Back in Italy

I'm writing this from my family house in Italy, and in a lot of ways, it's been a bit of a relief being back. There are also ways in which it hasn't, like the gigantic heatwave plaguing all of Europe right now, but unfortunately this was the time that I could go, so I'm trying to make the best of it: I'm currently sitting in the living room on the top floor, in the dark, with all the windows open. There's an anti-mosquito spiral burning in one window, and a fan blowing in air from outside in another, so hopefully this is keeping the bugs (e.g. mosquitos and hornets) away.

But anyway, back to... just being here. The last time I was in Europe was May 2019, not only before the pandemic but before I met my now-ex. I turned 40 during the trip, and had two birthday parties (one in London with my mom and sisters, the other here at Brozolo with my dad and extended family), as well as taking a city break to Stockholm in between. After I got together with my ex, I planned to bring her here, and show her London and Paris too, but of course, the pandemic got in the way the last two summers.

I was still a little apprehensive about traveling, since despite what almost everyone seems to think, the pandemic hasn't ended yet. But I figured that my parents and sisters have all traveled between continents without catching it, so I could too. So I booked my flights so that I'd be away for most of the month of July, and got to planning with my folks.

One thing I made clear to my mom and dad separately was that I wanted to keep as much as possible to how I've been doing things in the Bay Area. No indoor restaurants, although I was prepared to make a couple of exceptions, and I'd wear masks everywhere. My plans changed a little at the last minute, so that I wouldn't be in Rome with my mom on this trip, which has made staying masked up even easier, because being out in the country means fewer crowds and rarely eating out at restaurants.

I also stipulated that I wouldn't be stopping by London, because masks are politicized there (almost as bad as in the US), and because it seems that government policy there is to give everyone Covid and then tell them they're on their own. More seriously, much as I'd love to go back, I think that'll have to wait until the pandemic is more under control than it currently is. In the event, I think I did the right thing because travel through the UK has been even more disrupted than in other parts of Europe.

Otherwise, things are pleasingly the same as they ever were here. My dad's put me to work on various DIY projects, and I've also put myself to work doing some cleaning and tidying, because things pile up and my dad's not the best at housework... We've gone to see relatives at their houses, and are planning on doing some day trips before I leave next week. My sister's also coming over from London this weekend.

Some stuff is frustrating, like being unable to beat this heat, but generally it's nice getting back to my routine from before the pandemic. A lot of stuff is just how I remember it, and some stuff has improved (like the internet here at home is loads better than three years ago). It's also been nice just being Italian (ish) for a few weeks, and not worrying about the usual stupid stuff I have on my mind at home.

Now that I've managed this trip (hopefully without picking up Covid, but there's still a week to go!), I'm starting to think about taking more trips. Ideally abroad, because mask-wearing is so politicized in the US that I just don't want to deal with worrying about my seat mates freaking out because I'm wearing one. It'd be nice to see some other parts of Europe, or even to get out to Asia, if they're letting Americans in. I also want to go visit my other sister in Australia, though that might be for next year, hopefully when the virus has calmed down.

It's ironic that I earn more than twice as much as I did eight years ago, when I moved to California from London, but I'm taking way fewer interesting trips than I did at that job. Of course, part of that comes from the pandemic, but I'm hoping it calms down soon so that I can get out of the house more. In part, being here has reminded me how much I missed going to bars and restaurants and museums, seeing friends and family and hopping on planes every once in a while.

It'd also be nice if I could finally manage to get out to Vancouver for that trip I promised myself back in 2018, as a reward for starting my previous job. The mini guidebook I bought then has been sitting on my nightstand ever since, so it'd be great to put it to use.

Spoiler-Filled Thoughts on Stranger Things 4

When I logged in here just now, I saw a number of post titles referring to "all this" and "this chaos", so I'm happy to report that today's post is about Stranger Things 4, which I just finished a few minutes ago, and hopefully won't take in all the politics that have been giving ulcers to people of good will all around the country.

I mentioned recently that I've stopped watching Netflix much lately, in favor of the various other streaming services to which I have access. It feels odd to say, but I've even been watching more of Paramount Plus lately - this is odd because effectively I only watch it for Star Trek.

As I noted then, this latest season of Stranger Things was the big thing that brought me back to Netflix. It didn't feel very promising at first, either, with the first couple of episodes feeling like a lot more work than previous seasons. This is notable, considering that I devoured the first two seasons in 3 days each.

Once all that scene-setting was out of the way, I found myself getting drawn in further, until I was waiting eagerly for these remaining two episodes. In contrast to Stranger Things 3, this season did a better job of expanding the universe and bringing the characters forward in time, and doing so in ways that felt organic.

One way (here's where the spoilers begin) was in separating Lucas from the rest of the gang, as in the interim he'd started playing basketball and reinvented himself. The other members of the gang who were still in Hawkins had taken up with Eddie Munson, this season's new charismatic older kid, and Nancy and Jonathan were growing apart with their long-distance relationship.

Overall, the scene-setting was necessary, given how everyone had split apart in various ways since the end of the previous season. I just thought the business at Elle and Will's high school in California took too long to resolve itself, especially considering how little it got referenced later. On the other hand, it made for a decent foundation to build the relationship arcs for Mike and Elle, and Mike and Will.

I also have a weakness for stories where an ensemble cast is split among various different storylines that get visited bit by bit over the course of a show, or episode, or comics series. So it was good to see how each one developed in tandem, and played into one another by the end.

As far as the overall plot, there's not much to say. Another demonic presence from the Upside Down, another fearsome last stand from the heroes, another set of last-minute telekinetic heroics from Eleven. What elevated this season for me was the way that, especially in these last two episodes, there was a sense of real danger for each of the characters. We had Dustin and Eddie trying to distract Vecna's bats, while Max set herself as bait for Vecna, and Hopper and Joyce broke back into the Russian gulag, while Elle had to break out of the government facility where she was regaining her powers. And so on.

The best thing is, we've seen some actual permanent outcomes. Eddie died, and Max is comatose after being broken by Vecna but saved at the last minute by Eleven. This is in contrast to last season, where Billy's death didn't seem to leave that much of an impression and Hopper's apparent death was walked back literally in the same episode.

They also seem to have gotten the emotional balance right this season, too. While I was struck by the number of heart-to-heart conversations, I was also struck by the fact that so many of them landed, felt genuine. Steve's confession of his feeling for Nancy is one example, while Jonathan consoling Will over his feelings for Mike is another. The fact that the latter doesn't directly address Will's sexuality actually makes the scene land harder, as Jonathan offers his unconditional support to his little brother.

As an aside, that subplot, along with Robin's sexuality from last season, feel a little anachronistic, in that  it's difficult to imagine a movie actually made in 1986 dealing with LGBTQ issues sensitively... at least, this kind of story. But the anachronism felt justified, especially considering how good a job the show does of showing how much the characters love each other.

In fact, that feels like an outgrowth of the thing I first praised the show for. Back in Season 1, I was impressed that the creators had actually cast age-appropriate actors for the roles. This season, it felt like that had morphed into examining how their experiences would have pulled them even closer together. The fact that between seasons Lucas and Max and others had gone off on their own felt like a wound, and the characters were able to heal those wounds as the season went on.

Pulling back from the show for a moment, the other thing that told me Stranger Things was "back" was all the critical chatter about it on social media and everywhere else. It could just be the long hiatus between seasons, but I've missed this: it certainly doesn't feel like everyone's been talking about a Netflix show like this for a while. The closest I can think of is The Queen's Gambit, but even that was two years ago. There was also Tiger King, but I think everyone was obsessed with that because we were all in lockdown because of the (still-ongoing, btw) pandemic.

In a way, that makes Netflix's recent weakness more mystifying. I'm not saying they should make everything in the mold of Stranger Things, but it's disappointing that they haven't managed to create so much critical buzz for anything else.

I'm left looking forward to the fifth and final season of Stranger Things, which hasn't had a release date yet, but also wondering what will take the show's place after it ends. In addition, given how long it takes between seasons, what's Netflix going to do until Season 5 lands? If they're experiencing a loss of subscribers now, it's not like they'll be able to hold onto viewers before then just by dripping out trailers and on-set photos.

In any case, it's nice to see Stranger Things back to its strengths, and I'm hoping Season 5 sticks the landing as well as this. Hopefully we'll get to see more good stuff from Netflix in the meantime, too.

Can We Please Have a Break from All This

I don't usually plan my topics for this blog in advance. Sometimes I find myself chewing over an idea for a while, which I then commit to paper here, but usually I get to 7.55pm on a Sunday night and have to think up a topic to write about. Some part of my brain was thinking, say on Wednesday evening, that this week's post could be a rundown of Obi-Wan Kenobi on Disney Plus.

But of course there's more important things to talk about, since Friday.

I don't know if there's any call for me to weigh in on the overall topic of abortion, because it's honestly not a thing that's touched my life (as far as I know). That said, I don't take it lightly: I even consider it meaningless for me to say that I support a woman's right to choose, because I believe that such rights are so intrinsic as to render meaningless the idea of government "giving" them or "taking them away", to say nothing of some jerk (me) supporting those rights. Same as if I say I'm "against slavery" - that's great, but in the conception of Enlightenment ideals, nobody can even be a slave.

(And don't come at me about the Founding Fathers owning slaves; the fact that we've moved away from their flawed understanding doesn't invalidate the idea that all people are created equal and deserve the same rights)

Another thought I've been coming back to recently, even before the Supreme Court's ruling, was listening to a couple of coworkers talking in the office, back around 2006 or 2007, when I was living in London. Both were gay men, and they were talking about the prospect of the Conservatives winning the next general election.

What struck me, even back then, was how they didn't (outwardly, at least) regard a Tory government as an existential threat, whereas in my lifetime the Republican Party has always been about taking rights away from people it deems undesirable. Beyond the horror of imagining losing your right to marry the person you love, or become the person you are inside, it has to be exhausting for the people most threatened by the far right to make the calculation every 2-4 years of what rights they'll continue to have, or not, after the elections in November. What I would like for America - for my friends who are LGBTQ or whatever other minority or protected group, and for all my friends who aren't - is to not worry about some party of assholes coming along and denying rights to people.

Sadly, this dream seems out of reach, since there's almost certainly some asshole out there planning to execute on Clarence Thomas's wishlist of banning contraception, same-sex marriage and consensual sex between adults regardless of their gender. Someone's probably also targeting interracial marriage, which one hopes would finally get a no-vote from Thomas, since his traitor wife is white.

The other thing that makes my dream seem out of reach is the gigantic dropping of the ball by the Democrats. As John Oliver pointed out a few weeks ago, Barack Obama campaigned on the promise to codify Roe v Wade into law, but once in office put that on the back burner. Now we've got the unedifying sight of people like Susan Collins and Joe Manchin claiming that they "feel deceived" by the three Trump justices' assurances that they wouldn't touch Roe. We've also got Joe Biden giving addresses on abortion, but seeming to take any radical actions like nuking the filibuster or expanding the court off the table.

And I do see why Democrats are reluctant to take those nuclear options: once those norms are exploded, the Republicans won't hesitate to take advantage of them once they're back in power. But when 50 years of settled law is being overturned with a stroke of a pen, from no fewer than five justices appointed by two presidents who both lost the popular vote in their first elections, and when the party they represent is gunning for even more control, then I can't think of a better time to press as many big red buttons as they can.

It doesn't even need to be those two specific options. It could even be Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's suggestion to open abortion clinics on federal land in states that are banning abortion, which describes as the babiest of the babiest of baby steps. But Biden needs to do something to show that he's president, with control of both houses of Congress, and that Trump isn't the one actually still calling the shots in America.

Because from where I'm sitting, it's clear which party's really in charge right now.

Streaming War Update

Back in late 2019 (the Before Time, as I like to call it) I wrote a blog about Disney Plus and how I didn't think it was going to kill Netflix. My thesis was that with Disney entering the fray (HBO Max and Peacock hadn't launched yet), it was going to be more a case of various services coexisting, but that I didn't see myself cancelling Netflix anytime soon.

Fast forward nearly three years, and now that I'm on pretty much all of those streaming services, my perspective has changed. At the time I said that I didn't care too much about the exclusives, but now I'm not so sure. I'm still not quite ready to cancel Netflix, but I've spent very little time on it, apart from a couple of exceptions.

So what am I watching instead? I've mentioned that I'm spending a lot of time each month checking out what's about to leave from HBO Max. I'm also keeping pace with Obi-Wan Kenobi on Disney Plus, while also finishing up the second season of Luke Cage, after it transferred over from Netflix. Once a week or so, I watch an episode of Star Trek: Voyager on Paramount Plus, after having finished the latest seasons of Lower Decks and Picard; I keep wanting to check out Strange New Worlds, but I'm reluctant to do it now because I don't want to have too many series that I'm watching at a time.

The one thing that got me back onto Netflix was season 4 of Stranger Things, though even there, now that I've finished these first few episodes I'm back to Obi-Wan and Luke Cage as my primary shows. I do have things I want to get to, including the long-awaited fourth season of Borgen, but apart from that last one none of them seems particularly urgent. I did binge season 2 of Jessica Jones before it left in March, in part because it wasn't clear that the Marvel/Netflix shows would end up on Disney Plus.

If I had to choose a streaming service to rank above all the others, it's probably HBO Max at this point in time. It's grown beyond just having HBO content, which was good but a little limited, to having a really good selection of movies and a pretty good selection of TV shows from other sources. A lot of the movies I've been watching before they disappear are from the Turner Classic Movies hub, though in a slightly more adventurous mood last night I watched Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, which sits in the Studio Ghibli hub. Thanks to its tie-up with Warner, HBO Max also has a DC Hub, which is now the home of all the DC Universe shows that I mentioned in my previous post; the best thing is that now, barring a wholesale purge of DC content, I can be pretty confident that the DCAU shows I love are also pretty safe here.

That's also an advantage of Disney Plus. Although it was nice a few years ago to have the MCU movies show up on Netflix or HBO Go from time to time, it's even nicer to have almost all of them here, in one place, along with the original shows. It also helps that these Phase 4 shows have maintained a pretty high level of quality throughout: though none has been quite as good as WandaVision, they've all had some decent parts to them, even Falcon & Winter Soldier, which was my least favorite (the story was fine, it just suffered a bit in comparison with WandaVision and Loki).

The Star Wars shows have been a little more variable in quality, though even the Book of Boba Fett has had some points to recommend it, even beyond it being a backdoor third season for The Mandalorian. Obi-Wan has divided fandom, even without the racist knuckle draggers complaining about Third Sister, but unlike Boba Fett has provided a good bridge between movies, specifically showing what life has been like in the years between Episodes III and IV. I may not whip myself up into a blood frenzy for new Star Wars like I did around the Force Awakens and Rogue One, but I'm cautiously optimistic about the upcoming Andor series.

Peacock is the one I watch least, even less than Netflix, though the presence of Premier League football on that helps it stay kind of near the others. Like my list on Netflix, there are things I want to watch (like the Office or Parks & Rec) but nothing super high-priority. I'm tempted, against my better judgement, by Yellowstone, but it might be back on Paramount by the time I get to it.

Paramount Plus is my go-to for Star Trek, though a friend has recommended the Offer, about the making of The Godfather. It's probably the most frivolous, but since there's enough Trek to keep me busy for a while to come, I'm not in a hurry to cancel it.

And finally, there's Apple TV Plus, which wasn't even on the horizon when I wrote the previous post. I avoided it for a long time, because it didn't seem to have anything, but when I received it for free after buying some Apple gear, some of the shows, mainly Ted Lasso, grew on me. I cancelled it again a few months ago, because I was focusing on other streamers, but it seems to get better every month or two, so I'm expecting to get back on it soon to check out Foundation, For All Mankind and possibly Severance.

With all this stuff to watch, my main misgiving from back then remains, which is finding time to watch it. This is one of the ways in which the streaming wars have shaken out to be a repeat of the situation when you had to have cable to keep up with everything. If you want to be up on the shows that everyone's talking about (or creating memes for, which is kinda the same thing now), you have to be on all these services, plus probably Hulu and Amazon Prime. It does seem that streaming services have consolidated into these bigger ones that have a lot of different content, rather than the hyper-focused ones of a few years ago, which is good for keeping interest (at least, mine).

The upshot, though, is that I'm a little less confident of Netflix's ability to fight off the likes of Disney and HBO. It'll be interesting to see how well it holds people's interest after the final season of Stranger Things comes out.

Tired of All This Chaos

It's been a rough few weeks for people who are sensible and moderate in words and deeds (though I'm not referring to political moderates here). The shootings in Buffalo, NY, and Uvalde, TX, have started a bunch of discussions on social media - though crucially not in the US Senate - that have become increasingly acerbic and have led to people further entrenching themselves into their own beliefs, even when those beliefs are clearly misguided.

At the same time, far-right agitators are being galvanized by laws like Florida's "Don't Say Gay" bill to disrupt LGBTQ people's lives. They claim they're protecting children from pedophiles (i.e. grooming), but as usual with the right, it's a bad-faith effort to tar their opponent with the most outrageous claim they can find. The latest one was a storybook reading at a library near here in San Lorenzo, which a bunch of Proud Boys disrupted because it involved a book about a drag show.

Leaving aside whether you think it's okay to expose kids to stuff like drag shows (and to be clear, it's nowhere near as bad as all the violence they see constantly in cartoons, comics, TV and the news), it's definitely not okay to have a bunch of adult men in vaguely military get-ups coming into their space and causing a scene. I'm heartened that the San Lorenzo Police put a quick stop to the invasion and said in unequivocal terms that such things wouldn't be tolerated. But I'm also concerned that far-right accounts like "Libs of Tik Tok" are directing extremists toward events like this (that POS who runs it shared it on her account, in the hopes that exactly this would happen).

But do you know what I'm really concerned by? The way certain elements that portray themselves as left or progressive are also enabling this kind of hate against LGBTQ people. I've been following this on UK media for a while, ever since JK Rowling mounted her increasingly ludicrous defenses of so-called "gender critical" ideology. Rowling herself is pretty progressive on other topics, and so are a number of other high-profile TERFs in UK media, but it's becoming clear that giant parts of the media there subscribe to similar ideas.

For example, I was really grossed out by a column in the Guardian from Sonia Sodha, who used to be an advisor to former Labour Party leader Ed Miliband. In the column, Sodha took up the cause of a lesbian barrister who'd been asked to delete tweets saying she didn't want to have relationships with trans women. Sodha is outraged, OUTRAGED I say, at the idea that lesbians are being forced to have sex with men - her own terminology, and it's not happening - and that... er, I guess at the idea that maybe it's not something a barrister should be tweeting about? 

There are a number of offensive things about Sodha's column: one is the way she keeps referring to trans women as "men". Another is her clear concern-trolling, given that she herself is straight. Yet another is the TERF's classic tactic of not actually backing up their statements with concrete evidence: she provides a link to a statement that "women report being banned from dating apps" for saying they want to date cisgender women, but the link actually leads to a blog post by Helen Joyce (who's recently suggested trans people should be put in camps) about this exact case. You have to scroll down about 12 paragraphs to actually find an example, and Joyce provides... one.

I normally love the Guardian, but Sodha's joined in her TERFdom by Hadley Freeman, among probably several others. In the end, they can hold their ideas, even if said ideas are wrong-headed and destructive, but it worries me when someone supposedly progressive graduates beyond just distaste for a group to following someone who advocates for their destruction. At the very least, she and Freeman could probably go write for the Daily Mail or something? They'll get a warm reception there.

(Also, yes, I use the term Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist to describe this ideology. because Judith Butler put it best: excluding trans women from feminist spaces is a radical ideology. Why is this controversial? Also, while you're at it, read Butler here as well)

To tie this into the above: the far-right is being emboldened by people on the supposedly progressive side who are using chilling language to advocate against trans people. We're already on the brink (or past the brink) of political violence becoming a part of our daily lives, and we don't need our supposed allies to open a new front and provide aid and comfort to our enemies.

Do better, Guardian.

Champions League 2021-22: What A Long Strange Trip

In a lot of ways this season's Champions League passed me by, because I really only started watching it at the semi-final round. On the other hand, that's actually earlier than I started watching either of the two previous seasons, because with WFH I've been finding it oddly harder to tear myself away from work to check out matches in the middle of the day (and because I didn't have Paramount Plus until last summer).

Yet it's been a weird one. Not in the sense that Real Madrid won it, because this is the fifth time in a decade that Real has won the tournament, making it probably Real's most dominant period since the 1950s. But it's weird because Real's path to the final involved beating the champions of France and England (PSG and Manchester City), and the current Champions League holder (Chelsea), in addition to Liverpool, who came in second in the Premier League just the weekend before. As the football podcasts and pundits noted, everybody made a big deal of Real losing in the group stage to Moldovan minnows Sheriff Tiraspol, but then they fought their way through to win the whole thing.

As I noted on social media before the final, the last time a Spanish team lost in the Champions League final was 2016, when Atletico Madrid lost to Real; the last time a Spanish team lost against non-Spanish opposition was 2001; and the last time Real Madrid lost in the final was 1981, against Liverpool in Paris. You wonder how important a stat like that is, but there does seem to be some feeling of ownership that Real has over the Champions League, which no other team seems able to match.

The verdict is also that Liverpool appeared out of sorts, not just in this final, but in the two domestic cups that they won and for the last few weeks of the league campaign. You could argue that when Real beat Liverpool in 2018, it was the triumph of skill vs will, where the cohesion and dark arts of Real won out over what English pundits like to call Jürgen Klopp's heavy metal football. By now, Liverpool have calmed down their style of play, but this time it was Real whipping themselves up into a frenzy to win.

There was also a sense that Liverpool were outplayed, despite having put more shots on target than Real. It seemed clear to me that there'd be a second goal at some point, likely from Liverpool, given how many attacks they mounted on Real's goal, but it wasn't to be... and in fact, Real could have been two goals up by the end, given that weird disallowed goal that bounced around a bunch before being overruled for offside.

In terms of dominance by the top countries, this was business as usual. In fact, despite Bayern Munich winning in 2020 against PSG, you kind of wonder if it's not time to start talking about Spain and England being the Top Two in Europe, while Germany and Italy get relegated to the second tier with France. At the very least, fifth-place France's coefficient is closer to fourth-place Italy's than third-place Germany's is to England's. More to the point, no team from Germany, Italy or France made it to the quarter-finals, while the only team not from England or Spain in that round was Portugal's Benfica, though they still lost to Liverpool.

In a season or two, the Champions League will switch to a new format, which will further entrench the main countries and add a couple of places for teams based on coefficients rather than actual league performances. This is expected to let in teams like Manchester United or someone if they have a bad season or two, though in the short term it looks like it'll benefit Dutch or Portuguese teams.

I've aired my dissatisfaction over this state of affairs on Facebook, but been reminded that no one really cares to watch the Belgian champion when they can watch Real Madrid vs Barcelona or Juventus or Manchester City. These are fair points, and it feels like King Cnut ordering the sea not to come in, but I can't help thinking that a more democratic European league system would mean that Belgian, Portuguese or Eastern European sides could afford to hold onto star players and make for better competition with the big teams. 

Also, as exciting as it is to see the absolute giants of European football play each other, ratings have declined for anything before the knockout stages, because it's clear that such match-ups aren't special anymore. Real Madrid and Barcelona already play each other twice in the league each season, plus usually in the Copa del Rey, and then potentially in the Champions League. During their pomp, there were seasons when they met five times, thanks to various super-cups and so on.

I always say it'll be interesting to see how the competition shakes out next season, but let's face it, we'll get another match-up like this one, between two fabulously wealthy teams from the richest leagues. The only hope will be that at least we get wild nights like when Real beat Manchester City in the semi-final at the last minute, having been behind across both legs.

In Praise of the History of Rome Podcast

At some point during the pandemic, I saw an author (possibly Adrian Tchaikovsky but I haven't been able to confirm) mention several podcasts on ancient history, as potential sources for story ideas. These were The Ancients, The Ancient World and Fall of Civilizations, all of which I checked out. The Ancients is a weekly show that highlights different topics and has weekly guests, so I've dipped in here and there to download episodes that particularly interest me.

Fall of the Ancients is a narrative podcast by Paul MM Cooper, in which he talks about a different empire's collapse in each episode. I've downloaded them all but so far only listened to the first, about Roman Britain. 

The Ancient World is also a narrative series, with the podcaster, Scott Chesworth, starting from the very beginning of recorded history and going through most of Near Eastern History, prior to Rome. I downloaded the whole of the first slate of episodes, which started out by doing periodic surveys of what was happening all over the world in the earliest ancient times, including in South America. I haven't listened to his other sub-series, but at some point he mentioned Mike Duncan's History of Rome podcast, which I duly also checked out.

The first thing that struck me about the History of Rome was that the episodes were super-short, at least at first. My main experience with history podcasts was Dan Carlin's Hardcore History, which regularly features episodes exceeding three, sometimes four or five hours, so episodes lasting less than 20 minutes were quite an inducement (though I should note that I do enjoy Hardcore History, length notwithstanding).

The other thing about History of Rome is that it started from the very earliest, semi-mythical origins of Rome and went through to the fall of the Western Empire. I decided a few years ago that I wanted to investigate Roman history a bit more, since what I knew was picked up from scattered (sometimes fictional) sources, and I wasn't left with any sense of how it went from kingdom to republic to empire, or really what happened after it became ruled by the emperors. I read Mary Beard's SPQR a couple of years ago, but for whatever reason very little of it stuck in my mind, whereas the short, focused episodes of History of Rome have given me a better understanding of how the empire played out following the assassination of Julius Caesar.

What's interesting is that Mike Duncan isn't an academic, but a political science major who just decided to start doing it at some point in 2007, and kept going for 179 episodes until the fall of the Western Empire. His Wikipedia page claims that he was working as a fishmonger during part of the recording of the podcast, but that he's since also served as a consultant on a Netflix series about Ancient Rome and an episode of the Simpsons. This, of course, makes him a good example of the DIY ethos that I used to love about the old Nerdist Podcast.

I'd say my grasp of the back-and-forth of Republican Rome is still incomplete (through no fault of the host), because there are a lot of names and wars to keep track of, so it gets hard to sort your Scipii from your Brutii from your Marian reforms and Sullan dictatorships. Though the fact that I now know Marius and Sulla were political rivals is thanks for Duncan's efforts.

On the other hand, since the switch to the Empire, in which he focused heavily on the emperors themselves, I've learned the order of emperors, so now I can name them all from Augustus to Pertinax. Presumably by the end will really be able to impress the ladies by naming every (western) emperor through Romulus Augustulus.

Jokes aside, it's easy to get confused about the order of emperors, since some of the craziest emperors, like Caligula, came quite early in the empire's history. By contrast, some of the better emperors came a century after Augustus, and it's been good learning about the Five Good Emperors and putting their achievements, like Hadrian's Wall, in historical context. 

This is all important to me because, being Italian, it's part of my heritage, however remotely, and because whenever I go to Rome, or really anywhere that has Roman ruins or artifacts, it would be nice to understand how those ruins or relics fit into the wider history. To put it another way, now that I know who Vespasian was, I can appreciate the Colosseum's place in Rome's history, and understand why Hadrian built that wall in northern England (which I still have yet to see, but that's by the by).

I'm still going through the podcast, having taken a quick break before the episodes about Marcus Aurelius to catch up with the rest of my podcast backlog. I expect to finish it at some point this year, though, and may pick up listening to another podcaster's sequel series on Byzantium (though that's still not complete even though it's at almost 250 episodes). I'm also considering checking out Revolutions, Duncan's follow-up.

Overall, though, I'm enjoying these bite-sized (usually under 30 minutes) episodes of a history that's always fascinated me, so I urge you all to check the show out, even if it did end ten years ago.