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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23575 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026

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Cultural war and cultural revolution continues, as it should.

Revolution has a beginning, but it has no end.

And the newest battle is the most ancient, Homer's - and Christopher Nolan’s - Odyssey.

Many are happy, many are unhappy, and among the latter is world's richest man, as expected.

Elon was unhappy so much that he promised to rifle through his pockets for some spare change and give Mel Gibson $100 million to remake Odyssey in fully authentic and historically accurate way, with Greek actors and spoken in proper Homeric Greek.

Then, the next day, he changed his mind. Directors - and actors - are as obsolete as draft horses, Grok can do it all alone and cheaper.

If it happens, would it make a difference? Elite Mottizen human capital had been talking and daydreaming for a long time about potential of money to change the world. If only we were rich men!

The real life billionaire and centi millionaire activism is not encouraging but we can always dream how we will do it right!

edit: links

Back to this culture war topic: it is rather significant that there are no billionaire made and commissioned big budget movies. Cinema is art where you can spend unlimited sums of money, and for price of luxury yacht that will rust away in few years you can hire top Hollywood talent to create masterpiece that will last forever.

Not for profit, but just for fun, as aristocrats of old patronized great artists. Imagine billionaire who happens to be, as random example, 17th century boo and wants to see historically accurate Battle of White Mountain.

But, despite explosion of super wealth, no one is interested.

Is it because modern oligarchs are not valuing art for its own sake, and not interested to pour cash to enterprises that will never pay for themselves, or just lack of imagination?

Is it because modern oligarchs are not valuing art for its own sake, and not interested to pour cash to enterprises that will never pay for themselves, or just lack of imagination?

My immediate guess is that the opportunity cost went up by a lot. The places that anyone, rich or poor, can park their money in order to get more money has become larger, more diverse, and more easily accessible in the last few centuries - even just in the last few decades, really. So the relative attractiveness of spending a few hundred million USD to make a film has gone down, compared to investing that into other things.

Is it because modern oligarchs are not valuing art for its own sake, and not interested to pour cash to enterprises that will never pay for themselves, or just lack of imagination?

I suspect it's a personality difference between landed gentry and ultra-PMCs. There are definitely passion project films, but they are usually funded by filmmakers, rather than billionaires who have hired filmmakers.

I'm all for AI art but right now the state of video is absolutely godawful. Elon is completely delusional if he thinks he can make something good in a year. Than again nano-banana came out and nobody expected it (though most people are still using gpt-image-2 ... YUCK!!!)

About the movie, who really cares about "authenticity"? It's not like the story is strictly historically accurate to real events in the first place. Watch the movie and enjoy it. or don't. Whatever it's a movie. I'm not going to watch it though.

On a related but unrelated note, casting a black girl as the green girl in Wicked completely ruined the movie. Because despite being green she was just so black.

When did you last check video models? Seedance 2.5 and FLUX 3 are quite good. There are still problems of course, but I wouldn't call it godawful. I see no reason for progress to stop. In one year, who knows what we will have.

I only last checked the latest google models and gork imagine, and they're all complete dogshit.

FLUX 3

Haven't seen it before but the demo reel you shared is kind of disappointing. Not really impressed.

The real problem with the Helen casting is less that she's black, and more that she's incredibly unattractive. Now, these are correlated. I normally don't go all HBD when it's not necessary (preferring to blame culture for most issues among black people), but as far as I can tell this is not merely my subjective preference but an actual objective trait that the majority of men (including black men) agree with: black women are less attractive than white women (or women from most other races). As usual, everything is a bell curve, you can find a couple of exceptions here and there. But it's been shown in studies to be statistically significant, and more importantly you can tell just by Noticing with your own eyes. Everyone knows this except the minority of people with the opposite preference, they just assume that their own subjective opinion is contained to themselves and not universal. And even more importantly, this particular actress, Lupita Nyong'o, is not an exception. She's ugly. Everyone knows she's ugly because they can see her.

Helen of Troy is supposed to be so beautiful she started a war. If there's one time Hollywood actually needed to cast a beautiful person, this was it. The race swap is not merely historically inaccurate, it is disruptive to the plausibility of the plot. Who would ever go to war for that creature?

Lupita Nyong'o, is not an exception. She's ugly. Everyone knows she's ugly because they can see her.

Going solely by the trailers, Nolan also managed to make Charlize Theron (who is fifty and so getting older like us all) look like a dog and not the beautiful nymph who is a goddess herself. I know she's living on her own island, but I didn't imagine she'd be reduced to dressing in fishing nets.

Herodotus notably states that Ethiopia produces the most beautiful women in the world, and Herodotus is Right About Everything.

That said, I agree with you that this particular actress undermines the trope being played.

Herodotus notably states that Ethiopia produces the most beautiful women in the world, and Herodotus is Right About Everything.

Yes, especially when he is retelling second/third/Xth hand tales he heard on his travels.

When H talks about things he saw personally, he is not always reliable. For example when he traveled from Egypt to Babylonia, H was passing through Land Between River and Sea, that was at the time inhabited, as everyone knows, by wise and noble Elves Hebrews worshipping Eru Iluvatar JHWH at Laurelin and Telperion trees beautiful golden Temple with two pillars Jachin and Boaz.

Meeting people who worship only one god would be at this time like seeing real dog headed people. And H is silent, H says absolutely nothing about these wonders. Damn this Greek hater, damn him to Tartarus.

That kind of rhetoric just makes you sound like you are actually unusually racist and your beauty standards are uncalibrated (refer to the 3/10 elbows too pointy meme for further information). The actress is objectively not ugly, she easily clears most peers of her age you'd see outside, as well as many women a decade younger.

She's ugly.

Who would ever go to war for that creature?

There's no need to exaggerate. Lupita Nyong'o is not Leslie Jones.

Given that people tend to be somewhat looks-blind across race, my personal standard for black actresses is "if I were swiping on Tinder in Cape Town or Dar or Dakar, would she stand out", and Lupita Nyong'o fails that bar. But she fails it in a very particular way - she's a white liberal's idea of an Attractive But Strong (But Not Too Attractive) black woman. A couple decades ago and Hollywood would have dolled her up in a perfectly spherical afro.

Personally, I suspect she was cast because some extremely canny publicist identified her as ideal to cause controversy to drive marketing metrics, but most people aren't ready for the level of conspiracy theorizing you need to actually understand Hollywood (Mulholland Drive was a documentary).

Agreed she should not have been cast as Helen and it probably was deliberate choice to rouse up publicity via outrage, but she's not the ugliest woman I've ever seen. She's averagely attractive, and given proper hair, makeup and costuming, I wouldn't object at all to seeing her cast as Calypso, for instance.

Would you have preferred that black actress with Bette Davis eyes I keep seeing used in video games?

This is what really annoys me about the Odyssey casting. It's so clearly deliberate outrage bait. It's a classic bully tactic: make a big deal about some minor controversial issue, then belittle anyone who responds by asking why they're so weirdly invested in this little thing no one cares about, trusting that their superior social status will make everyone forget they're the ones who started it. I'd almost respect Nolan more if he had given Lupita or Elliot Page bigger roles, because that would indicate that he's just really passionate about a very particular vision for his film. The fact they're basically throwaway characters with like 11 minutes of screentime between them makes me think the controversy was the whole point.

the controversy was the whole point.

Maybe you're right, or maybe the point was making the film eligible for Best Picture.

A real baller move would have been to make the biggest film of the year and then watch everyone's confusion when they realise it isn't eligible.

I'm all for AI art but right now the state of video is absolutely godawful. Elon is completely delusional if he thinks he can make something good in a year. Than again nano-banana came out and nobody expected it (though most people are still using gpt-image-2 ... YUCK!!!)

If the theory is that in a year video generation will be on a level where you say "Grok make a movie" and it does it, then I agree. But take our current tools and a gifted artistic team and spend a year carefully prompting and editing, and I think you could make something pretty extraordinary. Even when I'm just making a joke image like "grok make me a poster decrying anti-italian discrimination" I have to re-prompt it at least four times. Once to get it to what I actually wanted, once to edit some problems, and twice to remove weird artifacts from the first two edits. For a feature length movie, you'd be prompting every scene dozens of times. Which is basically what a director does now with actors, they reshoot scenes over and over until the actors understand the prompts and the director sees what they want, and sometimes at the end they have to go back and reshoot scenes that didn't come out right or that they have to change later.

On a related but unrelated note, casting a black girl as the green girl in Wicked completely ruined the movie. Because despite being green she was just so black.

I didn't like it because they made her skin color a metaphor for...her skin color. Why not just have her be black at that point and skip the green altogether? Though my bigger problem is Ariana Grande, whose face I find disturbing. She looks, after all the plastic surgery, like a black girl wearing whiteface.

I thought it was a pretty OK movie. A lot of the dialogue was very clunky and heavy handed, especially the last line “the story will be sung to remember those of us who could read” or whatever it was, and Nolan clearly skimmed the Wikipedia on the Bronze Age collapse and decided the story was going to be a Lesson about Trump Tariffs (yes, really), which is poor form. But I liked a lot of the cinematography, I liked the sense of an adventure at a time when the world was a much larger place than it is today, and I liked the extremely ahistorical but very pleasing architecture, quasi-brutalist, of the exteriors of the palaces and buildings, especially in Troy. The plot also avoided the usual tryhard “mindfuck” quality of many of Nolan’s worst movies (Insterstellar, Inception, Tenet) where he can’t resist trying to paper over absurd plot holes with a combination of bullshit, misdirection and well akshuallies.

and decided the story was going to be a Lesson about Trump Tariffs (yes, really)

While I do believe that Nolan's Odyssey is a spiritual companion piece to Oppenheimer, since both movies are war-adjacent stories that deal with the consequences of winning a war in a way that might destroy your whole civilization, I don't really think that the timeline of Hollywood movie production makes sense for Nolan's Odyssey to be about Trump tariffs specifically. Doesn't it take years for a movie to be greenlit and made?

I would find it much more plausible that the themes of societal collapse are coming from a similar place to Coppola's Megalopolis, though I think Nolan manages to make a more enjoyable film out of the material. While I think Nolan does probably see Trump as one example of the kind of breakdown of law and order through the erosion of social norms that he's depicting in the Odyssey, I don't think the film is exclusively about that. I think Nolan sees the modern Western world as about to enter a new Dark Age, and he decided to make two movies touching on that theme.

I think it's funny that Emily Wilson and Ben Shapiro ended up having the same take: that Nolan's movie is therapeutic modernist post-christian hollywood slop that has no understanding of, respect for or even engagement with Homer's values. Ulysses without guile is pointless.

I never intended to see it and I'm comforted in my conviction. Why entertain art that has nothing to say? Why spend millions on IMAX cameras to make something with less spiritual content than an AI clip? I move that we separate Hollywood from the continent and turn it into a maximum security prison.

Jonathan Pageau has a galaxy-brain take that Nolan is playing 4D chess and is bringing a cultural Trojan horse into Hollywood and is subtly actually criticizing the things that he is apparently doing on the surface. Double inversion and whatnot...

separate Hollywood from the continent and turn it into a maximum security prison

That would be the 1996 film Escape from LA. I endorse this policy proposal.

That film is part of an amazing accidental genre of movies made out of spite by directors disgusted by Hollywood.

For another valuable entry see Cronenberg's Maps to the Stars.

Easily one of my favorite genres.

Why entertain art that has nothing to say? Why spend millions on IMAX cameras to make something with less spiritual content than an AI clip?

I wouldn't say that it has nothing to say, whether it is a good movie or a good adaptation.

Nolan's Odyssey is a little-c conservative movie, about how civilization is a result of maintaining a tradition of law and order that people can believe in, and what happens when you undermine that belief and destroy your civilization as a result.

While I do think guilt has largely replaced hubris in the movie, I think a lot of the threads Nolan is pulling on are actually in the original epic in some form. Whether it is the Cretan Lie that Odysseus tells the loyal swineherd inspiring the Sea Peoples plotline, or Achilles' speech in the Underworld (sadly ommitted in the movie), where he says he would rather be alive and a nobody than be the glorious dead warrior that he is, inspiring some of the anti-war (or anti-norm-violations-in-war) storyline of this movie. (And this is more of an Illiad thing, but Homer did a lot more to humanize the Trojans than many war movies do today. He gives the scene of Hector with his infant son, and often will give a short biography of a Trojan as he is cut down. Imagine a modern war movie showing a mini montage of a person's life every time an enemy soldier was killed!)

I liked the movie overall, and while there are scenes and episodes I wish that had been kept ("nobody", and the Phaeacians were sorely missed), I thought it was a fine retelling of the story. When the medieval world gave us things like Sir Orpheo (a retelling of Orpheus and Euridice, were she is kidnapped and taken to the Celtic Otherworld instead of the Greek Underworld, and it has a happy ending where they actually leave the Otherworld together), I don't really mind if an adaptation is unfaithful. We'll always have the original.

My hot take is that The Iliad and The Odyssey just aren't very good. I'm sure they were great works for their time, but we are so much better at storytelling nowadays. Not to mention that poetry in translation is uniformly awful.

The iliad and the odyssey are fine, but nobody wants to watch a movie of a faithful adaptation. It'd be seven hours, nc-17, and an art film all at the same time. The Iliad is better, I guess, but still.

The iliad and the odyssey are fine, but nobody wants to watch a movie of a faithful adaptation. It'd be seven hours, nc-17, and an art film all at the same time.

People watch marathons of the extended editions of the Lord of the Rings movies. I think truly epic and faithful adaptations of the Odyssey have the potential to be perennial favorites for some people.

Honestly, if I had one complaint about Nolan's Odyssey, it is more about it not feeling epic enough. Lord of the Rings mastered the art of absolutely massive battles with thousands of combatants, but the Greek and Trojan armies felt surprising small throughout the film. Not a deal breaker, but definitely a bit odd when Hollywood already had so many examples of massive fight scenes in film epics.

You know, Mrs. FiveHour watched The Big Lebowski recently, and I was struck by how much the quirked-up aesthetic has influenced everyone since, and how it must have hit when it first came out, but now it just kind of feels like everything else but a bit better.

This is true if your metric for being better at storytelling is entertainment. The attention market optimizes for that. But maximizing story entertainment at all costs is at odds with making stories that are worthwhile in other ways, and probably doesn't even increase the overall happiness derived from stories.

I think the Illiad is pretty hard to get into, but I actually think the loose adventure structure of the Odyssey actually keeps it pretty fun and engaging in the modern day.

It's part of why the Aeneid kind of sucks as well. The Odyssey-like part of the Aeneid just has worse episodes over all ("Ooh, some spooky ghost reeds say you have to go and found Rome"), or straight up retreads of parts of the Odyssey (like the guy Odysseus left behind on the cyclops island.)

Unironically they are mediocre stories and don't follow what's recognised as good modern storytelling. The iliad for example is about a month during the Trojan war, and the first 10 days of that is about a plague because Agamemnon was lecherous and wouldn't let go of a war sex slave he'd captured. The famous trojan horse story isn't even present in the Iliad, it ends before that point and just goes up until Hector is buried. Nor is the death of Achilles part of the Iliad.

It is very weird yes, and the Odyssey is only slightly better, the focus of the action and how much time is spent on different events is very weird and inconsistent according to modern tastes: Odyssesus nearly returns to Ithaca very early on in the story to the point where the people in his entourage can see it on the horizon, but then some asshole opens a bag full of stormy and dangerous winds that they have been explicitly told to never open (just put the bag tightly sealed in a chest and send it to the bottom of the ocean) and then they get blown back basically to their starting point. That bit reminded me of the Father Ted scene where Dogual presses this big red button on the airplane with a massive "Do Not Press" written right above it.

(just put the bag tightly sealed in a chest and send it to the bottom of the ocean)

Not much good to do that when you need those winds to fill your sails, just don't open the bag and let them all out at once, but of course some idiot does that.

The Odyssey makes for a bunch of great stories - tricking the cyclopes, the danger posed by lotus eating, having to pick between a rock and a hard place scylla and charybdis. There are important truths in there which can be edited and revamped for kids and teens to enjoy and learn from.

The problem is when you put it all together it is a jumbled mess that leaves you wondering what the point all is, if you're a modern person with modern sensibilities. Classicists like to study them because they provide a glimpse of what ancient people valued - how different these biologically similar people were! It's hard to believe that Odysseus didn't really seem to care that all his crew died.

Speaking of storytelling, have I ever posted my "modernism is self-limiting" take on the declining quality of art? The reason modern stories are bad is exactly because we are so much better at storytelling nowadays.

I don’t recall, but I agree, so link to it or post it!

Since the search turned up nothing, this is the idea in a gist:

Premodern people were unselfconscious creators. They drew images, told stories, played music without thinking why one work was better than the other. Memetic evolution ensured that only the best examples survived till present.

Later, people started thinking about art on a meta level. Call this change the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, or modernism, but no matter the name, people started thinking about their cultural output in terms of analysis and synthesis. What are the common traits all these stories have? Why is this image more lifelike that that one? What makes this song so catchy? Why does every culture have fertility rites? You tease apart works of art, you learn their overall structure, the nature of every link, and then you can create the best story or song or image ever by picking the best option at every stage.

This approach identifies the truth, but not the whole truth about the quality of art. This is why, when you consciously maximize the quality of each part of your movie, you first end up with Star Wars, and then with a summer blockbuster. Can you make a better movie than the latest capeshit? Sure you can, but you can't do it by consciously following the same blueprint.

Postmodernism is the highbrow answer to this problem. Instead of trying to write a 99.99% perfect story to top a 99.9% perfect story, you simply write a story that is deliberately, obviously imperfect. You take the same blueprint that everyone uses, and remove something previously considered load bearing. Bam, you've masterfully executed the blue ocean strategy, your work of art is now completely novel and novelty is as good as quality these days.

Where does this leave us? Our only hope is people that don't know what they are doing, that don't follow existing paths or deliberately tread on the grass. They simply create what they want, and the result might be a point in the space of possibilities that is both good and hitherto unexplored! Can art theorists come up with a new theory that lets us identify these points in advance, some kind of TRIZ for art? I don't know, but I want to see them try. If they succeed, we'll be able to use AIs to create truly novel and good art, instead of them trying to climb the same mountain of modernism as humans.

Related: my opinion that GRRM's failure to end ASOIAF undermines his positioning the work as a critique of Tolkien. You can write the beginning of an interesting story that deals with "Aragorn's Tax Policy" and the grimdark of a fantasy setting...but you can't write the ending, because a satisfying ending to the work GRRM began is impossible, it's ultimately sterile in that way.

You can write the beginning of an interesting story that deals with "Aragorn's Tax Policy" and the grimdark of a fantasy setting

Yes. The peasants of Gondor are revolting due to heavy taxes, and the protagonist, hard working King's tax collector, desperately tries to explain to these dumb rednecks that Sauron is real and is really coming with giant orc horde.

I think the natural ending is "Winter comes, the civilisational cycle for the humans on Westeros goes into decline and the non-humans take over and expand into that niche, and for however long it lasts this is how it goes".

How the warmer lands fare in that, I don't know (because I haven't worked out the geography, geology, and the entire rest of the worldbuilding). Probably something like a massive, centuries-long Ice Age that means humans can only live in a small band of what is now temperate climate territory, until the stellar orbit swings round again to gradual thawing and civilisation advancing again.

Of course, that's the SF-style explanation à la Brian Aldiss, and Tolkien managed to work out what a year in Middle-earth would be (can't remember where I read it, but he mentioned somewhere, or maybe Christopher Tolkien put it into History of Middle-earth, how he worked out the Middle-earth year/Númenorean year to be just slightly better than our Gregorian measure) , but Martin apparently says it's all to do with magic? Which makes it an even shittier explanation in the light of him going off (admittedly a jokey line) about tax policies. So he's writing grimdark Low Fantasy ripped off from his notion of the Wars of the Roses, but it's also post-apocalyptic in some fashion since there's references to lost higher tech with survivals from the past, which puts it in science fantasy territory, but he doesn't bother explaining anything (unless this is all tucked away in notes from decades past) so it's all put down to magic which doesn't seem to have any particular basis in his worldbuilding (is it the gods? natural force similar to non-magical energies like electricity? spirits? deals with the Devil?) and seems to come down to "whatever Martin wants it to mean, so it lets him have dragons but religion is just priestcraft").

R. Scott Bakker did a spectacular work as a critique of Tolkien in a very dark fantasy setting. The ending was fine, if depressing. I think this is just a GRRM problem as an author.

I disagree. Joe Abercrombie did it (and then he wrote three superb follow-up spinoffs, and then for an encore he did it again). I think you could argue Tad Williams did it before Martin ever put pen to paper.

I think the actual problem is that GRRM is just undisciplined and demoralized (and tbf, if I was in his position I would be as well), having written himself into a much more pedestrian corner involving too many loose plot threads rather than anything to do with the thematic aspect of his work. Another problem is that GRRM isn't actually all that grim dark. ASOIAF can be quite cynical and/or "realistic" at times, but it is shot through with a heavy strain of romanticism and that undermines critique-of-Tolkien angle. He can't square the circle between what he wants to write and what he has written thus far implies.

Another problem is that GRRM isn't actually all that grim dark. ASOIAF can be quite cynical and/or "realistic" at times, but it is shot through with a heavy strain of romanticism and that undermines critique-of-Tolkien angle.

Yeah, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms really made me take a step back and realize that GRRM is actually incredibly idealistic as an author. He kills off characters like Ned Stark or Baelor Breakspear, in order to show that in the long term their values are actually correct and will ultimately win out in the end, even if it might take a long time in the broken world they inhabit. They serve almost as "martyrs" for honor, virtue, and honest dealing, and inspire their successors (the Stark kids, and Sir Duncan) to carry on their values to victory.

I think he had an idea, back at the very start, of what he wanted to do and where he wanted to go. Worldbuilding is not his forte so he didn't stress too much about "how do seasons/dragons/magic work?"

Then as he went along over the years, he started writing side-quests and new characters (because I do think he gets bored trying to stick to the outline) and that meant he wrote himself into several corners, with no idea how to get out of them, and the original ending is now badly outdated but he can't create a new one because he's tangled up with too many plot threads and new characters.

He did give an unmerciful hostage to fortune with that crack about Aragorn's tax policy, even if it was meant as a joke, because dude. You can't even figure out how your damn seasons work, and that's more important than tax freakin' policies. He was trying to say he would be more realistic (translation: write the smexy with rape and incest and bare boobies all over the place and also gory violence and torture, just like Real Adult Writing) than Tolkien's work, but that only works if you the reader need descriptions of bare boobies and gut-ripping every five pages or you get bored.

a satisfying ending to the work GRRM began is impossible

I don't think so. Quiet Flows the Don, to take another epic novel, doesn't have a big climax, it fizzles out, but this is thematically appropriate and I don't mind the ending. Sure, GRRM has set up too many plot lines to resolve them all in a satisfying way, but that's a failure of this specific approach, not of his critique of the war as a noble struggle of good vs evil.

I think to some extent it does undermine the critique. The contrast asks the question: ok, cool, smart guy, you can critique the noble war made by noble warriors, the noble men obedient to and believing in a noble king, but can you come up with something better? You can critique, but can you build? Which approach is better if one can build an ending, and the other cannot?

One thing about the casting that I have seen very few people commenting on is just how weird the ages of all the actors are. I understand there are 10 years of war, then 10 more years of travel, but Matt Damon as a 40 year old at the beginning is not plausible, he only seems aptly cast for the end of the movie. Also why is he older than Agamemnon? Why is his wife so much younger than him? Did he have a child bride, knock her up then go off to war?

Did he have a child bride, knock her up then go off to war?

.... Based? I weep for what we have lost

My understanding is that ancient Greek marriages usually featured men in their 30s and women in their mid-teens, so a 15-20 year age gap. If that were the case for Penelope and Odysseus, she could have been in her mid-20s when the war ended and in her mid-30s when he finally returned. A woman of 35 wouldn’t be every man’s ideal partner, but a woman of 35 who also happens to be queen? That’s a different story. Plus remember that they’d been courting her for years by the time Odysseus revealed himself.

I think you must have misread something, since your comment just restates my own, at least as far as Penelope’s age goes.

If Penelope was much older than 40 then it wouldn't make sense for her to have so many suitors.

A ten year age gap is plausible. Matt Damon is 55 and Anne Hathaway is 43. If Odysseus left for Troy when he was 30 and his wife was 20, then he would return when he is 50 and his wife is 40.

If Penelope was much older than 40 then it wouldn't make sense for her to have so many suitors.

Typically when this is acknowledged it's explained in one of two ways:

  1. People lasted longer then, among the heroes it wouldn't be unusual for her to still be beautiful and fertile at 40 or 50

  2. This is precisely what makes the suitors evil, that Penelope is old/infertile, their intention is purely negative, to marry her and become king of Ithaca, but not to produce anything.

People lasted longer then, among the heroes it wouldn't be unusual for her to still be beautiful and fertile at 40 or 50

What is the mechanism of action here? They didn't have sunscreen or dentists

The mechanism would be that it was in the Mythical Heroic Age between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age.

Olive oil.

They didn't have sunscreen or dentists

Dentists aren't as important when tooth decay is almost a non-issue due to the limited quantities of sugar in one's diet.

Magic? Idk similar to whatever mechanism by which the heroes in the Iliad frequently toss large stones at each other "such as would take five men to lift in these degenerate times."

It's pretty well attested in mythology from China to Israel that the earlier generations of humans were longer lived and generally better than the modern breed.

The reason for this belief is particularly funny in hindsight. The Ancient Greeks had enough rudimentary archaeology to know that the civilisation whose ruins they were building in used bronze for metal tools and weapons by default. Now bronze is a lot more expensive than iron, so the Greeks naturally thought that a society that routinely used bronze must be richer than one which normally uses iron - rather than the truth, which is that they lacked iron smelting technology, and therefore had a lot less metal altogether because if they couldn't afford bronze they went without. So once you have established that you are living in the Iron Age, which is poorer than the lost Bronze Age, you assume that humanity is in decline and the Bronze Age was preceded by a Silver Age and a Golden Age when gods walked among us.

Whereas actually humanity was on the ascendent, and the Bronze Age was preceded by the Stone Age.

Weird, I haven't seen an unreconstructed "Ancient people's believed myths because they were just so fucking stupid" just-so story in the wild in a long time. Because that's just, like, your opinion, man.

Alternatively you have the "Greek Dark Ages" explanation, that there was a distinct and observable reduction in level of organization and civilization in Greece between the collapse of the Mycenaeans and the rise of the Polis, and that the myths stem from shepherds living among ruins they couldn't build, seeing script they couldn't read or write, knowing these kings fought wars with chariots.

Or the Jungian Ishmael explanation, that the universal myths of Golden Ages and great long-lived heroes of the past are archetypal stories of the distinct downshift in health, lifespan, and quality of life that resulted from the shift to agriculture. It is agricultural humanity's preserved ancestral memory of older nomadic peoples who were taller, stronger, tougher, and longer lived than the early agriculturalists.

Or you could just say that nostalgia for a lost golden age is a universal of human society, present even in those times and places that we call Golden Ages now, and the narrative of infinite human progress is an oddity of the Enlightenment period lasting until WWI, briefly lit and quickly extinguished.

But no, it's definitely just a weird quirk of metallurgy and the myths are stupid because ancient humans were stupid.

Or the Jungian Ishmael explanation

I prefer to think that the collective unconscious is accurately remembering Atlantis.

Oh neat I didn't know that - thanks for sharing

I suppose this is fair, just Hathaway is "40" in a way only enabled by the modern age.

Mostly I feel for most of the timeline Damon is way too old. Sure, in some ways he looks good for 55, ripped and the like. But he honestly strikes me as old for 55 for most of the shots. Its like the RFK problem

i hope he follows though and I hope it's good. I hope it makes a lot of money and more people start doing stuff like this. While I don't expect AI films to fully replace Hollywood (at least not in the near future), I expect them to seriously increase competition and offer a great indie alternative.

I do expect AI to mostly take over for adding CGI effects in actual Hollywood though. CGI is just too prevalent and too expensive for them not to do this once the tech is good enough.

I'm convinced that half of movie watchers must carry around a blindfold and earmuffs because holy shit Grok absolutely can not do it. Literally just freeze frame 11-12 seconds in and it is awful. The rowers in the back are all facing the wrong direction and the oars don't even touch the water. He's presumbly at the front of the ship and yet the sail is being blown in the other way, unless he's at the back of the ship in which case the wake is in front. I've also seen claims that the wheel type is achronistic and the armor is a mix of Greek/roman designs but can't confirm those. Although of course it shouldn't be of question anyway here because why is he wearing his armor on the boat?

Either way take almost any complex scene and you can spot these basic and obvious problems. No movie is perfect but if someone is talking about historical accuracy as their goal, it should actually have basic details right.

The average movie goer without the pause button on hand wouldn't notice because all the shots are like 2 seconds long at most.

Disagree. The average Twitter user may not notice, because we browse with half of our brain. Our mind is already on the next reel.

In a theater with all distractions gone and a giant screen you're way more likely to catch these things.

It's all moot though, it'll get to fidelity at some point.

Low effort trolling even by your standards. AI can be more directionally on vibe than the 'real movie' even if having AI hallmarks

So you're willing to defend even telltale AI slop as long as the political motivations are directionally correct? That actually seems like much more of a new low (of tribalist decay) even by the standards of American right-wingers. We had people push the "right=beauty, left=politically aligned ugliness" angle in the context of anime fanart only a few top-level posts ago, which would come to seem rather hollow if your attitude takes root.

AI is fine as a medium of expression and creativity. Within decade this will just be the latest iteration of 'digital art' doesn't count and I'd prefer to see an AI take on something I think is a worthwhile idea than human hands gently crafting something meh

But right now, as the poster you were responding to rightly pointed out, the results are bad. You can hardly call it a "medium" either, any more than Uber Eats is a medium for your culinary expression and creativity.

'Haha you have drafted something that would normally take a skilled professional 3 weeks of effort to approximate but the fingers are kinda weird (and that's never happened before in artistic medium), it is slop'

You witness the natural result of technical skill's cost being reduced to near zero: it is no longer valued and instead what matters to people are the subtle details of the work and its provenance (or less charitably, how prestigious its origin is).

And it is slop, the author objectively paid very little attention to creating it, including the parts that he could and should have affected.

It's like it's the dawn of photography and you have taken a picture of something unremarkable with bad composition and shit lighting. Sure thing, an artist would have taken more time.

No piece of media is perfect, and that's often not the point anyway. Writers simply don't care about accuracy that much, and they never have, there's a reason why Artistic License is a very common trope on tvtropes. Even things that try to be more realistic feeling often compromise for better story/visuals/gameplay/etc depending on the genre, like Kingdom Come Deliverance. Sometimes even because true historical accuracy feels wrong to the average person.

For example from the KCD tvtropes page itself

Artistic License – History: For the average player, the game is well-researched barring some minor issues. Meanwhile, historians and scholars have commented, criticized, and published studies about it's bigger inaccuracies despite promoting the game as being realistic and historically accurate so much that it has its own section in the Other Wiki. The historical consultant for Warhorse Studios eventually gave a presentation which downplayed the game's commitment to historical accuracy, stating that it's meant to be a game at the end of the day. To note some specific examples:

But that's ok, because Nolan's The Odyssey is aiming to be a movie you want to watch first and foremost. KCD is aiming to be a game I want to play first and foremost, just like the consultant apparently said.

If your goal however isn't the entertainment or sales, but historical accuracy? Then you're gonna get graded way harsher on your mistakes there.

I'd love for an Iliad or Odyssey film made by Robert Eggers in the same style as the Northman. With an attention to detail on historical and mythological realism, and a healthy mix of supernatural occurrence/doubt of the supernatural mixed in.

That's funny, I was just thinking the same thing. I think the Northman's style would be perfect for the Odyssey

In retrospect I think a lot of the discourse and disappointment is just people confusing Nolan's autistic focus on "realism" in the sense of shooting everything he can with practical effects for an Eggers-style autism about capturing the vibe/mentality behind historical stories.

I have to wonder if I just disappointed myself here by assuming Nolan was ever going to do something like The Northman. Where was the evidence for that?

Some scenes of the Odyssey did seem to deliberately pay homage to Northman IMO, then immediately zigged back towards the milquetoast modern stuff.

I would not care if the ghost of Roger Corman rose out of his unquiet grave to make a schlocky version of the Iliad or Odyssey, just somebody please give me a movie full of the burning Mediterranean sun and bright colours, and armour that looks like armour not "the costume department bought in a job-lot of black leather-type material from a closing down sale of fabrics manufacturer" or "soldered together a load of tin cans".

You can make the script as modern-day relevant as you like with Menelaus going to therapy over his PTSD and Clytemnestra being a Strong Independent Woman, I don't care, just no more "everybody schlubs around in unbleached fabrics and earth tones in the cloudy grey rocky nowhere". Give me colour, embroidery, jewellery, armour, brightness, dazzle, the golden world of the past in mythology!

I don't care if they cast Lupita Nyong'o as Helen, but let her appear as this Helen:

Now when they saw Helen coming upon the wall, softly they spake winged words one to another: “Small blame that Trojans and well-greaved Achaeans should for such a woman long time suffer woes; wondrously like is she to the immortal goddesses to look upon. But even so, for all that she is such an one, let her depart upon the ships, neither be left here to be a bane to us and to our children after us.”

Worst part to me was taking out the Nobody dialogue with Polyphemus. One of the big Odysseus highlights gone for no reason

Worst part to me was taking out the Nobody dialogue with Polyphemus. One of the big Odysseus highlights gone for no reason

I also missed "Nobody", but I don't think it happened for no reason. Because Nolan's film is about Odysseus being responsible for the Bronze Age collapse, due to the break down of norms the Trojan horse gambit caused, he couldn't let Polyphemus talk because it muddies the waters of what xenia/sacred hospitality/Zeus' law means in the film, by having something negative related to it that doesn't trace back to Odysseus' "original sin" of the Trojan horse.

I mean they let Polyphemus talk in the prayer bit which was bizarre since it both had Polyphemus directly addressing Poseidon as his father which shit on the vague agnosticism of the rest of the film, and it established that he could talk.

IMO scene should either have been totally mute Cyclops or the whole thing. Plus the sheep tying situation just kinda comes out of nowhere since it's never established the cyclops is either intelligent enough to check nor that they've got a system beyond sprint for the exit.

To be fair, it's hard to make that pun work in English, and Nolan's script seems to be rubbish (if I go by reports); at least, he can't write/hire someone to write dialogue.

It's still like one of the iconic Odysseus moments and giving the Cyclops actual dialogue does a ton to set the tone.

According to my Greek teacher, most other cultures with their own versions of the Cyclops legend had the trickster character claim to be called "Myself" so the Cyclops ended up screaming "Myself has hurt me" and getting just as little sympathy as if "Nobody has hurt me", and Homer changed it in translation because one form of the Greek word for "Nobody" rhymes with the word for "cunning" which Homer consistently uses to describe Odysseus.

So the Brad Pitt Troy, basically.

Haven't seen that one because I can't take Brad Pitt as Achilles seriously, but that at least does seem to have tried to stick to the story. I'm more interested in Hector as a lead character in the Iliad anyway, because he's not a psycho like Achilles (could be read as) and he's a decent guy caught in a trap because of his no-good younger brother.

Haven't seen that one because I can't take Brad Pitt as Achilles seriously

Are you kidding me? He looks like a statue of a Greek god come to life, with a face carved out of diamond by angels and a head adorned with luscious threads of golden sunlight; he was perfect for the role!

It's the starlet problem; I know he can probably act if given a chance (he was good in Fight Club) but he's too good-looking to be taken seriously as a proper actor. It's unfair, but I get the impression (mistaken or not) that he's cast because he's good-looking and a Star and will get people in to watch the movie regardless of what part he plays or what it's about.

Only advantage is that being a guy, he will have a longer shelf life in his acting career than a comparable woman who might be hot and a Star but will age out at a relatively young age and not get the lead roles any more (exceptions being the likes of Meryl Streep who has proven acting chops).

Funnily enough, I am finding this with Ryan Gosling, an actor I never previously paid much attention to (and thought he was too old for Ken in the Barbie movie, but so was Margot Robbie as Barbie); however, after seeing him in Project Hail Mary I am begrudgingly going "okay, now I see it".

I strongly recommend the book Song of Achilles, which focuses on the Achilles x Patroclus relationship. I found the book so compelling on an artistic level that I consider it canon.

that at least does seem to have tried to stick to the story

Not sure I'd agree. It completely cuts out any of the supernatural/divine elements, condenses the Trojan War into like two weeks (most of which is Hector's funeral), kills like half the cast in the opening engagement (IIRC Menelaus and Ajax die almost immediately), and takes sides much more overtly than the Homeric narrative. It is explicit that the war is a power play by Agamemnon, with Helen's abduction merely as an excuse, and there is not a whiff of the extensive honor culture that pervades the Iliad. Also, the dialog is terrible - apparently written by Benioff of Game of Thrones fame - and the all-star cast can't save it.

(Hilariously, Nolan was tapped at one point to direct Troy, but was passed over.)

Again, I'm only going by reviews and clips, but Nolan also seems to pin the rationale for the Trojan expedition as Agamemnon taking the chance to break the Trojan trade monopoly under the excuse of avenging his brother's honour. So there is definitely a modern take percolating through modern versions.

My point is a) Troy is a bad movie b) it has the exact same aspect of projecting modern sensibilities onto the Homeric narrative. You cannot complain about Nolan's Odyssey lacking fidelity to the source materially and then turn around and praise Troy for sticking to the text.

I'm not praising Troy for sticking to the text, I'm praising it for looking, or at least trying to look, like it's set in Ancient Greece with some idea of the arms and armour. No, they also fall for the black pleather look at times as well, but it's not all "we shot this in a Scottish wood with everyone wearing black unless they were the Giants whom we put into anachronistic faux-mediaeval tin cans".

You can give me an adaptation that has Penelope complaining to her besties about how "he never writes, he never phones, he never even sends me a dick pic anymore" just so long as she looks like the Queen of Ithaca and the sun shines on blue waters.

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Hector (played by Eric Bana) basically is the main character for any parts shown from the Trojan perspective. The movie isn't high art or anything, and it takes some liberties with the story, but it seems better than what Nolan just put out at least. Also Peter O'Toole is great as King Priam.

It's a pretty decent and well cast movie. The beach storming scene is a favorite of mine.

Related to this topic: Rotten Tomatoes manipulating review scores.

There's now a website account for the change the website made in around 2019, where it started weighing the scores towards ticket buyers through a phone app.

Odyssey was heavily featured as having a 97% Audience score on RT, but a 60% score when adjusted for the 2019 changes. More specific info can be found in the 'More Info' tab.

It's kind of crazy to me that this is spawned from /r/KotakuInAction . Old dogs continue to bark.

Ugh AI Slop. Can't stand the aesthetic. Can't stand every single sentence having multiple AI tells. The entire thing is vibe coded with literally zero oversight into the methodology or rigor. Just ignore this. Get it off my timeline.

The lede being buried here (per the actual KiA post) is that the 60% "adjusted" score is based on something like one tenth of the votes in the "official" score. About 7000 people voted on the app, and overwhelmingly liked the film. About 800 people voted on the website, of whom ~56% liked it. That really doesn't sound like "the people's true opinion is being suppressed", but just like a "a small contingent of people cared to give the movie a rating even though they didn't have the app/watch it in a way the app registers; many of that select set didn't like it". You could argue for the greater validity of the combined score, which amounts to 92% or so; but considering the 56% sample the most valid one is just wishful thinking that none of the right-wing set would stand for if the political valence were flipped (small subset of special users that might not even have consumed it likes a thing that's considered right-wing much less).

I wanted to believe in manipulation as much as anyone, but this is weak. It really looks like Nolan has cracked the code of making the modern audience turn out for woke remakes, and team anti-woke is huffing copium.

Related to this topic: Rotten Tomatoes manipulating review scores.

Would be a big deal if true, let's see what the alleged manipulation is.

"Before 2019, RT made you work to rate a film. You logged in, found the page, and submitted. So only motivated fans bothered.

After 2019, RT switched to a "PUSH" system. Ticket apps like Fandango ping you after the show. ONE TAP on 1–5 ⭐, and you're done"

That doesn't sound like manipulation, that actually sounds like a better system. You want to get an idea of what the general public believes, you poll the general public. Push notifications with easy reviews is how you get the casuals to tell you their opinion. Plus it being from the ticket apps means they're all inherently confirmed viewers too which helps to mitigate culture war shenanigans and review bombing.

Most movies having a negative "popcorn gap" should be expected, we know with all sorts of feedback systems that they skew away from normal users and towards complainers and the more friction there is the more the skew tends to be.

How do you explain a positive “popcorn gap?”

Rare occurances where for some reason the selection effect of "people who bother to write a review" are more positive than the casual viewer. I imagine it'll be heavily correlated with preexisting large fanbases.

Would be a big deal if true

Why? Few would notice, and those that noticed would be ignored. To they extent they're not ignored, you'd have a good chunk of people coming up with arguments for why it's not true. Even if it somehow came out that it definitely is true, people would just shrug, like they did with the "far right conspiracy theory" of shadowbanninf on other social media.

Doesn't sound like a big deal to me.

It would be a big deal if actual manipulation could be shown and proven, particularly if it happened constantly and wasn't just a one off like "oh this reviewer got caught in a bribery scandal".

The big issue is that most of the time when people claim to find something like that they're wrong and everyone knows it's wrong and stupid so they get ignored. Like this right here, where the site is alleging manipulation as the bailey and then retreating to "it's just that they're polling the normies now instead of self selected users on the website" as the motte is not going to win anyone over.

It would be a big deal if actual manipulation could be shown and proven, particularly if it happened constantly and wasn't just a one off like "oh this reviewer got caught in a bribery scandal".

You're just repeating the original assertion, not explaining why you believe it's true.

The big issue is that most of the time when people claim to find something like that they're wrong

I disagree. People claimed that social media was shadowbanning and limiting their them based on their politics, it was called a conspiracy theory, and ended up being 100% true for multiple social media platforms. People thought Google is deranking independent websites, people like you called it conspiracy theory, and it turns out to be 100%, and so on, and so on...

Manipulating algorithms you have power over is completely normal. Your insistence that it would cause any sort of scandal strikes me as extremely naive and baseless.

You're just repeating the original assertion, not explaining why you believe it's true.

If the right can rally around scandals as first world problem as "a beer brand did a promo with a trans tiktoker as part of their plan to recruit more customers" and "the mnm is less sexy" then certainly they could rally around greater scandals. The issue is, those scandals, as silly as they were are at least true. Bud Light did do a promo with a trans tiktoker. The MMM could be considered less sexy.

So if it was real, we can either ask ourselves "do right wingers really care about more jerking off to candy than rotten tomatoes manipulating review scores?" or consider that there's so little meat in the claim that no one can get it taken seriously. I proposed the second, they aren't manipulated just because of a 2019 change to increase poll responsiveness among casual viewers.

I disagree. People claimed that social media was shadowbanning and limiting their them based on their politics, it was called a conspiracy theory, and ended up being 100% true for multiple social media platforms. People thought Google is deranking independent websites, people like you called it conspiracy theory, and it turns out to be 100%, and so on, and so on...

Manipulating algorithms you have power over is completely normal. Your insistence that it would cause any sort of scandal strikes me as extremely naive and baseless.

Or consider that just like the false claims of manipulated review scores, these also lack anything actually substantial to rally around so everyone cared more about sexy candy.

"It turned out it was true all along" is one of my favorite type of arguments however. I hear the same thing from anti vaxxers, how it's finally been proven that they're dangerous and cause autism or whatever else. It happen constantly, 20/20 vision has finally validated all the conspiracies and the microchips that Bill Gates implanted into you are going to activate anytime soon. Ok fine the soon doesn't come, but it's been proven even more now! Yes, your low quality evidence belief is validated by further low quality evidence, but it's clearly not that convincing to the general population. People who have low standards for proof can't grasp why everyone else won't care about their "proven" worries.

If the right can rally around scandals as first world problem as "a beer brand did a promo with a trans tiktoker as part of their plan to recruit more customers" and "the mnm is less sexy" then certainly they could rally around greater scandals.

It's not a greater scandal. Websites secretly manipulating their algorithms / whatever results they present is completely normal now.

Or consider that just like the false claims of manipulated review scores, these also lack anything actually substantial to rally around so everyone cared more about sexy candy.

Ok, let's consider it. In a world where these claims are completely false, I don't expect to see Twitter moderator frontend screenshots getting leaked with accounts being tagged with terms like "search blacklist" or "trends blacklist", and for external tools that check whether an account was shadowbanned to exist, or Google API documentation leaks that show that in their ranking algorithm they keep track of attributes they deny have any relevance (including one literally called "smallPersonalSite".

"It turned out it was true all along" is one of my favorite type of arguments however.

Yes, it's a great argument! Whether we're talking about the dual wielding Scottish girl having been sexually assaulted by migrants all along, Imane Khelif being a man, transgender medicine not being based on sound science, and the most renowned pro-trans medical association being fully aware of it, and deliberately hiding the fact, the "It turned out it was true all along" argument is popular as it shows how little regard for facts self-styled "anti-conspiracists" have.

It's not a greater scandal. Websites secretly manipulating their algorithms / whatever results they present is completely normal now.

If this was true at all, why does the accusation of manipulation against RT have to be so dogshit? If it's normal, certainly there would be better proof than "they started polling the normies"

Ok, let's consider it. In a world where these claims are completely false, I don't expect to see Twitter moderator frontend screenshots getting leaked with accounts being tagged with terms like "search blacklist" or "trends blacklist", and for external tools that check whether an account was shadowbanned to exist, or Google API documentation leaks that show that in their ranking algorithm they keep track of attributes they deny have any relevance (including one literally called "smallPersonalSite".

It's very easy to conceive of them as anti spam bot/impersonation/algorithm manipulation etc measures that you would deploy in order to help hide how fast (and in what ways) you detect them while still not allowing them to deteriorate the typical user experience. This is a pretty common sort of thing in video games for instance, ban waves of cheaters and hackers so they don't know what triggered it.

I imagine basically every single mainstream social media site has such mechanisms (as they are all the constant targets of spam bots and other such malicious use) and thus the existence of them alone doesn't mean much.

Yes, it's a great argument! Whether we're talking about the dual wielding Scottish girl having been sexually assaulted by migrants all along, Imane Khelif being a man, transgender medicine not being based on sound science, and the most renowned pro-trans medical association being fully aware of it, and deliberately hiding the fact, the "It turned out it was true all along" argument is popular as it shows how little regard for facts self-styled "anti-conspiracists" have.

Funny then that so many of your examples are still highly debated, even in conservative circles like Khelif. It's so weird how Algeria, a Muslim country with extreme anti LGBT policies to the point that you are probably woke compared to them, does not agree she is "a man".

But yes, this proves all the conspiracy theories are true after all. Vaccines do cause autism, Charlie Kirk was killed by Israel, and a 2019 change to poll casual movie watchers by RT was actually a secret plan by their woke seers to cover for The Odyssey actually failing. In retrospect, they've all been proven because conspiracy theorists have incredible track records.

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If it turns out that a rather banal culture war event about a mainstream Christopher Nolan film is what compels the creation of the techniques and tools to generate feature-length Hollywood-quality (in the sense that someone presented with that film and an actual Hollywood film has no better shot than a coin flip at guessing which one was the actual Hollywood film) films using AI tools, it would be a pretty hilarious result. Like how Will Smith's name will be forever immortalized in the annals of history as the guy whose depiction of eating spaghetti became a de facto standard AI video generation benchmark.

Speaking of which, back in ye earlye dayes of Stable Diffusion in 2022, Emma Watson had become a de facto standard benchmark for AI photo-like image generation, but I think that was abandoned a long time ago, to the extent that I think she won't be remembered for this. I haven't heard much about Watson recently or really, after Beauty and the Beast live-action remake, which is like a decade old now, and so perhaps 2022 was getting close to the end of her run of popularity, riding off the Harry Potter wave.

IMDB says she hasn't done much after that remake. One thing opposite Tom Hanks, and a Little Women remake, and a short film to try directing, and nothing for the last 4 years. Wiki makes it sound like she didn't want to say she'd never act again but she was sick enough of it not to sign up for anything that wasn't at least "get to work with Tom Hanks" level.

Little Women remake

Based on my limited knowledge of Emma Watson, she seems like a... less than stellar choice for that, just from a "personal view fit" level.

I hope he does both. The Matter of Troy offers an infinite canvas for reinterpretation, and I'd love to see a firm effort from a Grok lead AI team to build a new version. Every work on the Matter of Troy, including Homer, is an interpretation, a new artistic spin on a series of events. The Greeks and Romans fought endlessly about Agamemnon: heroic leader or jackass who would get cucked while he was away and murked upon his return? Odysseus, charming trickster hero, or villain set for the inner circles of hell? Paris, romantic hero or kidnapper?

Odysseus, charming trickster hero, or villain set for the inner circles of hell?

Dante puts him in Hell, no questions asked. I think he is an interesting character; he's clever, and he wins the war for the Greeks through stratagems not the heroic epic battle prowess of Achilles (whose end is to die young in a blaze of glory, more or less, but only for personal glory).

He doesn't want to go to the war in the first place, and is entangled in it by an ironic twist of fate (or karma coming to get him) because of his ploy back at the start to keep the peace between the warring suitors of Helen and make them all swear to come to the defence of her husband, whichever of them got picked as her husband. He wins the war by a series of shady to dishonourable tactics, and really does only want to get back home (he spends seven years as the sex toy of Calypso, weeping on the beach by day longing to get away before being dragged to the bedchamber at night).

When he does get home, it's not the triumphant return of Agamemnon (which got him killed in revenge), it's another trickster move and finally he kills all the suitors in the proper, heroic warrior, style (though very blood-soaked, and his hanging of the maidservants reads uncomfortably to modern eyes).

Some of his troubles he undoubtedly brought upon himself by being too clever for his own good (or not taking the long-term consequences of his deeds seriously enough, at times he's really just "get out of this immediate pickle and deal with the fall-out later") and it was only by having the patronage of Athena that he survived at all.

Do it, make a realistic Odyssey. I want more conservative-morality, gritty media.

Complaining about a problem without advancing a solution just wastes your and audiences’ time and emotion.

I want more conservative-morality, gritty media.

Nolan's Odyssey is arguably little-c conservative. It's about how breaking down the traditions that uphold law and order can lead to the collapse of a civilization.

The original Odyssey isn't really "conservative", so much as it is pagan and bronze age morality. There are a few scenes that really stand the test of time, like the shade of Achilles' lament that he would prefer to be alive and a nobody instead of being a glorious dead warrior, but it's got a lot of stuff that even most modern conservatives probably wouldn't go for. (Like, would they be okay with him cheating multiple times on Penelope?)

Have you read the Odyssey? It's protagonist centered morality, full of sex and violence, with an approach to the progression of time that isn't particularly keyed to modern sensibilities, and it spends most of the plot in fantasyland.

I want more conservative-morality, gritty media.

Conservative morality of Late Bronze/Early Iron Age? Why not, if you want to retvrn, retvrn all the way back!

Well, all the way back we have European literature for, any way. But was that first-ever literature conservative for its time? Asked that way the question practically answers itself, no?

"There will be no epic poems written down in this house, young man!"

"You just don't get it! I'm going to Coroebus's! His dad lets him recite Gilgamesh!"

There will be no epic poems written down in this house, young man!

We have written evidence of the criticisms of writing down stories and wisdom, as opposed to personal oral transmission.

Any and all kinds of morality. I want more diverse media in the real sense of "diversity".

In St. Johnsbury, Vermont, a town of 7k, there is the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum. It was founded by an industrialist who was part of a family who got wealthy thanks to industrial weighing scales and I imagine 0% of the public in the US has heard of the guy (his brother also founded a museum that is in St. Johnsbury). Even so, the place is astounding. It has so many collections and so much stuff that it's impossible to process it all in a day. It would take many trips to really grasp everything that the Athenaeum has. You could spend hours just staring at this Bierstadt painting of Yosemite (it's 10' by 15'). These brothers were not wealthy to the level of Carnegie, Morgan, Rockefeller, etc. and yet they spent money to build museums and collections that are still amazing 150 years later.

In contrast, the current richest man spends his time complaining about stuff on Xitter and proposing to have a computer make a movie.

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Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


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