Fantastic Four: First (Tentative) Steps

It's over a week now since I saw the Fantastic Four movie, at the same Vue Cinema on Finchley Road where I saw Iron Man and Black Panther. I'd just arrived in London from Italy, and was enjoying some free time and mobility (living out in the country has its advantages, but the drawbacks are needing a car to get anywhere), so I took an afternoon to finally catch the movie.

There's two ways I can discuss it: first off, I can (and will) discuss it on its own, and then I'll talk about how it fits into the MCU. There are some spoilers, as usual, so read on carefully after the jump.

A Tangent on Rule of Law and Property Rights in Byzantium

This two-month trip to Europe has allowed me to finish a couple of books that have been sitting on my TBR pile for too long, among which is John Julius Norwich's Short History of Byzantium. Lord Norwich is perhaps not my favorite historian, but I appreciate his ability to put together a coherent narrative for the thousand-year history of the Byzantine Empire, even if he himself didn't add any new scholarship to the subject. He also had a nice and catty turn of phrase, which livened up the books of his that I've read.

One of these bons mots came when Lord Norwich suggested that a Byzantine emperor nationalizing a certain industry amounted to socialism, avant la lettre. He was being cheeky, given that he was no fan of socialists or communists, but his joke points to something relevant beyond his target, which is the role of property rights in the concept of rule of law.

Lord Norwich's joke was that this emperor was nationalizing the means of production by taking over this industry. I take it as a fair point, although a government doesn't have to be socialist to ignore property rights - it just has to assume that every item of property in the country belongs to the government, which in this case can be a single monarch or junta.

It got me thinking about a concept I've been turning over in my head for a while (which I acknowledge is probably old hat to scholars who study this stuff professionally), which is that you can't have rule of law without well-defined property rights. In this case, I define rule of law as the idea that the law applies equally to everyone, whether that's the king, the president or the ruling council. Property rights, for my purposes, consist of the idea that certain items or intangibles don't belong to the government.

To put it another way, if there are no property rights, then effectively everything in a country belongs to the government, and you as a citizen (or subject, I suppose), legally own nothing. The government can take your house, your car or your laptop whenever it wants and there's nothing you can do about it. This means there's also no rule of law, because if the government owns everything then the law is whatever it says it is at that time. This is indeed a pretty good definition of the legal status in autocratic empires such as Rome and Byzantium, but probably also France under the absolute rule of Louis XIV or China under its Communist Party.

On the other hand, if there's a mechanism for a private citizen to obtain legal redress from the government for property being taken away, then that means the government's powers are limited, and rule of law becomes possible. More than that, there should then also be a well-defined legal basis for resolving disputes between individual citizens. I don't know anything about Roman or Byzantine law, but despite the voluminous legal codices put together by emperors such as Justinian I, I assume there wasn't any concept of individual rights as we understand it today. This is probably also how Napoleonic France approached things, despite having sprung out of the Revolution: I suspect that Napoleon was okay with liberty, fraternity and equality as long as he got to run everything - and take whatever he wanted from whoever he wanted.

Lord Norwich's joke may have been aimed at well-heeled Trotskyites of his acquaintance, but you can also argue that English history has been a slow crawl along that continuum from absolute power wielded by the strong, whose monopoly on state violence meant that if they really wanted your land, they could take it. Documents like the Magna Carta were the first steps toward the other end of the continuum, where the monarch and the state could be held accountable for injuries to individuals, even if the individuals they had in mind in 1215 were landowning nobles and other potentates.

It's not a long distance from these concepts to our modern understanding of what governments can do with their own citizens. Prior to the Second World War and the Holocaust, international law essentially suggested that a government could do whatever it wanted with its own citizens, whether they owed allegiance to the head of state or a duly elected government. When the Nazi government decided to massacre millions of its own Jewish, Roma, LGBTQ and disabled citizens, among others, the world community essentially decided that this state of affairs couldn't stand, and built mechanisms to hold accountable leaders (if not nations) who tried to do the same.

The success of these measure is debatable, but it's notable that the debate exists at all. Apparently, when an Armenian survivor of the 1915 genocide killed one of his Turkish oppressors, there was no legal framework to mitigate the charges against the Armenian, who was tried for murder. Now it seems logical to us that a crime like the Armenian Genocide or the Holocaust should be prosecutable - even if international law scholars would point out that there's still a lot more nuance than how lay people understand this question.

Anyway, this is how my brain works - John Julius Norwich makes a cheeky comment about socialist Byzantine Emperors, and I find my way straight through to absolutist monarchies, rule of law and crimes against humanity. All of which, it must be said, are questions that run straight through Byzantine history anyway, if in different contexts to our own. At any rate, all things being equal, I'd rather live in a society where the government can't just jack my shit with impunity, because that also means the government can't just shoot me and toss me in a ditch whenever it wants.

At any rate, if a government did that to me now, one hopes there would be some debate about whether it was justified. It's a big question, and one we've been trying to solve throughout human history.

The Great European Roadtrip

On this large portion of my trip, where I've been in Italy for over a month, I've had time to consider two points: one, that driving long distances here in Italy is actually not too unpleasant, and two, that there doesn't seem to be enough travel literature that looks into that.

Listen, I'm just as obsessed with trains as the next travel nerd. I've reread Paul Theroux's Great Railway Bazaar more times than I can remember, and I've reread most of his other travel books too. Same with Bill Bryson and any number of travel writers. One year I treated myself to the Eurostar and the TGV as a way to get from London to Turin, and it remains one of my favorite travel experiences ever.

At the same time, I've recently become disillusioned with all the urbanists that I come across on social media and YouTube. This is a source of deep cognitive dissonance for me: I live in the Bay Area, where you have to drive pretty much everywhere and where it's unpleasant to do so. If Caltrain ran more regularly from my nearest station than once per hour, it'd make it more fun to go out drinking in San Francisco or San Jose - but at the same time, having a car means I can go to either city whenever I want, and can also go to a bunch of places that aren't covered by public transportation.

When I lived in London, I found it difficult to get out of the bounds of the city, in part because it meant getting on a train and figuring out the schedule and all of that. But not having my own set of wheels meant that certain parts of the country just weren't available to me: I'm sure you can visit the Lake District without a car, but it might be a lot more of a faff, or more expensive, if you're taking taxis everywhere.

I've also come around to this way of thinking in the last couple of years because I've finally felt financially secure enough to start renting cars when I'm in Italy. My family house is out in the countryside, away from rail networks and up a big hill (with a dirt road to get up to it, no less), so even buses aren't a great option - and those only come around once per hour, if you're lucky.

My dad's tried to get me to learn to drive manual transmission, which I can broadly do, but I'm way more comfortable driving automatic. This is mostly because the roads are narrow and winding and I'd rather focus on getting around than on being in the right gear. Renting cars with automatic transmissions  means I can trade off driving duties with my dad for long drives up to the mountains, or just take off on my own for an afternoon.

Coming back to my earlier point about driving in Italy, I've now had the chance to drive the autostrade, and I find that it's harder and harder to go back to freeway driving in California. The main thing is that European freeways only allow passing in the left lanes, which means you get way fewer of these cases where some jerk goes almost all the way to the left and then cruises along at 50mph. I know that if I get in the left lane, I should step on it and pass whoever I'm passing, because otherwise I'll end up with a Mercedes riding my exhaust and flashing his lights from here to Taranto.

But then there's the more actively pleasant part, which is the rest areas. Not every rest stop on the Italian autostrade is like this, but the vast majority are owned by the Autogrill chain, which means a certain consistency in architecture, facilities and food service. Stopping for lunch on our drive down to Pisa last week, I had the fried chicken sandwich with fries: instead of a soggy chicken burger and a plate of chips that had just come from under a heat lamp, the man behind the counter assembled a fresh bun, condiments and fixings on top, then lovingly placed a freshly cooked fried chicken escalope on it. He then provided a perfectly crispy portion of fries that outdid anything from McDonald's.

While it's important not to over-romanticize a meal at a highway rest stop, it's notable that in Italy, you can get decent quality food that isn't just from a large fast-food chain (at this same lunch my dad got a plate of chicken curry with rice and fresh roasted vegetables).

It's worth noting that you don't really get this quality of food on European trains anymore. I still remember a train trip with my dad in 1990, from Padua to Turin, where there was still a dining car with tablecloths and silverware on the tables. I was super impressed to be fed a cotoletta milanese and a Coke by a waiter in a white jacket, and my dad still reminds me of this wide-eyed wonderment. But if you think you're eating like this on the TGV or the ICE or the Frecciarossa, I'm sorry to report it ain't necessarily so (although business and first class on the Eurostar do feature some excellent dining).

Are trains better for the environment than a million cars on the road? Of course they are. And it's one of life's great pleasures to sit on a train and either read your book or listen to a podcast, enjoying the changing scenery and the knowledge that someone else is doing the driving. Bonus points if the scenery is great, as it frequently is when you're crossing the Alps.

But the pleasures of tooling along in your own car, listening to your own music or podcasts or chatting with your passenger in peace, are not to be discounted either. You can stop for a snack or a bathroom break whenever you want, without losing your seat or worrying about someone stealing your stuff, and when you arrive at your destination, you're right there (although you do have to find some parking, of course). And again, the car lets you get to places that the trains don't go - not only places off the beaten path or in the countryside, but you can also stop off somewhere on a whim. When you're on the train, you can see some unexpected spots from the window, but most of the time you can't get off and explore without losing your reserved seat or missing your onward connection.

Again, I'm not saying everyone should stop using the trains to get around. I'd love to see a robust public transit network in the Bay Area, if not the whole of California. If California could finally get around to building a train network that takes you from downtown SF to downtown LA, I'd adore that - and it wouldn't even need to be high-speed (although, you know, yes please to doing it in three hours rather than eight).

But also again, sometimes the car lets you have experiences that the train doesn't. Just because we're over invested in car infrastructure doesn't mean we should correct that by over-investing in rail. We should have multiple ways to get around that don't excessively prioritize dangerous and dirty modes of transportation.

If anything, what I'd really like to see is a good-quality equivalent to the Autogrill, but along American highways. Imagine stopping off for a good, not too expensive meal with access to clean bathrooms while driving down the 5 from SF to LA - it may not be as good as a three-hour high-speed train, but it sounds pretty great to me.

Unexpected Fecundity on Vacation

Given that this is my second time being between jobs, I've tried to improve on the previous bout, which was back in 2018. I had a lot more freelance work, then - scratch that, I had freelance work, full stop - but in between jobs I found it harder to maintain focus on bringing in business and taking care of other stuff I wanted to do. The main thing that I remember wishing I'd done more of was writing.

So this time, I decided to do things a little more intelligently. I built myself a weekly schedule, which broke each day into four parts similar to how I organized my time after I started working from home during and after the pandemic. While almost each day had to feature one block of time for job-hunting, I also built in a block for writing, and I've generally managed to stick to both, plus other important stuff like learning and going to the gym.

When I decided to take an extended trip to Europe I continued with my weekly scheduling, which was easier to do when I was in London and mostly on my own. It was a little more difficult in Oslo, but I gave myself a break for being officially on vacation... and I still managed to do a little job-hunt related stuff and a fair amount of writing-related stuff.

One thing that's helped keep me on track with writing has been the sequence of TV writing classes I've been taking through the UCLA Extension since last fall. I lost my job just as the first class in the sequence ended, and I've since continued plugging away at it, because I figured that at least I'd have something to show people once I finished (I'm now in possession of a Star Trek: Strange New Worlds spec script, if anyone out there wants to get me on that writing team before the show ends).

Now that I've moved on in the sequence to the part where I write my own TV pilot, I find the ideas flowing even more freely. In addition to the outline and script I'm writing for class, I'm developing a couple of ideas that have been percolating in my head for the last couple of years, as well as looking at revising a novel I was working on a year or two ago and writing novel versions of my TV pilot ideas.

It's actually been quite exciting to have so many things to keep me occupied during this time. Also, the class allows me to break up tasks in a way that deeply appeals to my methodical nature, which means that whenever I finish one component of a given project, I can just move on to the next project, knowing that I'll return to the first one the following week. Work for the TV class takes precedence, obviously, but the structure also gives me a way to break down my other stuff and devote time to work on it when I'm up to date on my homework.

The other thing that's allowed me to do so much writing is simply time. Of course I have the same 24 hours each day here in Italy that I have in California, but I also have fewer demands on my time. I'm way out in the country, so mobile internet is spotty, even with my roaming pass from T-Mobile; not only that, but the Wi-Fi in the house only reaches a couple of rooms, so I'm not doomscrolling from every horizontal surface I can lie on.

I also don't have a car, so I can't go out and do other stuff that I'd do in Palo Alto. The most obvious thing is going to the gym - though back home that got its own block of time on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so it didn't interfere with the writing. The main thing that should take time away from the writing is doing DIY work on the house, but even with that in mind I manage to carve out a couple of hours for writing and job-hunting and even some learning on Khan Academy.

Of course, I'm super fortunate. I have a pretty big emergency fund, plus I'm spending the month of August in a pretty cheap part of the world, and I'm not even paying for a hotel for the privilege. I had the wherewithal to depart for London, Oslo and Turin for two months in the first place, which not everyone in my position could have done.

There's also the fact that the freelance stuff has been singularly thin on the ground this year. When you don't have the option of doing that to earn a crust of bread, then you fill your hours with other stuff. I've just been lucky enough that I could fill my hours with writing a Star Trek script and plot out novel revisions. 

But the main point that's worth considering here is, how easy it is to get distracted from writing, or whatever else it is you think you "should" be doing. Even when you're not employed full time, your house can hold a lot of distractions, and the ability to deal with them. There must be some way to neutralize those distractions, and when I get home I hope to continue this streak of getting shit done.

In any case, the upshot is that, whatever else I remember and/or regret about this particular period of funemployment, when I look back on it at least I'll be able to say that I took the time to get serious about the writing. And hopefully that leads to something, somewhere down the line.

Oslo 2025

With the loss of my job came a lot of time to think about next steps and so forth, and not long after I had the idea to go traveling. My initial thought was a little out there: months and months away, in which I'd be soliciting freelance work and stuff. In consultation with my family and my bank account, I cut that down to two months, in which I'd spend some time in my usual spots of London and Turin. But I also wanted to take advantage of the free time that I had to do something that I don't get to do that often. 

When looking at Europe, the problem is whittling down the enormous array of stuff to see. I knew I wanted to go somewhere I hadn't been before, but the glamor of a long train trip down through France was also attractive. In the end, I decided that as much as I love the Eurostar and Paris, and that a few days in Lyon would have been nice, I'd rather go to a completely new country. Eliminating anywhere too far out of my way (like Iceland), or too small (like Luxembourg or Malta), left me with the Nordics, and so I decided on Oslo.

I'm really glad I did that.

The Radhuss, from the National Museum

I found a decently priced hotel, which turned out to be right in the center of town. The hotel itself was nothing special: the room was so tiny that in the evenings I had to move my suitcase against the front door, so that I wouldn't trip over it if I got up to pee in the middle of the night. The bathroom sink was so tiny that shaving or washing my face meant getting water everywhere. And worst of all, this being a, normally, particularly cold part of Northern Europe, there was no air conditioning - which is forgivable except that the window barely let in any air from outside, even at night.

Did I mention that this was in the middle of an epochal heatwave? I based my activities in the three full days I had in Oslo around where I could find air conditioning.

Luckily, that wasn't too difficult - major sights like the National Museum and the Munch Museum were air-conditioned (and required me to put my bag in a locker, so I got to dry out even further), and the day I went up to the ski jump at Holmenkollen it was high enough in the hills that there was some breeze, especially in among the trees. Also, walking along the harbor was a delight, because any wind coming off the water did a nice job of cooling me down.

The harbor, from the National Museum

The location of the hotel, despite my objections above, was perfect: the only time I needed public transportation was to get to Holmenkollen, but everything else was within a 20-30 minute walk. I had the royal palace just five minutes away, which I didn't catch because I was busy with other sights, and the National Museum was about ten minutes away. There was also food and drink aplenty, about which I'll speak in a moment.

The National Museum was a particular highlight for me. The first floor had a lot of Nordic design and some plaster copies of classical statuary, but the best was on the second floor, where it offered a survey of painting from the 1500s through to now, with a special focus on Norwegian painters. Among those there were a lot of good landscape paintings by Johan Christian Dahl, as well as a room devoted to Edvard Munch. In fact, the National Museum is a better place to see Munch's most famous painting, the Scream, than the Munch Museum itself (both have copies, but the one in the National isn't mobbed and is visible at all times).

The Munch Museum was also pretty great, even if I wasn't initially sure I wanted to spend a morning just with Munch's paintings. The building itself is beautiful, a 13-story tower overlooking the harbor and with views of the whole city. I could even see the Holmenkollen ski jump from the Munch's upper floors. The assortment of Munch's works was also great, though I feel like I might have appreciated a more biographical approach, seeing how his work evolved as he battled depression and drink over the course of his life.

The Munch Museum seen from the Opera House

The very first day, I went up to Holmenkollen, which was a trek because the T-Bane up there was out of service, so I got to enjoy a sweaty, crowded replacement bus service for half an hour; as an aside, I find it notable that rail replacement buses, the bane of my existence when I lived in Britain, are just as grim in Norway. As you can imagine, I took an Uber back into town at the end of the day.

The ski jump at Holmenkollen

Holmenkollen itself was nice, though - I got to walk around the hill where it's located, exploring some of the wooded trails surrounding it, and got to explore a classic Norwegian stave church. Under the ski jump was a little museum dedicated to skiing, which was nice for me to see as a northern Italian who learned cross country skiing at the same time I learned to walk.

The stave church at Holmenkollen

The food was uniformly good, whether I went to restaurants or ate a quick sandwich or focaccia at the museums. I've previously had bad experiences with food in Denmark and Sweden (or at least so unmemorable as to be etched in memory), so it's probably not too surprising that I ended up eating a lot of Asian food while I was in Oslo. But it's a good sign when a city has decent foreign food - it shows that there's a lot of openness to new stuff, which is good to see. And the city itself was pretty diverse: a glance at Oslo's demographics on Wikipedia suggests that immigrants or children of immigrants account for about 30% of the population, compared to 14% nationally.

In terms of other tourists, I was surprised to hear German as the most spoken language at all the tourist sights. There were Italians, Spanish, French and Brits, as well as a healthy smattering of Swedes and probably Danes, but it felt like wherever I went was a German, or at least a German-speaker (there were some Swiss around). The people of Oslo were themselves fairly unobjectionable, apart from their tendency to run red lights on those little electric scooters that were the plague of other big cities a few years ago. There was also the extremely drunk guy who wandered into the place I was having dinner on the second night, whereupon he announced he wanted to have sex with the waitress (I think that's what he said anyway; he was speaking English but slurring heavily).

Overall, I can't recommend the city highly enough. It might be different in other seasons, or even when the summers aren't as blazing hot as July 2025 was, but everybody seemed to be having a great time, whether tourist or local. There were people swimming at the beaches by the Opera House and the Astrup Fearnley Museum (and er, this is a good time to note how good-looking a lot of Norwegians seem to be), and the vibe felt to me like Sydney. If I was going to splurge irresponsibly on travel during this period of funemployment, then I'm glad I did it in Oslo. I can't wait to check it out again.

This good boi travelled with Amundsen, 13/10

James Gunn's Punk as F Superman

I just saw the new Superman movie yesterday, marking the first time in... gosh, years... that I've watched a movie on opening day. Of course, it's easy to do that when you're funemployed and able to hit the 3.30pm show at your local cineplex. I'm gonna write without fear of spoilers below the jump, but just in case you're skimming, my overall verdict is that this is a way better movie than we had any right to expect, and better than any other attempt this century. I'd say the original, 1978 movie with Christopher Reeves is still better, but this absolutely holds its own.

RIP Diogo Jota

Just a quick one, as I didn't know much about Diogo Jota as a person or as a player, but like everyone I was blindsided by the news this week that he'd died in a car crash in Spain. Coming so soon after Liverpool's Premier League victory, and after Jota's wedding to his long-term partner, it all feels like a bad dream.

Given that I'm not a Liverpool fan, and my knowledge of the team is based mostly on its storied history and my own travails choosing Liverpool players for Fantasy Premier League, I don't have much of a sense of him. He was certainly important, though, scoring a number of important goals over his years there. He may not have been one of the most high-profile names in a team that featured Mohamed Salah and Sadio Mane, but he was surely more than a squad player. His Wikipedia page says that he scored 47 goals in 123 appearance for the club, which is an impressive feat.

In his time at Liverpool the club won the Premier League (2024-25), the FA Cup (2021-22) and the League Cup twice (2021-22, 2023-24), while also coming in as runners-up in the League Cup in 2024-25 and the Champions League in 2021-22. At international level, he was part of the Portugal teams that won the Nations League in 2018-19 and 2024-25.

These stats are obviously just numbers and dates, and sadly, his part in the history of Liverpool, Wolverhampton Wanderers and the Portugal men's team is over, carrying with it the question of where his career might have gone. If he hadn't died, one can question if he'd ever have won another trophy (football is after all a cruel old game), but at least he'd be here to savor the ones he did win, as well as getting to see his kids grow up. His death, and the hole it leaves behind in the lives of his loved ones, is a reminder that, in Arrigo Sacchi's words, football is the most important of the least important things in life.