It's time to get the 2026 reading thread started with a vacation comfort read provoked by how much I enjoyed Pirate Borg: Stephan Talty's Empire of Blue Water, on the exploits of the Welsh privateer Henry Morgan in the 17th-century Caribbean. A light, at times slightly silly read, but plenty of inspiration for piratical tabletop gaming.

Last year, I read 89 books in total; the thread is here: https://mastodontti.fi/@mhalila/113795566419816144

My second book of the year, which was my holiday read, was the Eisenhorn omnibus by Dan Abnett. More Warhammer nonsense, some of which was very entertaining. I think Magos may be my favorite Abnett story so far.

My second book of the year, which was my holiday read, was the Eisenhorn omnibus by Dan Abnett. More Warhammer nonsense, some of which was very entertaining. I think Magos may be my favorite Abnett story so far.

I'm continuing my Paul Virilio reading project with City of Panic (2004, trans. 2005). I still can't quite decide what to make of the guy. Mostly this just feels like empty word-games to me. But there are some interesting notions in here about the manic speed and siege mentality of the 2000s West, both of which have only gotten worse.

I mean the guy talks about information warfare as war on reality, the loss of a sense of reality, and throws around capitalized phrases like the TYRANNY OF REAL-TIME, so you see the appeal.

A particularly interesting point he makes is that if the industrial age was a time of producing synchronized public opinion, the goal of the information age is to synchronize public emotion.

Whether he has anything worthwhile to say about all this is another matter entirely.

I've now read This is an Uprising, by Mark and Paul Engler from 2017. I think this is an excellent and inspiring chronicle of nonviolent protest movements and how they work, with special emphasis on the US civil rights movement and Serbia's Otpor. There's history, theory and practice, and I can think of several events in Extinction Rebellion's history that exemplify some of the things the Englers talk about.

I found this tremendously energizing and inspiring. Highly recommended.

Seeing as how this came out in 2017 and Extinction Rebellion was launched in 2018, I don't think it's a coincidence that a lot of what's in here is very similar to XR's way of thinking; they're both products of the same time and, no doubt, very similar discussions.

A key dynamic throughout is the juxtaposition of the community organizing tradition, identified with Saul Alinsky, and the mass movement idea, associated here with Frances Fox Piven. XR definitely being on the mass movement side.

It's a fruitful tension, because the more time I spend in XR and the more I learn about organizing, the more I come to believe that while it's absolutely vital for it to stay a mass movement, the fight is simply so big, and going to be so long, that we can't keep neglecting the organizing side of things.

On the whole, this has been a really good return to first principles that's also served to highlight where I think we're going wrong. Like I said, very inspiring.

Because I've seen some very lazy criticisms of nonviolent direct action on the commercial social medias, I did appreciate that the book had a chapter dedicated to what goes into choosing tactics for a movement, and what the logic of nonviolence is.

We always say that nonviolence is a privilege, in that not everyone is in circumstances where they can make use of it. Similarly, I think there are also circumstances where violence would be totally counterproductive. It's a question of tactics.

I still find that most critiques of nonviolence seem to willfully misunderstand it, but more pertinently, looking at the history of violent direct action, I just don't see what the case is for violence being somehow inherently a more effective means of social change in the kind of society we're in now.

We just had that thing where apparently some German anarchists caused a pretty big power cut in Berlin, and personally, I'm quite mystified by what that's supposed to achieve.

Anyway if you're interested in how nonviolent movements work and can bring about social change, this is a really good book to read. There's apparently a new edition coming out next month or thereabouts; I'll be interested to see if they've made any updates.

So playing Pirate Borg got me interested in pirates again, and seeing the play Kuningatarnäytelmä at the Helsinki city theater, with the amazing Elsi Sloan as Queen Christina, got me interested in Swedish history again.

When I learned that there were Swedish pirates on the Baltic, and there's a whole 19th century Swedish novel about them, what was I supposed to do? Especially when it's been translated into Finnish and can be found at the university library in a beautiful leather-bound edition.

Viktor Rydberg's Fribytaren på Östersjön was serialized in a Göteborg newspaper in 1857 and then published as a novel. It's an intensely melodramatic but highly entertaining story set in the 17th century, starring Swedish minor nobility and featuring piracy, tragic love, alchemy, a harrowing witch trial and a coup plot to overthrow the regency of Karl XI (the son of Christina's cousin).

Rydberg is, of course, moralizing about his own time, when he was heavily involved in trying to make Sweden more democratic. The way he portrays the witch trials and the cruelty and utter stupidity of the fanatical Lutheran priest Suenonius has stood the test of time pretty well, or if anything, is even more relevant now than it would have been a couple of decades ago.

Because at one point in the novel, the Dutch show up as antagonists and we're treated to a pretty horrifying account of how some Dutchmen have treated a slave, I'm tempted to repurpose a joke from Austin Powers Goldmember and say that there were two things Rydberg hated: people who can't see past their own prejudices and perceive others as individuals, and the Dutch.

(I don't think he actually hated the Dutch, I just wanted to make that joke and justify making the Dutch the villains in my upcoming Pirate Borg campaign, when the real reason is Max Verstappen)

I've been having a rough start to the year, so I needed a comfort read, and Geoffrey Roberts's biography of Marshal G.K. Zhukov is one. It's a bit thin on actual biography, but he's done what he can. There's bits you can really appreciate as a Death of Stalin fan, and while the spectacle of fascists being defeated was always a heartening one, it has extra resonance today.

@mhalila Compulsory animated gif.