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Elon Musk threatens to make ‘historically accurate’ version of The Odyssey with Grok (www.thepinknews.com)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/nottheonion@lemmy.world
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[–] 129 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (20 children)

The Odyssey is fictional story.
Does he think magic and giants and gods are historically accurate?

What about a historically accurate version of Harry Potter Dresden?

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  • [–] 25 points 2 months ago* (11 children)

    I do think it’s still fair to consider the very likely possibility that there’s a fair amount of truth contained within the story though (obviously not all the supernatural stuff, but still). That’s definitely the case with the Iliad; Troy was literally discovered in modern-day Türkiye in the 1800s.

    All the crazy stuff in it is probably at least in part a result of its origin as an oral tradition instead of written text. The story being passed down across generations of memorizers without any hard reference to go off of tends to make for a really long game of telephone.

    None of this is to humour Musk by the way. I just think this topic is interesting in general.

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  • [–] 64 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    New York City is a real place that exists, but that doesn’t make the Avengers films any less fictional.

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  • [–] 12 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

    I’m going off of what real historians have hypothesized, not just baseless rhetoric. Nor am I claiming that the legends themselves are wholly factual (though as I’ve said it’s definitely possible to be partly the case). Feel free to read the Wikipedia article on it and draw your own conclusions.

    Personally, I think it would be absurd if it were the case that in Late Bronze Age Greece — in or around the Bronze Age Collapse — they chose Troy (evidently not even a Greek setting) specifically to be the setting of an oral war story without there being a material reason for it, however minor. But that’s just me obviously.

    Addendum (This is somewhat unrelated but still important to bring up): I think it's honestly quite offensive to compare an entire cultural heritage's creation to relatively simple blockbuster films made not even a couple decades ago. You're comparing a cultural creation brought about in the midst of an entire mythos, through countless generations, to a few simple narratives; the origins of which can be found not even a century ago. Not only is it a false equivalence, it's downright ignorant if not explicitly ill-intended. One was made through the contributions of several minds over hundreds of years through the sole intent of participating in a rich communion of ideas; the others were made, fundamentally, with the intention of turning a profit. It's belittling and ethnocentric to pretend that they're equivalent in any form.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 months ago (6 children)

    The theories are that its a mythic retelling of a legend that's an embellished version of something that basically 'kind of' happened, around the time of the Late Bronze Age Collapse, between the 13th and 12th centuries BCE.

    The original date of it being first written down is somewhere in the 8th century BCE, so, yeah roughly 500 years of oral tradition untill then.

    https://www.britannica.com/topic/Is-the-Odyssey-a-True-Story

    Schliemann’s findings and the continuing work of later archeologists seriously fueled theories of the historicity of the Trojan War, dated by later Greek authors to the 12th or 13th century bce. While the mere existence of Troy is not proof that the war was real, the discovery of arrowheads, signs of fire, and unburied bodies found in a layer corresponding to the 13th century bce indicates the possibility of battles having occurred.

    Supporting evidence includes Hittite records mentioning warfare with Wilusa, their name for Troy. Some historians believe that a kingdom the Hittites called Ahhiyawa was really Achaea, or ancient Greece. Records suggest that sometime in the 13th century, Ahhiyawan forces were involved in a war against Wilusa, whose ruler, Aleksandu (very similar to Alexandros, a name for the Trojan prince Paris), requested military aid from the Hittites. Experts believe that a real conflict or a series of conflicts of some scale—either a struggle for political or commercial supremacy—inspired embellished accounts of the Trojan War.

    So... taken in whole... the Odyssey is maybe roughly as actually historically accurate as... the Old Testament.

    If your lense is 'is this legitimate history?'...

    There are kernels of events that basically actually happened, and some important people who did something vaguely similar to what's described in the stories... around which is erected a grand mythic narrative featuring a great amount of totally fantastic and impossible nonsense, and many wholly fabricated characters and 'plot points'.

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  • [–] 13 points 2 months ago

    Does he think magic and giants and gods are historically accurate?

    Would you put it past him? The guy is so high most of the day he probably thinks the sparkle fairy brings him a coffee every morning.

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    [–] 64 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    With historically accurate cyclops, scylla, charybdis, sirens and ghost of Agamemnon...

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    • [–] 54 points 2 months ago (7 children)

    Um, the Odyssey is fiction. It literally can't be "historically accurate".

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  • [–] 62 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    It's a dog whistle for casting only white people and no queer actors. If something has a racist angle, assume that's the one Musk means

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  • [–] 42 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    Ah yes, the famously pale ancient Greeks who definitely only engaged in the "correct" kinds of relationships.

    If he isn't an actual fucking idiot, he's a premium rate actor.

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  • [–] 18 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    (Looks at the history of Musk in the public eye)

    I'm gonna say it's the idiot one. All the moron had to do was keep his mouth shut and keep paying to buy the founder title of other market disruptors and he'd've been the next Henry Ford (literal nazi that Americans remember fondly cause he was "pro-labor" (threw labor a bone to disrupt union efforts))

    Instead, we now all know he's an evil idiot with an ego problem.

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    [–] 43 points 2 months ago

    Elon Musk says

    ok

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    [–] 37 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    he should buy memphis the water treatment plant he promised so grok can stop using AQUIFER DRINKING WATER for cooling.

    fuck elon i hope he gets pancreatic cancer and 4 flat tires on his ride home.

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    [–] 33 points 2 months ago

    Thank GOD! I HOPE he can do the Same with Avengers so we can FINALLY get a HISTORICALLY Accurate version of THAT too!

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    [+] 32 points 2 months ago (5 children)
    [removed by mod]
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  • [–] 23 points 2 months ago*

    Like if you look at how most billionaires since the 80s came into being its almost entirely one strategy:

    1. start with a decent pile of money

    2. Put the money pile on a stock market bet

    3. Manipulate the stock price by lying, cheating, stealing or making a popular product.

    Elon musk is some kind of idiot-savant in manipulating stock prices and then diverting a maximal amount of money away from material product creation. His "money taken" to "physical product created" ratio is just modestly better than elizabeth holmes.

    There is a larger discussion to be had of whether we should allow society to give people that level of power because they're good at marketing and backroom dealing. Especially since the entire reason we created the entire stock market system was in theory to build more popular products, not to reward skilled stock market manipulators.

    Its sort of salt in the wound that the material value of most of elon's companies and products are largely dwarfed by the amount of money musk has been awarded by the government.

    Society would probably have been better served by spinning up state owned electric car factories and state owned satellite delivery systems because we could have gotten all the same benefits for a fraction of the price we paid for it and are continuing to pay for.

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    [–] 30 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    I can’t wait to see what a historically accurate cyclops looks like.

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    • [–] 27 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    Elon will run his mouth for a while, then forget about this.

    He will never follow through.

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    [–] 24 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    This is not oniony, this is just yet another "Elon musk says"

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    [–] 23 points 2 months ago (11 children)

    Why are we okay with every robin hood movie being an interpretation, but all the sudden the oddesy needs to be historically perfect?

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    [–] 20 points 2 months ago

    Wait till he finds out how many twinks were in the Odyssey.

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    [–] 20 points 2 months ago (5 children)

    The Odyssey is a work of fiction. It's a heroic epic, not a history. How do you make a historically accurate version of fictional oral poetry?

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    [–] 17 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    Will white republican Jesus be in it too?

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    [–] 17 points 2 months ago (6 children)

    what next ? historically accurate Star Wars ?

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    [–] 16 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    I can't wait to see a historically accurate Polyphemus.

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    [–] 16 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    Is this because they made Helen of Troy black

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    • [–] 16 points 2 months ago

    Not enough gay sex, I'm guessing?

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    [–] 15 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 child)

    I have a feeling he wouldn't wanna hear about Caeneus

    The Lapith Caeneus was originally a young woman named Caenis and the favorite of Poseidon, who changed her into a man at her request, and made Caeneus into an invulnerable warrior

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    [–] 14 points 2 months ago*

    You don't need to make en entire fantasy film to show us that historically accurate cyclops, Elon!

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    [–] 14 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    How is this a "threat"? What would be the dire consequences if he did?

    "Offers" is the right word here.

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    [–] 14 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    I'm looking forward to Helen of Troy being part Bird or whatever

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    [–] 13 points 2 months ago

    And he wants to do it all with AI, of course, because he has even less talent and creativity than a rotting dog turd.

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    [–] 11 points 2 months ago

    So like a Nazi Odyssey?

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    [–] 11 points 2 months ago

    Bring back Troy McClure and his cologne, Smellin of Troy.

    You may remember him from such classics like "Lead Paint: Delicious But Deadly".

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    [–] 10 points 2 months ago

    Melting shit candle makes plopping noises that sound like words

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    [–] 8 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    I'm going to pray to Jah every night that he follows through on this train wreck of a movie.

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