My woke take, as someone who has worked in both a public library and a school library, is that we desperately need both more books that are at a higher reading level but a less mature subject matter, and more books that are at a lower reading level but a more mature subject matter, because 8 year olds who are advanced readers are still 8 year olds and don't want to read about graphic violence and torture, and teens and adults who have learning difficulties or who are just later readers for whatever reason are still teens and adults and don't want to read about Billy the Bunny going to school or whatever the hell.
Shoutout to people in the notes also mentioning people learning the language, I should've mentioned that really, given that I've been stuck reading German picture books myself while learning German.
it's such bs that the whole guilt-ridden stoic self-sacrificing martyr thing doesn't work outside of fiction. repressing all your emotions and neglecting your physical wellbeing should make you god's most tragically beautiful morally unassailable little soldier of righteousness but all it does is give you bad skin and gastrointestinal problems
If you’re reading this… congratulations, you survived Ray Bradbury’s doomsday!
“‘Today is August 4, 2026,’ said a second voice from the kitchen ceiling…”
-Ray Bradbury, “There Will Come Soft Rains”
Today is August 4th, 2026–the day that Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” is based on. I have included the short story below for anyone desiring to read it. Please feel free to let me know what you think in the comments! Happy doomsday;)
Art credits: “House Fire” by beccastadtlander (Etsy)
Just FYI, one of my favorite things I learned as an Ancient Greek major in undergrad was that a lot of city-states who had contact with Egypt considered the Nubians to be the absolute peak of beauty, and adjusted their societal standards accordingly.
So Lupita Nyong’o being cast as Helen is quite possibly the most historically accurate thing in that entire film.
This is the sequel to the Trojan War Adaptation Bingo post.
Square #1: Odysseus will have only one ship for the entire movie. Where his other 11 ships went will never be addressed.
Square #2: The Laestrygonians don't exist because we already got rid of all but one of Odysseus' ships, and the Cyclops exhausted our adaptational willingness to show cannibal giants.
Square #3: The Lotus-Eaters also don't exist, and the Lotus flowers become a tool of Circe and/or Calypso.
Square #4: The Cicones don't exist because opening the movie with what looks like a pirate raid will make the audience question Odysseus.
#5: Either Aelous or the sun cows will be cut, thus reducing the amount of crew stupidity by at least one incident.
#6: Odysseus and crew either leave Circe's island immediately after she gives them the Underworld information, with no year-long vacation, or they get trapped there for years, instead of a voluntary one-year stay.
#7: At least half of the people Odysseus talks to in the Underworld are cut. Usually it's the "Tiresias and one other person" show, and the other person is weirdly never Achilles.
#8: The Phaeacians are cut entirely.
#9: Poseidon shows up to express his displeasure with Odysseus in person.
#10: Odysseus somehow physically overpowers Poseidon, regardless of how nonsensical this is.
#11: Scylla and Charybdis are inexplicably not directly across from each other.
#12: Nestor doesn't exist.
#13: Telemachus' journey is entirely offscreen.
#14: Alternatively, Menelaus shows up to go "nope, no idea where your dad is", even though in the poem he DOES know where Odysseus is because he wrestled the information out of Proteus.
#15: Helen has hardly any lines, or doesn't exist.
#16: Somehow the Cyclops scene will be changed in a confusing way. Sometimes Odysseus idiotically tells the Cyclops his real name before they've escaped. Sometimes Odysseus doesn't reveal his identity at all, thereby making it unclear how Poseidon ever learned he was responsible. Sometimes they have him anger Poseidon before he meets Polyphemus, thereby making him look stupid when he reveals his identity to the guy who just said he was Poseidon's son. The "Nobody" trick is removed with surprising frequency.
#17: The sirens are mermaids. Or cut. Also if they do exist their song is likely to disappoint.
#18: Odysseus' crew don't get names.
Square #19: The crew are killed by something other than Zeus' wrath (because we cut the sun cows).
#20: The sack of Troy is in the movie, despite the Odyssey's flashbacks mostly cutting off in the horse.
#21: In order to accomplish the above, the movie briefly becomes an adaptation of the Aeneid.
#22: In spite of being described in the Odyssey, Helen recognizing Odysseus when he infiltrates Troy in disguise, and later mimicking the wives of the Greeks inside the horse, are NOT in the movie. Even though the Aeneid is.
Square #23: Ten percent of the movie is a speed run of the Iliad.
Square #24: This gives us a mostly incomprehensible Achilles, a one-dimensional supervillain Agamemnon, and Meneluas being...there.
#25: Clytemnestra killing Agamemnon is either never mentioned or folded into Agamemnon being a supervillain.
#26: Ithaca is delayed until Penelope and Telemachus are almost required to be underdeveloped.
#27: Telemachus comes across as naive, whiny, and/or useless because all his important scenes get cut.
#28: Penelope becomes "sad woman waiting".
#29: The bed test is cut.
#30: The situation with the suitors isn't properly explained, so the audience is left to be bewildered by the fact that Penelope and Telemachus don't tell what appear to be obnoxious frat boys to just leave.
#31: The suitors become so incompetent they're not a threat or so overtly murderous that they might as well just kill Penelope and Telemachus. Once they reach the point of murdering commoners--and each other-- every other scene it becomes somewhat unclear as to why they're still bothering to pretend legitimacy. At that point just declare yourself the new ruler and be done with it.
#32: Melanthius and Philoetius keep getting their job descriptions switched around. Eumaeus keeps his because...I guess he has more lines.
#33: Only one named suitor can exist. And it's almost always Antinous, but with Eurymachus' ability to pretend not to be a violent parasite for more than 5 minutes.
#34: Melantho is the only maid to be treacherous or die. And she and Melanthius always die differently from how they did in the poem.
At least I understand why this change happens. Because no modern viewer would watch that and not probably conclude "Odysseus is sadistic".
#35: Athena becomes the only Olympian to do things (except Poseidon).
#36: The movie forgets that Circe and/or Calypso are in fact immortal.
#37: The suitors show up either too early (they're apparently there like as soon as the Trojan War ends) or too late (only like a year before Odysseus returns). It's more usually "the suitors have been here forever apparently", I suspect because people sort of mentally merge the amount of time Odysseus has been gone with the amount of time the suitors have been eating all the food. The implausibly early version also implies that Ithaca somehow has unlimited resources.
#38: Athena doesn't disguise Odysseus, so 20 years of aging and different clothes are doing all the work to sell the beggar disguise. Not inherently impossible, but less seamless.
#39: Antinous at some point directly assaults Telemachus and beats him half to death. IN THE PALACE.
#40: In spite of the above, Antinous chucking the stool at beggar Odysseus gets cut. Partially because most of Odysseus begging also gets cut.
It also implies that Penelope is shockingly oblivious and Antinous is shockingly bad at realizing he's basically in charge of Ithaca already and thus shouldn't need to keep waiting.
Antinous: I am effectively the king, and obviously a horrible person. But instead of just declaring myself king, I will continue to wait for Penelope to marry me.
#41: There are maybe 30 suitors instead of 108 because filming Odysseus murdering 108 guys in a hall would be difficult.
#42: Either Laertes or Anticlea exists, but for some reason never both.
#43: Odysseus, the man who never shuts up, becomes Odysseus, stoic action hero. Because PTSD can only be portrayed in one way, apparently. His habitual use of deception is also considerably downplayed. And he never smiles.
#43a: Odysseus' downplayed use of deception is a constant even in adaptations that want him to be morally ambitious, like EPIC the Musical, The Return (2024), or, to a lesser extent, Nolan's recent take. You would think that would be an obvious angle, but apparently not.
#44: Odysseus never gets to use his five-page Cretan prince backstory.
#45: Odysseus is frequently treated as the only Greek leader to have any moral scruples.
#46: Even though the movie shows Odysseus leaving for war, it cuts out his attempt to pretend madness. And also the fact that he proposed the Oath of Tyndareus.
Languages tend to peak at their word for butterfly. Never seen 2 that are the same, either. Papillon. Mariposa. Borboleta. Fluture. Vlinder. Schmetterling. Pillangó. Babochka. Farfalla. Sommerfugl. Perhonen. Farasha. Titali. Chōchō. Nabi. Húdié. Buom buom. Great job guys, i really mean it.
Cute observation we’ve probably made before: European languages approaching the problem of naming a dragonfly.
French, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Greek, Romanian: it has wonderful balance, so we will sensibly name it “level” - as in ⚖️, balance. It’s so rare that all of us come to such a nice consensus. Hopefully it’s not because, like, English rode in roughshod and -
English, spitting: dragonfly
French, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Greek, Romanian and a whole host of others: normally you’re more with us than everyone else - did you … get that from the celts, or…?
Welsh: no. Fuckoff. snake’s servant
Irish - BIG NEEDLE
Basque, supportively - witch’s needle!
Swedish - troll’s spindle
Norwegian - eye sticker
Danish - goldsmith
Croatian - fairy’s horse
Finnish: wolf’s rod (?)
Hungarian - sieve-knitter
Turkish - little Joseph 😊
I’d like to study the rest of the world, and ask a few languages some probing questions, but there’s never enough time.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary however, there are some popular names among the same lines as "dragonfly", such as German drachenfliege and drachenhure, they just aren't like the standard terms! The first attestation of the English word is from 1626, but like, compounding like that is a pretty Germanic thing to do, so it makes sense.
Ooh according to the Historical Thesaurus of English there was a term "adderbolt" in use from 1483-1703 (can't get the tumblr link thing to show the specific page but it's category 01.04.01 if anyone wants to look it up)
Ahhh that’s the faint little dying sparks of the snake connection - look at the Welsh name (“gwas y neidr”) and the original English word for adder!
It looks like the “libellule” variants swept over a lot of older regional names, themes in which seemed to be snakes, magic, horses/riders, witches and devils, and needles. Normally it’s English words that do that, but in this case, English is going 🗣️ DRAGONFLY 🗣️ in a mild eddy of independence, and is clearly not guilty.
If you squint, the “spindle” and “needle” themes might go back far enough to connect to the “snake” ones!
things I was not expecting to learn when I looked up the word (PDF link):
As far as we know today, dragons featured only in German witch trials from Thuringia, Saxony, and Bavaria, i.e. from the eastern parts of today’s Germany. [...] The belief in a connection between witchcraft and dragons seems to belong to the bedrock of witch beliefs in this area. “Dragon whore” (“Drachenhure”) was a common insult in sixteenth-century Saxony. Dragons featured in the oldest eastern German trials from the early sixteenth century, and they disappeared only in the early eighteenth century when the witch hunts themselves finally petered out.
Dillinger, Johannes. "The Dragon as a Household Spirit: Witchcraft and Economics in Early Modern and Modern Sources." Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, vol. 17 no. 2, 2022, p. 212-240. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/mrw.2022.0024.
(the thing I was expecting to learn is also in that paragraph but like)
idk who needs to hear this but it’s healthier for you to just accept that you’re gonna be kinda fat than it is to live the rest of your life miserably trying to monitor yourself to maintain a skinny weight your body doesn’t want to hold onto
“nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” what feels even better is living a life where your self-worth isn’t entirely dependent on your thinness and you don’t constantly monitor and shame yourself. attaching the tweet that was worth at least five hours of therapy for me
if you ever feel bad about your laundry situation you can reflect on book six of the odyssey where princess nausicaa has been putting off her laundry for so long that the GODDESS ATHENA notices and COMES TO HER HOUSE using a lecture on laundry procrastination to get her to meet odysseus
many women are excited to get old and weird, but i have great news that it's fully possible to become weird now, before you get old. just imagine the heights of weirdness you will be able to reach in fifty years if you get started now. that's what I think
The Catalogue of Ships in the Iliad is, to a modern audiences, what classicists have called “boring as hell,” but I can’t help but think that if you were watching Homer recite it it would have been more like when comedians go, “anybody here tonight from Chicago?” and the Chicagoans in the back start cheering
Homer’s like, “and there were forty black ships from… LOCRIS” and the Locrians in the crowd start going absolutely nuts
