The new Odyssey adaptation has inevitably gotten people talking about a Muppet version of it, and they’re frequently suggesting Kermit as Odysseus, Miss Piggy as Penelope.
I’m sorry but that’s thinking way too small, hear me out:
We need to have Miss Piggy as Odysseus, and Kermit as Penelope.
Think about it… who’s the more fickle, prideful, warlike one in that relationship? Who is absolutely ready to go ham, at a moment’s notice?
Worldcat is my bestie and my one true love!! Not only does it tell you what library a book is at, but it also price compares different used book sites against each other for easy view! It's how I got Tarot For the Master for $10!!
Oh, and since I have your attention: z-library (books and textbooks) and sci-hub (gatekept scientific journal articles.) I just ripped a textbook for class off z-library and snatched a required reading from sci-hub. Life is good and education should be accessible at every stage and station of life.
i want you all in the wu xie fandom to know to never be sorry to me, the op, because all your comments light up my life even if this started off as a separate post for a separate fandom im so happy it became a cherished post in yours <3 have a good day all
As a Greek, in response to the current controversy about Matt Damon being cast as Odysseus, I'd just like to share that one of the moments that changed my brain chemistry as a kid was reading a novelized version of the Odyssey and coming across the following description of Odysseus when Circe sees him for the first time and thinks he's hot: "his hair curled like a clematis and his eyes were very brown".
So may I present my own casting choice for Odysseus:
“the millenium falcon would wipe out the enterprise in seconds” lmao the enterprise is just an innocent science class floating thru space…. all they wanna do is look at some rocks… kiss an alien…. find some space plants….. why would you fight that its not a battleship theyre just nerds…… leave them olone
So while it’s true that the Enterprise is not as big as people think, that goes double for the Falcon!
A good way of thinking about the relative size is by using a bridge comparison:
The Enterprise bridge has space for 11 people to work, as well as a significant amount of space between stations to move around comfortably:
[Bridge illustration by Tobias Weinmann via here]
And the whole thing fits in the nipple thing up on top of the saucer:
Meanwhile the Falcon (beloved weed bus) has a cockpit that seats 4, with only 2 main operational stations, and zero floor space:
And since Serenity was mentioned too…
Serenity has a bridge more comparable to La Sirena - with 2 stations at the front and quite a bit of floor space.
And for those interested in a visual comparison:
(Boeing 747 for scale as well as the Delta Flyer because Why Not)
TLDR: The Millennium Falcon is pretty dinky, so I propose *true weed bus status* goes to the excellent smuggling ships of Serenity and La Sirena. The Falcon is herby demoted to man on his weed bicycle with his pet monkey and a gun
(to be clear the monkey is Solo)
Welcome to another round of W2 Tells You What You Should See, where W2 (me) tries to sell you (you) on something you should be watching. Today's choice: 吴邪私家笔记 / Wu Xie's Private Notes / Time Raiders.
Time Raiders is the 2025 installment of the Lost Tomb/DMBJ series that tells the origin story of everyone's favorite tomb-raiding throuple on their very first adventure together!
That "very first adventure together" part should let you know that even though Time Raiders is part of an ongoing, sprawling, and fairly long-running action/adventure franchise, this series in particular is accessible to newbies. It's a mere eighteen episodes long, and it breaks pretty neatly into two complete, coherent story arcs. In short, it's the perfect gateway drug.
This is going to be partly a normal rec post, but partly a more general rec post for those who are intrigued by but otherwise unfamiliar with the Lost Tomb franchise. I believe with all my heart that this is a franchise both wonderful and terrible, and that if this is even remotely a genre you like, you should fling yourself into it with wild abandon. Therefore I am using this post to pitch Time Raiders primarily as an entry point to the larger DMBJ world. As such I will be trying along the way to impart some of the structural information you will need to appreciate what you're seeing, for this series and beyond.
Maybe nobody needs another obsession in their lives. But if you want one, here's five reasons to follow these dipshits into the tombs.
1. So you want to know what all this DMBJ business is
There is a real, serious structural problem with the Lost Tomb series, and that is the problem of, how do you start watching it? Because not all the series and movies have been made by the same production studios, and many of them have taken incredible liberties with their adaptations (sometimes because they had to, sometimes just because they could), so there's no agreed-upon entry point. Furthermore, the good shows don't start at the beginning, and the shows that start at the beginning aren't good.
Rejoice! Time Raiders does both! It is good and watchable as a show, and it starts from a good starting place! It tells the story of how God's Special Idiot, first-person book narrator and all-around birthday boy Wu Xie, goes on an adventure with his uncle, meets his two future husbands, and then gets said future husbands to go with him on an expedition to find his uncle, who up and disappears halfway through the show. It is a ground-level introduction to who your main players are and what they're doing in relation to one another. It takes your hand and helps you dip your toe very gently into what is clearly a tiny creek that flows out into a much larger tomb-raiding ocean.
It also does a very good job of giving you a taste of what there is to know without penalizing you for not knowing any of it ahead of time. Zhang blood kills bugs! Certain surnames keep popping up! People can disguise themselves convincingly as other people! Bugs have weird hobbies! And it all just slowly becomes normal, so you don't get the thrown-into-the-deep-end shock of getting to, say, Sand Sea, and suddenly being confronted by an evil tenth family (and you're like, what happened to #1-9?) that uses snakes as recording devices.
It's also such a Boy Show For Boys. In fact, Time Raiders is very good for setting your expectations for how much a Boy Show For Boys the whole franchise is. It is a show about men and how they relate to other men while also running from giant snakes.
The tomb-raiding world is incredibly homosocial, and while women are not barred from participation, they're always outliers. Time Raiders in particular has nearly no romance and zero love interests for the main characters. It has one girl who can tomb-raid with the boys, and she's a motorcycle-riding black-leather too-cool chick who walks the line between ally and enemy, who is conceptually great yet consistently one of the worst-written characters in the franchise. (Jump cut to me at the protest with my A-NING DESERVED BETTER sign.)
I don't consider this singular focus on men a failing of the show or the franchise, because I find these unselfconscious portrayals of masculinity fascinating. It's kind of like a war movie, where you get to see all these various ride-or-die relationships between men as they are tested by the dangerous circumstances they find themselves in. Unlike soldiers serving in a war, though, these tomb boys have dedicated themselves to full-time living like this. To put it mildly, there sure are a lot of Lifelong Bachelors running around.
(I swear, the guy who writes all these books -- we'll call him "NPSS" for Reasons -- is either so gay that he just can't stop writing all these stories about men in love, or so straight that he honestly has no idea that he's writing all these stories about men in love. There's no middle option. So on the one hand, no, there's nothing here that's actually, textually gay. On the other hand, uh, yeah there is.)
So yes! If you have ever wondered if DMBJ could be just the thing for you, Time Raiders is an excellent, enjoyable, low-commitment way to find that out. This way, if you bounce off it, you know you're not bouncing off because of unrelated quality issues. And if you wind up hooked, baby, do I have so many more snakes to show you.
2. Three Men and a Baby
Forget for a minute what I said up there about the twink's polycule. Allow me to explain the real romance of the show.
First, we have Wu Sanxing. He is Wu Xie's uncle and surrogate father, the one who basically raised him in the Ways of the Tomb Raiders. He is an incredibly charismatic piece of shit who gets away with literal murder by being charming and smart. This guy fucking sucks. In every other series, whenever he appears, you mildly to viciously hate him.
And then they cast Actual Hong Kong Actor Francis Ng, and I'm like, fuck, you're going to try and make me like Wu Sanxing, aren't you? And to my eternal chagrin, despite all my efforts to the contrary, the show made me like Wu Sanxing. It leaned into the fact that he's a complicated and very traumatized man, and it showed him caring for his friends and Wu Xie, and I just [shreds a napkin with my teeth]
Our next old man is Pan Zi. A veteran of an unspecified jungle war, Pan Zi is our Weapons Guy who will ill-advisedly follow Wu Sanxing anywhere. He has dreams of how they're going to be old and live in the same retirement community together. I am not making that up. He literally says this. He's also incredibly hot. A rangy, scruffy, highly competent combat officer and archer with a manbun? What's not to love?
Finally, we have Da Kui. Da Kui is a Big Boi™. He's the party tank, the shock absorber who is pure of heart and dumb of ass. He's here to do the job so he can pay for his aging mother's medical care, because he is a Good Boy™ as well as being a Big Boi™. He also needed to spend like 90% more of the show in that tank top, because mama.
(Also, how much do I love that Da Kui and Pan Zi are played by men in their forties, and Francis Ng is in his sixties? Good, more of this.)
And then they're all going to take care of their pure and perfect baby dummyface, because let's be real, three is the minimum number of responsible adults you need keeping an eye on Wu Xie at all times.
So yes, the killer set of interpersonal dynamics this time around is the co-parenting relationship of a Good Boy™, a Reformed Bad Boy™, and a man who is literally the worst, except he loves all three of them in the only way he knows how. You spend all of Ultimate Note (one of the other DMBJ installments) hollering at Pan Zi about how he needs better taste in men. And then you get here and it's like, shit, I get it now.
The whole DMBJ series is a fascinating series of unintentionally revealing commentaries on male friendship, and this middle-aged trio is one of my favorites. Pan Zi in particular is just so in love with Wu Sanxing, and it may not be in a gay way, but it's definitely not in a straight way either. Da Kui keeps flinging himself into danger for both of them with absolute trust. And Wu Sanxing himself has never in his life known how to express an emotion and isn't looking to start now. Men will literally fight an evil tree for the Bug Armor of Immortality or whatever that bullshit is called instead of going to therapy.
3. A promising start to an Iron Triangle
So if you're familiar with DMBJ canon, all you need to know is this: This baby version of the Iron Triangle didn't get much screentime, so it's hard to judge, but it has some good bones, and I'm optimistic about seeing this trio tackle upcoming plot points!
If you're not familiar with DMBJ, here's the rundown: As I mentioned earlier, (most) DMBJ books are written in first person like they're from Wu Xie's perspective. He does most of his tomb-raiding with two other men. One, Zhang Qiling, is a mysterious and frankly god-modded hoodie-wearing emo boy who loves to show up, pull Wu Xie's ass out of the fire, say nothing, and disappear again. The other, Wang Pangzi, is a loud, jovial angel who is somehow both incredibly competent and unfairly the butt of all the jokes. Their relationship is the glue that holds together story after tomb-raiding story.
And this is the tale of how they meet! Wu Xie runs into Zhang Qiling in the first episode and is immediately down bad for this strong, silent cat-like man. Then he meets Pangzi several episodes later, and you can just see Pangzi overtaken all at once by a staggering need to care for that little dipshit. (Wu Xie survives entirely by provoking this response in people.) You get to see them all bristle and sniff tentatively around one another, while you know that one day, these three will straight-up be the most important people in each other's lives forever.
I have to say, sweet little Xu Zhenxuan more than holds his own as Wu Xie, to the point where ... he may be my favorite Baby Wu Xie? (He has to duke it out with Joseph Zeng, at least.) It took me several episodes to recognize that he was also Ying Lei from Fangs of Fortune, where he was an absolute scene-stealer. He leads Tomb Raiders with a funny Wu Xie who's precious enough that you want to put him in your pocket and feed him snacks, but twerpy enough that you want to shove him in a locker, which is exactly the energy he needed to bring to the role.
I can't say quite as much about this version of Zhang Qiling, because he's just in so few scenes. His job this round is mostly to be a mysterious and handsome desire object that makes Wu Xie search "how to make a boy notice me" on his phone. He is the hundred-year-old sparkly vampire who has never felt love before and Wu Xie is the teen who's drawing hearts around his name in her notebook. He is the horse and Wu Xie is the horse girl. (Really, he's the horse and NPSS is the horse girl.) Sometimes the plot contrives reasons for him to remove his shirt and show off his huge chest tattoo. Also he is extremely weird and I love him forever for it. Now I'm the horse girl. That's fine.
And of course Pangzi is perfect. All Pangzis Are Perfect.
So yeah, I kind of have to grade this Iron Triangle on potential. Time Raiders is mostly about the relationship between Wu Xie and Wu Sanxing, which means everything else takes a back seat. These three are on their own for barely a third of the show; Wu Xie and Pangzi get to spend more time together as a duo, but two do not a triangle make. I'd be more upset about this, except that I know for certain that we're going to see this Iron Triangle again (see the end of this post), and when we do, we're going to hit some points in the plot where all three of them get to be together for some serious shenanigans.
I mean, look at those nice boys up there, in their nice suits. Don't they look like they're about to take you out to a very nice restaurant? A very nice, very expensive restaurant?
4. A pair of fun, (mostly) followable adventures
This series is divided basically in half, and each half has its own storyline, and each of those storylines makes ... I don't know, 80% sense? Something around there? And the missing 20% is largely things that are clearly being teased as continuing on into future installments of the story, which isn't the same as being forgotten about.
In the first story, Wu Xie and Wu Sanxing go on an expedition to find some other people who went on a previous expedition but never came back. This works for them about as well as it does for most people who go on an expedition to find The Lost Expedition.
In the second story, Wu Sanxing has gone missing, so Wu Xie decides to get an expedition together to find him. This works for him about as well as it does for most people who go on an expedition to find That Guy Who Went Missing Last Expedition.
Now, lots of meaningful things happen on these adventures! In particular, the second story provides you with a huge amount of backstory that will become relevant in later series! It's just that right now, you do not have the necessary information to interpret all the little nuances of it. It makes no difference to you if somebody is a Huo or a Xie, and it doesn't have to. If you keep on with DMBJ, someday it will.
Like I said earlier, it's kind of hard to criticize the completion rate of these stories because they are meant to be just the tip of a much larger mysterious iceberg. This show absolutely styles itself as Part One of More. The main plot ends with Our Boys' completing their adventure, but the show tacks on two little stings at the end to make damn sure you know that all has not been wrapped up for good.
So yeah, Time Raiders is not going to tell you what happened to Chen Wenjin; you've got to check out Ultimate Note for that. It's not going to tell you who A-Ning is working for; just pick pretty much any other main-canon series and start watching until you see a weird white guy. It's not going to tell you what's up with Zhang Qiling's tattoo; nobody knows what's up with Zhang Qiling's tattoo, except that it's there and we love any excuse to make a hoodie boy take his shirt off.
But you don't feel cheated, like someone presented you the first two-thirds of a story and then didn't care enough to bother telling you the rest. You get two separate arcs here, and both of them have beginnings, middles, and ends. Even beyond whatever else it might be teasing, Time Raiders is a complete piece of media that makes about as much sense as anything in the Tombs does.
...I can't quite explain why, but Time Raiders feels like Season 1 of a series that never got a Season 2. You know? It's got that sense of something that's making a lot of promises it'll never get to keep, down to the little stings at the end. Except it didn't get canceled at all! Quite the opposite, in fact! The fulfillments of those promises are (mostly) already out there! Lucky you!
5. Fucking finally
This is not the first time this part of the story has been adapted for the screen, but the previous runs at it have ranged from Meh to Real Bad.
Time Raiders provides a good, solid, coherent starting point in a watchable format. And I know that sounds like I'm damning it by faint praise here, but you would be shocked by how every single other attempt to adapt the material covered here has fumbled that ball hard. Some of them make up things that are directly contradicted by key parts of the larger canon. Some expect you to come in with way more prior knowledge than you necessarily have. Some of them get bogged down in side plots that are completely irrelevant to anything else. And more than one of them just wanders off mid-story with a shrug, until you're left wondering if you missed a couple episodes or something.
So I can't tell you how happy I am to have a recommendable, watchable beginning of the story. I feel comfortable pointing the uninitiated at Time Raiders and going, yes, start there.
It also helps that the production quality is pretty high! The acting ranges from perfectly competent to legitimately good. The editing is logical and curates a coherent story. There are no ten-minute scenes of people aimlessly scuba-diving or special effects that look like they were made on a home computer in 1997. You are not subjected to episode-long flashbacks where one of the main cast members plays a completely different character for no discernible reason. And again, if this all sounds like damning by faint praise, well, now you're really getting a sense of why I'm glad we now have the version we have.
Let me not give the impression that this is Serious Cinema or anything. Good performances do not High Art make. You will be expected to roll with some goofball action-movie bullshit that contradicts everything you know about, for example, the natural properties of bronze. But that's fine! If you are even remotely a fan of the action/adventure genre, you are familiar with how sometimes Indiana Jones tells you that in Latin, "Jehovah" starts with an I, and you're like, well, I guess it does now!
I care about many elements of this franchise, and also the elements I care about also tend to be buried real deep under several layers of prohibitively arcane bullshit. Even I initially bounced off the first DMBJ series I tried! And I'm so glad that I didn't, because DMBJ has brought me hours of entertainment and creativity and time spent with both old and new friends. Because I nearly did, though, I am attentive to how individual shows don't always put their best foot forward.
Your ability to watch any given DMBJ series depends on how that series strikes a very delicate balance, with Things You Will Like on one side of the scale, and Shit You Must Tolerate on the other. The higher your tolerance gets, the less difficult it becomes to enjoy the good parts, until it doesn't even faze you when the clam-powered woman-shaped skin puppet breaks into Wu Xie's bedroom to watch him sleep, or someone uses a saxophone to have a late-night conversation across a desert in English, or a man tells you about how ancient civilizations used to catch fish with snakes in their (the fishes') eyebrows, remove those snakes, and put the snakes in their (the humans') own eyebrows. By the time you get there, you'll just be like, that's Tombs, baby!
So build up your tolerance! Start here and work your way in! There's a whole weird world of wonders waiting for you. See you in Gutongjing.
All right, you've convinced me! How do I watch this -- and then, more importantly, what do I watch next?
Two excellent questions! Let's tackle them in order.
(In this scenario, you are Wu Xie, listening eagerly, and I am Wu Sanxing, handsomely imparting questionable information to you.)
Watching Time Raiders is easy and fun! Here's all the episodes subtitled for free on YouTube!
But oh boy, once you're done, what do you watch next? I don't have a definitive answer, but I have some suggestions:
OPTION 1: Ultimate Note. This wild, wacky series doesn't pick up immediately after Time Raiders leaves off, but you can figure that Some Stuff Happened and just roll with it. Be prepared to be tossed head-first into the whole multiple tomb-raiding families bullshit.
PROS: Features many now-familiar Time Raiders characters; immediately addresses the whole reef expedition thing; some of the best, most equilateral Iron Triangle dynamics ever; heihua (you don't know what this ship name means yet, but trust me)
CONS: Tonally somewhat different from the other series; reef expedition thing may still not be clear without further information; does not have a satisfying ending
WATCH IT NEXT IF: You just want the adventure to keep moving forward
OPTION 2: The Lost Tomb 2: Explore With the Note. Despite the 2 in the title, this series adapts many of the same books as Time Raiders does. At 40 episodes, though, it adapts a lot more of the material in those books. It is up to you to decide whether this is a good or a bad thing.
PROS: Absolute must-see for Pangzi/Wu Xie fans; provides a ton of Lore about what you just saw; sexy mob boss Xiao Hua
CONS: Covers much of Time Raiders' plot, but worse
WATCH IT NEXT IF: You can feel how the Time Raiders story was edited down and crave the unabridged version
OPTION 3: Wu Xie's Private Notes 2: A trailer dropped for it just a few days ago, and it looks like it's picking up right where Time Raiders left off! However, it's not even done filming yet, which means that this series may air as soon as the middle of next year, and as late as never! You have to love Chinese TV surprise scheduling.
PROS: A direct sequel to this one; same actors; trailer looks good
CONS: You'll be waiting a while
WATCH IT NEXT IF: You're incredibly patient
OPTION 4: The Mystic Nine: Oh, you want to start from the beginning beginning.
PROS: A rainbow of colorful new and lovable (and hateable) characters; contains information that is relevant to literally every other DMBJ series; the Jiumen Association is a polycule
CONS: You will recognize exactly one (1) character, and he won't even show up until the last few episodes; absolute jank-ass quality
WATCH IT NEXT IF: You were really into whatever was going on with Wu Xie's grandfather.
Or you could go entirely rogue and fling yourself wildly forward into one of the other DMBJ series I've written an individual rec post for! In which case: Sand Sea and Reunion (and Southern Archives coming just as soon as I finish watching it), have fun.
Seriously, there is no wrong way to watch DMBJ, because there is no right way to watch DMBJ. You just sort of piece it together from whatever. You're going to see some plot points 2-3 times. The same character will be played by multiple actors across different adaptations. The timeline is utterly broken. NPSS will start thirty new stories before he writes a single ending. The rules are made up and the points don't matter. It's snakes all the way down.
You know, thinking about it, I imagine the Leverage crew are pretty philanthropic. Parker might have had to be introduced to the concept (”You just give them money and they go away with it? How does that work?”) but probably once she got her head around it she’d be into it.
What gets me is how god damned frustrating it would be to work somewhere that one of the Leverage crew supports. Nate would be okay, he’d just make small monthly gifts to ten million different organizations so that nobody thinks he’s worth very much (he doesn’t own his home and he gives such small amounts monthly that Development writes him off as an earnest but low-capacity donor who should get a thank-you card around the holidays). It’s probably a bigger inconvenience to him because he’s on every nonprofit mailing list known to man. He has so many address labels, guys. (I don’t want to be Nate but I am Nate. I have so many address labels.)
Sophie I imagine has an extravagant alias for every charity she supports; she gives outrageous amounts and in return demands only attention and adulation, tickets to all the galas, and to be in at least one photo in every annual report. We have a donor like this – she’s genuinely invested in our work, gives generously of her time and money, is never rude or demanding, but if she’s in the room all eyes must be on her at all times. I actually really like her but constant exposure could get…tiring.
Eliot just sends enormous, anonymous checks once a year through a shell company or DAF, which while not unusual would be irritating in that they can’t ever reach out to thank him and/or steward him into a larger gift appealing to his interests. They can’t even send him dumb swag! He deserves a charity-branded bottle opener and keychain flashlight! (He has stolen all of Nate’s, but they don’t know that.) Still, they’ve probably got a fun nickname for him; I have a few people in my research files who are simply named after characters from Greek mythology because that’s all the data I have or am allowed to store.
For a long time Hardison just dumped money into the bank accounts of his charities of choice, seamlessly, invisibly – it just APPEARED in the account, and he was cool with that until he checked back after a few years and found none of his money was being used because they couldn’t figure out where it was coming from and were worried it was a clerical error despite the bank assuring them otherwise. Now he still dumps money into the accounts but he entertains himself building an elaborate digital paper trail so that the accounting all works. Have you ever watched a Gift Processing office try to balance a nonprofit’s books? Sometimes they cry! Don’t be mean to them, Hardison.
Parker, bless her heart, just leaves bags of money on the doorsteps of random employees with notes directing how, in general terms, it should be spent. If she’s particularly pleased with the climbability of their home, she leaves a donut for them, too. Generally if she mentions she’s done this to the crew, Eliot calls up the charity to assure them that the large bag of cash was a legitimate donation and is not some kind of money-laundering scam. (That was ONE TIME Eliot, and the IRS didn’t even NOTICE.) This happened to me once. A tiny old lady in a Cubs jacket showed up to our office with a backpack full of money and it was a very intense morning.
Anyway, what I’m saying is that every year, across the span of roughly two weeks, Hardison’s Nana’s church gets their regular $25 check from that nice Mr. Ford, a visit from the very devout but slightly weird Madam Sofia who wants a private choir recital, an enormous check from a bank in the Bahamas with no name attached, a large direct deposit from a heretofore-undiscovered bond the church invested in a decade ago, and a large bag of cash with a dozen donuts on it and a note reading THANK YOU FOR THE NEW ROOF IT WAS VERY SLIPPERY AND FUN. PLEASE BUY STUFFED ANIMALS FOR CHILDREN WHO NEED STUFFED ANIMALS.
“Because the truth is, tech doesn’t have an image problem. It doesn’t have a message problem. It has an intention problem. What’s wrong with the axe murderer who broke into my house is not that he hasn’t successfully persuaded me to buy into his narrative. What’s wrong is that he’s trying to kill me with an axe. Similarly, when you launch a product that’s designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isn’t that you haven’t told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them.”
The answer to "How did these Ancient People do this????" is basically always
1. A lot of dudes. Just a ton of fucking people from beginning to end of the process.
2. Ancient people weren't stupid, they just figured shit out the same way we do: fuck around until you find out.
3. We're gonna plan this out and it's gonna take ten fucking years, and you will cope.
4. Sticks and string are surprisingly versatile and can be used for a variety of purposes, like moving stuff and making sure things are even and go in the spot you wanted to put them in!
5. I want to make this easier and more efficient to move. If I put this on the round thing and push, it will move. If I put this in water, it will move. If I get some animals and rope and have a whole bunch of them drag it, it will move. All of these things are a better option than one guy trying to pick the whole fucking thing up.
History absolutely does record the stupid megaprojects that failed. Here are just a few of them:
Fidenae Stadium Disaster of 27AD. A huge gladitorial stadium, built fast and cheap, collapsed and killed 20,000 people, as well as injuring many more out of the total audience of 50,000.
The Sagrada Familia was started in 1882. It is still not finished.
Mingun Pahtodawgyi was started in 1790 but a prophecy said the king who commissioned it would die when it was finished, so he stopped building it.
The Pyramid of Neferefre was never finished because Neferefre died early and his successor didn't bother.
Alai Minar was supposed to be twice the diameter and twice the height of Qutb Minar. Didn't get past the first storey, abandoned in 1316.
Bara Kaman, abandoned in 1672.
The Basilica of San Petronio was started in 1390. The main facade was never finished. In 1514, they hired a guy to construct the dome, but the pope ordered the "megalomaniac dream" halted.
Arguably every empire that has ever fallen counts as a stupid megaproject that failed.
@ariaste Sagrada Familia is done, as of a couple of weeks ago. At least as "done" as any building of that complexity could ever be. Maintenance must be daunting.
oh my god lmao Sagrada Familia was the only one I didn't double check my info on to make sure it was accurate LMAOOOOOO oh god that's fucking hilarious. INCREDIBLE. good for her
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