dmellecker

@TODNewsHub The airport spur has always been there. They are probably just improving it. DCA has always been a great airport.

One bridge. Five worlds connected. Reagan National is quietly dropping the best airport upgrade in America. This new pedestrian link turns DCA into a real mobility powerhouse: ✅Straight from your gate to Metro ✅Straight to VRE commuter rail ✅Straight into Crystal City’s offices & restaurants ✅Straight onto the Mount Vernon Trail for bikes All connected. Zero shuttles. Zero stress. Just walk out and live your life

Ya know, if you read the numbers in reverse, The Odyssey is not doing well at the box office.

@wil_da_beast630 And how much more prep does the instructor need to do

How would this work better than a...regular blackboard?

@fesshole She said, "I know you aren't. The chances of 2 serial killers meeting in a parking lot is astronomical."

Mid-90s, walking up my street. Saw a young woman struggling to lift some heavy-looking boxes into a van. Asked her if she needed help, she said "Ah no thanks I'm OK". For some reason I then said "Are you sure? I'm not a serial killer!" The alarmed look on her face haunts me still

@fesshole Take them to different barbers.

Father to identical twin sons. Always had trouble telling them apart but I could play it off as being silly when they were small. All their teen years one's had far worse acne, but now it's finally clearing up and I'm terrified I won't be able to tell them apart again.

@bendreyfuss And there is no way any one translation impacted the movie.

I do think it’s funny that she didn’t like the movie for all the dumb reasons everyone hates academics mainly because the entire “Nolan is adapting Wilson’s feminist translation” discourse was based entirely on him having read many translations including hers

@captainrontron Oh please. He is not.

Hermes is the key of the story of the Odyssey. If you miss this, you've missed the whole point of the story.

@Th_Angelopoulos Just finishing up the poem mendelsohn translation). Thus rings true

The moral universe of these poems does not permit uncomplicated triumph. In the Iliad, the poem opens with Apollo sending a plague on the Greek camp because Agamemnon disrespected his priest. By Book 24, Apollo is standing before the assembled gods condemning excess: he calls the gods themselves σχέτλιοι (merciless) for enabling Achilles, and Achilles himself ὀλοός (destructive), his feelings οὐκ ἐναίσιμοι (not just). Apollo protects Hector's body with his golden aegis against desecration. Zeus himself intervenes to ensure the dead receive proper rites. In the Odyssey, Nestor tells Telemachus what happened after the sack. His words at 3.133: οὔ τι νοήμονες οὐδὲ δίκαιοι πάντες ἔσαν/"Not all were prudent or just". And because of this, many Greeks met evil fates through μήνιος ὀλοῆς γλαυκώπιδος, "the deadly wrath of the bright-eyed goddess" (3.135). Athena, who had protected the Greeks throughout the entire war, turned against them because of what they did during the sack. This is the world Odysseus lives in. He is πολύμητις; the most intelligent man in the poem. He understands what the gods think about what happened at Troy. He is the architect of the stratagem that made the sack and everything that followed it possible. And when the bard sings the song of that stratagem, Homer does not show us a man swelling with pride. He shows us a man who melts, who sobs so hard he blows his own cover, and whose grief Homer compares to a Trojan woman being beaten and dragged into slavery. He asks for this song himself. He asks the bard to sing the story of his greatest achievement. And he breaks down. Is he grieving for lost comrades? Sure. But this is a man who has been away from his home for too long. Ten years of a war he now calls στυγερὴν ὁδόν, a hateful journey (14.235). He knows that the gods turned against the Greeks for what they did during the sack; Nestor says it plainly. He knows what followed after what he designed: the city burned, children killed, women dragged into slavery. The tradition is explicit about what happened at Troy; Astyanax thrown from the walls, Cassandra raped in Athena's own temple, Priam killed at the altar. Odysseus did not do all of these things, but he built the horse that opened the gates, and kind of encouraged an infanticide. He is the smartest man in the poem. He lives in a moral universe where the gods punish exactly this kind of excess. And he is sitting in a foreign court, still not home, still paying the price, listening to a bard sing about the night he made it all possible. Of course he breaks. That is not a mystery. That is human. You do not need Odysseus to stand up and announce "I regret sacking Troy" for the text to be doing what it is doing. Homer does not work that way. He works through similes, through divine frameworks, through compositional structure. And every one of those is telling you the same thing. Nothing in ancient Greek world is linear. Nothing is clean. Nothing is one-dimensional. Nothing is simple. Every hero, every act, every victory carries its weight. The Odyssey is not an exception. It is one of its finest examples. Keep melting.

@_Zeets That's kinda how it happens in the poem

Odysseus and his men didn’t even get a chance to figure anything out in that island of giants. Enemies came out with pure violence. No words exchanged. It was like when you start a video game and you accidentally go into a high level area that you shouldn’t be in at all.

@TheAmericaMan1 @damespjuffy Yes. He knew that. That's also why he booked out of town. He knew civilization was endjing and he was part of the problem.

@damespjuffy The way Odysseus did it, killing all the suitors while they were in his home, was a violation of the law.

A question for Nolan Odyssey fans: Why is punishing the suitors for violating Zeus’ law treated as a violation of Zeus’ law in and of itself? Why is it a violation of the law to enforce the law? That seems like a profoundly stupid system to me.

@GrimRprGaming @PaulTassi It's a 3 hour movie

@PaulTassi Why is changing parts of the story and inserting people into it who were not part of the original writings laughable? How do they exclude Achillies from this story and that is laughable? The movie may be good, but changes like that should not happen.

Yeah, The Odyssey. As good as promised. Starts slow but you realize why by the end and the payoff is just incredible. I know CGI was used but I couldn’t tell you where (the giant soldiers and cyclops were practical). Each sequence more harrowing than the last. The complaints about casting and accuracy and all that are absolutely laughable once you see the movie. And you should see the movie

@CathyYoung63 I'm ping ponging btwn those 2 translations as well I'm audio.

Re-reading The Odyssey (switching between Wilson and Mendelssohn, lol) I am struck by how often gods, especially Athena, literally put thoughts in people's heads. (E.g. Athena telepathically suggests the bow contest to Penelope.) People complain about Nolan largely purging the story of gods but would this stuff really work? Would the human characters feel like puppets with little agency?

@daffyposting @WardoftheStates Do a sequel to RRR! My guilty pleasure movie

@WardoftheStates You might not care about foreign box office, but there's gonna be a decade of slop made for India after how well the Odyssey does there, like there was a decade of Chinaslop before. *sigh*

The issue with movies like The Odyssey is that no one is actually watching the film regardless of what the box office totals are. Thirty years ago blockbusters like Independence Day pulled in a quarter billion dollars when the average ticket was four bucks. Thats 56 million butts in the seats. Fast forward to today and average tickets are $20-$40 bucks with the frills and gimmicks and I-Max etc. With a domestic box office of $142 million only 7 million Americans watched Nolan’s adaptation. (No I don’t care about foreign box office. Foreigners don’t matter) Motion pictures are becoming a niche genre and that is the death knell for any form of mass media.

@WardoftheStates @PaqWilly Hollywood would rather have the $40 iMax customer

@PaqWilly Exactly. A $40 IMAX seat vs 10 general admission tickets from 1996 is not the same

@trojanchick99 @LunarM4x Im looking forward to people jumping off the interstate to visit Xenia, Ohio because of the movie. Odysseus couldn't escape that Hell.

@LunarM4x I mean the man introduced a lot of people to the concept of xenia which to me is incredible.

Can liberals stop defending the literal erasure of Greek history just because they want to own conservatives? Nolan is deliberately erasing real Greek history in favour of his Anglo-Saxon view of it, but because some morons got upset at Lupita suddenly this isn’t a real issue

@LEGS223 @spqr_sulla That's how I saw it

@spqr_sulla I thought she was a vision of Athena, and the beheading you see inside the gates of Troy is the statue of Athena being beheaded. But you could be right, either way it doesn't really change anything.

I forgot in Nolan’s Odyssey the gods aren’t even present. Zendaya is not really Athena. Zendaya plays a priestess of Athena who Odysseus witnessed being beheaded at Troy who then haunts him through the film

@spqr_sulla I thought, the way it was shot, that during the sack, they lopped the head off the Athena statue, and in Od's eyes, that was lopping the head off Athena herself

@SPHistoriador @acurioushensman The original poem by homer was not historically accurate!

Why? If you're going to adapt a cultural work that's central to Western civilization, and you distort it to that extent, just accept the criticism in silence. Nolan had a massive budget for this project, and this is what he ended up giving us. He wasn't even able to consult a single historian. That's just doing things half-heartedly.

Some guy who’s all about “anime and movies” and has never read any of the existing historical literature, yet draws conclusions as if he were an expert. The context of the Iliad is real. The conflict between the Achaeans and the city of Wilusa is even confirmed by epigraphic evidence.

@CmsbSpin Naw, it was when Penelope was talking to vampire guy.

Btw the best time for a bathroom break in the odyssey has a definitive answer officially for me. Right before they get to Circe , it’s about 1 hour 10 mins in, if you run to the bathroom when they see the island you will get back right about when she tells them to take off their armour

@simonsbookclub You go through literally unimaginable trials to get home,only to find a bunch of freeloaders who have helped themselves to your wealth, want to kill your son, and are trying to fuck your wife. A "Sorry guys, time to leave" ain't gonna work.

Why did Odysseus have to kill the suitors? He brings 12 ships to Troy, according to the Iliad. At an average of 50 men a ship that's around 600 men he brought to Troy. Every single one of them died either on the battlefield or on the return, and when he gets back home, he slaughters another 100 men in their prime. Couldn't he have met with Penelope, revealed himself, and then told the suitors to all go home? Yes, he could have. But he chose to continue the decimation of his people.