Review

Footnotes to Thucydides A War Like No Other works best as a second pass through the Peloponnesian War. If you haven’t read Thucydides, start there. If you have, this goes one layer deeper without sending you into into Herodotus. It’s less a fresh narrative and more annotations with the context of a few more millennea of human conflict. One marker of the thirty-year struggle between Athens and Sparta is how little either side understood what they were starting. Missed exits accumulated. Short pauses for negotiation gave way to a conflict that grew harsher, less restrained, and harder to stop. So, the Greeks did to one-another what Xerxes could not. ...

It’s interesting that this is where I landed with my computer playing time. It’s also a good cautionary note for where AI falls short. It dissuaded me from trying to play AOE4 citing the shorter pace, and tried to convince me to play more Halo, but turns out that code was buggy for LAN. Such a shame. The AOE2 campaign was probably a bit too easy and I ended up going through the motions. I even delayed the start of the LAN party to finish one campaign that I was working on with castle age tech, which is similar to the loop I found myself in playing AOE4 after the fact. ...

What did I get out of this film? I enjoyed it, perhaps over-chatGPTd it. I get the allegory ot the 1920’s Irish civil war, I understand Colm perhaps more that I expected, and perhaps most of all, I enojoyed being able to watch a movie where its harder to see around corners, and the narrative structure of the format doesn’t destroy inevitability. 2 weekends with LX, and we watched a movie in each of them. I think watching about 10 movies a year and reading 100 books would e a pretty fine ratio. And watching the movies with LX is the right way to do it. Also watching movies with the kids, if they are new to me, could be fun.

Heat Before Serving There’s a limit to how much grimdark fantasy I can take, and Best Served Cold found that limit. The book begins with echoes of Victor Hugo—a sense of grand tragedy and sweeping revenge—but quickly settles into a relentless bleakness where nobody is allowed a good time. Not even a little bit. Part of my struggle might have been circumstantial: this was a book to fall asleep to, and fall asleep i did many times. I experienced sections out of order and never quite found my footing in the story. But even discounting my non-ideal reading experience, I lost steam. There are only so many partially failed assassination attempts you can read before fatigue sets in, physically and mentally. ...

ChatGPT, write a novella with sad narrator, based on this prompt: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Let’s turn this into a review: I deliver Parcels in Beijing Competently written. One of the nicest things about reading is just the ability to get the details of a different life, one that I will perhaps never live. Hu Anyan does a great job depicting both the ups and downs of blue collar work in modern day China. What are the social relationships that form, and what are the hardest parts. I appreciate the revenge list, the things that really pissed him off, and the honesty that he never really acted on it. ...

Tea Drinker Reading Inheritor three years after the first two books, I had to reassemble Cherry’s political map from fragments. Like Bren, I often didn’t understand what was happening. What holds the book together is the widening field of conflict. On the human side, factions maneuver against each other. On the atevi side, rival interests circle the center. The multilateral tension gives the novel its energy. No single antagonist dominates. Instead, power shifts through conversation, protocol, and small missteps. ...

Last week was at my college alma mater, and I was surprised at the memories that came back to me. The campus was permeated with fear and self criticism, bad memories of asking for a loan, opening a bank account with a $50 paycheck, or thinking about how to spend the last $4. What I forgot was the wild ambitions, of foundj a club, gettingperfectgrades, the compulsive gap to live in a fantasy world since incremental progress was itself depressing. Of mice and men nails this reality of being poor. Thinly sirprisj g part is how hard it is to see the reality when you are in it. ...

Author: Paul Thomas Anderson Score: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Completed: January 1, 2025 Last edited time: January 2, 2026 12:43 PM Status: Reviewed Type: Film What was it that made that movie so good? It had a cultural element, looking head on at the immigrant situation to paint a dystopia that is not far from our own. The vision of an alternate America haunts. The theme of being a dad, being a better self to protect one’s daughter, that also hits hard. The few lines, about biological vs genetic father, about parenting in a way that is different than peers, and the cinematic moments of being caught, of discovering that the time is now, of what it would mean to be paranoid against the US government.

Author: CJ Cherryh Score: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Completed: January 1, 2025 Last edited time: February 17, 2026 3:39 PM Status: Reviewed Type: Book Diplomacy, in spaaaaaaace Diplomatic crises have been resolved planet-side, so there’s nowhere to go but up. Precursor shifts the setting but not the governing concern. Cherryh remains focused on diplomacy as process rather than event, this time filtered through a claustrophobic space faring human civilization and its political consequences. She has some views on the engineering and mechanics involved, but mostly leaves them unexplored. (too bad) ...