iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

One of those things that comes up every year. But with the film I’m now the guy to ask among my friends, so it’s coming in handy again.

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Can’t imagine spending all these years teaching Homer in translation without it

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Area Man @pthibodeau.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

Yes “poem about Odysseus” in its most literal form. Various possible sources for his name, including some older/variant forms (see other replies), but it seems his name converged with the hate word in some way

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In Ionic poetry his name has the 'd', and it looks like his name has something to do with hate. But in early west Gk. inscriptions his name has an l followed by s's or t's. (hence Latin Ulixes, w/ l). Some scholar, name I forget, suggested the scar (oule) story was prompted by west Gk. 'Olyttes.'

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John Ma 🇺🇦 @nakhthor.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

It’s probably older bc of variant Oliseus >Ulixes

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I’m too tired to write this up but I got these screenshots together for a private chat and thought I’d just leave them here and you can work it out yourself. last one is from Wilson, I love that translation and this choice in particular

Tumblr post “did the name Odysseus already exist”

Yes there was a Greek word that his name seems to relate to

The word even appears in bk 5 of the odyssey

And Wilson does a really clever job with it

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Los Angeles Review of Books @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

Nolan’s Odyssey is a gift to anyone teaching myth, Homer, vel sim this fall. But I’m interested to hear how folks make that pitch. The course where they read the odyssey is required of all first years here, but it’s not a classics dept course, so it’s not immediately clear we can recruit off this

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"My field of scholarship had become a legal and criminal minefield." Arabic Literature professor Huda Fakhreddine on seeing herself unfortunately reflected in "Law and Order": lareviewofbooks.org/article/law-ord…

A screenshot of a woman testifying in Law and Order

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Kyle Cheney @kyledcheney.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

It’s a fun spectacle and I get angrier about how stupid it is the more I think about it, which is on me for thinking about it

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NEWS: The Trump administration has activated a secretive and never-before-used legal process to quickly deport foreign nationals deemed to be “alien terrorists” or their immediate family members. w/ @joshgerstein.bsky.social www.politico.com/news/2026/07...

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Jonathan @jsench.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

If you've heard me talk about booklabs at any point over the last decade you've heard my bitter anger over a Vice Provost's shortsighted decision to shutter & give away our legendary campus press. A bunch of us never forgot. In 2027 Silver Buckle Press comes home. education.wisc.edu/news/silver-...

education.wisc.edu

Silver Buckle Press returns to UW–Madison, expanding hands-on learning for students

After nearly a decade at the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum, the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s historic Silver Buckle Press is returning to campus, under the ownership of the Art Department ...

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Joseph Howley @illdottore.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

A guy in the thirteenth century wrote an extra book for the aeneid to give it a happy ending en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maffeo_...

en.wikipedia.org

Maffeo Vegio - Wikipedia

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Joseph Howley @illdottore.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

ok wait in the flashback to the conscription lottery is there a roster or something? I’ll look when I see it again

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Joseph Howley @illdottore.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

Not a scrap of Linear B in the film and he had the chutzpah to make Matt Damon say this

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Ryan Boyd @ryanboyd.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

We (faculty at USC) took on an institutional behemoth with all the money and clout on earth, and we WON. We won our union. We're the biggest private-university faculty union in US history. Trying to make people care about this, challenge level IMPOSSIBLE

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Helena Fitzgerald @hellafitzgerald.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

reread Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey today and you know what’s pretty fucking great is the Odyssey, thanks Christopher Nolan for this magnificent experience (me reading a book in my house)

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It would have been way more interesting

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Josh Fruhlinger @jfruh.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

O is a very good man, and a wife guy to boot, he is guilty only of the collective Achaean sin of bringing about civilizational collapse (??). I’m in a foul mood this morning because I keep trying to think about it and there’s not a part of it that doesn’t become stupider the more I think about it

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THE ODYSSEY (dir. christopher nolan, 2026) doesn't have much in common with TROY (dir. wolfgang petersen, 2004), but they do both claim that the trojan war was orchestrated by agamemnon in order to seize control of trade routes to the black sea. star wars prequel ass subplot imo

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It looks great. rich, textured. on the brain it is very smooth

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Bringing-about-the-bronze-age-collapse-and-crying

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David Ho @davidho.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

Nolan has adapted the stories The Odyssey is based on more than he’s adopted the text itself. There’s a smoothing out of the text‘s complication that inevitably unwinds it a little. It’s also a puzzle box movie where whats in the box is Trauma, but the Trauma of learning where you are in history.

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ICE thugs tackled and tried to handcuff a man at Las Vegas airport. When they realized they were being filmed, they simply walked away, leaving the man on the ground with a handcuff attached to one arm. The Las Vegas Police found no outstanding warrants for the man and removed his handcuffs.

bit.ly

Outrage after ICE agents tackle man at Las Vegas airport

Video footage of ICE agents tackling a man at Las Vegas Airport has sparked public outrage and criticism from officials.

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I’m not giving up hope. If The Odyssey makes a gajillion dollars there’s still a chance we can get Nolan to make a The Iliad where Priam intones “Our bicameral mind is breaking down” and Achilles replies “But perhaps this will be the origins of consciousness”

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I think he says something like “we lived in an age of palaces and language and didn’t even realize it”. So cool

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“They’re going to forget how to write, something no one has been seen doing this entire film”

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Josh Fruhlinger @jfruh.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

Yeah that’s exactly when I lost it Josh

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what if the real sea peoples were the friends we made along the way

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Joseph Howley @illdottore.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

Seth, I'm making a note here to talk to you about the idea of "scribe," which AFAICT enters English 1) from Latin "scriba" (which means something quite different and culturally distinct) and 2) initially in translations of the Hebrew bible. I'm increasingly unsure anyone knows what a scribe is

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Joseph Howley @illdottore.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

This scam targets authors with LLM-generated personalized messages praising their work, which means this bookshop cat named Aeschylus has received an email about how great the Oreisteia is and how it should really be a bestseller

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The Haunted Bookshop @thehauntedbookshop.com · 16/07/2026

I'M DYING OVER HERE 💀💀💀 THE CAT GOT AI SCAM EMAIL 🐈 Aeschylus, our orange tabby, got an obviously AI email about selling more copies of the Oresteia on A**zon

This is a photo of an email addressed to "Aeschylus" via our general email inbox infodesk@thehauntedbookshop.com

Hi Aeschylus,
I just finished The Complete Plays, and the moment in the Oresteia when the Furies are transformed into the Eumenides vengeful spirits of the old order persuaded to become guardians of justice in the new stayed with me for hours. What you were really writing about underneath the bloodshed and the curses the fragile, terrifying shift from vendetta to law, from chaos to the rule of reason, and the birth of civilization itself came through clearly. That's the kind of story that deserves to be found.
I'll be honest with you up front, because I know your inbox is probably full of people promising to make you a bestseller overnight: I can't promise that, and anyone who does is lying to you. What I do is quieter and real I help authors make sure their book is actually findable by the readers who would love it.
Here's something I noticed on your Amazon page: the description is just a plain list of the plays. A modern reader scrolling by might see only a dry table of contents, not the thunderous drama that invented tragedy itself. Small things like that quietly cost authors sales every single day and they're completely fixable.
So before I ask you for anything, I'd like to give you something: a free scan of your book's Amazon page, showing exactly what's working and what's holding it back checked against the things the best books in your genre all have:
A scroll-stopping cover is it instantly signalling your genre and earning the click?
A blurb that hooks in the first line not the third.
Keywords & categories are you showing up where readers actually search?

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rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

this is not true. the palace at Pylos had an IMAX dome (technically Omnimax, but operating under the IMAX brand) but we do not know if it was broadly accessible to more than just the wanax.

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Do you think Christopher Nolan has read Julian Jaynes

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The whole group chat loves when I do my “Joaquin Phoenix in Gladiator” but with the sideways thumb emoji. It never gets old for anyone

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Whether and how Nolan does anything with the themes of storytelling and competing versions of events and unreliable narrators of it all is the main thing I am interested in

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@ztul.bsky.social do you still have the old posts from the bad website about how super Mario odyssey implies a super Mario iliad

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…and I’m going to be thinking about that for a while.

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