almost always improvising

April, June, and November

All the rest have 31

Except for Zenquish, which has none.

yall we did it

It doesn't trust it's own kind. That's not just because it's internalized a lot of predjudice. It doesn't entirely trust itself either.

It's so... it's not just that it wants good people to exist. It's that it can only look for them and find them outside of the system it came from. It's so contemptuous in it's own narration of the people on the ship bound for a indentured servitude, but Mensah picks up on the truth anyway. "You wanted to help those people" "I couldn't have helped them" It's not a revolutionary. It doesn't imagine dismantling the corporation rim. It just wants to neither be hurt or made to hurt people. It tries not to get attached to lost causes. Sometimes it does anyway.

Life works so much better when you only engage with others based on their words or actions and refrain from any additional analysis.

Someone didn't text back? Okay so you're not making plans with them. Someone consistently ignores your attempts to contact them? Okay, so you're not gonna be interacting with them now. You can move on with no additional drama. It doesn't need to be a big judgment on them or a big judgment on yourself.

there are 2 main types of waves. wind waves and swell. wind waves (called chop when the period is short) are caused by present wind kicking up the surface of the water. this is where you see little whitecaps and generally pointy, uneven waves. swell is caused by powerful sustained wind whose waves have traveled a long way and developed into consistent self-perpetuating wave forms, and looks like long smooth waves; the energy is coming from the sea itself. swell is the thing that makes you feel like the entire ocean is heaving & is what throws ships around. the sea state is usually described as a combination of swell (the ground movement of the sea) and chop (the movement of the surface) so you might say we have a 4 foot swell (measured from the trough at the bottom to the crest at the top of a large heap of water) plus 2 foot chop (smaller waves closer together on top of the swell). swell is the hardest to get in photo or video in a way that shows its true size, especially if you're shooting on your phone for an instagram story from the bridge of a ship, but if you were say making a 70mm film adaptation of a story where the main character is being tortured by the ocean itself you would probably want to figure that out. because you generally need swell in order to get any kind of impressive motion going on*

*EXCEPT in storms, when the winds are so strong that the wind waves themselves "heap up" and can become mountainous without a preexisting ground swell (when the waves escape the storm or the storm ends these waves will sort themselves out and continue as swell). wind waves obviously behave differently and have different features in higher winds. the beaufort scale is the tool used internationally by mariners and meteorologists to determine wind speed in unprotected waters and describes the features of gale-force, storm-force, hurricane-force winds.

so for example when i'm driving a small work boat at my job, if i notice long streaks of foam starting to run down the backs of the waves, that's my cue to call in and consider ending operations for the day, because on paper my operational limit is sustained 30 knot winds (in that anything higher increases my level of risk). you can see how things get more impressive the higher the winds get, and based on this you can imagine the kind of things we'd expect odysseus to encounter. spindrift is when the wind is so strong that it breaks the surface tension of the water without interacting with any object and all the crests look like they're steaming, it's super cool to see. here's a really good video of the waves caused by "violent storm" winds so you can get a sense of what it might look like if the ocean was mad at you. we want mountainous waves blocking out the horizon.

here's a shot of a "storm" from the odyssey trailer.

so check the scale. this is literally described as a Gentle Breeze. like a Moderate Breeze if we're being generous. what else can you say. this is 2 seconds after a guy gets swept overboard by a wave. obviously the trailer doesn't represent the entire movie but i watched the whole three hours of that and i would say that the bigger seas occasionally got up to 3 foot swell with 2 foot chop, but usually just a 1-4ft chop on flat ocean. it's possible that it got up to force 6 but definitely not above that and im not sure it got that high, i mostly just remember confused seas with a lot of quick, smooth chop (this kind of behavior doesn't affect boats at all). occasionally it looked like they would try to use a powerboat wake to simulate swell but they shot way too close to the origin (and you can't get big swell that way) and just ended up with more sharp, confused-looking waves

as for the on-deck shots, the behavior of the ship and the conditions on deck were obviously totally inconsistent with the environment, but also comically inaccurate even for the conditions they were pretending to be in? so like first of all the ship was almost always rolling side to side, which IS the scariest and most dangerous type of motion especially in a boat shaped like that, but if you're in a storm you should be turning your boat to point into the waves so that you're pitching fore and aft instead of killing everyone on board. we should be seeing the prow dive into the front of a wave and have green water flood the front of the ship and then see nothing but sky a second later. in a ton of these "matt damon is wet and getting splashed with white water" scenes you can see the flat sea in the background and they often stop trying to make it look like the ship is moving at all from one shot to the next. the spray they throw at the crew is imo not enough to snatch someone off a deck like that, and it all looks like white water that comes from waves hitting the side of a boat and splashing up, but in a lot of cases the direction it comes from makes no physical sense. maybe that's poseidon idk. what you should see instead in this kind of situation is a whole wave breaking OVER the side of the boat and basically a solid wall of water sweeping people away, but you need big waves for that.

this is stuff that directors of maritime films work hard to perfect. even major directors like ridley scott (white squall), peter weir (master and commander), baltasar kormákur (adrift -- similar size ship to the odyssey btw), ang lee (life of pi) have developed and used strategies for showing us waves and storms that are exciting and impressive and scary. it IS understood to be an essential element of competence in this kind of film. of all these The Odyssey should be the most epic. it's The Odyssey. all maritime literature is descended from The Odyssey. but christopher nolan didn't seem interested in spending more than $100 of his thousand morbillion dollar budget on the main antagonist of the story.

Benjamin Foster’s Gilgamesh condenses all the different tablets we’ve found together to make one cohesive narrative which is way less intimidating and therefore my go-to if you want something that feels cohesive while also sticking very close to the language of the original. 10/10

Andrew George is the most thorough and up-to-date, and sticks as close to the text as you can get. It does, however, separate out all the different tablets, and feels very unedited in its style. Definitely not a “pretty” version. 10/10 cuz he’s a legend and this is the most definitive scholarly edition but don’t start with it.

Maureen Kovacs has a lovely translation with some very interesting footnotes on word choices. Her Ninsun is absolutely incredible and if you want to cry your eyes out over Gilgamesh’s fate that’s the one for you. It’s one step up from Foster’s in terms of poetic-ness but still pretty close to the original. 8/10

Sophus Helle is more poetic than Kovacs but BRILLIANT, one of my favourite Enkidus and his Shamhat is wonderful. Top favourite of all time. This is a very good starting point. 9/10

I wouldn’t recommend Sandars simply because it’s prose, and also condenses the twelfth tablet into a nice tidy ending that doesn’t really work with the Standard Babylonian narrative. 6/10

Lewis’ Gilgamesh Retold is more of a poetic retelling than a translation; it’s beautiful but definitely not a starting point. Sweet and gentle Enkidu though, very charming. 7/10

Stephen Mitchell I’m not a fan of. He smooths the poem out into something tame and very expected. This is my personal bias but I really dislike his Shamhat. His Enkidu and Gilgamesh are also explicitly more like brothers, which is a valid interpretation but also again not one I lean towards. 5/10

Herbert Mason’s Gilgamesh has some stunning moments in it (Enkidu! They do not know you like I know you!) However it is nowhere near the real text BUT closer than Lewis’. Changes the ending of the poem so it’s about Gilgamesh mourning Enkidu rather than mourning his own mortality; a much sadder conclusion with less resolution than in the Standard Babylonian. 7/10

BONUS ROUND:

Derek Hines’ play GILGAMESH is fucking DERANGED guys. Ten Gilgillion out of ten.

Source

here's the thing. A lot of people like to assume that only "idiots" or whatever are susceptible to this. But when you are experiencing sustained hardship, it can be much easier to see meaning where there is none, believe things you wouldn't ordinarily, etc. Many MANY people, possible MOST people, are a simultaneous heartbreak and job loss away from being at risk for this kind of thinking.

It is very survivable and usually pretty temporary IF you are not heavily influenced in the wrong way while you are at your most vulnerable.

Meanwhile, AI LLMs are being marketed as person-like, trained to behave in a person-like way, the interface and design is such that we interact with it very much like it is a person.. when it is NOT anything like a person at all. But it touches our brain in a way that is similar to how we experience interacting with a person, because we are hyper-social creatures, and these programs are designed to feel person-like.

These things are not our friends, they are not our therapists, they are, despite their name, not intelligent or thoughtful in any way, they are data-set probability generators. And they are good at generating words with a statistical probability of being interpreted as believable and trustworthy and smart.

We need to not talk about them like they have anything in common with people, and there should be legislation against marketing them as people, with people names and people voices and descriptions like "friend" or whatever.

First of all, they're not real. That part is really important.

Second, one of the advantages of fiction is that it allows you to see the entire shape of a character and their backstory. You can understand how they became who they are, what wounds they're carrying, what fears are motivating them, and what choices led them to where they are.

And now, look at me in my fictional Tumblr eyes for a second while I say this, as I gently grab you by the shoulders:

Sympathy is not the same thing as endorsement.

You can recognize that a character is hurting the people around them while also recognizing that they're hurting themselves.

In fact, I'd argue that's one of the most important things stories can teach us.

Cycles of cruelty, abuse, isolation, and self-destruction don't become easier to recognize by pretending the people caught inside them are cartoon villains with no inner lives.

They become easier to recognize and end when we understand how those cycles form in the first place.

A character can't only be tragic if they're innocent.

They can be tragic because you can see exactly how they got here and exactly how they could have been something else.

You can feel bad for them.

You can understand them.

You can even love them as a character.

And still think the way they treat the people around them is abhorrent.

Those aren't contradictory positions.

That's just engaging with a character as a character. Not as a morality test. But as an idea being explored through fiction.

Sometimes a story isn’t asking you to agree with someone.

It’s asking you to understand them.

And understanding people, fictional or otherwise, is harder than deciding whether they’re good or bad. But it’s also more important, because it’s what actually opens the door to change and self-betterment.

Stories, at their best, aren’t really about verdicts.