Serious #Downfall vibes in the series finale of #Rome. I’m not an educated classicist and I know they had to change things for the show and its collapsing budget by this point, but I’m a bit skeptical that the real story was like this.
No wonder people see this show as a precursor to Game of Thrones - I may get round to watching that. I’ll have to rewatch season 1 later.
I also just bought Ten Caesars and will read it soon.
@GrittyLipids@bookstodon Tom Holland’s Rubicon, an excellent short history of the last century of the Roman republic, was the first book I read after watching Rome, and it really made me want to read some fiction set in the period (and that’s when I found McCullough’s at-the-time ongoing series).
Off the top of my head I don’t remember how much the book of #Dune talks about the Harkonnen use of gladiatorial combat, but the movie draws a relatively subtle link between their idea of it and bullfighting - the guys in the wide black hats are like picadors, who stab the bull with lances to weaken it. I’ll avoid spoilers on a 60-year-old book or the new movie, but it’s a fun subtle thing.
@GrittyLipids
The impression I have is that it's not just the Harkonnen; it appears to be normal in Imperial high society to challenge. Count Fenring is (tacitly) the emperor's champion and (an?) ambassador and has an appallingly lethal reputation; if he challenges you it's effectively an Imperial death sentence.
@GrittyLipids@bookstodon
Damn, I think that's right. The Shadout Mapes wants to clean the blood off the horns of the bull's head. I'd entirely forgotten. Cheers!
(FWIW, I re-read Children and Chapterhouse recently. Not worth while, IMO; very much less interesting than I remembered. No bullfighting in either.)
I forgot how much I hated the sound of that fucking idiot fake cowboy’s voice. Rich bitch from New England playing at being a working class Texan. That’s not even considering his stupid pablum bullshit about sensing Putin’s soul.
Also this doc has gone well off the rails of history and into modern information campaign stuff. No mention of red mercury, no mention of the IMF/World Bank, no shock here.
I’m glad they’re talking about the certificate scam in ‘90s Russia, but something tells me they aren’t going to talk about the American role in forcing that asinine bullshit through the IMF and World Bank.
I never realized how close the Kurils are to Japan. Leaving aside, y’know, all of Russian and Japanese history prior to 1945, no wonder the Americans were so keen on becoming friends with Japan after the war.
Even if we definitely should have insisted on more trials of murderers and criminals like Shiro Ishii.
Watching the BBC documentary on #einstein via #netflix. Transparently obvious that this was made because of #Oppenheimer, but at the same time it’s an interesting overview of Einstein’s life between exile from Germany and turning up in the US.
I also thought they were taking liberties with his voice until they showed a clip of the real Einstein speaking. Turns out not so much, though I kinda want to watch more of that now.
Went to the African-American history and culture museum yesterday - everyone should. Despite what I imagine some people believe, it’s not just violence and trauma porn, it’s a lot of day to day normal stuff on the upper floors. My wife wondered where the slavery and Jim Crow stuff was, but it occurred to me that it would probably be concentrated somewhere else in the building - excessive focus on slavery and trauma is a complaint I’ve heard about cultural stuff usual made for white audiences.
Probably the most informative exhibit (“favorite” sounds wrong) was the segregated train car. You really get a sense of how petty and cheap the racists were - the Black bathrooms are tiny (about the size of airplane ones now), white ones have a “lounge” area, which is weird, but regardless of how weird it was they had more space. Plus you couldn’t use the suitcase storage areas unless you were white, which is just ridiculous.
If I get a chance to go back I’ll have to see if they’ve got a Wilmington 1898 exhibit and what they have about COINTELPRO-related fuckery. Probably the single most horrifying thing in there is the child-sized shackles, but there’s also plenty of stuff in there that isn’t evil or soaked in blood.
Reading Chip War and it’s interesting how American companies did the same thing with semiconductors and Japan that they later did with China and everything else - just the racist assumption that nobody in those countries would ever figure out how to duplicate and then improve upon their technology.
Japan doesn’t seem to have been as openly theft-oriented as China, but they weren’t above corporate espionage shenaniganry.
Started reading Stratigakos’ book about the Nazi occupation of Norway and its influence on Norwegian infrastructure. Now I’m curious how much Norwegian infrastructure is still based on stuff the Nazis built and how much that affects Norway’s economy. Not like they should go back and demolish those roads or anything, but I’m curious.
I know the commonly accepted wisdom is that you shouldn’t exercise in the morning on an empty stomach, but I’m trying to lose weight and previously I’ve never had a problem exercising on an empty stomach in the morning.
@WTL@GrittyLipids but... if you can't comfortably exercise when eating, then you gotta do what functionally works.
I'm a professional eater, I can eat at all the times, hungry, full, sleeping, awake, give me food, I'm eating it.
I do need a little time to settle, and am selective about foods, but coffee / oatmeal / bagel / banana pre run, I'm g2g. I do try to move post coffee, but it's not a requirement. YMMV, everyone's patterns are different.
So in Confederation America (1780s) there was the Anarchiad, a satiric epic poem that for the most part is tedious because I’m not into that kind of literature.
However, there are chunks of it motivated by extremely Confederation problems, like fighting over whether or not paper money should be accepted and/or states should be able to issue their own.
Started reading Morris’ book on the 1780s - it was written in the 1980s and really shows its age in only kinda-sorta treating non-white people as fully human when asking questions like “was this area actually inhabited” or “how many people weren’t Protestant”.
It does kind of ask some of those questions, but probably not in as much detail as a bunch of historians would ask today. I’m reading this for political history, but still.
I didn’t know the #Sardinians had anything to do with the Crimean War until today, but apparently they sent troops too.
And also a Russian general named Khrulev proposed blowing up the city of Sevastopol and then doing a mass suicide charge into the allied positions, with the attitude of “Let everybody die! We will leave our mark upon the map!”