that guy

this is a great description. really informative.

[dragongirlsweetie]

you don't understand the only way to keep children safe is to isolate them from everyone except the people who are statistically most likely to abuse them

[oodlyenough]

a thing about me is i basically never notice a wig or other kind of hairpiece in tv/movies. it has to be party city territory for me to even twig it. people will complain about characters' wigs looking bad and i will nod along but there is like a 90% chance i did not notice for a second while watching. i consider this mostly a blessing.

[darlingofdots]

so fun how as a tenant you just have to double check everything your landlord says against the actual law because they WILL demand money from you for repairs you legally are not responsible for. why do I need to be an expert in tenant's rights in order to not be exploited. why are there no consequences for landlords who lie to their tenants in order to extract more money from them

[rainintheevening]

Okay, we got a new one, boys.

[fleshengine]

Close enough welcome back Chekov's gun.

[comma-souptra]

Prev you can’t bury this in your own tags

[bells-lettres]

local matchmaker losing it over yet another unrealistic demand from the clientele 🤣🤣

Translation by me. :))

[elodieunderglass]

“Even a slightly increased possibility of summoning rain is still an ability to summon rain” is such a good point

[depsidase]

[depsidase]

[klapollo]

the mandela effect is so funny bc almost all of it can be boiled down to "you were a kid and memory is highly unreliable," "you assumed how a word was spelled based on how it sounded," or "you're confusing two different things"

[an-ruraiocht]

which of these classical texts have you read?

the iliad, the odyssey, and the aeneid

the iliad and the odyssey, not the aeneid

the iliad only

the odyssey only

the aeneid only

the aeneid and the iliad, not the odyssey

the aeneid and the odyssey, not the iliad

I have read none of these

Remaining time: 2 days 4 hours

"what if I've read part of it" if it's a large enough part that you would consider yourself to Have Read It in general contexts, then it counts. if it's not, then it doesn't. only you can be the judge of that, but I'm not giving you a nuance button.

any translations count, but abridged retellings don't

obviously, there are lots of other classical texts out there. you might have read none of these and be an expert on greek tragedy. I'm not judging your classical knowledge so you don't need to tell me all that. I'm just curious about combos of these specific texts and their popularity, bc a post i just saw got me thinking about it

[an-ruraiocht]

#i want to hear from the 1.7% who have read the illiad and the aenied but not the odyssey #<- SAME #you read everything EXCEPT the most iconic story?? #how?? why?? (via @shrinkthisviolet and prev @bobakick)

hi it's me op that's my combo!

firstly, i don't think i've ever particularly thought of the odyssey as more iconic than the iliad, so that's the exact kind of cultural attitude towards the texts that prompted me to make this poll; it seemed from conversations that @postarcadian was having in the notes of related posts that in north america at least, it's very dominant, but i wanted to see how widespread this was. i think this particular dominance or preference is not global. in england, for example, you wouldn't read the odyssey in school unless a) your school offered classical civilisation as an elective subject (already a minority of schools) and b) opted to do the odyssey-specific module (only one of lots of modules). if they don't do class civ, you probably wouldn't read any ancient texts in school!

my school did class civ but not the odyssey module, so it never came up, which brings me onto:

this is the module for which i read the aeneid and the iliad when i was 17 and in secondary school. we read the whole thing although the commentary passages were from selected books. the odyssey was not relevant to this module and we did not have time to read it unnecessarily. but you can see based on the themes and focus of the modules why the aeneid-iliad combo would be chosen!

(sidenote to the person in the notes who said they think you need graduate level study to understand the cultural context and references in the aeneid... i don't think you do? they're teaching this to 17-year-olds reading in translation with no latin background? i mean, obviously if you do it at a graduate level you're going to understand it more and in greater depth and get more nuance and whatever. but it's not Impossible To Comprehend The Aeneid And Its Themes as a layperson. can attest that 17-year-old me managed it well enough)

now obviously i'm 30 now so there's been loads of time to read the odyssey since then for funsies. and i've had it in my house since 2018. and i've started it multiple times. and i just can't get through it tbh. one day i'll get there maybe. but as a medievalist the latin texts were always a lot more relevant (medieval authors primarily had access to the classical world via latin) and i work on heroic literature of a very particular sort so i've ended up more in the aeneid - statius - latin histories end of things insofar as i look at anything classical (which isn't very much)

i have however read Merugud Uilix which is the medieval irish version of the odyssey and which is completely bonkers and absurd and absolutely nothing like the actual Odyssey

and finally there's an extent to which when something is very culturally well-known you just kinda take it in via osmosis and then it feels less compelling to read the original. like i read a bunch of retellings as a small child i think? and things like Ithaka by Adele Geras. and that filled the niche. that was enough odyssey for me. wasn't really fussed. maybe one day i'll get through the rest of the real thing though.

[penny-anna]

just reblogging this again with some additional context:

as far as the Ancient Greeks were concerned, the Iliad was THE epic poem. the story of the Trojan War was The foundational myth cycle and the Iliad was The Trojan War poem. it was & tbh is generally considered to be the superior of the two. if I HAD to say which one is more 'iconic' I would point to the Iliad.

I think it's fair to say, the reason the Odyssey has become so widely studied at school level is because it is, to be blunt, 'easier'. it is structurally much more like a modern novel, it has a relatable protagonist in Odysseus, it's got a bunch of fantasy adventures in it, many of which are straightforward stories w clear and easy to understand metaphors and/or morals.

the Iliad in contrast is, if you like, a 'true' epic poem? it doesn't really have a conventional A->B->C plot and a lot of it is 'guys you've never heard of killing other guys you've never heard of'. I would say it is significantly more esoteric. Speaking from personal experience: i read both as a teenager and had a massively easier time with the Odyssey.

in terms of the emotional impact of them as works, obviously YMMV but to me, the Odyssey is a fun romp and the Iliad is like getting hit by a truck.

anyway in short, I don't think it's accurate to say the Odyssey is 'more iconic'. I think it's just a very popular choice for USAmerican school curricula.

[cages-boxes-hunters-foxes]

every conversation on here increasingly feeling like this tweet

[norwegianaxiom]

requested by @visceral-fragments

38)

[skippyisntfunny]

[bisexual-engineer-girl]

Pulitzer Prize type shit

[wizardshark]

Why's this dude built like crash bandicoot

[spooky-narwhal]

Everything about this damn post is so funny to me. The lighting of the arm from the flash. The posing of the arm like a dramatic death from a novella. The fact the photo somehow got taken still and looks this good. The subreddit name. The fact this guy really is built like crash bandicoot

[longsightmyth]

I bring a real 'actually people who are pregnant do deserve some special consideration because they are effectively at least temporarily disabled if not permanently after some complications' vibe to the party that a lot of people don't seem to like

[we-are-knight]

You know, I don't think I'll ever get over how that one post I made about women as knights in history, made it all the way to Reddit only for a bunch of redditors to argue that women couldn't actually be knights because:

- "the term is gendered" (it's not, and feminine equivalents were sometimes created specifically for the purpose)

- "they didn't actually do things as knights" (who didn't? The Hatchet women fought the Moors. A few other Orders had women as masters of arms. Both martial and formal examples)

...and a few other reasons that come down to "I don't like imagining my manly men in steel had women in their ranks, girls have cooties".

And the reason I say this is because recently, Wikipedia updated their page on "Knight", specifically adding a section about women with the title of knighthood, and what function they performed. And I know: "Wikipedia is not an academic source"--but every academic institution will accept the sources and articles used to back up wikipages, which confirm what has been said.

Knights were sometimes women. 🤷

[we-are-knight]

I saw this and needed to answer.

The gendered versions of 'knight' come from Romance languages, and literally just change the word to fit the gender of the subject (within a binary). So it isn't like English, where a female knight has always been a 'Dame', but, using Spain as an example, the word for Knight in Spanish is 'Cabellero'. This is the default masculine.

The feminine word for Knight? 'Cabellera'.

Similarly in French: "Chevalier" becomes "Chevaliére".

In Italian, "Cavaliere" becomes "Cavaliera".

Outside of Romance languages, "knight" is just a title for a social rank, so even the English Dame is by default a knight by rank, but may not have the title (although not impossible).

So it's not a silly infantilisation, than using a word for the knightly class and gendering it in a binary, which means we can actually tell that, yes, women as knights existed, enough that the feminine form of the word pops up now and then, so we know it existed.

[jv]

ooh, where one could read that original post??

Just a note about translations and ... well, patriarchal bullshit.

When you say "Hatchet women fought the Moors" I was like "hey, that seems to be part of my local history, how have I never heard about it?", and when I googled it ... I actually have heard about it, it's the Orden del Hacha from Catalonia (Orde de l'Atxa in the original Catalan). But ... there's something odd going on. Why the fuck in English they have translated like "Order or the hatchet"? You know, in Spanish and Catalan there's no really a difference between "Axe" and "Hatchet": There's a single word for them, "Hacha/Atxa". But in English, there's a difference. A Hatchet is a hand axe, pretty much the smallest one you can think of:

So It's pretty remarkable that whoever translated the name of the order to english first decided to use "Hatchet" and not "Axe". I'm pretty sure if this was a order of men warriors the name would have been pretty different. Specially when THIS was their coat of arms:

So dear academic-who-translated-this-first: Does that look like a hatchet to you, motherfucker?!?!?

[we-are-knight]

Important inclusion I was not aware of, thank you very much friend. :)

[heroineimages]

I’m going to be chuckling over ‘Does this look like a hatchet to you, motherfucker?!?!?” for the rest of the day.

[mixelation]

remember like an actual decade ago, there was a post giving advice for what to do if The Heterosexuals asked for your celebrity crush, and the advice was to just say "chris" and let them guess which chris and then just agree

and as your local ace i understand why such advice is appealing because i have been 13 and feeling a rising panic that i would answer "wrong" and bad things would happen. however as an adult i now understand that most people asking this are just asking you a question on par with asking what movies/music/whatever you like. they're not testing you, and if you give a fake answer, you're going to end up fielding follow-up questions or being sent memes or whatever, because they're trying to engage with your answers. just say a celebrity that you actually like (regardless of if you find them attractive or have a "crush"), or if you don't have one, say you don't pay attention to celebrities

anyway, i went out to drinks with people i didn't know that well, got asked that question, and said i wanted to study robert pattinson like a bug. now i get sent weird photos of him

[fladurblegon]

“What if poor people abuse the system?”

The system intrinsically abuses poor people.

Hope this helps.

[breninarthur]

"What if poor people abuse the system?"

Rich people abuse the system far more and out of pure greed, not necessity or desperation so idrc about that

[catchymemes]