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This is an enormous step forward for women of people.

Watching Scarpetta (2026, based on Patricia Cornwall novels) and my uncanny valley radar is going off hard. There are a bunch of shots that are so obviously touched up by cgi I couldn’t concentrate.

Kind of want to watch The Pitt but I am very squeamish at medical stuff. Perfect show to enjoy while browsing on my phone, can look down whenever there’s anything too gory.

grim posthumous scenario i had not previously considered: you post a picture of the missile headed straight for you, and are memorialized by a bunch of random assholes complaining about alt text

Argh, finished my last book I took on my trip! Need to find an English-language bookshop here soon or looks like it’ll be an airport novel on the way home…

Psst. On Instagram a lot more now. If you want a follow then drop me a message here. I promise to bombard you with holiday snaps, occasional reheated memes, and thoughts about books.

Moon peeking through the clouds here in Firenze. Finished my next book for the year, which was The Great When by Alan Moore. Had its moments but felt constrained, like he was trying to write something more acceptable than a sprawling epic like Jerusalem. Diet Moore is still better than most though.

Third time in Rome. Wouldn’t want to be anywhere else right now.

Book 26 for the year is done! The excellent ‘A Memory Called Empire’ got on my list via a passing reference on a @nopunincluded.com video essay. I started to bounce off some of the sci-fi naming conventions (same thing happens with Banks’ Culture books) but after a chapter that became invisible.

Been a bit more quiet here, but weirdly been on Instagram more. The algorithm there doesn’t yet know me so I’m being given all sorts of random things. The novelty will wear off soon, I’m sure.

It was my birthday the other week and got a stack of novels, subsequently finished two books in as many days. Wolfe’s ’Fifth Head of Cerberus’ took me longer than anticipated - I loved the first two stories but the third didn’t grab me and I felt like I needed to drag myself across the finish line.

Hello Canberra, we really do need to talk about your lack of skyline.

Another day, another solo game of John Company. The Sykes Family had an impressive run of military victories only to be undone by rebellions. Walsh dominated the Board of Directors and kept the company out of debt, but it was Larkins - who married well, and retired better - who got the victory.

Reading update! Finished Neal Stephenson’s The Confusion the other day. It’s a slow start but built tempo as it went on. As I reread the series I do wonder how the pitch to the publisher went. Have started The System of the World (final volume in the series) which I remember quite enjoying.

Today’s view.

Been in bed with the ‘flu for the last couple of days. Good news is that I smashed through Spook Country and my twentieth book of the year, Zero History. I think my issue with SC is that it feels a little unmoored, the overarching story only coming into focus fairly late in the piece.

So I’m on book 19(?) for the year. Output slowed a bit for a while there, but work trips and shorter books for those numbers up. After reading Virtual Light I couldn’t help but plough through the rest of Gibson’s Bridge Trilogy, along with both volumes of Le Morte D’Arthur and Pattern Recognition.

Sydney is a coffee and nominal burger from a Japanese restaurant that was, presumably, once a house. Comfort food, like rereading Pattern Recognition and realising, suddenly, how alien the futuristic present of 2003 has become.

Maria! Played this one last night, recreating the Wars of Austrian Succession between 1740-1748. You can’t tell from the pictures but gorgeous art, clever mechanisms and tense all the way through.

Instagram seems to think I’m a bear. Flattered I suppose?

Put on The Princess Bride for the kids tonight and they loved it. Both of them had seen it before - my daughter watched it maybe four times in two days, at one point - but it’s been a few years and it’s such a damn joy. Perfect dialogue, perfect casting, perfect everything.

Caxton published Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur in the last week of 1485, and 540 years later, in the last days of July, I finished it! A tremendous tome, genuinely epic in scope, and I feel better for having read it and for having finished it.

No exciting photos on this trip, best I can give you of Sydney is a poorly cropped G&T in the business lounge.

Updated my profile pic on another social media platform; reader, I aged seven years in a day.

At the Atheneum in Melbourne tonight, and the light fittings made me think of a neoclassical Minion.

In Canberra today. Okay, so my hotel isn’t really giving me the impressive skylines like some of the places I’ve visited recently, but it does have those bright cold mornings that I love.

Nov 30th 1969: Princess Margaret is speaking to David Bowie after the Save-Rave charity concert at London’s Palladium. To Bowie’s right are Dave Cash & Ed Stewart, both Radio One DJs, and singer Clodagh Rodgers.

@mattthr.bsky.social I have followed you for a bajillion years on various platforms, but somehow only just found the Cult of the Old podcast? I have catching up to do…

After starting it many, many years ago, I finally played through the end of Pandemic Legacy S1! No pictures here for spoiler purposes, but a satisfying finish. (Sorry, London. They know what I did.)

@bwholland.bsky.social congrats on the new role! Fantastic news. 🤘🤘

Tolkien used hobbits to represent traditional English values. This is why Bilbo leaves his home, lies to a foreigner, steals his treasure, and causes a war which kills and displaces millions of people.

And good morning Gold Coast. On of these visits I’ll actually go to the beach rather than seeing it at a distance through a window.

Good morning Brisbane.

*I wonder how many times I have read learned laments like this. Centuries of them. Gentlemen should be trained to carefully read Latin, for instance carlhendrick.substack.com/p/ultra-proc...

All this article has done has convinced me that Ms Zetteler is a good person and her company would be one you’d be happy to work with.

Book #12 for the year was Virtual Light, a William Gibson classic. One of the first of his I ever read and it has remained one of my faves. Partially chosen due to its size - a work trip this past week meant I needed something small, so a Neal Stephenson tome was off the cards.

Double democracy sausage.

Good morning Queensland, you are looking very Queenslandy today.

A solo game of A Distant Plain to while away a public holiday. Warlords got the win; after calling a local truce to boost their resources, they rallied guerillas in Pashtun to shift the balance of power. The Taliban in second place, having created a wave of terror starting in Helmand and Kandahar.

Playing my third game of Arcs tonight, and the first with Leaders & Lore. I’m a Warrior with Signal Breaker, wedged between an Upstart, Rebel and Demagogue. Can I make this three for three?

Starting book #11 for 2025. I unfortunately bounced hard off White’s The Sword in the Stone, and the next one in the series wasn’t a great deal better. Finished them both off and I do suspect I’ll revisit the series just to see how things go, but for the time being it’s time to return to old fave.

Where was Gondor when the Westfold was tariffed at 30%

Ok, this could finally be the one that gets us into TCGs

A picture of my reading pile for 2025! Quicksilver took me nearly three weeks. There are another two books in the series to revisit there (the last, System of the World, being my favourite from memory) but I wanted to try something else…

Movie night.

hanging with your sphinx pal and it’s like „what sucks shit in the morning, sucks shit at midday and sucks shit in the evening“ and you’re like ya girl Kyle sucks shit spill the tea and she goes lol yeah Kyle what a shitbird

Changes to the law or to campus regulations that treat “Zionist” and “Jew” as synonyms will end up eroding all freedom, not just that of Palestinians. #auspol

I haven’t posted about my reading habits for a little while but I’ve kept up my habit of daily reading. My latest one is a monster, Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver. I read it multiple times in the mid-00s when it came out but it’s been 20 years since I last picked it up.

He tried . . .