you in December what I watched in March.

I Am Learning Japanese. Here Is the Map (Month 0)

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0200

千里の道も一歩から Even a journey of a thousand ri begins with a single step.

Tomorrow, September 1st, I start studying Japanese. The deadline I gave myself is August 31st, 2029. Three years, thirty to sixty minutes a day, starting from absolute zero. And starting today I’m going to publish a monthly update here, every month, for thirty six months, so the whole thing is documented in public and I can’t pretend in month nineteen that I never said any of this.

How 'The Will of the Many' addresses privilege in a fantasy world.

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0200

As I said in my last post, the habit of reading was something I abandoned (cowardly) over the last 10 years. My relationship with literature was that of a compulsive hoarder, a first-rate spine collector (adj. said of someone who buys books for the hollow aesthetic pleasure of seeing them on a shelf), who came nowhere near diving into the pages of a good novel. I read several, yes, but short ones and with some specific interest, like the one used in my post Drinking poison to remain useful: abortion in the Far West, but it wasn’t literature for the simple pleasure of reading.

Hello again, my friend.

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0200

I haven’t posted anything on this blog in over a month, and the reason is one of the best possible ones: I became a father. That happened more than a month ago, but thank God, I’m finally starting to get a reasonable amount of sleep again. Now that my brain is at least minimally functional, I can sit down with a little more patience and write in what has become my open notebook on the internet.

The Concrete Ghosts of Italy '90

Wed, 10 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0200

In recent months I’ve been to the Luigi Ferraris stadium a few times to watch Genoa play. It sits in Marassi, wedged between the Bisagno riverbed, a main road, a prison and a listed fourteenth-century villa, with four red-brick towers planted at its corners like chess rooks. Those towers are not decoration. They went up between 1987 and 1989, when Vittorio Gregotti rebuilt the ground for the World Cup, and they are the most honest thing in the city about what that summer was. Genoa got a stadium that people still admire. Most of Italy got something else.

Drinking poison to remain useful: abortion in the Far West

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 +0200

Anyone who knows me knows that my favorite movie is Unforgiven (1992), a western directed, produced, and starring Clint Eastwood. I savored the mastery of the first season of the series Westworld (2016). The ending of Red Dead Redemption (2010) touched me personally. I love the feeling of being in the world of Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018). Furthermore, I have a mini-collection of TEX comics (which I’ve read less than I’d like). What I mean is that for me, the Old West has a certain charm. But don’t think my enchantment is with John Wayne-style worlds, of incorruptible good guys fighting evil (evil being indigenous peoples and Mexicans). It is the charm of the post-western: a genre that demystifies the gunslinger, where moral ambiguity reigns and the violence of a lawless land is as impregnated in the characters as the mud encrusted on their boots.

Programming Like It's 1982. Part VII – Project: Mini Piano

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 +0200

Over the previous posts in this series we took the C64 apart piece by piece. Registers, memory, instructions, flow control, and the hardware chips. Now we put it all back together into something that works.

The project is a five-note mini piano. The keys Z X C V B play C D E F G. Each note changes the screen border color, plays a sound through the SID, and displays the note letter in the center of the screen. Simple enough to fit in one post, complex enough to use all three chips together.

How to make something stupid less stupid?

Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 +0200

Search engines are dying. The manual labor of finding information is dying. StackOverflow is already dead—well, it’s just not official yet.

AI assistants are already part of people’s daily lives. Simple searches, code, texts, math, even visual ideas like interior design or logo creation. Our lives today pass through these probabilistic chatbots.

And that is dangerous.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not the functionality itself. It’s great to get information without having to enter sites with giant pop-ups and dubious data. Asking about simple things quickly and directly. Visualizing decorations or logos before consulting with a specialist.

The Agony of Making It: The Dark Side of Professional Football

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 +0200

In the majority of cases (excluding countries like China, India and, of course, the United States), football is the king of sports, the most popular, the most watched and by far the most profitable of all. This popularity provokes that, for many children, football is the main option to play with classmates and friends and the perfect choice when the parents want to pay for a more ‘‘professional’’ structure for the development of kids’ skills.

The Boys: Making the Absurd the Norm Is Absurd.

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 +0200

There is a scene in the first season where Homelander lets a plane crash. He could save everyone on board. He doesn’t, because he can’t carry the plane alone and can’t bring himself to admit it. He stands still in the sky, watching people die, and flies away. It is one of the most disturbing scenes in the series. Not for the blood. For the cowardice. There is no gore. There is a powerful man who chooses his image over the people, and the viewer understands everything about him in thirty seconds. The scene works because it is contained. Because it trusts the viewer. Because the horror is in the subtext, not on the screen. The series that produced that scene and the series that exists today share the same name. They don’t share much else.

Programming Like It's 1982. Part VI – In-Memory Hardware

Mon, 18 May 2026 00:00:00 +0200

In the four previous posts we built the complete model. Registers, memory, instructions, decisions, and loops. You already know how a program moves through memory and how the processor executes every byte it encounters. What is missing is the most surprising part of the C64 story, and probably the most elegant idea in the entire series.

Writing to memory was triggering hardware

In the post about the memory map we saw that certain regions were not regular RAM. The range from $D000 to $DFFF belonged to the hardware chips. The VIC-II, the SID, and the CIA. But what that means in practice only becomes clear when you see the code.

Daredevil Will Never Win. And That's Why It Works.

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 +0200

I finished the second season of Daredevil: Born Again. What a season, ladies and gentlemen! Acting, writing, action, everything. But don’t worry, no spoilers here. I won’t even really talk about the show. Let’s set aside the audiovisual material for a moment and focus on the world of the ninth art: comics.

Before that, I want to tell a story. In 2004, I had just moved and, naturally, as a nine-year-old you need to find your footing in a new reality. Near my new home lived a woman who spent countless hours tending her personal garden. Sometimes alone, sometimes accompanied by her grandchildren, who occasionally stayed at their grandmother’s after school, as was normal for kids with a widowed mother. The youngest, Bruno, my age, was the first one I met. Back then in Brazil, in working-class neighborhoods, it was normal to use the street itself as a football field. Two flip-flops marked the goalposts. The sidewalk marked the sideline. Another era. Bruno, an extremely sociable kid and a football fanatic, showed up on the first day asking if I liked the sport. It didn’t take long before we had a group of four friends playing football every day, rain or shine. The second brother, Breno, two years older, was the exact opposite: closed off, introverted, always reading “something,” it never even crossed our minds that he might play football with us. In short, the nerd at a time when being a nerd was seen as a problem.

Zena.food: I Used Machine Learning to Find Genoa's Hidden Restaurant Gems

Tue, 12 May 2026 00:00:00 +0200

There is an article by Lauren Leek called How Google Maps quietly allocates survival across London’s restaurants. I read it eight months after moving to Genoa and could not put it down. The premise is precise and a little uncomfortable: the way Google Maps ranks restaurants has almost nothing to do with food quality. It is about algorithmic prominence, a composite of review count, review velocity, web presence, and interaction signals. Venues that accumulate more reviews rank higher. Higher rank brings more visitors. More visitors bring more reviews. The loop does not care whether the food is good.

Programming Like It's 1982. Part V – Flow Control

Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 +0200

In the previous post we saw how the processor moves data and does arithmetic. But a program that only executes instructions in a straight line does not do much of anything useful. At some point it needs to make a decision. Go one way or another, depending on a result. It needs loops, conditionals, the ability to behave differently depending on the state of things.

In 6510 assembly, all of that is built on a single mechanism. Flags.

Programming Like It's 1982. Part IV – Instructions

Sun, 10 May 2026 00:00:00 +0200

In the previous post we built the map. We know where data lives, how memory is organized into addresses, and why certain regions were worth more than others. Now for the missing piece. What the processor actually does while running a program.

The program is also bytes

In the post about the execution cycle we saw that the processor reads a byte, interprets it as an instruction, executes, and moves to the next. But we never talked about how a byte becomes an instruction.

Programming Like It's 1982. Part III – Memory and Addresses

Sat, 09 May 2026 00:00:00 +0200

In the previous post we saw that the processor has three general-purpose registers and a simple, uninterrupted execution cycle. The problem is that three registers are not enough for any real program. You need somewhere to store data while you are not using it, store the program itself, store variables and intermediate results. That place is RAM.

RAM is one giant array

If you have ever used an array in any language, you already understand RAM. The C64’s memory was exactly that:

Programming Like It's 1982. Part II – The Processor

Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 +0200

In Part I we covered the landscape. The era, the machine, the context. Now it is time to go one level deeper and understand how the processor actually works. Where data lives, how instructions are read, and what happens every fraction of a second while a program runs.

Registers, the processor’s workspace

When you write something like x = 5 + 3 in any modern language, the processor needs to pick up the 5 from somewhere, pick up the 3 from somewhere, add them together, and store the result. That “somewhere” is the registers.

Programming Like It's 1982. Part I - The 80s, the Commodore 64, and Why It Matters

Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0200

When I entered the tech industry in the back half of the 2010s, high-level languages were already the default. When I studied Computer Engineering, even embedded systems were written in C++, and that was considered the low level. In the software and games world, the abstraction went even further. Java dominated the industry, and Unity was in the middle of democratizing game development to the point where anyone with a free weekend could ship something playable.

The Reality of Favelas. No Solution?

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

As someone who lived in Brazil for six years, although fortunately that was not my own reality, I know better than most foreigners the scale and the characteristics of the favela or slum situation currently facing the country.

I am horrified every time reports appear in the media of tourists (Germans, Belgians, Americans…) visiting a favela in Rio as if it were a human safari, taking photos of the misery and enjoying the catastrophe. Some people might think that, at least, it is economically beneficial for the neighbourhood, and that these people are spending this money in the area and not somewhere else, but for me, it is morally problematic. Favelas should be something fix, not to enjoy.

My rant about the languages I speak (and why Spanish is my favorite)

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

With my recent move to the Italian peninsula I had a very interesting challenge alongside others: I had to learn Italian. I dove into grammar studies, consumed various audiovisual materials and today I find myself in Italy using this wonderful language.

With that, the following conversation came up:

“Which languages do you speak?”
“Speak fluently? Spanish, Portuguese, English and Italian. Catalan I can try a little bit, but I wouldn’t count it”
“Wow, so you fluently speak 4 languages, right?”
“Yes… four…”

And honestly I hadn’t stopped to think about it. Four languages. It is absolutely nothing out of this world, but I didn’t have this realization that it had been a while since I was just bilingual. Portuguese is the language of where I was born, Spanish of where I was raised, Italian of where I am right now and English… well, English was a necessary evil for someone who works in IT and likes to travel. But I want to share my perspective on some aspects of these four languages that don’t necessarily have any philological or scientific basis. These are my two cents on how I see each of these languages.

Forget Programming. What is the Future of the Programmer?

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

Years go by and in the software development world we ask the same question: “What is the future of programming?”. For this answer we always had the hot topic of each moment. Cloud computing was a hot topic in 2010. When I was in college Big Data and IoT were the trend, then Deep Learning, NFTs and so on. You can even divide the eras of technology by looking at the trending topic of each period. But now in 2026 there is a topic that arrived in full force and is already the reality of the market and changed the technology field forever: Artificial Intelligence.

From Sunny Plazas to Air-Conditioned Aisles: Why Europeans Walk the Streets While Brazilians Live in Malls

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0100

It is a fact that few people would dare to deny that the shopping mall is a key element in large cities today. While it is a place of consumerism, it is also a meeting spot for friends during adolescence, a hub for restaurants and cafes, and a home for cinemas. In recent decades, it has become a space that includes a little bit of everything under one roof.

I Over-Engineered a Solution to My Steam Backlog. No Regrets.

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0100

As a kid, I grew up reading video game magazines, primarily the legendary Spanish publications Hobby Consolas and Playmania. It was a tradition to stop by the newsstand on my way to school and ask the owner if they had already received the latest Hobby Consolas or Playmania, as well as the official NBA magazine. I spent hours reading the reports and the news sections. However, the section I enjoyed the most by far was the game analysis. An article explaining the gameplay and evaluating a title based on pre-established criteria, resulting in a final score, was enough for me to decide whether a game was worth playing. This was actually more important to me than playing the games themselves since new releases were largely inaccessible to me (except on specific dates like Christmas). So, reading the analysis was the closest thing to playing a game in the pre-YouTube era, before the days of walkthrough videos and gameplay streams.

Borderless Bites: Is Italian Gastronomy Really All That?

Sat, 17 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0100

A few months ago, if you had asked me to name the best food in the world, I would have said Brazil and Spain without thinking. I was raised Brazilian on Spanish soil, so my palate grew up between the two. Brazil has flavor and comfort; Spain is all about the ingredient, from tapas in Madrid to seafood in Galicia. I thought I had already eaten the best.

Then I moved to Italy, specifically to Genoa, between the Ligurian Sea and the mountains, where the smell of basil and focaccia from the oven seems to fill the city. The question everyone asks: is Italian gastronomy really everything people say?

Toni Kroos is the greatest Real Madrid player of the 21st century.

Wed, 14 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0100

Two days ago, the dismissal of manager Xabi Alonso from Real Madrid was announced. One of the main reasons reported by the media was a loss of confidence among the squad and the coaching staff. His tenure wasn’t a disaster. If we look strictly at the numbers, we are talking about a win rate of over 70%. Second in the league, Top 8 in the current Champions League, and alive in the Copa del Rey. But anyone who watches football beyond Sofascore, like I do, knows that the feeling on the pitch regarding the Merengue team was negative. It is more or less the same story we saw during Carlo Ancelotti’s season. A disconnected team where it seems the attack and defense aren’t speaking to each other, you know? It lacks the glue that holds both sides of the field together.

Why all this hate for schools? The case of the Famiglia nel Bosco

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0100

Recently here in Italy the case of the “Famiglia nel Bosco” or Family in the Woods made headlines. It was a family living in radical isolation in the Abruzzo region. The English father and Australian mother decided together with their children, an 8-year-old girl and a pair of 6-year-old twins, to live off-grid in a totally isolated house.

They adopted so-called neo-ruralism. They lived without basic services like electricity, running water or conventional heating and maintained almost total social and technological isolation.

The Only Correct Way to Return API Data

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0100

We live in an era of digital excess where developers are taught to believe that the goal of an API is to serve data. This is a fundamental fallacy that has cost billions in infrastructure and security around the world. We spent years debating REST versus GraphQL or gRPC versus WebSockets and forgot to look at the most elegant and performant solution that exists. I am speaking of the concept of No as a Service or NaaS (https://github.com/hotheadhacker/no-as-a-service).