michael-dean-k/

1. For someone who has never read—and knows nothing about—Homer's epic, Nolan's Odyssey is a success. My wife, who cared little about the Odyssey as I read and raved about it in the preceding weeks, said it was 10/10, one of the best movies she's ever seen. It's easy to imagine Nolan fumbling this. I thought his last two films were structural failures; but he stuck with a pretty conservative retelling of the arc, rendered mythic scenes in a remarkable way, and, along with the cast of stars, it all culminated in the summer blockbuster that we now all feel compelled to write about.

2. Importantly, though, it works for fans and readers of the Odyssey too. Prior to this, I watched the 8-part mini-series from 1968 in Italian. At eight hours, it is far closer to matching the book literally, but the cinematography is so primitive that it often feels like you're watching an amateur play. Still, you get over it quickly, and can appreciate the power of the original translated into a visual form. I also watched the cyclops scene from the 1997 two-part series, and it was so tonally off, so non-terrifying, that I decided I wouldn't sit through the whole thing. Nolan's film loses some key details in compression, and it's far from a perfect rendition, but negative reviews miss that this is the first-ever rendition of a strange, ancient story that hits the proper cinematic register, and that alone feels historic.

3. When the movie started, I couldn't help but feel that my recent obsession with the Odyssey might hamper my experience of it. By knowing the classic so well, I was able to see the seams and exclusions; yet also, I could appreciate details that the casual viewer would miss. Early on, I decided to try to suspend disbelief, to take it in as a purely sensory, non-cerebral experience. The low-frequency bass of the IMAX theatre was so often so loud that my head would tingle—it is an audiovisual spectacle, and with the mind off, you get totally enveloped in it.

4. Most negative reviews of the film cover dialect, costumes, and casting. The lamest of post-watch YouTube reviews I saw was from someone refusing to even see it because Elliot Page was in it (and that buying a ticket equates to supporting trans-ideology, and thus, the fall of western civilization, etc.). I did not think about Page or Damon or Hatheway, or any of the actors during my watch. If you are not suspending belief, and instead getting hung up on irreversible decisions like casting, then you're absolutely in no position to feel the movie. Instead of immersing yourself in the epic, you are sitting outside of it, as a critic, and ironically, depriving yourself of experiencing one of the core stories of western civilization, the Ur narrative.

5. My general stance is that I extremely enjoyed an imperfect translation of one of our most foundational stories. A good scene to dissect is the cyclops. At a structural level, it was off on a few important beats: (1) it seems they're unaware that they're on the island of cyclops, which takes away from Odysseus's reckless curiosity—in the book, he explicitly wants to meet one; (2) Polyphemus doesn't talk, which makes him more on an animal than a humanoid beast, meaning Odysseus can't use his cleverness to outsmart him; and (3) when leaving the cave, he doesn't declare his name in an act of hubris, which launches the curse, and is really the inciting act of the whole odyssey. So in one sense, the structural importance of the cyclops is botched, and it feels like one monster in a chain of monster. But, tonally, the cyclops is far better than any depiction in film. Unlike the '68 version, the cave is pitch black. The first minute or two in the cave is epic, and so much is gained by not showing the cyclops, and just his hands (Jaws-like). Then, when we see him, the actual prosthetics and decisions on his face, with his twisted nose and asymmetrical eye, we truly get the grotesque horror of a mutilated monster. I do think, for this rendering, they showed too much of it after the main reveal. And also, the animatronic cyclops sometimes led to awkward leg movements that broke immersion. So it wasn't tonally perfect either, but still, there are seconds of that sequence that are so far beyond any visual depiction of the cyclops that it felt historic to watch.

6. It deviated from the original in some ways that improved the story. I thought Antonius was far more developed as a villain than in the book. The ending was also better too. (SPOILER:) Instead of Athena enforcing a peace treaty after the Ithaca mob vows to avenge the bloodbath of their sons, Odysseus realizes that he can't stay home, and has to flee into oblivion with Penelope, leaving his son the throne. Still imperfect, but better than the book. It doesn't make sense to try to retell the Odyssey exactly, the original itself is hobbled and contentious. Similar to how the Trojan Horse is in one of the 6 lost books on the Trojan Wars, so is Odysseus's fate: In Telegonny, we learn that Odysseus had a son with Circe, who comes to Ithaca and unknowingly kills his father with a mantid spear (fulfilling the "death by sea" prophecy).

7. I thought the omissions of the Phaeacians made sense, given his time constraints, but a lot if also lost. That's how Odysseus gets home, and the consequence of them delivering him is having their magic ship turned stone. I thought the '68 series made some good variations to the Phaeacian sequence that shows Odysseus trying to deceive them. Each retelling of the story, whether in text or film, is an attempt to resolve all the relationships between the characters, events, and places. Each retelling is a way for me to understand new potentials within the discrete elements, which will guide my own imagination when I eventually decide to recombine them all into a version of my own. I took no notes during or after watching Nolan's film. I'll probably see it a second time with a moral critical eye, specifically looking at what his version gains and loses.

I did not expect to be able quote whole scenes of The Sandlot (1993) from memory, but there I was, the annoying co-watcher to my wife who barely remembers it. I must have watched it a dozen times. If not, the few viewings of it must have been a religious, formative experience. Somehow it came on, via streaming, already more than half way through, but early enough to be inside of the dream of Benny Rodriguez¹ where the ghost of Babe Ruth delivers his classic line: “Remember kid, there's heroes and there's legends. Heroes get remembered, but legends never die.”

Did this quote shape my elementary consciousness? Many of my essays here are about “textual immortality” and legacy—doesn’t that word have a shared root with legend? Has my drive to devote my life to creating something memorable (something that outlasts me and shapes the future) a product of a 1990s cult film with a $7 million budget?

Obviously the answers to those questions are lost; all that is left are fuzzy caricatures to reason with. I can’t know exactly the evolution of my psyche, but it does seem that in almost every phase—from baseball, to music, to architecture, to technology—there was this boyish desire to be Ruth-like, to master and transcend a genre, to have a bunch of goofy nicknames, to have leagues of kids yell my name in unison, and to be remember beyond my life. To lean into and live by that line is to become a megalomaniac.

There is a second half to that quote (which is less memorable): “Follow your heart, kid, you’ll never go wrong.” This disarms the grandiosity of the prior line. The goal is not to become a legend for legend’s sake, but to be attuned toward your heart (towards “the way,” nature’s order, the virtuous thing, the hard thing) which puts you on a path, perhaps towards doing legendary things, but the path is the point.

The other day I was listening to a podcast and noted “the purpose of life is the transmission of legacy.” The context is that in the face of death, we strive for immortality in different ways. The immature and impossible version of this is physical immortality. Religions promise spiritual immortality. Pharaohs and estates focus on material immortality. They referred to another option, “secular immortality,” which I’d rather call “symbolic immortality.” This is about living into the future through art, language, and symbols. This can be more modest than the cultural immortality of Babe Ruth; this can exist solely within the family. I’m talking about the paintings we have hung up of my wife’s grandmother, and the sayings from my great grandmother that I’ll pass down (“be your own person, choose your friends wisely”).

There are two ways to think about death. The first is cosmic deflation, to realize that Babe Ruth, the entire culture he's within, and even the species itself, are all just a temporary evolutionary blip; if everything will be cosmically forgotten, then it’s futile to strive to be remembered for anything. Alternatively, you could see your immediate chain, the generations before and after you, as equal to yourself, to see the whole lot of you as a single entity, and to act in a way that could be exemplary for your kids.

Funny to think that Stranger things is a mirror of modern parenting paranoia: if you let your kids ride around on bikes outside, they will be abducted by horrific interdimensional monsters who are controlled by an MK ultra experiment gone wrong (a telepathic reptilian Jeffery Epstein), so just stay safe, stay inside, and watch Netflix.

I had a horrific dream last night. We were in an oversized living room, and there was an inter-dimensional parasite that would one-by-one, burrow into each person’s ass. Whether you then exploded or not was somehow a testament to your character. It went up mine at least twice. I survived, and the second time the parasite coiled up and turned into an egg. I think I won this tournment? Was this a Harry Potter dream? Actually no, this thing was slimey and shadowy and probably from the Stranger Things univese. Actually, I probably had this dream because Season 5 of Stranger Things just dropped.

Stranger Things features possessions, ghosts, monsters, and every breed of supernatural evil, but all packaged in a way to be maximally accessible. It is a cultural juggernaut, the beast of Netflix. It gets billions of views, and is the #1 show in 90 countries. It is cross-generational and nostalgic for both kids and parents, resurrecting songs from the 80s back onto the billboards.

Is it weird that a hit show normalizes paranormal and grotesque violence? I mean yes, in the end, I’m sure the kids will win, but are we not poisoning our subconscious? I guess this reflect a general hesitation to the whole genre of horror. I do think there is something valuable to virgin eyes—if you see CGI evil, even once, it could haunt you eternally. Many other cultures see Halloween as soul-damning (my sister-in-law, a true Orthodox Christian, recently went upstate to visit a monastery on the night of Halloween, to avoid the inevitable images of teenagers dressed as cadavers).

I had a dream last night that involved several adventures with CansaFis Foote (who in this reality wore a backwards baseball hat). Most of them were trivial, like how he said he was going to order a Baha bowl but then told the waiter he wanted three tacos, and then I ate at all the chips when he went to the bathroom. Also his wife was some NYC executive who was about to become the president of my wife’s architecture company. But the best detail was when I saw a poster for the movie Point Break (1989), and I was inspecting it to see who the actors were. Was it Gary Busey and Anthony Keidis, like CansaFis insisted? Was this poster special for omitting the lead actor, Keanu Reeves? One way or another, this triggered lucidity, because we were sitting on a bench and I was describing how “I know we’re in a dream,” and “at any moment now, all of reality is going to wobble and collapse and I’m going to wake up” (as it usually does when I become lucid). But then nothing happened… Yet now I get it; I get why after asking CFF why Keanu Reeves wasn’t in his description of Point Break, he said, “because I’m dangerous.”

I'm ashamed to admit that a meme on Sora got me to laugh and cry so hard that my head was in pain and I had to close the app. It was Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech,” but AI replaced the text with the script from the meme of that 4-year-old who can’t describe his dream (“Have you ever had a dream that you, um, you had, your, you— you could, you’ll do, you— you want, you, you could do…” etc.). There is something about seeing a great American orator mumble endlessly that I apparently can’t handle. Technically, I “made” this meme, which makes it worse, like I’m laughing at my own jokes.

What makes Sora an incredibly weird experiment is that, in 10 seconds, anyone can upload their “likeness.” Basically, you spin your head around, you say some words, and you get a photorealistic avatar that you can lend to your friends so they can prompt you into absurd situations. Of course, Sam Altman is one of the default avatars available. 50% of the app is Sam Altman fan fiction. You will find him stealing graphics cards from Target, smoking weed and saying “we’re cooked,” debating Cartman in court, using Pikachu to power a fusion reactor, etc. Also if you like Pikachu, there is now infinite Pikachu content. It is all very dumb, but it is endlessly novel.

This feels like a preview of a culture who only communicates through Superbowl commercial skits. I hope it doesn’t work, but I fear it might. I assume most people are questioning “why would anybody make their likeness public?” The answer is attention. I imagine that, within a week or two, Sam will have the montages and metrics to sway influencers and celebrities. It will be pitched as the new way to engage your audience: “let them create through you.” They know they can’t use the likeness of real people; I wonder if the point of this app (a wrapper over their underlying video model) is to get people to hand over their identity for free.

I am debating if I should delete this from my phone (I don’t allow any feeds on my phone … except Substack), or, if I should lean in, sell my likeness, and write about the consequences. This feels like an essay-worthy moment, but I can’t find the terms and conditions, and I get paranoid when I imagine the possibilities.

Imagine a concept called "Angels in the Outfield" (named after the movie), an AI-powered “fantasy league” that is more popular than living baseball. You could assemble the best all-time players for each team (ie: all-time Mets roster), and then run simulated seasons each year. You could already achieve something like this through any MLB video game; but to make it good, it would require more than accurate statistics, mechanics, and hyper-realistic graphics, but personality recreations of each player (ie: a convincing first base conversation between Pete Alonso and Joe DiMaggio would be part of the uncanny fascination).

Imagine having the worst thing you’ve ever done broadcasted to the entire world? Everyone would assume that lapse in virtue was your full self. Everyone has a different mean and a different range, but the question is, where does this particular cheater—the CEO at the Coldplay concert—stand? We see this 10 second clip with no context into who he actually is, and we assume it’s representative of his whole character. But when I hear that his wife who was cheated on was actually the mistress from his first marriage, it points to a pattern. Still, who knows if it’s true or not. The situation is something like a perfect storm for a man who probably deserves it. Out of millions of Jumbotron kiss cam moments, all the wrong moves happened at the same time. They could’ve separated when the kiss cam was announced, they could’ve played off the reaction instead of devolving into horrific embarrassment, and Chris Martin could have held his tongue, but none of that happened, and so now an angry public—one looking for a scapegoat—found a powerful man in a cartoon situation, getting the fate we think he deserves.

The Darth Vader x hip hop crossover is a good example of fan-led genre breeding that’s about to explode. Something like Star Wars can be bred with, effectively, anything: baseball, jam bands, New York City, whatever. The question is which hybrids can sustain an audience for more than a single short? Will someone build an empire off of an unexpected but perfect hybrid? (I think there’s potential in GTA meets Mario)

Snorp started as a statue inside of a children’s hospital waiting from in 2016, evolved into an Internet meme in 2017, an now in 2025 it resurrected as an AI-generated music video (NSFW/NSFL). This is the future of entertainment: strange, grotesque, ironic, nostalgic, and gross—the kind of thing that could lodge itself easily in your subconscious, the kind of thing you probably shouldn’t watch, the kind of thing that I hesitate to share in my logs but want to make sense of. (EDIT: Link removed, so linking here to a Google video search for "snorp music video")

If you're familiar with "inter-dimensional cable” from Rick and Morty, you might appreciate the latest AI reels. It's exciting to imagine how I might eventually use this, but it seems like the larger media environment is about to get a macro-dose of absurdity.

The absurd used to be fringe (think of the early surrealists in post-war culture); until Super Bowl commercials realized people react well to non-sense. We’re about to get flooded in it. I feel like there’s something rejuvenating about absurdism in small doses—I enjoy surrealism—, but something feels off when it’s cheap, effortless, and endless, the new vernacular of modern culture. You can't compare low-effort absurdity to high-effort absurdity.

TikTok’s optimizes for novelty: at first it was just people at extreme peaks (best looking, best stunts, best soccer juggling ability); when that got old we had NPCs, weird people in weird social contracts; now short-form AI surrealism is the most potent delivery of the uncanny (wow, I’ve never seen polar bears on a beach screwing mermaids, what a trip, maybe I’ll watch just one more to see something else I’ve never cared to imagined before). Results could be sexual or pedestrian, angelic or demonic, but it feels mostly ironic and campy right now.

There's a whole sub-genre of meta-concepts, where VEO3 characters pretend to be in a crisis by insisting they are real and not prompt-generated: I’m real, don’t you believe me?. There is also a strange of vengeance towards their prompter.

It won't be long until inter-dimensional cable emerges as its own dedicated app type.

My expectations for realism aren't that high for Mission Impossible movies. In the name is a bid for permission to chain highly improbable events in a never-ending sequence. If you scoff at the fact that Ethan Hunt can ride a motorcycle off a cliff, and then land his parachute not just into a runaway train that’s a mile away, but to break into the exact right window at the exact right time, then you probably just don’t understand the terms of the title. It’s impossible.

That’s not an excuse for sloppy writing. The villain in MI:8 was “The Entity,” a rogue super-intelligence that has taken control of the world’s nuclear arsenals (not exactly a new premise, but perhaps the first time this AI doomsday scenario shows up in a spy movie). I’m by no means an expert in how ASI will go rogue, but at the least I’ve read the 2027 paper, and can imagine the basics, and it seems like no one on their staff did. As my mother-in-law said, technical realism would go over 99% of people’s heads, but what is there to lose by setting good constraints?

While MI:8 was a fine closer for the series, the climax as a bust because: (1) they didn’t seem to care to explore the unique possibilities of an AI vision, and, (2) instead, Tom has had a vision for 20-years to do some real-life impossible propeller plane stunts. So basically, the ego of a stuntman/actor got in the way of a compelling climax.

Here’s the gist of how they set up the AI. Tom (and his sidekick Luther), built a “poison pill” (malware), and stole (impossibly, BTW) the “source code” from a sunken submarine. The idea is by plugging the “pill” into an external hard drive, it will confuse the ASI—it will think that it’s retreating into an underground base in Africa before setting off all the nukes, but actually it’s retreating into a “5D” optical drive, and it’s being disconnected right before it can launch anything. So many questions arrive:

Is it not a distributed entity? Meaning, if it’s a super intelligent hive mind, then wouldn’t it see it as an extreme risk to relocate all versions of itself to a single location? The climax of the movie is Tom falling from a broken plane, seemingly trying to plug a USB-A dongle into a hard drive, and he just can’t get the direction right—and how exactly does an offline, analog, disconnected device instantly propagate through all it’s instances?

What’s impossible to me is that a film with a $400 million budget couldn’t do some basic research to understand its final boss. Feels they picked AI because it’s the hype of the 2020s, and didn’t bother to really look into it. Instead, they scoped it’s destruction to plugging in a USB drive (remotely), and paired the ASI with a human agent—Gabriel, who wasn’t that compelling, but by embodying the villain in a human form, it let them make the climax a plane chase with cool stunts.

I would’ve rather seen Tom directly battle a digital entity. Perhaps the most unique dimension was when Tom went into a coffin with what seemed like a VR experience where he could talk to the entity himself. That only happened once, but it could’ve played a role in the climax—ie: imagine Tom in an inception-like world of illusions, where The Entity convinces him Rebecca Ferguson is still alive, but by him realizing it’s a simulation, he kills her and gets some piece of information that’s vital to protect the world.

Ultimately, the challenge is that there’s no real way to stop or kill a ASI, short of, destroying all digital system and rebuilding from scratch, which is it’s own kind of devastation.