Tuesday 14 April 2026 to Tuesday 21 April 2026

Books

• “Eyes of the Void” Adrian Tchaikovsky
  Finished Wednesday 15 April 2026. Continues on from “Shards of Earth”, and is still very much reminding me of The Expanse in that there is a vast external threat, so everyone is bickering amongst themselves and ignoring the threat. In fact going so far as to kick off actual wars rather than focus on said threat. There’s a lot in this about ownership, particularly ownership of people (in the broad sense of people), and about how sometimes the deal you make in desperation can have costs that you might find worse than the situation it got you out of. And about consent and agency more generally, can you really consent if your culture puts huge weight on doing what society needs of you regardless of personal preference? What about if you don’t know the costs going in, what then? I don’t know where the next book in the series is going, but I’m pretty sure it won’t be what seems inevitable at this point (genocide would be very thematically at odds with the rest of the series so far).
• “Understanding Early Civilizations” Bruce G. Trigger
  Chapter 3 looks at the question of what counts as an “early civilisation”. Trigger goes through some other definitional attempts, in order to point out that providing a checklist doesn’t work – for instance some previous definitions rule out the ancient Egyptians which would seem ridiculous. Trigger’s preferred framework is that the key point is that an early civilisation has replaced social organisation on the basis of kinship with social organisation on the basis of class. That doesn’t mean kinship has gone away, nor does it mean that there were no classes before, but the primary organising criteria has changed – my brother has an in with the king might get you a better elite job, but you’ll still be part of the ruling elite even if your family isn’t best buddies with the royals. I’m partway through the bit where he’s talking about what separates an early civilisation from a later pre-industrial civilisation. He’s talked about money of some sort becoming the way you measure wealth, and also talked about even more complexity in social organisation. And about a switch from the early civilisation where the nature/society/supernatural realms are all one thing conceptually (which lets the king be a divine intermediary with divinities that are part of nature, whilst still being a man), to a later separation of that conglomerate into three separate spheres (so the king is now clearly a man, but might be divinely anointed or protected, and the divinity that does this is not a part of nature).

Podcasts

• The Rest is Politics US
  
  • The blockading of the strait (which the guest standing in for Katty Kay approved of as a way of putting economic pressure on Iran, whilst disapproving of the entire rest of the war & the way it has been conducted), plus Trump taking on the Pope & pissing off millions of voters.
  • The way the US economy is looking good if you’re an investor and utterly terrible if you are not, and what that means about the way the markets are responding to Trump’s Iran war (after all, volatility means you get more chances to buy low & sell high). And just how out of touch Trump & his administration are, and how little they care.
  • The Iran war is all that there is to talk about … the subject mostly about how to get out and whether the Trump administration is capable of getting out. And they did actually talk about other things namely the way the people in the top jobs of Trump’s administration are incompetent, in light of recent allegations about the head of the FBI routinely getting so drunk that his security detail bring along equipment to force entry into his room in case they can’t wake him.
• Talk 90s to Me
  Leonardo DiCaprio.
• The Rest is Politics
  
  • Much boggling over the idea that negotiations might only take 21 hours (which isn’t long enough to finish the initial throat clearings) and quite a bit of chat about the Zelensky interview that I haven’t got to listening to yet.
  • Question time talked about the Hungarian election as its main topic.
  • A brief extra on the new revelations of the Mandelson affair, it’s been revealed he failed his security vetting before being made ambassador to the US, but that was over-ruled. Neither Rory nor Alastair were impressed by the idea that Starmer didn’t know till this week (either he’s lying when he says that or isn’t competent, was the gist of it).
• Empire
  
  • a break in their Mao series to return to talking about Iran, an overview of the now three Supreme Leaders and talk about what the outbreak of war would mean for Iran (this was recorded around a month ago).
  • an episode about Lebanon, Hezbollah & Israel, where the guest is a woman who lives in Beirut near where the Israelis were striking initially (but she’d moved out to an airbnb elsewhere as her dog is scared of the bombing).
  • an episode about the Iran conflict with a guest who is part of the Iranian diaspora, having left in her late teens after the revolution.
• The History of Egypt
  Retelling a story about Khaemwaset that we have from a Ptolemaic text, which is a fairytale about him finding a book with knowledge from the gods and this nearly bringing ruin to him until he comes to his senses and returns the book to where he found it. The film The Mummy had this as part of its inspiration.
• The Rest is Science
  
  • Cognitive ghosts, all the weird ways our minds demonstrate they don’t work the way we think they do, like deja vu, or the way it can feel like you’re going to jump off if you’re high up near an edge (your brain notes you’re scared and confabulates a reason why you’re so scared when it’s not that scary), or how there are people who have brain damage that means that they are blind but still process vision then act on it unconsciously (then confabulate stories for why they did whatever).
  • a Q&A episode, also with some of Michael’s favourite science books. Included a discussion of the optimal way to open the windows in a car to blow air through while you’re driving (front driver’s side a little bit & the one diagonally opposite).
• Oh God What Now
  
  • Their guest was Peter Chappell who has just published a book that games out what might happen if Reform wins (based on what they say they’ll do, and what he predicts would be the results of this).
  • quite a bit on the Mandelson scandal (essentially whilst it’s perfect believable that Starmer didn’t know Mandelson had failed his vetting that says nothing good about Starmer’s operation), plus their guest was the author of a book about the completely fictitious Report from Iron Mountain which is now underpinning the rightwing US conspiracy theories of today.
• The Bunker
  • An episode about the history of (not using) the atomic bomb.
  • Weekly Wrap Up, a bit about the local election campaigning where Labour are leaning in to Reform’s poor track record on “women’s issues”, but also some on Trump v. the Pope & on the Iran war.
  • an episode about Muskism, with the authors of a book on that subject – essentially he seems to think that everything in society, politics etc is downstream of the computer, so controlling the computer means you can shape everything else.
  • an interview with the author of a new history of Europe, his key thing is treating Europe as a cohesive whole even if it’s been politically fragmented, there is a sense of shared values across the whole continent over the last few hundred years & there’ve been multiple attempts to create some sort of unified Europe.
  • Start the Week, the Mandelson scandal again, plus a bit more on the Iran war.
• The History of Byzantium
  The legends that grew up around the death of the last Roman Emperor – Arthur-ish tales of how he would come back and restore Constantinople.
• The History of England Shedcasts
  Another episode where Crowther talks to friends about objects that are quintessentially English (different friends to the one on the main podcast feed, different objects too).
• More Jam Tomorrow
  British Guyana, and the way it gained independence (less violence here than other similar stories but a lot of rigged elections after the first guy elected had strong communist sympathies).
• The History of China
  The Opium War moving into a new phase where the British man in charge is much more enthusiastic about the war than his predecessor, and is also encouraged to hurry it up as Britain as a whole is distracted by the disaster in Afghanistan. The treaty that is eventually signed makes no mention of opium despite that being the trigger point, and the two sides have drastically different views of what was actually agreed.
• Origin Story
  The story of the General Strike of 1926, which I had heard of but it turned out I knew very little about it – not actually successful unlike what I’d assumed (the TUC called it off and capitulated before it fell apart but it wasn’t clear to everyone it would fall apart), and actually seemed to energise the fascists in Britain at that time.
• The History of Philosophy
  Malebranche’s occasionalism, which is the idea that the things we think are causal (fire causes burning) are just occasional causes and it’s actually God that causes everything, which has previously been discussed in the episodes on Islamic Golden Age philosophy as it was a core part of some of their ideas too.
• Journey Through Time
  Wrapping up their series on McCarthyism and looking at how there is a direct link to the politics of today – Roy Cohn worked with McCarthy during the Red Scare, and worked for & mentored Trump who very much operates by Cohn’s playbook.

TV

• Art’s Most Horrific
  From gory bible stories, to mindfulness aides involving depictions of rotting corpses, to the brutal imagery of the First World War, to images of hell.
• Rick Stein’s Australia
  Back to the coast, and back therefore to seafood and we won’t be trying the recipes from this one as they were either shellfish or whole fish. Quite a bit about sustainability & the difficulties of climate change.
• Easter Island Origins
  Took us through the standard story (silly natives cut down all the trees to move their great statues then had infertile soil so population collapsed and now we have remnants of a lost civilisation) pointing out how it doesn’t match the evidence on the ground. Rehabilitated Thor Heyerdahl a bit, in that the genetics do show some influence from Columbia pre-arrival of the Europeans as well as the expected Polynesian ancestry, and also they demonstrated that the statues could in fact be walked upright from where they were you just needed to have the base shaped at the correct angle (like the ones found halfway to their destination). The deforestation is chalked up to the rats they brought with them – if you do slash & burn agriculture and then the rats eat the new growth then the forest doesn’t regenerate so eventually you run out of forest, but I wasn’t quite clear why this happened here but not wherever they brought their agriculture & rats from, perhaps it was just the difference in climate that tipped the balance.

Games

• Diablo IV
  Had a longer break than intended, and likely won’t get the pet this season (there’s about a week left at time of posting). But we did blat through the capstone dungeon for Rank III, a bunch of Pits (up to Tier 22, could do 25 and open Torment II I reckon (J is more pessimistic)).

Exhibitions

• Ramses and the Pharaoh’s Gold
  Exhibition of items from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo (mostly, some had accession numbers from there but were from Sharm el Sheikh or Saqqara museums). Ramesses II was the king they used as their narrative thread, but the exhibition also included a lot of Middle Kingdom jewellery and a lot of later coffins too. Plus some of the newly discovered animal mummies from Saqqara which felt a little shoehorned in but were neat to see (they include a lion cub and scarab beetles tho they only had boxes those were found in). Highlights for me included the falcon headed coffins of Sheshonq II (one silver, one which had been gold on cartonnage but the cartonnage had (mostly?) rotted so the gold leaf was reconstructed on a modern backing). Also they had the sarcophagus lid of Merenptah which was usurped by Psusennes I, which was rather well displayed with a mirror below it so you could see the image of Nut. There was also a rather fun ostraca with a drawing of a cat herding geese. Overall it was a well displayed exhibition, and when we went it wasn’t that busy so we could spend time looking closely at things. The labels were a bit on the brief side tho. We did the “VR experience” afterwards, which was kinda cheesy but also neat to see two places we’ve been (Abu Simbel & Nefertari’s tomb).