It was a while since I had watched Peter Jackson’s 2001-2003 Lord of the Rings Trilogy. I last saw Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers in 2021. My distaste for Jackson’s Denethor (an enduring stain on the third film) means you have to go back to Christmas 2016 to find my last viewing […]| A Phuulish Fellow
Completed reads for August: The Shadow of the Torturer, by Gene Wolfe Absinthe: The Green Goddess, by Aleister Crowley A very quiet reading month. Real Life got in the way a bit, and I just couldn&…| A Phuulish Fellow
6 posts published by strda221 during August 2025| A Phuulish Fellow
Hitherto, my posted Chess content has involved oddities played against Martin the Chess Bot and Worstfish. But today I can report a ten-minute rapid game played against a human. Played on a Guest account at chess dot com (so thus unrated), it stands as a monument to the madness inherent within the game of chess. […]| A Phuulish Fellow
In January and February 2025, I started a review of C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books… but only managed the first four: I hadn’t forgotten. I had just become distracted. As one does. But I can now continue the series, with a look at the The Voyage of the Dawntreader and The Silver Chair. The Voyage of […]| A Phuulish Fellow
I feel I am in a race against time with these Latin-to-English translation projects. Working through them while the window of free public access to AI is still open. As I have noted before, I don’t think the LLM-incarnation of AI is viable in the long-run, what with the costly energy issues and the issue […]| A Phuulish Fellow
My trend of 2025 being about Dusting Off the Old Stories continues. As noted previously, stories that have sat around forgotten for years are finally getting their day in the sun. Or are earning themselves a re-print. Well, today, I can report that my 1700-word fantasy-horror piece, Fleeing to the Dawn, has been accepted by […]| A Phuulish Fellow
A few days ago, I posted the first English translation of Pope Stephen VI’s Letters: I also noted that the Letters are utterly mundane and administrative in nature, rather than centering on t…| A Phuulish Fellow
Completed reads for July: I have now read the complete Ovid. His stuff in exile is powerful, even in translation, but dear god is it depressing. In terms of writing this month, it was very much a case of dusting off and re-editing texts that had been sitting forgotten on my hard drive for years. […]| A Phuulish Fellow
Hitherto, my hobby of using AI to translate previously-untranslated Latin texts has focussed on fairly meaty material. Stuff that requires months to check and edit. Well, today I thought to mix it up. The Epistolae et Privilegia of Pope Stephen VI (896-897) are a small handful of documents – so much so that I was […]| A Phuulish Fellow
As you might have noticed, I have picked up an additional hobby. Translations of old Latin texts that have never before appeared in English (or in anything else). In April and May 2025 I finished work on texts by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Pope Victor III: Today I can announce the completion of a […]| A Phuulish Fellow
Completed reads for May: The Tale of the Two Lovers: Euryalus and Lucretia, by Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (Pope Pius II) Germany Must Perish!, by Theodore N. Kaufman A very quiet reading month. I w…| A Phuulish Fellow
One occasionally runs into the question of what J.R.R. Tolkien would have thought of George R.R. Martin. For years, I had a go-to online answer: we could use a stand-in. Tolkien’s thoughts on…| A Phuulish Fellow
