In the Odyssey Odysseus's dog (Argos) is old and weak but thrilled when he recognizes his master before dying peacefully. I'm not aware of any other text where that trope of the loyal dog appears earlier and I hope I see it in Nolan's adaptation and I hope it hits just as hard as when I first read that poem years ago. My second favorite example of that archetype is a certain scene from Robin Hobb's Assassin's Apprentice but I won't say anything else in case someone wants to drop what they're doing and read the first book in a trilogy which kicks off a 16 book fantasy series.

The ATU system catalogs plots from folktales for cross-cultural comparison. "The Magic Mill" (ATU 565) is a tale type where someone gets a magical grinding mill that cranks out meal or salt or what-have-you, but the mill only listens to its true owner and causes havoc when others try to use it. Why is the ocean salty? Well, a long time ago a magic salt mill fell into a sailor's hands and he unintentionally filled the ocean with salt because he couldn't turn it off. Magic mill go brr? 🤔

What if two civilizations were fundamentally incompatible and the only recourse was war? The Sun Eater series by Christopher Ruocchio is a good read if you have some tolerance for melodrama and minor pacing issues. It's thousands of years in the future and humans are living on thousands of different planets. The technology is hard to distinguish from magic but the social structure is late stage Roman Empire. Roucchio uses a first-person narrative framing device to great effect. Think Kvothe in The Name of the Wind. And just like Kvothe the protagonist (Hadrian Marlowe) is a bit self-absorbed. But unlike Kvothe it's established in the first paragraph that Hadrian will follow an "innocent Anakin becomes jaded Vader" arc. The world-building is strong, too. There's echoes of Dune, The Hunger Games, Red Rising, and Game of Thrones, but the storytelling doesn't usually feel derivative. The killer combo for me is that Ruocchio is unsentimental about politics and power but optimistic about what groups of individuals can do. I had never seen a speculative fiction writer explicitly reference Jouvenel's high-low vs middle dynamic. And yes there's an alien civilization but first contact is less Arrival and more "let's be friends oh wait you seem to enjoy the taste of human flesh as something of a delicacy."

In Things in Rings you put things in rings and guess the secret rules. Lots of fun Easter eggs on the cards. Pretty sure that banana card is a reference to that guy who taped a banana to a wall and called it art.

This weekend I will be installing @Zapstore, @Amber, @White Noise, and @derps on my wife's phone. She said, "Sure, why not?" 😂

I feel like Salieri trying to keep up with Mozart whenever I use an LLM to learn something technical.

Saw some short films today. The Singers is worth a watch if you like broken men in bars with strong pipes. Based on the short story by Ivan Turgenev. A little too self-consciously heartwarming to be great. Or Two People Exchanging Saliva if you like black-and-white cinematography, absurdist world-building, forbidden love, garlic gum, retail therapy, and paying for goods and services with power slaps. I was moved by the end.

I learned recently that "nostos" is a theme in Ancient Greek literature. It usually includes "an epic hero returning home, often by sea." The Nostr space feels a bit like coming home. I wonder how many folks had to dodge Sirens and lotus-eaters to get here. 😂

@Sats 4 Snacks the variety pack arrived. Thanks for the extra strawberries and handwritten note! So far I've had the freeze dried mangoes, which taste great. Looking forward to trying the rest soon.

My wife did beautiful gouache art of locations in Banff, Switzerland, and Iceland (left to right).

Excited to try some honey and maple syrup from @SweetSats. I'll probably put the former in some tea and the latter in some coffee later. And I appreciate how secure the packaging was. The box could have been tossed out of a helicopter and the contents would have been fine.

In The Hunger Games, the nation is called Panem. In Juvenal's Satires, he coins the phrase "panem et circenses," or "bread and circuses."

The author of Mandibles has a new novel out, might read it after I finish Lyonesse by Jack Vance. 🤔 Fun Fact: Vecna of Stranger Things is an anagram of Vance, whose stories I think had an influence on aspects of D&D.

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Democracy: A Guided Tour is a good political philosophy 101 kind of book. Democracy is a tool, not a poem, and we can judge how well it's working from the standpoint of standards like stability, virtue, wisdom, liberty, and equality. The table of contents itself is useful for developing a mental model. 1. Democracy: Why or Why Not? 2. For Stability: Stability through Shared Power 3. Against Stability: Passion and Polarization 4. For Virtue: Does Democracy Enlighten and Ennoble? 5. Against Virtue: Does Democracy Make Us Angry, Mean, and Dumb? 6. For Wisdom: Two Heads Are Smarter than One 7. Against Wisdom: Garbage In, Garbage Out 8. For Liberty: The Consent of the Governed? 9. Against Liberty: Democracy as the Many-Headed Master 10. For Equality: Democracy as the Public Expression of Equal Standing 11. Against Equality: Is Democratic Equality an Illusion? In general, I found the "against" chapters more persuasive. #books #bookstr

Ordered To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism with @Whitepaper Books after requesting it and getting notified that it had been added. Excellent service, and paid in sats. Looking forward to making more purchases. #bookstr

Shōbu (2019) feels like a game humans could have been playing for hundreds of years. You win by pushing all your opponents stones off any one of the four gameboards. The twist is that you get two moves on your turn, a passive move followed by an aggressive move. The passive move is setup, no pushing allowed. The aggressive move must involve a different stone, and must mirror how the passive stone moves. Pushing is permitted here. #boardgames