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Notes -
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
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.
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?
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.
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
ElvesHebrews worshippingEru IluvatarJHWH atLaurelin and Telperion treesbeautiful 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.
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