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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

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.