Wednesday Media Consumption Roundup

[mousetrappling]

Books

Fiction: Finished "House of Chains" Steven Erikson - I think I said anything I wanted to say about it already, I just had about 5 minutes of reading left.

Started "Midnight Tides" also Steven Erikson - this book in its entirety is a flashback, the story that the Tiste Edur Trull Sengar is telling his travelling companions about his past. So there are none of the familiar characters, except Trull himself, but there are definitely still connections between this story and the ongoing one, some subtle & some less so.

Non-fiction: Still reading "The Making of the Middle Sea", Cyprian Broodbank - I've now started the chapter about the 2nd Millennium BCE, which is an era where a lot of the more spectacular finds from the pre-Classical world date to.

Shakespeare: Love's Labour's Lost: Act 1 Scene 2 - a servant outwitting his master.

Listening

Podcasts: ep 5.0 of the History of India - scene setting for the next era of Indian history that he'll be discussing (the "medieval era").

ep 79-82 of The History of China - through the short Sui dynasty & into the early Tang.

Sunday Podcast: an episode of In Our Time about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight - discussing the plot of the poem, as well as the language of the poem & how it fits into the culture & literature of when it was written.

Music: While running I listened to a metal compilation called "Corrosion".

Watching

The Balfour Declaration: Britain's Promise to the Holy Land - looking at Britain's involvement in the creation of modern Israel and how the ramifications of it resonate through to the present day.

Pubs, Ponds and Power: The Story of the Village - a multipart series about the history of various villages where they showed all the parts simultaneously on the different regional channels. So I went and hunted about for which one I thought was most interesting, and we watched the episode about Warkworth in Northumberland and how the Norman Conquest affected it.

ep 1 of The Hairy Bikers Home for Christmas - more cooking show & less travelogue than the other series by them that we'e watched.

ep 4 of Digging for Britain - a special on Iron Age excavations, including an upright chariot burial where the chariot was buried attached to two ponies.

Egypt: Secrets of the Dead - looking at New Kingdom beliefs about the Pharaoh's afterlife, based on the texts in Seti I's tomb (and illustrated with CGI vignettes). Rather good, I think it's quite old tho.

The Egyptian Job - programme about tomb robbery in Ancient Egypt, in this case of the pyramid of Amenemhat. The gimmick was having a team of specialists reverse engineer how the heist was done from the evidence that remained, including more than just Egyptologists. A bit shallow, really, but I think I liked it more the first time I watched it.

Bandersnatch - the most recent episode of Black Mirror. We've not watched any Black Mirror before, but as it's all standalone stories we joined in with Ed & Tash to play/watch this episode collectively on New Year's Day. This particular episode is a choose-your-own adventure story in TV form, about a kid who is a game developer in the 1980s, so it hit a lot of our collective nostalgia buttons. We spent about 3 hours exploring it, and thought it was very well done. None of the possible storylines went quite where I thought they would, and all of it was pretty fucked up. There's a lot of breaking the fourth wall going on, and making the viewer complicit in the events in a disturbing way. And various different ways to interpret the "reality" of what was going on, including popping right the way out in two very different endings to remind you it was all a game/programme except obviously that wasn't real either coz it was still part of the show...