Why do we travel? A comment at a movie outing today got me thinking. Mention of Christopher Nolan’s upcoming The Odyssey brought to mind my own far-off encounter with that ancient epic, and coincidences being what they are, it turned out to be almost 15 years to the day since I trekked across the muddy fields and dusty lanes of Gozo in search of Calypso’s Cave.
That trip to Malta and Gozo, thrown together towards the end of 2010, sticks in my mind as something of a personal turning point. Prior to that, holidays had been sporadic, taken with friends, family, or loved ones, arranged whenever and however suited them (always seeking to please, never comprehending that understanding what I wanted might be something they wanted). That winter, reeling from as painful a breakup as I’ve had, I wanted to be somewhere else, even if it was alone.
A stone arch on Gozo. Collapsed now. Possibly an omen.
Why Malta? The substantial part of me that’s a frustrated historian and archaeologist is eternally fascinated by points in history where legend and myth take on solid reality. Not so much The Odyssey in this case as Malta’s Stone Age past. The ancient Ġgantija megalithic temples I knew of, and a little extra research revealed the wonders of the Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum (allowing me to book a last-minute place on the waiting list). It was also a manageable destination. Having never travelled anywhere for long on my own, going to a small island where most people spoke English was about as safe I was going to get.
I didn’t have high expectations, starting out. A week in Malta, an itinerary that was mostly self-arranged (apart from the Hypogeum date), a chance to simply walk, enjoy the winter sun, and be somewhere other than back in Dublin, working and treading the usual routes. Whatever came of wallowing in Malta’s millennia of history, I’d take it.
A deserted and half-finished villa on Gozo. Hopefully not an omen.
Off-season Malta wasn’t impressive at first glance. I’d booked a cheap room in Sliema, the island’s party capital in the summer but dead in December. That just meant it was quiet though. I could grab a beer at a deserted bar if I wanted, but mostly I wandered. Up to Valletta and its museums and beyond to the harbours where the billionaires’ yachts lay tied up, waiting to spring to life at a jolt of funds. I visited every site the guidebook directed me to within walking distance of the city centre, and I descended into the underworld of Ħal Saflieni, glimpsed the distant past by flickering lights, then emerged into the day again.
Small as Malta was, my feet wouldn’t take me everywhere I wanted to go. For a few days, the bus terminal in front of Valletta’s city gate was my key to the island and beyond. Out to the temples of Ħaġar Qim and Mnajdra and their stunning views over the Mediterranean towards Africa. The cliffside roads I walked along, watching the birds scuffle in the dust and sheep graze far below me. Stopping for lunch at a mostly empty cafe, then catching the bus to the next site. I’ve a lot of photos but my use of GPS doesn’t reach back so far, so where each one was taken, I can but guess.
Mud- and sand-encrusted shoes on a red sand beach. Ominous.
I remember Gozo though. That was a day trip in and of itself. Up early to catch the bus to Victoria, across the narrow strait on the ferry, past Comino, island of the blue lagoon. It looks larger on the maps, but I headed north when I arrived and walked all the way to Calypso’s Cave, only to find a rubble-choked and deserted site. No one in the villa next door either, half-finished despite the promising aspect, with a view over the red sand of Ramla Bay below. I clomped over fields and onto the beach, shucking shoes clogged with mud and red sand, enjoying for a moment my natural state: on the shore, neither on land nor at sea.
I have, of course, lied in the above. The walk along the cliffs came the day after the trip to Gozo, not before. But it suits me better to bring the story to an end there, on the shore below Calypso’s Cave, facing the journey home rather than the cold comforts of stillness. Thinking of my state of mind on the sunset ferry back to Malta, into night. Thinking of the wish to share the experience and the desire to remember it.
Yours truly with a stronger Northern accent than he currently has. Ominous by some measures.
We travel for all sorts of reasons. To please others and to please ourselves. To learn more about the world, and about ourselves. To experience something new. To enjoy the journey home once more.
I have my own reasons. Some time after my trip to the islands, I came across the poem Ithaka by C.P. Cafavy. You might know it. Calypso doesn’t get a mention, but she’s there in spirit. I think of that poem often when I travel. Whatever weathered stones may harbour me, it’s only for a time. Ithaka awaits, and the tide is changing.
What does it mean to be happy? Is it being free of cares, or does that merely grant calm and contentment? Is it losing yourself in the moment, enraptured by music or art, or is that mere euphoria? Or is true happiness only found in the love we bear for others, whether family, friends, or partners?
Vince Gilligan’s new series, Pluribus, seems to be digging into this question, among many others, and I’ll admit that I’m fascinated. Both on a personal level, as someone who finds happiness hard to define and achieve, and as a writer who enjoys fiction that engages with knotty questions about human nature.
(Naturally, there will be spoilers below the cut. Pluribus, though not quite finished with its first season, is well worth knowing as little as possible about before tackling.)
I’m going to start trying to write again, so a regular blogging habit might help with that. Reviews won’t be all of it, but I’m fond of my old three-sentence review format. Let’s see if we can get some more mileage out of that.
The Surfer (2024 film, Lorcan Finnegan)
The Surfer is an Irish-Australian production from director Lorcan Finnegan that provides a vehicle for Nicolas Cage as a man who views buying his childhood home as a potential solution to a life falling apart at the seams, only to face hostility to an absurd degree from the locals. That’s an incomplete, if not to say entirely misleading, description of a film that has clever and interesting things to say about the pressures that men face and the maladapted ways that many choose to cope with them. However, for me at least, the film gets off to the wrong start by making Cage’s character completely unlikeable, rendering the first two thirds of the movie a depressing slog, no matter how well thought out it is.
Ithaya: Magic Studies (2025 PC game, Blue Turtle)
Ithaya: Magic Studies is less a game than it is a study or work aid, but it’s so well put together by blueturtle that it’s both entirely enchanting and well able to perform its chosen task. The “narrative” sees you, as Ithaya, arriving at an ancient city to study magic, and the systems of the game slowly unlock the world surrounding the city as you devote tasks and time to the underlying organiser. The lack of pressure from the mechanics and the appealing nature of the art and audio means that there’s plenty to appreciate and explore, and I’ve already devoted more work to it than I’ve managed in multiple months beforehand.
Andor (2025 TV show, Disney+)
Of the various spin-offs of Star Wars that have appeared in recent years, none have received the same acclaim as Andor, a two-series show from Tony Gilroy, which serves both as a prequel to his film Rogue One and as a deep dive into the mindset of people making the decision to resist an authoritarian state (hmm, wonder why that feels relevant). As someone who wasn’t a huge fan of Rogue One, I’ve enjoyed Andor to a much greater degree, with its longer format providing the chance to dig into its characters, their troubles, and the inevitable costs that raising a rebellion incurs. There can be few countries around the world that don’t have some revolutionary history of their own to speak of, and for all that it feels distant from the mainline Star Wars offerings, Andor speaks to a broader human experience and may well endure all the better for it.
Blue Prince (2025 PC game, Dogubomb)
I gave up on Blue Prince not long after starting it: Dogubomb’s puzzle game is structured in such a way that it requires an investment of effort and thought to get over the initial hurdle of bafflement. As someone who tends to solve puzzles by brute force (or ignoring them for extended periods of time), this isn’t a puzzle game exactly suited to me, no matter how much I might enjoy taking notes as I progress through an ever-changing mansion of rooms with multiple meanings, hidden treasures, and unguessed-at secrets. I don’t want to spoil too much, as this is one of the deepest games and the most carefully crafted titles that I’ve come across in many years, but if you have the patience (and an ability to think laterally), you might just have a lot of fun digging into the foundations of this mansion of madness.
A City on Mars (2023 book, Kelly & Zach Weinersmith)
Fans of Zach Weinersmith’s webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal will already know of his deep interest in science of various flavours, and A City on Mars stands as an excellent follow-up to his and his wife’s Soon-ish, a review of the reality or unreality of various upcoming technologies. In A City on Mars, the Weinersmiths pick apart the various arguments in favour of settling Mars (or space in general) and try to get to the reality of the new life that often gets hyped up by over-promising tech bros. The result is a highly entertaining and gently chastening book for anyone with the vaguest interest in space or the future of humanity, at the same time offering solid proof that humorous is not the opposite of serious.
It’s been a while since I came out of a Marvel movie with anything more than a feeling of having been adequately amused. Like a lot of other nerds and comics fans, I got caught up in the initial rush of not only comic book movies done right, but a comic book universe splashed across the big screen in release after release. We had a roller coaster ride for ten years, with the payoff of Avengers: Endgame to complete it all, and then… it kept going.
(Spoilers for Thunderbolts* below.)
That it kept going wasn’t in itself the problem. The problem was that there didn’t seem to be a solid reason for it to keep going. The success of telling an increasingly coherent story over the first three “phases” of the “Marvel Cinematic Universe” necessitated some sort of structure to what came next, but the MCU as such had started with only the vaguest hints of an endgame, whereas the next saga was instantly anticipated but largely left hanging in the movies and television shows, outside of a nebulous concern with the multiverse, a concept broad enough to cover any potential stories but hardly one to stir audience interest.
With a mix of tentative new stars and second-stringers stepping up to prime time, the MCU went on struggling to fill its sizeable shoes, usually managing to deliver that adequate entertainment but increasingly losing the buzz it once had. In this growth-obsessed world, holding steady (or worse, slight declines) don’t cut it. To audiences and studio bosses, the MCU was starting to look a little shabby.
This is the ground that Thunderbolts* steps into. Presenting a collection of Marvel’s broken toys in a story of betrayal and despair, it’s a surprisingly bleak little offering. Yet in contrast to what I’ve heard of the preceding MCU movie (Captain America: Brave New World) it does seem that Thunderbolts* at least knows what it’s about and how to stick to its guns. Because I came out of a showing last weekend not only adequately amused but wholly charmed.
Much of this, of course, is down to Florence Pugh. Playing Yelena Belova, the grieving, self-loathing sister of Scarlet Johansson’s Black Widow, she’s rightly kept at the core of the film, her path towards acceptance and her growing awareness of the suffering of others as important as the occasional beatdowns she inflicts on anyone unlucky enough to get in her way. She’s a magnetic presence, nakedly emotional against the Marvel tendency to be ironically cool.
Along the way, Pugh gets to pinball off (both literally and figuratively) some of those aforementioned broken toys: Wyatt Russell’s U.S. Agent, a similarly self-loathing replacement for Captain America; Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes, stuck in a job he can’t stand and desperate to punch someone; Hannah John-Kamen’s Ghost, a mercenary with phasing powers (and the one character underserved by the story); and especially David Harbour’s Red Guardian, Yelena’s bombastic but failure-addled super soldier father.
And then there’s Bob. Now, I have to admit some bias here. Bob Reynolds, aka the Sentry, is one of the more divisive Marvel characters among fans. Created as a Marvel mirror image of Superman and often used to explore the terror of godlike powers in the hands of an unstable personality, the Sentry rubs some people up the wrong way, especially as his origin retconned him into decades of Marvel continuity. Here, that isn’t a problem, but I have a lingering affection for a character I’ve followed since his creation, and I was fascinated to see how the MCU would treat him.
As it turns out, Thunderbolts*, in the hands of director Jake Schreier and writers Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo, very much knows what it’s about with Bob and his terrifying alter ego. From the very first moments, when he appears amnesiac and confused in the middle of a fight to the death between Yelena and some of the other broken toys, to Yelena’s quickness to ascertain that things aren’t quite right with him and her first instinct being to help, we’re clued into the notion that Bob is important, not just for what he is, but simply for who he is.
So when we get to the grand confrontation with the villain and ensuing punch up that normally marks the denouement of a Marvel movie, Thunderbolts* is ready to start twisting the script. First of all, it’s not much of a fight. The broken toys are hopelessly, hideously outclassed by the Sentry, who even saves their lives during the fight when he might have accidentally killed them instead. Bob, it seems, doesn’t want to kill people he knows, even if the only way some of them know to get through to him is punching.
There’s an oft-quoted Terry Pratchett line that I’m going to mangle here: “Sin, young man, is when you treat people like things.” That theme seems to run through the background of the movie—I can’t imagine that at least one of the writers didn’t know that line. The broken toys are treated as things to be discarded by Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Valentina, then Bob is treated as a prize to be used (to save her ass) and then discarded when he turns dangerous. It’s treatment that causes only hurt and makes the world worse, and it unleashes the dark flip side of the Sentry, the Void.
This kind of broad-strokes storytelling of the light and dark side of a personality can fall very flat if not handled right, but the movie stays on target. As the Thunderbolts were outmatched before, so they are now. All they can do is try to save people from the Void’s wrathful self hatred (did we forget that the fantasy of the super hero is that someone is coming to save us?), and ultimately try to save Bob from himself.
There is only a little punching at the end of Thunderbolts*, and it’s a terrible thing. The victory of the climax is that we get to a point where punching isn’t necessary. Where the characters realise that it doesn’t help, and that what they are there for is to help. It’s a surprisingly uplifting, lighthearted turn for a movie that spends so long looking at self loathing and despair, but it’s all the more earned for that.
I’m not saying it’s a perfect movie. There’s more than a bit of clunky exposition, certainly more than I was comfortable with, and one or two characters were poorly served by the script, but overall this is one of the bigger Marvel successes in a while. The series as a whole may yet get sucked back down into the maw of chasing those post-Endgame highs, but for now it’s shown that it can still make good use of its broken toys.
Well, it’s been a year. Or 13 months, to be more accurate. I kept meaning to write, but every time I did, I would look out at the world around me and feel that my words, whatever they were, would be inconsequential and inadequate to the moment. And it’s not like things have been getting better, has it? Everywhere, from every front, the walls seem to be closing in.
I wish I had a more cheerful way to start this post. For me at least, things aren’t too bad. I’m still employed, I’m still as healthy as I was at the time of my last post (plus a couple of stone lighter, for reasons I may get into later), and I’ve even started travelling properly again, slowly filling out that map of Europe to the point where one more trip should more or less finish it. Even so, with the moral void of Trump on one side and the utter absence of guiding principles of Starmer on the other, it’s been a little uncomfortable to be viewing the world from Ireland in the past year. Layer on top of that the continued disgrace to the world that is the treatment of Gaza and the feeling that the still-there threat of global environmental collapse has gone onto the back burner, and it’s not a recipe for a settled state of mind.
So, the world around me is not supportive of optimism right now. When I started writing this (early, to give a bit of time for editing) I was sitting at home with my mum, at the beginning of an Easter weekend when I was hoping to get to see all the members of my family, one week shy of the five-years anniversary of dad’s passing, almost five and a half years into my own treatment for a cancer that ten years ago almost certainly would have killed me by now … well, there are still good things in the world. Good people are everywhere, and the ties that bind are also the ties that hold us up when things get hard.
Out on the shore, trying to run.
To start at the beginning then, home is home. I’ve lived in Dublin more than half my life, but the eastern end of Dundrum Bay, the southeast corner of Lecale, is and always will be where I’m from. I didn’t get a car until around two decades after I moved away, but now that I have one, it’s easier by far to get back for the weekend. There’s powerful healing in being around one’s loved ones, to be by the sea and shore, to sit in familiar seats and let the day fade over the evening without needing to turn the lights on. I bring friends here when I can, because it’s something of value I have that deserves sharing. And I lose nothing in the sharing of it.
Mum remains the heart of the family, as always. A steady presence, even when pulled one way and the other by the need to help out with grandkids, whether it’s homework, lifts to and from home, and impromptu meals. I’ve never been the best at saying “I love you,” so I started to say it at the end of every video call to mum and dad a few years back. I still keep that habit. It’s worth saying it, even if it’s a known thing. Hearing it can be even more important.
Easter’s an odd time, of course. I stepped away from the Catholic Church almost as soon as I hit Dublin, and from religion in general some years after. Not angrily, though some of the causes for that departure were causes for anger too. Over time, I found my balance. Religion provides something for some that it never did for me. The why of it, I never succeeded in dissecting, and I’m not sure of the benefit had I managed it. I listened and learned and built myself an outlook that works for me, and I hope for those around me too. All those nieces and nephews are part of the school system up here, of course, so they’ll go through the same rituals I did. Who knows where they’ll end up?
I still miss dad, of course. I wanted to do something to mark his fifth anniversary, but there’s reluctance to pull people out of the new shape of their lives when so much time has passed. Wakes are for the immediate moment of grief, a gathering of the living around the sudden absence in their lives. These days, the absence is there, but it’s not a gaping hole, it’s a green patch of good memories and faded regrets. I’ll visit his grave at some point over the weekend, stare out over the bay and tell him how I’ve been and what the news is. What I miss is talking to him, but I can still fill in my half of the conversation.
Would you believe me if I said there was a stone circle at the end of this? Probably.
As for myself and my health, that remains, as I said, as positive as could be hoped. Last year I’d had a bit of a thyroid downturn, but things seem to have balanced out now, with my new array of pills and dosages keeping me on an even keel. My doctor’s visits have crept out to six weeks, and I’ve even tried running a few times (laziness is a factor here). As mentioned, I have succeeded in losing a chunk of weight, which has a lot to do with feeling better about myself and was a direct result of being told I was on the verge of diabetes given how much sweet stuff I was cramming in every day. So—sugary foods minimised, and as a result, the pounds fell off. Who knew it was so easy?
Truth be told, I’d let my health and fitness drift a bit, after the dual blows of cancer and Covid lockdowns. Hermitry isn’t an aid to a healthy life. I’m clawing it back inch by inch, still hoping to hang around long enough to avail of an eventual miracle cure. That’s assuming Trump doesn’t shut down all the research labs or sell them off to Elon to research hair replacement medications. I mean, I could do with that too, but I know where my priorities lie.
Not Diocletian, but his less august successor, Julius Nepos, the last surviving emperor of the Roman west.
Anyway, having ensured that this post will get picked up by some lowly spook somewhere, I may have come to the end of things I wanted to say. I would promise to write more often, but without looking I’m pretty sure I made that promise last time, and look how that turned out.
Oh! There is one last thing to talk about. Travel! More specifically, the two trips I’ve been on since I last wrote. Actually, I tell a lie, it’s three: thirteen months, after all. I meant to post proper descriptions up to the travel section of this site, and I still do, but in the interim some brief descriptions.
Oh, and I got to see the aurora borealis. Forgot to mention that.
Trip one, in March 2024, was to a city, a state, a site, and whatever else came after. More specifically, Barcelona, Andorra, Carcassonne, and Marseilles. It was the first proper trip I’d been on post-Covid and post-cancer, and I was a bit wary. It wasn’t easy at times, especially given my thyroid-affected tendency to sweat way too much when exerting myself (and being a bit overweight at the time) but it was hugely freeing. Barcelona was a pleasure to wander around, Andorra a fascinating oddity (with an excellent city centre spa), Carcassonne every bit as impressive as its reputation, and Marseilles a character-filled coda to a trip that outdid my expectations.
Trip two, in September 2024, was occasioned by a wedding. My cousin getting married in a Tuscan villa, and myself with an invite (mum was supposed to come but was unwell and unable to travel). The wedding was a delight, and I span the trip out into nearly two weeks of travelling: to Venice via a few hours in Florence, a day in Padua, a few days in Trieste, then over the hills into Slovenia and lovely Ljubljana, and from there into Croatia, for stays in both Zagreb and Split. The latter was a particular highlight, the centre of town being built in and around the remnants of the palace of Diocletian, one of the more storied Roman emperors. I splashed out a little more cash than usual and made sure my hotel was in the walls of that palace. In fact, if I may offer a little advice, if you’re doing a city-hopping trip like those I favour, it’s a good idea to save a little spending money to make the last stop more plush, so that you return home rested, refreshed, and positive. It seems to work for me anyhow.
Carcassonne by night. Because by day is not enough.
This year’s trip, again in March, was one of the two trips left to mainland European countries I haven’t visited. (Ukraine and Belarus being out of reach for the moment.) In this case, it was a tour of the Baltic states and Finland, which I dubbed a “Last Chance to See” tour in a moment of black humour. I started off in Helsinki, still in the grips of the fading chill of winter but with a population already dreaming of summer and willing to take any opportunity to stroll in the sun. Across the Gulf of Finland lies Tallinn, a return visit from more than a decade before, where I had a lot of fun wandering around one of Europe’s most intact medieval cities. After that it was railways all the way, first to Riga by the banks of the Daugava River, where wandering through Soviet-era architecture brought me to a trio of museums: a rickety collection of fire engines and fire brigade memorabilia, a paean to a brand of chocolates that once delighted the children of the USSR, and a tour through the cells and depravities of the KGB’s effort to keep the people of Riga down. Last of all was Vilnius, where I roamed forested hills, independent districts, and restored palaces as I learned about the history of Lithuania and the determination of its people not to lose their identity.
If you’re still here, thank you for allowing me to ramble on about my trips. Getting to venture out and see more of the world has been one of the big wins of the modern era of technological advancement and no wars between major powers. For me, Covid and cancer conspired to take it away for a few years, but the past 13 months have given it back. So that’s a victory I don’t take lightly. I hope to get back to writing properly again too, so that’s a task for the next 13 months. Will see you there, with any luck.
Spiral patterns in the paving stones of Barcelona. Feet author’s own.
The first philosophical thought I remember having (we were living in the old house, so I would have been ten or a little under) had to do with solipsism. It suddenly occurred to me that though I was aware of my own thoughts and feelings, I had no access to the thoughts and feelings of others. How could I prove that they were the same as I was, had the same interiority? (Ten-year-old me wouldn’t have used that word, of course.) What if I was the only person like this?
I wouldn’t have used these words to express the feeling, of course, and as I wasn’t equipped to resolve this particular solipsistic worry, I don’t think I dwelt on it for long. The fact is that none of us can prove that others feel or think in the same way that we do. We can infer it by observing them, but that’s as far as that goes. This missing link affects how we view humanity and why we create art. I’ll get to the art later, but let’s talk about humanity first.
Because we have first-hand access only to our own thoughts and feelings, we have to grant others equal status to ourselves in our estimation. That’s done naturally enough with family and friends, who share so much with us, and even to others like us, but there are many who we may not think of enough to even consider it. And there are plenty of examples in the past, and sadly now, of whole populations being taught to think of “others” as lesser, unworthy, unwholesome, or simply not human at all.
I was brought up Roman Catholic, and repeated many times across the lives of Christ in the gospels is the insistence that everyone is worthy of the same consideration and care, no matter their age or origin. It’s not a sentiment that survived those who came after with their legions of “You see, what he really meant was” but it’s a good lesson to learn, and many have. Despite no longer holding to that or any faith, I imagine it’s where I got the idea from.
If I hold to one belief about humanity, it’s this: we are all unique, possessed of untold abilities, and here on this planet for a limited time. If there is any purpose to our existence, it’s has to be a purpose we create for ourselves. In the decades since that first philosophical thought, the only purpose that has ever made sense to me was ensuring that we and those we share a span of time and space with feel as much joy as possible during our time together. Joy being a catch-all word for fulfilment, pleasure, tranquility, what have you.
If I believe that, and I believe that all of humanity is deserving of the same respect, then I can’t exactly be happy at the current state of the world, can I? An ongoing slaughter in Palestine, of people who have been deliberately dehumanised for decades by both the occupying power doing the slaughtering and those who are supporting and funding their efforts. A seemingly worldwide effort to push fascism as a valid ideology; fascism of course being all about “othering” outgroups and favouring violence as a solution to all of life’s problems. All against the backdrop of market-driven capitalism winding itself into its planet-destroying death throes.
Because, yes, the quarterly profit figures won’t look so good when there’s no market left to admire them. The latest folly to cross the news is that Amazon and Microsoft are planning to buy their own nuclear power plants in order to meet the wild increase in power needed to fuel new “AI” services.
Now, there’s a conversation to be had about nuclear energy’s role in a sane energy policy. But this is not that conversation, nor is it anything approaching sane. I watched an episode of Chernobyl before setting off on my current holiday, and as bad as Soviet employment practices might be, I shudder to contemplate Amazon management getting their hands on some control rods.
They’d probably let an AI manager run it anyway. That’s the point of all this. Not to provide better services to customers but to remove all human expense, to remove as entirely as possible all jobs that lie below the executive line. Perhaps AI Wrangler might remain as an entry level post in some businesses.
This is why, when the first inklings of AI burst upon the public consciousness, it did so in the form of “AI art.” Nothing is quite so indicative of humanity, of what we might call a soul, as art. Art is, after all, an effort to communicate the secrets of one heart so that another can understand it. If this AI could make art, didn’t that mean there was something at its heart? Didn’t that elevate it in worth?
Well, no and no. “AI” doesn’t understand its “art.” It’s not trying to communicate anything. It’s taking whatever instructions it’s given and matching them against the actual art it was trained on, then tossing out a guess of what the instructor wants. That’s why it’ll throw out multiple guesses, never the same twice. It’s why any factual accuracy in AI-generated text is the result of refined guessing, not innate knowledge.
AI is only half accurate. It’s certainly artificial, but it’s not intelligent by any useful meaning of that word. It’s a well-trained parrot, regurgitating phrases it doesn’t understand. The Large Language Models currently being passed as AI may have massive potential as productivity tools. But so did capitalism, and we made the mistake of letting that run everything too.
These days, I’ll gladly grant any other human being the same interiority and worth as myself. It feels to me like the best way to live. I don’t have to do that to what’s being sold to us as AI. Perhaps I will, someday. I hope we all live that long.
Health Update
Sunset over Andorra. Still plenty of light—the sun sets early in the mountains.
This is the fourth of these thirteen-monthly updates that I’ve provided. Once again, despite the nature of my initial diagnosis, I hit this arbitrary celebration in good shape. As I type this, I’m passing through a Pyreneean tunnel on a bus from Barcelona to Andorra. The first lengthy solo trip I’ve been on since I went to Chile to see an eclipse in 2019.
Covid had more to do with that hiatus than ill health, but I will admit to some trepidation. I’m not as fit as I was in 2019, and the medications I take require an extra regime of care. The cancer, thankfully, remains as quiescent as it’s been since the last update, but the new medication I shifted to in January 2023 did a number on my thyroid, resulting in swollen feet and sweating.
Medication for the thyroid has brought both under control, but dialing in the dose is a tricky matter, and it’s an issue that has to be observed over the long term. I worry a bit about my physical capability being slowly whittled away over time, but I’m still up for a day of tramping around Barcelona (with a siesta) and I’m looking forward to the cooler climes of Andorra and the walls of Carcassonne.
So as we descend toward La Seu d’Urgell, I’ll just say that I’m happy to be in good health and good spirits. I’m glad I still get to travel this way and enjoy a job that my younger self would have dreamed of. I’m less glad to be living in a world that has horrors like the Gaza Genocide and the prospect of Trump II in it, but we can work against those things. In fact, I think we have to.
So we’re onto the new edition of the Rugby World Cup. This is not an inconsequential thing, rugby being the only form of sportsball that I follow with any real attention (golf doesn’t count, not being an actual sport). It’s also a marker of the times, given that World Cups come around in four-year cycles. The last edition was thus happening at around this time in 2019, a very different world.
To speak of the local team, Ireland are coming in as one of the favourites once more. Last time, under the stewardship of Joe Schmidt, they were a little past their best, their time as world number one a distant memory, other teams having figured out Schmidt’s meticulously drawn playbook. Ireland were shocked by Japan in the group stages and mercilessly dispatched by New Zealand in the quarter finals.
This time around, Ireland look a more formidable package. Under Andy Farrell, they rebuilt towards retaking the number one spot, but this time they’ve defended it, against opposition clearly also building towards this tournament. It’s a misfortune of the draw (held, oddly, only a little after the last edition) that finds them in the same half as the three other favourites: New Zealand, hosts France, and champions South Africa, who are in Ireland’s group.
I’m watching Ireland’s first game as I’m writing this, and at this point they’ve just replied to a surprise early try by opponents Romania to the amount of three tries. Ireland remain an efficient machine, and I may get the chance to follow their progress beyond the quarter finals for the first time. If they can break that hoodoo, there’s every chance they’ll make it to the final.
It is, honestly, hard to remember the last edition of the Rugby World Cup. Held in Japan, I’d hoped to go to it but ended up on a eclipse-chasing journey to South America instead. My brother who did go to it posted to the family group this morning a picture of himself and his baby girl in matching Ireland tops. Four years ago: a different world.
We’ve had Covid and lockdowns in the interim, of course. The lunacy of Trump ended, or seemed to, and the U.K. government buried its head in the sand and screamed madness to the worms. For myself, I’ve had the ups and downs of cancer and a new job. And then of course, there’s dad.
I haven’t been to a rugby match since lockdown began. Before, I’d go to several a year, almost always with my dad. He had a grumpy appreciation of the ups and downs of sporting fortune that he passed down to his sons, and if I was the one who followed him in supporting West Brom (an even more lost cause), we all picked up a passion for Ulster and Irish rugby.
Just as Covid was first impinging on the public consciousness, Dad and I had planned a trip to Treviso in northern Italy for an Ulster away game. Northern Italy was, of course, where Covid started spreading first, and we decided it was safest not to risk it. Not long after, flights were being cancelled and lockdowns coming into place. It would have to wait.
Except it wouldn’t. Just over a month after lockdown began, I got a call from home. Dad had died suddenly in his sleep. The world was different. I made it up home for the funeral, but I had to head back to Dublin soon after. Then we all just tried to adjust and make it through the next few years.
They haven’t been bad years, in general. Quiet ones, of course, as the world got ever stranger and more perilous. There are two new babies in the family now, and there’s a wedding to look forward to later this month. Strange to be enjoying events like these without dad. Perhaps that’s what prompted this post.
I’ll keep watching the Rugby World Cup for the next month or so, of course. I’ll probably even go to a match at some point in the future. And I still plan to travel to Treviso some day and finish that interrupted plan.
It’s only half time in the match, after all, and Ireland are well ahead. Hope remains.
I don’t know where I am. This is a strange world to me, and unkind. I have no memory of how I came to be here, but in exchange for this amnesia, I have been given technology that shields me from the harsh surroundings. It is greedy for fuel, but it suffices. I can explore.
Way back in the long ago of 2016, a game called No Man’s Sky was released. Its launch was accompanied with a huge amount of hype and an equal amount of disappointment. The promise of multiple galaxies worth of exploration was undermined by a lack of things to do and procedurally generated worlds that were unique in their details but repetitive in sum. Add to that a lack of functioning multiplayer gameplay and No Man’s Sky was, at launch, a vast expanse of loneliness.
Near where I came to consciousness, I found a crashed ship. Half wrecked and unfit for the skies, it seemed an omen of a past better forgotten. I chose to leave it behind and struck out instead in search of habitation. From local plants and rocks I can keep the technology that preserves me fuelled. This world is severe, but it sustains me.
Over the next few years, Hello Games, the developer of No Man’s Sky, released a stream of patches and updates for the game that expanded the things a player could do and added variety to the countless worlds. (Thus making No Man’s Sky one of the few things on this benighted planet to have improved continuously since 2016.) And somewhere along the way, I jumped on board. I woke on a strange planet and set out to explore the worlds beyond.
This world is not untouched. I came across an abandoned facility, built who knows how many years ago. Buried in its technology, I came across a signal. Somewhere across the hills and valleys of this world, a distress signal still calls out. My existence has been graced with a direction.
Since then, it’s become one of my more-played games. I’ve explored through many updates, constructing an array of bases across many worlds, and managing a fleet of fully upgraded ships from my capital ship. I have, in other words, done pretty much everything the game has to offer. For the past year or so, I was only dipping back in whenever something new was released.
There are techniques for survival that this world has taught me. Carbon and Sodium will serve to maintain life support and power, but it is more efficient to craft fuel cells and life pods for these purposes. To do so requires delving into caves in search of rarer minerals, which also offers the benefit of temporary protection from the harsh environment of the surface. However, the caves extend for many miles and not all paths lead back to the harsh light of day.
This is the problem of procedurally generated content. After a while, you’re just going to be seeing variations on what you’ve seen before. A new gameplay loop, such as the corrupted sentinels and sentinel ships introduced in the last update, “Interceptor,” can be woven into the setting, but any narrative essentially sits on top of the game world. My bases and ships may be all my own work, but the story I’ve experienced is the same as anyone else’s.
My efforts to survive on this world are not unopposed. There are sentinels here that object violently to my plundering; robotic guardians that float in peace across the surface but gather in wrath when I transgress. I have learned to avoid their gaze and so endure. The few other aliens I have encountered have been isolated traders or scientists. I lack a language they would understand, but I have been able to trade with them for credits and equipment that might serve me later.
An answer to this dilemma recently presented itself. Watching a YouTuber’s public play session, I saw a new option for a new game: ignore the starter ship. Rather than accept the nearby crashed ship that the game directs you towards, head out into the wilderness and look for other options: follow a distress signal to a crashed ship, come across a crashed ship by chance, or find a trading post and buy one of the ships that lands there.
The distress signal that I follow is far distant, but my journey grows swifter. Scavenged technology has improved both my survival suit and my mining tool. My jet pack now carries me across narrow valleys and cushions my descent from great heights. My scanner can now detect buildings at a greater distance. Still, I must not be careless. Even with these improvements, I could easily die from a fall or neglecting my protection or sustenance.
The first time I tried this, I got lucky. A distress signal pointed me to a crashed ship only an hour’s travel away. Quite quickly, I was spacebound, trading in my scavenged ship for a pristine model and prospering across several systems. However, the sense of immersion in the world for that first few hours was so impressive, that I decided to up the difficulty. I started again in Survival mode (in which several basic technologies are unavailable at the start) and Iron Man (one life only, with the save game deleted on death). The result was interesting…
I wish I could convey to you the feeling of skimming millimetres over a ridge line, then landing soft-footed on the next peak. To clamber to the top of a mesa in order to survey the land for miles around, then cast yourself to the winds and direct your fall wherever you wish to go. To play hide and seek with implacable robotic guardians, like some scavenging imp. This world is harsh, yes, but there is joy here. Still, I have travelled for many hours and my quarry feels as far distant as ever.
This time, I started on a desert world. I quickly located another distress signal … 18 hours travel away. No problem, I figured, I’ll head that way and find another signal or a crashed ship along the way. Several game sessions later, and every distress signal pointed the same way. I’d enhanced my suit and mining tool with the technology I’d found along the way, but it looked like I was in this for the long haul.
In the shadow of a wrecked freighter, I came across a trading post. I’d gathered credits and hoped to bargain for one of the ships that landed there, but it seemed that what I owned was insufficient. Until I remembered one other thing I possessed: knowledge of the location of the ship I had abandoned. A trader in a small scientific vessel was willing to accept the prospect of salvage in addition to everything else I offered. I was no longer bound to the surface of this world.
About halfway through my trek, I picked up the signal of a crashed freighter. It was a bit of a detour but not too far away. So I ventured that way and picked over the gigantic ruin. On the way back to my route, I stumbled across a trading post. In No Man’s Sky, this is one of two kinds of places (the other being the space port that most systems have) where you can be guaranteed to encounter landing ships. I initially scavenged in the area for valuable goods to increase my credit count, but when I realised the trade-in value of the starter ship, the skies belonged to me.
I do not know where I will go now. I do not know if I have a past to discover. I do not know how far this universe I inhabit extends. But I will never forget the world on which this life of mine began.
Ultimately, once you’ve made it into space, the game’s story reintegrates with the rest of the NMS experience as crafted by Hello Games. But that first world? The struggle to survive and find a way off the surface forced me to actually engage with the starter world, to write a little story of perseverance in my own head. And that story is unique and solely mine. It’s opened my eyes, and the next time I go back to a game I feel I’ve played out, I’ll first ask myself how changing just one rule might change the narrative.
Way back in the distant past of 2000, there was a movie called Dungeons & Dragons. It was a pretty big deal at the time, with a substantial budget, plenty of flashy CGI, and a cast that included Jeremy Irons and a then-hot Thora Birch (hot in the sense of fame, for clarity’s sake). It was also, unfortunately but deservedly, a rather massive flop
Treating the fantasy trappings of the game it took its name from as an embarrassing necessity, its mix of overwrought portentousness and slacker humour didn’t work at all. D&D crashed and burned, failing to make back its original budget (not even accounting for what I remember as a substantial marketing campaign). It was enough of a flop that it could have killed off fantasy movies as a genre for a decade, were it not for the small matter of The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring coming out the next year. As it was, the D&D film series limped on with a couple of direct to DVD sequels before being put out of its misery.
Well, now we have a new D&D movie, in the form of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, and it’s coming out into a very different landscape. Not only is fantasy as a genre both more diverse and more respectable, but D&D and roleplaying are actually kind of cool at the moment, courtesy of cameos in Stranger Things and real-play series like Critical Role. And, wonder of wonders, HAT (they might have thought a little harder about that acronym) isn’t just a good movie, it’s also a riotously fun one.
Spoilers below the jump…
Sure, the film is stuffed with CGI, but that CGI is actually used to recreate elements of the Forgotten Realms setting from D&D that players would recognise, and those elements are used as functional parts of the narrative, not as embarrassing set dressing. (The beholder from the original movie can make me cringe at a distance of two decades.) As the action hops from location to location, each one is colourfully depicted and the various fantastic beasts that show up all have a good amount of heft to them.
Cleverly, the writers of the movie have hung the story on a familiar movie form: the heist. The main characters have to run a scam on a former friend and in order to do so they have to gather a team, case the joint, make a plan, deal with setbacks, collect necessary equipment, etc. Any halfway ciné-literate viewer will catch on to how things are supposed to work, and that allows them to just sit back and enjoy the ride. A ride that takes them on a whistle-stop tour of the Forgotten Realms, complete with encounters with the undead, dragons, and Red Wizards, not all of which are hindrances to our heroes’ quest.
The lead heroes in question are Chris Pine as bard and spy Edgin, who is only marginally handy in a fight and slightly better at making plans, and Michelle Rodriguez as barbarian warrior Holga, absolutely the combat specialist of the two and devoted friend to Edgin and surrogate mother to his daughter. That shared devotion provides the emotional hook for the plot, driving the heroes into and through their heist and counterpointing a personal motive against the more traditionally grandiose plans of the villains. In fact, the conflicting web of motivations is one of the strongest points of the movie: everyone’s reasons for what they’re doing are kept clear and consistent, right up to the inevitable but satisfying conclusion.
For D&D fans, there’s plenty of fun in spotting the many and varied call-outs to elements of the game’s lore, both Forgotten Realms-specific and otherwise, but what really makes the movie sing is how it uses now-recognisable elements of the roleplaying experience to enliven the action. The heist itself, with its many setbacks and impromptu plans, resembles closely many roleplaying sessions of my own experience, in which players came up with outlandish plans that got themselves into trouble (with or without the help of the dice), which they then got themselves out of via even more implausible plans. There were times in the action when you could feel the fumbles and criticals being rolled.
Special mention needs to be given to Regé-Jean Page’s extended cameo as the paladin Xenk Yendar. The “lawful-good” alignment in D&D is often jokingly referred to as “awful good” and paladins portrayed as dour enforcers of divine will, but Page brings a warmth and humour to his portrayal while still being the perfect paladin. It’s an impressive achievement and one I want to catch again on a rewatch. For many, I suspect Page will be the highlight of the movie.
All the above is only a very quick and incomplete stroll across the highlights of the movie. D&D: HAT is a surprising riot of a film, and it’s one that should manage to entertain both fans of the original game and people who don’t have the first notion of what a displacer beast is. Go see it, relax into it, and enjoy the ride.
Starting to write this while watching an extremely aggravating Six Nations match is probably not the best way to kick off a review of the past year. Better to have a clear mind, surely? To offer a dispassionate view of the past thirteen months and all that they’ve contained.
Nah. This particular repetition of the Six Nations has already caused me heart palpitations, during the epic first half between Ireland and France, so I think I can handle a ramshackle Ireland trying to avoid falling apart against Scotland in Murrayfield. Probably. In any case, I’ll provide a final score when the match gets to that point. (Currently it’s 7-8 to Ireland at 54 minutes.)
So, to my own situation. It’s actually pretty good, all things considered. As my late-year catchup post probably stated, I had a pretty good 2022 overall, despite getting caught with Covid not once but twice. In fact, the second time, coming around the end of November, presaged something more serious. The cough wouldn’t shift and proceeded to get worse. By the time an early January CT scan rolled around, I was pretty certain I knew what it was going to show.
My old friend alectinib had, after three years, decided to hang up its boots. The cancer was back on a growth path and new options were needed. Luckily there was a new candidate ready to go. Second choice it may have been, but lorlatinib was an able deputy: one pill once a day instead of four twice a day, and a new suite of side effects to take stock of.
Three months down the line from that changeover and I’m pleased to report that things are, if anything, better than they were. The cough and raspy breathing are gone, I have plenty of energy, and the side effects seem restricted to a rising cholesterol level. For which I need to take another pill. The final count on the pill front has thus halved, so I’m pretty happy, and if I get another three years out of lorlatinib, I’ll be ecstatic.
Thinker/crank Aubrey de Grey has a concept called longevity escape velocity, according to which there will come a point at which expected lifespans will be increasing so fast that that mortality itself will be left behind. There’s not much sign of that yet, but I have my personal version of “cancer escape velocity,” in which advances in cancer treatment outpace my cancer’s ability to colonise my lungs.
On that front then, so far, so good.
(The match has now ended, with Ireland winning 7-22, so add that to the good news. Six days to a showdown with England in Dublin, a Grand Slam at stake.)
As for the rest of life, no complaints and onwards and upwards. The job continues to be fascinating and engaging (and the office is walkable in good weather), and the family are all well, with the gaggle of nieces and nephews expanding in recent months by two of the former, Clodagh and Brigid. There’s even a family wedding to look forward to later in the year and Best Man duties to be executed in a fashion that suggests I might actually know what I’m doing.
It all suggests something of a return to normality, and in truth I’m even planning some travel for later in the year, Brussels this month and something new and worthy of a blog post or two around September time. I might even (whisper it), dig out the running shoes in the next week or two and see if the lungs are up to a light jog.
So everything seems to be going pretty good for me. I wish I could look around and say that the same is true for the rest of the world. While politics in Ireland seems to be running along more-or-less standard lines (which is to say, venal and dishonest on the part of the ruling power block), things either side seem to be taking a distinctly nasty direction.
The U.K., of course, remains consumed by the mire that Brexit was always going to become, and it trundles on seven years in, currently trying to heave its bulk over the largely flattened roadblock that is Northern Ireland. (Where the fundamentalist DUP have come to the end of the knots they’ve spent the last few years tying themselves in, only to find that they’ve, well, run out of rope.)
The Conservative regime, desperately unpopular and now on its fifth Prime Minister since Brexit, is reduced to culture war gestures, targeting refugees and trans rights in a desperate bid to gin up a bit of good old-fashioned hatred. Their latest efforts on this front have led to them going to war with the BBC’s Sports department, or rather its personnel, who have left work en masse rather than condone one of their number being victimised for having a public opinion contrary to that of the government.
Transphobia, meanwhile, is being used as a wedge issue by the U.S. far right—sorry, the Republican Party—as it plays its own games of hate and works to make the Hunger Games a real thing in time for the next Olympics. There’s a weird cultural cross-contamination process going on, as right-wing groups on both sides of the Atlantic spout the same talking points within days of each other, even when they’re wildly inappropriate.
The claim that “15-min Cities” were a globalist conspiracy to restrict movement may have made some sense in car-addled Los Angeles, but in much of British suburbia it’s just how life is lived. And faking moral outrage at children being brought to drag story time at libraries is a lot harder to do in a country where most children grew up watching drag performers on stage during pantomime season, every Christmas.
But logic and common sense require a firm footing in reality, and there’s precious little of that to be had these days. Facebook groups share all the poison gossip in restricted circles while Elon Musk burns Twitter to the ground in the desperate hope that someone, somewhere might someday like him. You’d be forgiven for forgetting that there’s a war on, but though Ukrainians are bleeding for Bakhmut as I type this, there’s a breed of online narcissist who’d as quickly blame them for the bloodshed.
Beyond even that, there’s the accelerating degradation of the world we live on. The increasing desperation of fossil fuel companies to extract as much wealth as they can from the planet before their business model crashes into the ground and takes us all with it. The way that market-driven capitalism cheers them on, a system for extracting value, never suited to run a society filled with complex human beings, now governing the fate of a planet. The only planet we know of that we can live on.
It’s all a bit much, and far beyond the compass of a blog post to comprehend. I can only reiterate what I have read and found to be good: that no person is illegal. To which I’d venture that no person is good or evil either. Only deeds. People are complicated and sometimes broken, sometimes by choice but more often not.
Given the option, most of us would help and share rather than hoard and compete. I believe that. I still see it regularly, even in the middle of myriad systems that encourage the opposite. Green shoots push through concrete, given time.
And if nothing else, there’s a Grand Slam to look forward to. Now who do I know might get me rugby tickets?
cerandor.com 