Orbits

I'm easily nerd-sniped, especially by the humanities. Something catches me, I go deep, it cools off, and sooner or later it comes back around. One rule runs through most of them: if something is a culturally important acquired taste, I have to acquire it.

What I'm doing currently is as of October 2026.

Reading

Kulikowski's Imperial Triumph, Abulafia's The Great Sea, and, in Latin, Ad Alpes and Ørberg's Roma Aeterna. Next: Kulikowski's Imperial Tragedy.

Mostly history (Rome, late antiquity and the steppe, lately) and poetry, with the epic tradition at the center: the shelves run from Gilgamesh to the epic of Gesar. The compilers are next to Heidegger.

The last year in books

Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, Persians
Jeremy McInerney, Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic Age (Great Courses)
Colin Elliott, Pox Romana
Mary Beard, Emperor of Rome
Mike Duncan, The Storm Before the Storm
Tom Holland, Rubicon, Dynasty and Pax
Anthony Barrett, Rome Is Burning
Christopher Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road
Barry Cunliffe, By Steppe, Desert, and Ocean 🐪
Richard Wrangham, The Goodness Paradox
David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything 🤮
David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State and Against the Grain 😍
John Kelly, The Great Mortality
Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England
Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror 🫳

And in Latin: Wheelock's, Ørberg's Familia Romana, Colloquia Personarum, Fabulae Syrae, and nineteen sections of De Bello Gallico.

The bookcases are photographed at an angle and straightened with a little linear algebra: four corners of each case fix a homography, and the camera's focal length fixes each case's true proportions.

Classics and coins

I majored in Philosophy and Classics, and the ancient world never let go. These days it's Rome above all, from the Republic to Byzantium. In college, when I called a Plotinus-loving friend Platonist scum, he called me peripatetic swine. All in good fun.

This year I started collecting Roman coins: an Elagabalus first, then a Vaballathus with Aurelian on the other side, because a Zenobia would be absurd. (She was his mother, and her coins are priced accordingly.)

Languages

Greek, Sanskrit and Chinese. Italian and Spanish are resting.

French I speak fluently. Years ago I mainlined its grammar for a month, read Le Petit Prince and then four Harry Potter books, and ended up explaining the electoral college to my italki tutor, in French. Latin came next: Wheelock's, then Ørberg, and I can recite 150 lines of the Aeneid. Since then: Italian, Spanish, Greek, Sanskrit and Chinese.

Anki keeps them all going, along with the poems I know by heart:

108,178 Anki reviews on 651 of the 679 days from December 7, 2024 to October 16, 2026; the longest streak was 155 days. Mature cards are ones I won't see again for three weeks or more.

Deck	Cards	Mature	Reviews
Latin	4,681	3,660	28,068	active
Greek	1,397	707	3,737	active
Sanskrit	2,044	623	8,097	active
Chinese	10,195	717	12,276	active
Italian	1,769	1,707	17,668	paused since May 2026
Spanish	1,559	1,498	15,777	paused since May 2026
French	87	87	711	active
Poetry by heart	75	55	1,500	active
Math	93	93	566	active

Folklore and the news

Probably The Vanishing Hitchhiker next, for bignews.day.

I follow geopolitics, but what really holds me is how the news turns events into stories, and how those stories shape what people believe about politics. bignews.day is how I look into it: it follows 145 outlets and classifies the recurring narratives in political claims, in an index grounded in folklore scholarship. Folklore isn't only in old books; it's in tonight's chyron.

Fabric

One book did it. Virginia Postrel's The Fabric of Civilization, about how much of human history went into making thread and cloth, took me from athletic jeans, Kohl's tees and flip-flops to Irish linen, selvedge denim and Montflex desert boots.

Italian didn't help. By chapter 3 it teaches stare a pennello, to fit perfectly. French wants you to be able to find the train station; Italian wants you to be able to compliment a well-cut blazer.

Food and drink

I love fine dining, and wine and spirits, especially the underappreciated ones, sherry, armagnac, Cru Beaujolais. I make a mean cocktail. The mark of cocktail graduation is being able to backfill the spec from a restaurant's ingredient list. But I'm a bit of a London dry martini snob now.

Coffee and tea

Discovering pu'er and oolong, in a gaiwan.

Pourover every day, and you can bet I grind it on a 1Zpresso ZP6 Special and brew with a small rotation of drippers. And espresso too!

Running, cycling, swimming, lifting

I run, cycle, swim and lift. My 5k PR is 22:36.

Birds

Hummingbirds.

Birds and plants are old orbits (orchids especially). This summer it was the hummingbirds at my feeders: I wanted to know how many there really were, so I had Claude build a program that works it out from how much nectar disappears.

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<section class="source"> <header class="source-head"> <a href="https://github.com/mas-4/standingwater-flat/blob/main/src/${source.path}">${source.path}</a> <span>${source.lines} lines</span> </header> <pre class="listing"><code>${source.code}</code></pre> </section>