Stephen > Recent Status Updates

Gets really slow in the second half in a way that feels purposeful but to me condescending. Theres this big duel the author sets up and then the mc spends like 3 chapters meandering toward it. There’s even a half a page dedicated to defining what a duel is. In another hands I think I’d appreciate that but it really annoyed me here. Just was too obvious maybe.

"We are history relived and that is all, without end that is all"

Audiobook was very well made but I need to sit my Quon Tali ass down and read it physically.

T.E. Lawrence almost died with this guy?

After some time on the western front, Percy Faccett would return home on leave and sit for hours in silence, head in his hands. On the battlefield he used an Ouija board to make tactical decisions. Lobbing artillery at positions it advised him to fire upon.

Victorian explorers gravitate between “Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent” and “I will fight from the heart of the beast!”

Very interesting tidbits on theosophy as a counterculture. Despite its orientalism it seems it convinced a lot of educated people to oppose imperialism.

Every man has the homie that’s doomed to wander.

Something that I shouldn’t be surprised about but was is the evidence that humans as far as back as the Paleolithic made clothing simply to look good. Most of which would be described as incredibly immodest by modern western standards.

They have a very gross cannibal empire in this that makes it legitimately hard for me to pick up sometimes. I’m getting soft.

There are vaguely racist references in this novel that I can’t even comprehend. Raymond what does it mean when someone’s “smiling like a Filipino on a Saturday night”?

Very good so far but curious the lengths the author goes to let the British off the hook for the opium trade. As if they started selling it by accident!