Archaeology with a side order of fiber crafts

Disabled archaeologist, mostly European prehistory and all things Ancient Greece. I also spin and knit and write.

[perplexingly]

above all shadows rides the Sun and Stars for ever dwell: I will not say the Day is done, nor bid the Stars farewell.

Based on the chapter “The tower of Cirith Ungol”. In my opinion it’s the most beautiful scene that Tolkien had written and I really wanted to illustrate it.

[theodysseyofhomer]

the good:

i loved the opening in ithaca, unabashedly (and i love THAT the film opens in ithaca, being who i am). travis scott as the bard is captivating. penelope's entrance was literally showstopping, as she also does in the poem.

anne hathaway was the strongest performance by far. don't think there was a penelope scene that didn't hit for me. the use of the screen in the great hall and the loom as shields showed her isolation and opacity while letting her also be present for the action.

eumaeus & eurylochus are the standouts of the supporting cast.

the scenery looked a lot better than i feared from the trailers; circe's island was my favorite set/location.

i liked the pacing, broadly speaking. i saw it with two people with no background knowledge and neither were bored or thought it dragged, for the length. any feature film even at 3 hours was always going to be a brutal struggle for adapting epic poetry; it's not the medium i think is best suited. but for what it was, the choices of what to cut, abridge, and include largely feel correct to me.

i got jumpscared once by clytemnestra and once by scylla and that was crazy

my personal favorite moment(s) of the film: stringing and plucking the bow to make it sing. the sound design on that alone was worth the imax ticket, but man, to find a way to call back to that... from the first scene i knew how they were gonna do the climax and it hurt my fucking feelings!!!!

the bad and the ugly:

whether by natural inclination or direction, matt damon plays odysseus as an everyman, and the thing about everymen is they can't have strong personalities. the range goes from "kind of despondent" to "even more despondent," in the words of one of my companions my (who, again, went in blind). he's bland as hell. the most fun i had with him was in the palace as a beggar and his face was covered. the lead is the film's most significant problem, and that's not something i can forgive.

like it's to the point that when he wants to hear the sirens, it feels out of character

the costume design is exactly as bad as it looked in the trailers. mostly i can ignore this because it's really not my bag, but in some cases (the trojan armor, notably) it inhibits the messaging

and, to a lesser extent, the monster character design. the laistrygonian giants truly should have been cut for time anyway. goofy ass

i will join the popular stance against a cyclops encounter with no "nobody," but for me it's not so much about that exchange, iconic as it is, as the loss of all humanizing traits of polyphemus. it doesn't sit right with me to treat him as a mindless monster encounter instead of a chance to probe odysseus' xenohobia.

i have long noted that no one is interested in portraying agamemnon as a human being, but never before to THIS extent, oh my god. he kept making me laugh which was not the intended effect

helen and clytemnestra not actually having much screentime was a letdown for me, since that was what i was looking forward to most.

since they bothered to cast mia goth you might think melantho would have anything to do, but you would be wrong.

slavery is generally glossed over. antinous makes one reference to slaves having no choice but to be loyal to who's in power; that's truly it. as usual (with the return 2024, for instance, which has much stronger theming) i thought the message would have hit harder if the hanged women were included

if i had a nickel for every time someone cut all the sex from my beloved sex object i would have 2 nickels

inconsistent diction. every time telemachus said "mom" or "dad" it broke my immersion

the interesting, what's missing, and whether it worked for me:

the ambiguity of the gods, particularly athena (and her various disguises in the poem): i would not characterize it as a "fakeout" as some people have. there are still undeniable supernatural elements in the film; whether you read athena as odysseus' hallucination, how he perceives her, or how she chooses to present to him is left up to you. worked for me, but would have worked even better if he had killed that trojan girl himself

replacing the phaeacians and the lotus-eaters with calypso: poor nausikaa, i miss her. but i thought pairing calypso and the lotus, odysseus piecing together the story while literally picking up the pieces of his broken wreckage, was a strong choice to streamline the narrative

along with that, the way his departure from calypso is framed as a surrender of control felt powerful in that moment, after all the useless striving against fate. people made fun of the "defy the gods" tagline but once again, if one cares to actually see the movie, the point being made is that odysseus can't.

circe: loved the setup, enjoyed swapping out a palace for a more folklorish witch's hut, absolutely ate up the body horror. but i think the thumbprint of madeline miller's circe is there in how she's portrayed as vulnerable rather than a woman in a position of power, as i would argue she is in the odyssey, and i think that's a weird choice to make when you're stripping the sexual violence that is in the narrative out (the hanged women).

i could take or leave crow pasiphae but it doesn't actively offend me

the underworld, sinon, and antinous: rolling together elpenor and achilles into sinon, and using him as a representative of common soldiers who died at troy, was not a move i predicted. it works to tie the story of the horse back into the narrative, while also giving antinous more depth and history. i also loved the visuals of tiresias, the muck, and the tide of dead soldiers almost dragging odysseus down with them. however: i think his mother's ghost could have been included here without losing anything.

i'm not sure why both odysseus' parents were cut, actually. it doesn't streamline all that much.

odysseus' return being interrupted with an action sequence where he rescues telemachus at pylos: mixed feelings. my first feeling was that it would undercut the impact of the violence odysseus does in the hall not much later, but i'm not sure that it did. mentor's death was an interesting note and callback to the body odysseus had to leave behind in the cyclops' cave. did enjoy it as father-son shenanigans, but missed opportunity for odysseus' first interaction with telemachus to be witnessing another man greeting him as a father, which is, you know, more thematic and impactful.

totally copied the return's homework by having odysseus recognized because he does pet argos before the dog dies. not sure how i feel about it as the moment of recognition between him and telemachus but i think i liked it? neither actor was really Giving but it was like. serviceable

i will say again that i loved anne hathaway as penelope. my only complaint is that they sanded down her ambiguity (i suspect to make her more sympathetic, which i object to on principle). having her, for instance, vocally state (in private) that she hates the suitors, or odysseus flat-out saying he doesn't have to test penelope's loyalty, he just has to prove his identity to her, is the coward's way out of the mind games. in the poem it's very much both. she is way more ready to believe it's odysseus. and yes maybe i did tear up when he plucked the bow and she realized but is that and the athena brooch (the brooch is based on something in the odyssey) as clever, iconic, or indicative of her character as the tree bed? i submit to you that it is not

spinning odysseus' foretold quest and departure from ithaca as going into exile after violating xenia: less ambiguous than the poem's ending in many ways. but i am kind of a sucker for it, especially after my stomach plummeting when they played it like he was going to die. and idk. penelope goes with him. am i supposed to say i don't allow that. me. ME?

trying to tie in the bronze age collapse: maybe i'm just too used to reading the odyssey as mythical rather than historical, but this was not successful with me. i did like the emphasis on xenia, including that odysseus' ability to "come home" has been shattered by his own violations of hospitality laws. i just don't think that really worked as "the reason civilization is collapsing and what if the real sea peoples were the pirates we created along the way"

i also don't think you can entirely successfully bring home (haha) the theme of odysseus' displacement while also reveling in the violence, as a film. in a way i think nolan tries to lure the audience in with spectacle, then to deconstruct it by returning, at last, to the horror of the sack of troy. but we dive right into the violence again with the suitors, and i don't know that we're any less invested in odysseus' coolness. i think it will be interesting (for more people than just me) to compare this to the return, which wants more or less the same arc for odysseus, but executes it more consistently and with more economical storytelling. so did this work for me? i... i don't know. at some point i'm going to write a substack essay about it, probably.

there's enough in this film that i believe it will inspire people to read the poem, and if they have the tenacity to stick with it, i think they won't have a wrong idea of what it is and be put off. (i use the word tenacity because i think people make too much out of how hard it is to read the odyssey; i think it is and should be accessible, but it is still a story removed from us by time and culture and style, so it does ask you to put in some work.)

[frankenmouse]

It is so ridiculously easy to gain a reputation for being competent by just reading signs.

This is not metaphorical. I mean actual, literal pieces of paper/plastic/metal/whatever explicitly erected to inform the public.

“How did you know this was the right trail?” I read the sign.

“Wow, how did you know what that flower is?” There’s a SIGN.

“How did you know we needed to use the side door?” THERE IS A SIGN POSTED ON THE FRONT DOOR.

Just…why are we having such different experiences of the world? People can read. I KNOW they can read. There’s nothing wrong with their vision.

Just. READ. THE. GOD. DAMN. SIGN.

This also applies to:

Syllabi

Instructions

[thefibrarchaeologist]

I continue to be fascinated by the logic of Word´s ongoing spell and grammar check issues. It currently marks this

as a potentially wrong word and suggests Blues instead, which makes zero sense in context, except for the fact that Rock in German can either mean skirt (like here) or the genre of music. And if it´s the genre of music, it would make sense to pair it with another genre, namely Blues. Bluse on the other hand means blouse, so this is also a very sensible and normal pairing of words, but the program makes me check, just in case.

On the other hand it is completely unable to flag that I had misspelled Quartier (lodgings) as Qaurtier, as if there is any word in the German language in which a q is not immediately followed by an u.

[thesilicontribesman]

Barbed and Tanged Flint Arrowheads, Early Bronze Age, Perth Museum, Perth and Kinross

[grand-theft-carbohydrates]

stop using chatgpt!!!! take a bronze pin and carve your questions onto an ox scapula, then toss it into the fire!!!! use the cracks to divine the gods answer!!!!

[grand-theft-carbohydrates]

citations still have to be APA 7th edition though. if you plagiarise, the gods will flood the yellow river again. and you'll lose your academic standing.

[dkpsyhog]

(The Gods, personal communication, July 18, 2024)

[charl0ttan]

something i actually just realized on call w some friends recently is how crazey it is that your online friends are as many as thousands of feet above or below u right now. like if you teleported to their location without changing your height above sea level, well your fucked in some way basically

[charl0ttan]

How high above sea level are you right now?

0-250 feet

251-500 feet

501-750 feet

751-1000 feet

1001-2000 feet

2001-3000 feet

3001-4000 feet

4001-5000 feet

5001-6000 feet

6001-7000 feet

7001-8000 feet

8001+ feet

Voting ended onJul 19

[the-merry-otter]

Hais

“Take fine dry bread, or biscuit, and grind up well. Take a ratl of this, and three quarters of a ratl of fresh or preserved dates with the stones removed, together with three uqiya of ground almonds and pistachios. Knead all together very well with the hands. Refine two uqiya of sesame-oil, and pour over, working with the hand until it is mixed in. Make into cabobs, and dust with fine-ground sugar. If desired, instead of sesame-oil use butter. This is excellent for travellers.”

2 2/3 c bread crumbs 2 c (about one lb) pitted dates 1/3 c ground almonds 1/3 c ground pistachios 7 T melted butter or sesame oil enough sugar

“We usually mix dates, bread crumbs, and nuts in a food processor or blender. For "cabobs," roll into one inch balls. Good as caravan food (or for taking to wars). They last forever if you do not eat them, but you do so they don't.”

Source: Cariadoc's Miscallany

[mistresssheo]

Tja

Found here 🦋

[translating-german-to-english]

Depending on context:

* well then.

* ain't nothing you can do about it.

* well how about that then.

* you brought that upon yourself dude.

* it is what it is.

* that was completely to be expected.

* told you so.

[translatingpoststogerman]

Je nach Kontext:

* tja.

* tja.

* tja.

* tja.

* tja.

* tja.

* tja.

[frogsandfries]

Nalbinding for confused lefties

I find that there are simply not enough resources for how to begin nalbinding online, and next to none for left-handed fiber-crafters. To be totally forthright, I learned from Happy Needlebinding, on Youtube, from their lefthanded video, but I wanted there to be more resources for other lefties to choose from without getting frustrated, feeling like they have to mirror a site or videos (a place I was getting to before I discovered the Happy Needlebinding video; btw he seems like SUCH a sweet, patient guy).

Step One: Make a simple knot.

Yes, most resources recommend using a wool-based yarn. I'm using what I have on hand. Once/whenever I find my darning needles, or give in and buy a needlepoint or other plastic needle, I may/will try to add a Russian join. Right now, I've been joining my ends by tying each ply together and I can't find my joins in my work. You'll be okay.

Step two: Put your knot over your thumb with the crossover on the pad of your thumb.

For demonstration purposes, I have made the tail way too short. Your working end should always come to rest in the cradle of your thumb.

Step three: Hold your tail in your fingers (I'm only holding the end with my ring finger and pinky), and drape the working end through the cradle of your thumb.

Step four: The way I learned to start, from Happy Needlebinding, was to pass your needle between the crossover of your first knot, and the pad of your thumb.

If you don't like this starting method, I'm aware that other methods; this is the way that I learned and it works for me.

Step five: Pull your working end until you form your second loop, which goes under/"behind" your first and return your working end to the cradle of your thumb.

If I was actually working a project, I would want both of these loops snug around my thumb. Personally, I work closer to the top edge of my nail; you might prefer working a little further back to begin.

Now, this next part is where I repeatedly got lost, so if this seems a little drawn out, I apologize (I think? =P):

Step six-A: You're going to push the first loop off your thumb, and I tend to hold it in place, gently but firmly.

Step six-B: Put your needle in this loop

Step six-C: Turn your needle around and direct it under your second loop and your working yarn. For demonstration purposes only, my working yarn is not in the cradle of my thumb. Normally, my needle stays at more of a 90degree angle from where it entered the first loop

I appear to have maxed out the images in this first part.

[frogsandfries]

Part Three: Adding a row

I'm going to be totally forthright: I had an incredibly difficult time finding a good resource for this, and even so, I still really struggled to figure this part out. You're welcome lol

Step one: Count three stitches back. Remember, nalbinding has two working loops so

This is kind of what my three stitches ends up looking like.

Step two: Holding your first row like so, front toward yourself, this end in your hand, the other end generally pointing to the left, and insert your needle.

Yes, I do have a different needle for this. I carved my first wooden needle myself; it was my first time carving/whittling something like that and I wasn't positive what I might want/need in a nalbinding needle. Luckily, it was just wood.

Step three: You don't necessarily have to do this, but I ended up flipping my working loops up closer to the working end of my thread.

Step three-A: What I've done, if you look very closely, is I'm holding down the second of my two working loops. From here, you'll nalbind pretty much as normal. Go in your first loop as normal, and turn to go back, through your second working loop, and under your working yarn.

Step three-B: I honestly found this difficult to photograph with this pale color of yarn, but as with your starting chain, you'll go in the first loop, turn, go through the second loop and under the working end of the yarn.

At this point, I just repeated: Put your needle through those humpy stitches on the top edge of your chain row, hold down your second loop if you need to/find that helps, put your needle through your first loop from the front, like normal, turn, go through your second loop and under your working thread, like normal!

Again, I hope this helps. I tried to really slow down, draw out exactly what I was doing. The great news is, the second row goes lightening fast, compared to the first row (for example, my chain row took like five days, and personally, once I picked up nalbinding, it felt pretty second nature), especially if you were having to stop to adjust all your stitches down to your desired size (by contrast, I got a third of my second row done just in a short, couple hours session).

I think it's a pretty commonly held understanding that nalbinding is gaged by your thumb, but that's not entirely true. If you were really driven to nalbind a scale piece for a Barbie or Obitsu, you absolutely could. And that's super apparent when you get to the second row, when it's easier to work what's called off (your) thumb. Once you're comfortable with nalbinding, try it out!

[doloneia]

ok ive seen nolans odyssey and what the fuck was that actually

[doloneia]

Parts that made me tweak in a dim-lit movie theater:

1. Every time we meet a woman or enslaved individual that, y’know, had some semblance of agency in the text, Nolan has just… removed that? Circe’s commanding presence & how she genuinely overpowers Odysseus? Gone. Helen actually stealing the show in Book 4 where she walks down into the room and controls the conversation re: Odysseus & Troy? Gone. Utterly Gone. Lupita Nyong’o gets 0 chance to speak on her own terms and its actually so depressing. Athena doesnt get to do ANYTHING it was actually shocking. Telemachus is instead accompanied by Real Mentor for fuck knows how long. Athena is the one who pushes him to leave in the first place??? But not in Nolan’s adaptation ifg 😭 Also I’m genuinely unsure here but it seemed like Circe & Calypso’s divine status was… nonexistent?? They’re both goddesses but apparently not to Christopher Nolan 🫤

And this treatment extends to Odysseus’ slaves, specifically Eumaeus & Eurycleia (eurynome & philoetius not appearing in this goddamn film ifg). Almost every action taken by Eurycleia in the Odyssey is attributed to someone else in Nolan’s adaptation, she gets 0.2 seconds of screentime, its actually absurd. I think she has two lines in the whole movie. Eurycleia. Odysseus and Telemachus’ nurse. The woman who canonically organizes the doors to be locked during the suitor’s slaughter? Who canonically helps secure Telemachus’ provisions for Pylos? fuckin. Not There. And Eumaeus (who literally perfectly models xenia to a disguised Odysseys while living in extreme poverty) notably Does Not Get To Do That in Nolan’s odyssey, instead he’s like. injured I guess? I’m so fuckin confused as to why that happened, it just made the plot more convoluted. Medon is also just not there at all. Medon who is actually the fuckin best?? My underestimated king??? Where Is He.

2. oh my god everything abt the scene with Polyphemus makes me want to claw my eyes out (except maybe his eye? that looked kinda cool idfk). yknow how polyphemus appears, speaks to the crew, and they let their guard down? how the polyphemus episode represents the world outside of greek customs like xenia? how he fucking talks to them? he talks to them and his neighbors? yeah. in Nolan’s odyssey, there are no neighbors. there is no existential mirror/cyclopean foil to ithacan society. there are no other cyclopes. He doesnt even fucking talk 😭😭 <- i mean he gets one line but the audios so distorted that without captions i had no idea what he said

3. Anticleia reunion scene? Nonexistent. Laertes? Nonexistent. Allegedly still around. Sir Not-Appearing In-This-Film. Book 15 reunion between Telemachus and Odysseus? Nonexistent. Reunion between Odysseus, Eumaeus, and Philoetius? Not there. The fucking marriage bed scene? The goddamn marriage bed? NOT THERE. screams into a bag

4. ODYSSEUS “DIDNT WANT TO RETURN HOME” 😭 they keep fucking saying this over and over again too and. No he very much did. No home means no guaranteed kleos guys. his sons life is in jeopardy but Ok christopher shitlan do whatever the fuck you want, i guess

5. every time i heard them say “our civilization is collapsing” or “they say the peoples from the sea are attacking” or “our age of bronze is ending” not only did i feel my soul die a little more inside but i also kept thinking “man, this sounds a lot like the white supremacist belief in ‘western civilization’ just superimposed onto a falsified image of the late bronze age” and thats because It Is.

strange decisions:

1. boar scar apparently occurred when odysseus was an adult???

2. elliot page’s sinon gets one helluva backstory which i guess was kinda cool if you ignore elliot page getting brutally slaughtered in the first 30 seconds of the movie? not sure how to feel about that

3. travis scott kept showing up randomly which was like. fine i guess? genuinely im not sure what the difference between him & phemius was supposed to be. i didnt even see phemius. tbf i was taking notes this whole time so maybe i missed him? but travis scott shouldve just been phemius idfk why he wasnt

4. The Phaecians are just not there guys and i have no idea why. odysseus’ wanderings are being narrated to calypso?

5. the crew mutinies at scylla instead? odysseus tries to sail towards charybdis??? this was a bizarre sequence

6. no nestor or peisistratus. somehow telemachus sails to the 100% inland palace of menelaus. who needs a chariot when you’ve got a Boat i guess

7. half of my notes just say “what happened to show, don’t tell” because the amount of exposition made me want to slam my head into the wall

highlights:

1. anne hathaway and tom holland had a very good dynamic, i feel like they really captured some of the tension between penelope & telemachus, ie penelope running the house for 20 years and still assuming some of that authority vs. telemachus trying to grow up/assume control of the household/establish his own kleos. loved that dynamic tbh. one of the better parts of the telemachy sections

2. lupita nyong’o was great in the uh. 30 seconds she had on screen. im so serious helen was fucking robbed in this movie

3. himesh patel fucking carried every scene he was in on his Back

4. rare cicones appearance

maybe the real sea peoples was the troy we sacked along the way

[doloneia]

also they were not lying when they said there was a massive strobe sequence during the destruction of odysseus’ ship. it was like 5 minutes of violently flashing lights. i barely saw eurylochus die because i was like “Man This Feels A Bit Risky, And I’m Not Even Photosensitive”

[pspsappho]

& honestly there's no debate to be had the zendaya earrings are orders of magnitude worse than kim kardashian wearing that marilyn dress. yes that piece was a one of a kind unique textile made so specifically for marilyn monroe she had to be sewn into it. at the end of the day it was a ~70 year old usamerican cultural artefact being repurposed by an american for an american cultural event and everyone involved knows exactly where the dress came from + what happened to it + where it went afterwards. zendaya is wearing the looted (or forged) cultural heritage of a people her government is currently bombing & whose lives they have been deliberately making unliveable for decades to a movie premiere that has fuck all to do with iran. we don't know where those discs came from where they were found or by whom & we never will. AND the jeweller appears to have altered them substantially from their original condition. destroying a people's cultural heritage at the same time you destroy their country + their lives so you can look good on a red carpet One Time i want to fucking hurl

[uhhhhmanda]

Zendaya’s The Odyssey premiere earrings spark ethics row

The earrings, worn by Zendaya at The Odyssey press tour, are believed to be 2,000-3,000 years old and come at a time when the US is bombing

An archaeologist quoted in the article says "the point of these earrings is not to showcase legitimate ancient artistry, it is to fetishize the past, to be a commodity, stolen from the elite, circulated illegally, and immorally…this is about class signalling."

[bulljumpingfresco]

Minoan fresco from the Aktotiri settlement, Thira, Greece

[thelawfulchaotic]

If I ended up out of work during the academic year, I would have volunteered myself out to be a ringer in college classrooms for sad professors.

Like, is your classroom dead silent and full of rigid and disengaged undergrads?? I’m your one stop solution!! Services provided:

1) Will provoke a rollicking and current event-relevant class discussion even if it’s just between you (prof) and me (humanities only)

2) Will sit in the back of the classroom and loudly ask questions/make statements about the people fucking off on their laptops (“Hey this guy’s playing a video game”) (yes I will make it awkward)

3) “I think (x student) has something to say”

4) I’ll do the reading

5) I can out-argue fascists in my sleep

Consider me for your quiet undergrad class needs! Guarantee that I will make the class interesting. No other guarantee provided.

[gudgercollege]

This is my dream job.

[thelawfulchaotic]

I’m sayin!!!

[chaotic-archaeologist]

God what I wouldn't give to have you in some of the classes I've taught.

[neat-deadandlive-things]

What is "walking distance" to you? (provided that the weather is okay)

Less than 5 minutes.

Less than 15 minutes.

Less than 30 minutes.

Less than 1 hour.

Depends on... add a tag.

other/I'm not canadian and don't measure distance in time.

Voting ended onJul 15

[twobeesornottwobees]

printers behave like that because the medieval monks they put out of work are haunting them