Patrick Stuart > Recent Status Updates

So far this is just "the same bad decisions - now in 4k"

No play of textual opposites too facile, no miscellany of graboid factlings too precious or twee, no angsty bourgeois whine too petty. How will I find the strength to finish this?

He is still annoying

being a chao space marine is very much a vibe in this book

"As Blood Gorgons, what do we actually *do*? I mean what is the point of us."

"Just a vibes thing bro. Don't overthink it."

is this man's prose like hit pocket-skittles or did I get dumber in the last ten years

Reading this makes me want to interview middle ages peasants, steppe warriors and western hunter gatherers to ask the same questions of how they find their way around.

She's such an amazing writer.

"Above his grave were forty horse skulls arranged in two neat rows. .. The amount of meat forty horses would have yielded - assuming they were slightly bigger than Prewalkis, or about 400kg live weight - would be roughly 8,000 k, enough for four thousand portions of 2 k each. This suggests a funeral feast of amazing size. Horses were suitable animals for extraordinary ritual sacrifices."

"Meanwhile the _male_ aspect of modern horse DNA, which is passed unchanged on the Y chromosome from sire to colt, shows remarkable homogeneity. it is possible that jus a single wild stallion was domesticated."

"Domesticated animals can only be raised by people who are committed morally and ethically to watching their families go hungry rather than letting them eat the breeding stock. Seed grain and breeding stock must be saved, not eaten, or there will be no crop and no claves next year."

"But a person on foot in the Eurasian steppes feels very small. Every footfall raises the cent of crushed sage, and a puff of tiny white grasshoppers skips ahead of your boot."

Good lord this kid is dumb.

Holy shit he goes OFF in the last chapters

Bit of parallax atm as with a later theme of the book being Western Civ losing its fucking mind partly under the deep weight of its own well-recorded history, which is both gift and terrible burden; this book is also that gift and the burden and I feel both pretty strongly.

"The musician, far from dealing in pure forms, molds tonnes of air."

A book that makes you want to read other books, but you do not have the time, for this one is massive.

"He is learned but practical, unmistakably of his time but naively religious, conservative but unconventional. His genius lies in common sense, not common-places_ like those of Franklin's Poor Richard, but unusual judgements made by clear-eyes observation and couched in lapidary words." - on Boswell on Johnson, but also a self description I think?

The essay on prose in the chapter on the Baroque is really good

'The Luciads'! Why didn't I know about this before?

This is more of an adventure than an argument. I ain't complaining tho.

He writes beautifully, thinks beautifully, loves history but seems vaguely angry that it has happened. A patina of loss shimmers lightly over all.

The prose & writing in this is really good.

God damn the dynamics of 'An Adventure in Futurity' were a trip.