When I was in high school I started the Philosophy Club with some friends. I would promote our meetings by putting up flyers like this one, which came to mind today. (The text is by Francis Bacon.)

let the record show i gymmed. it was lame. but i did it.

read a book! read something other than self-help or a bestseller! read a book published more than 50 years ago!

i’m struggling to internalize the fact that nolan found a way to make the Odyssey a searing political message for our time while staying true to the thematics of the source material. and i thought it was going to just be a shitty action adventure movie with wonky time dynamics.

I demand an adaptation of Aeschylus’s The Persians. I am stomping my foot. This must happen.

abstractions are lossy! summaries are lossy! remember this when you use a compressed artifact (an LLM) to generate another compressed artifact (a summary) instead of actually acquainting yourself with the source data.

some guys next to me at this cafe (i think old college friends) are comparing notes on work. one is a lawyer, one is a software engineer, idk about the other two. they’re talking about AI. the SW guy says “it’s useful for some stuff, but some stuff i’m still better at” then the lawyer speaks up

maybe to fight despair i should start deciding what i want to do if my career evaporates permanently.

I made a note for myself during the movie to do a PSA about my favorite pedantic hobby horse: MENTOR IS A GUY’S NAME. IT ISN’T AN AGENT NOUN. MENTEE IS NOT A WORD.

this man raped and trafficked girls and women and poisoned the minds of thousands of boys, his sexuality is neither here nor there

What? Aristophanes literally wrote jokes making fun of audience members into his dialogue.

People are going to walk away hating Nolan’s Odyssey for the same reasons they would have hated reading the book: it is sprawling and complex, with a lot of layers, a huge offscreen mythology, tons of backstory, moral ambiguity, and loose ends.

“he can speak! why didn’t he talk to us?” “would you talk to an ant?”

i am electrified. good god.

You know the movie is going to be relatively authentic when there's a scene early on where somebody is going through a litter of puppies and casually throwing the weak ones off the side of a cliff.

OK. I'm going to share my notes on Christopher Nolan's rendition of The Odyssey. This thread will have copious spoilers so please don't expand it if you care about things like that.

ok i’m a snob, i have read (some of) homer in the original and i fully expected it to be awful. it was amazing.

idk what the last thing i saw in a theatre was. but i figured id regress to pretentious cinephile elliot ways and pack a notebook. ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Chris Nolan, πολύτροπον…

have been too depressed to eat much or go to the gym this week but i guess you guys have some cake.

I used AI to catalogue and organize 20+ years of old files I had sitting on barely functional external harddrives. I'm reading old seminar papers from college and it's so stupid that I didn't do a philosophy phd.

This only makes sense as a way of saying "I'm doing market manipulation and you can get in on it, for a fee."

I see the odyssey takes have started coming in

A Haitian friend lives is terror as the July 24 deadline for termination of TPS looms. He smiles as he always does but can’t help but look pained, “they will start deportations” he said. This is a man my son runs to from across the street to hug. Not sure how to raise him in this cruel world.

Abolish DHS.

got matcha for the first time in a year.

well, my bp continues to be amazing.

Reading challenging books is worth it. It literally makes your world bigger.

guy sitting next to me on the train is reading James Baldwin (The fire next time) and i feel very blessed.

man i just feel like crap all the time lately.

based on tiktok, men are better at telling if other men are on gear than if they’re straight.

Today’s poem: W. H. Auden, “September 1, 1939” (excerpt) #lunchpoems

"all I know is a door into the dark" "all I have is a voice / to undo the folded lie" "All I could never be, / All, men ignored in me, / This, I was worth to God"

This is a wild read and I'm not even finished with it:

check out the world trade center

chest ✅

Let others learn and take note.

Maybe it’s time to reread this book.

me in my team slack: “has anyone else read Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle?”

the sky is burning

oh and it’s basically hell outside in nyc so there’s that

Today’s poem: Tennyson, “Crossing the Bar” #lunchpoems

every time i read tennyson’s “crossing the bar”, i remember the guy i was friends with in high school whose favorite poem it was. he died 15 years ago this summer.

i am so tired.

I enjoy this game so here’s another one: A widow learns to make soup.

I want sigourney weaver to read me children's stories.

calves?

“Sometimes, in doing philosophy, one just wants to utter an inarticulate sound.” - Wittgenstein (as quoted in Rorty’s “Consequences of Pragmatism”)

I reread this on my morning walk. It's good. I'm glad I wrote it.

Lawyer is repeatedly arrested, and then gets shot.