Remembering Everyone

Prior to this point, when Odysseus tries to exercise Xenia (ancient Greek guest rites/hospitality code), he did what he was supposed to do. (Well, we think so anyway — notably, the most famous books of the Odyssey are told by Odysseus, who isn’t exactly a reliable narrator.)

But when Polyphemus kills and eats some of the men, the game changes. The Cyclops makes it clear he has no intention of abiding by Zeus’s laws, and will cannibalize the lot of the men. So, Odysseus responds in kind — he breaks Xenia and lies. He introduces himself under a false name as part of a trick. Polyphemus then breaks Xenia again — he tells Nobody he’ll be eaten last, and that is the Cyclops’ guest gift to him.

Odysseus’ transgression is clearly the lesser one. The Nobody trick works. It gets Odysseus and most of his crew out of the cave alive.

But, crucially, before leaving Odysseus sheds his disguise. He admits his true identity, in detail, so he can boast of his achievements and add vanquishing a Cyclops to the list. And it bites him in the ass spectacularly.

The only reason why Polyphemus can curse Odysseus, can bid his father Poseidon to curse the man who blinded him, is because he now knows who did it. If Odysseus had kept his mouth shut, he might have safely made it home from there. But while a big part of why the Nobody disguise vs. real name reveal is showing Odysseus’s hubris, it’s not just about that. It’s also about the start of a pattern that hurts him more than it helps him.

From this point in the Odyssey on, Odysseus lies about his identity constantly. And sometimes it protects him, but more often it’s a detriment or at least unnecessary. He’s lying about his identity primarily to people who are on his side — a kindly loyal swineherd, his son, his faithful wife, his ailing father.

The last one is especially damning, because happens when Odysseus has already killed the suitors and returned home and reunited with the rest of his family sans disguises. He knows from everyone else that Laertes never betrayed him or his legacy, but was mourning his son and heartbroken for almost a decade. Odysseus has publicly declared his return to everyone else — his father doesn’t know because he’s living in squalor remotely. But Odysseus doesn’t tell his father who he is. He makes up a fake identity and tells a story implying Laertes’ son is dead. And when Laertes bursts out crying, then Odysseus drops the charade and finally admits who he really was.

There was no utility to that lie. No loyalty to test. No hidden threats to worry about. But Odysseus still instinctively lies to his beloved father about who he is, only dropping the charade when he sees the damage it’s doing to his relationships.

Because at this point, lying is pathological for Odysseus. He can’t seem to stop doing it. Because with Polyphemus, a lie protected him and the truth hurt him. That is the point of the “ Nobody” disguise.

Oldest human footprint discovered, made 153,000 years ago in South Africa.

Oldest human footprint in North America, made 21,000 years ago in New Mexico, USA.

This will be a somewhat brief introductory post to flat reed basket weaving, these two patterns are provided. Below are SOME websites you can buy supplies at:

Basketweaving.com

Peerlessratten.com

Thecountryseat.com

Explore these websites, as you learn basket weaving there's different materials you can learn to use and replace others and these websites will often provide the tools you will need too. You can use dyes or stain for flat reed, I have more experience with dyeing which basically involves boiling the color and then dunking the reeds in it.

Flat reed is literally that, flat reeds. Many flat reeds used are commercial but some traditional ones will be made of splints from trees such as Ash or White Oak. They are soaked in water and then shaped and woven into the craft desired.

Source

These patterns will tell you how you will need to cut your reeds. You will need a water source, preferably a tub of some kind, an awl, measuring tool, and a flat workspace.

Tips:

Do not let your flat reeds stay wet for too long! Let it dry in an open air space when you are not working on it or when it is complete, FLAT REED CAN MOLD.

If you soak flat reed for too long it can become mushy and unusable, at the very least if you soak it for extended periods be careful with how you bend it.

Flat reed tends to (not always) have a 'rough' and 'smooth' side, you want the rough side to be on the inside of your basket.

If you're a flat reed has started to split trim it as close to the split as you can as quickly as you can or it spreads.

Starting is the most difficult part and no basket will look like the end result in the beginning. Getting overwhelmed is normal, come back to it, these are not projects you do in one sitting.

it's still actually perfectly fine to do it

and you shouldn't stop yourself from starting just because it won't be a permanent change.

Like if starting a new daily planner gives you an amazing afternoon of planning and four days where you feel in charge of your life,

why not do it?

It doesn't matter that it won't be a permanent change - 4 good days is still worth it.

If you ever catch yourself thinking, "I wish I could pray/stretch/prep/plan/do the thing, but I always get started on that and it never lasts more than a couple of days,"

what this really means is, "hey, I can feel better for a couple of days."

if this post is making you think of things in your own life that you wish you could stick to because of how good they make you feel,

just be aware:

you're not thinking of a list of ways you've failed to commit

You might have noticed that when you include more than one item in your AO3 filters, the number of results drops drastically. When you include more than one item, you're telling the filter to find fics that have tag A as well as tag B, and the more items you include, the more things you're requiring a fic to have in order to show up in your results.

You're telling AO3 that you only want fics that have all of the things. You're not telling AO3 that you want fics that have any of the things.

This is because the filters use something called Boolean operators. The Boolean operators are: AND, OR, and NOT. You need to use caps for these terms in order for them to function as an operator and not just another word in a phrase.

AND (the one used by include filters) means you want both (or all) of the things

OR means you want any of them or any combination of them

NOT (the one used by exclude filters) means that you want none of them, either alone or in combination

So if Include = AND and Exclude = NOT, then how do you use OR? Use the Search Within Results box. It's near the bottom of the filter menu, right above where you can choose which language you want to read and below where you can choose word count range and completion status etc.

In this box, type the name of the first tag you're interested in, then the name of the second tag and put an OR in the middle. Keep adding OR in between them, and you can stack as many tags as you want - until you get to whatever the character limit is (character, in this case, meaning letter, number, or symbol).

If a tag is just one word, then your filter would look like this:

angst OR fluff

If a tag is more than one word, then your filter would look like this:

"no beta we die like men" OR "I wrote this instead of sleeping"

You need the quotation marks around multiple words to let the filter know that those words belong together, in that order

If you want to do an OR search for ships, it gets a bit more complicated because of the symbols used in ship tags. For ships, instead of using the name of the tag, it's better to use the tag ID number.

To find the tag ID, tap/click on the ship tag to go that tag's results page (I'm using Frodo/Sam in this example). On that results page, tap on the button labelled RSS feed. That will either open up a new page full of code or download a text file of code. Near the top of that code, you'll see something that looks like:

The tag ID number is the number that appears after /tags/

In this case, the tag ID number for Frodo/Sam is 13674. When I repeat the same process for Frodo & Sam, I get the tag ID number 716913. Then I just need to set up my OR statement and let it know that the tag number I'm providing is a relationship ID:

relationship_ids: 13674 OR relationship_ids:716913

Put that in the Search Within Results box, and I'll get fics with either one of those ships tagged, and I'll also get results with both ships tagged.

Instead of quotation marks you could also use brackets and instead of NOT you can you a dash. (Boolean Operators have alternative characters/symbols that can be used instead of typing the entire operator but this also depends on where you are typing them. If you type them on a site that doesn't recognize the character/symbol, you might not get the results for what you want.)

For example, if you're searching for Frodo & Sam OR Frodo/Sam but you don't even want a mention of Bilbo, you can write it like this:

(Frodo & Sam) OR (Frodo/Sam) -Bilbo

It will filter out every work that has Bilbo anywhere in the tags (and summary, title, series titles, and if the author's name contains it😅) while giving you the works that you want. It doesn't work for partial words however (I think you would have to use an asterisk (*) which is sometimes called a wildcard, but I haven't tried that yet, I'll update if I do), i.e. poly vs polyamory.

Note that when using the dash there mustn't be a space between it and what you want to filter out, or else you will get a page with zero results (I think it ends up filtering out every work with a space, and that's all works).

Dashes can also be used with brackets, for example: -(character death)

This will filter out Major Character Death, Minor Character Death, Temporary Character Death, Canon Character Death, and so on so forth.