A comprehensive quiz + bonus fan faction about the the underrated cult classic show "Kelly Unicornstrider and Friends" (1982-1985). Questions range from really easy to really difficult.

I think putting this on "publish" makes it so only we can see this. It's just for us, sweetie. I made it to celebrate our anniversary and remember some special intimate moments together over the years in an interesting way as a present for you.

I hope you love it, Natalie, as much as I love you!

(Of course if there's any admin looking at this, or if I messed up, don't read this, because it's got private things in it.)

This is my required report to the full faculty in accordance with the rules noted in the Faculty Handbook (version 15.1, as of October 2017)

"Personally I can only read 16 words in one go before words stop working," wrote Mizal.

This game has sixteen words per path.  Not counting "The End."  So you can play quickly.

When reviewing, please use precisely sixteen words.   That should be plenty for your suggestions and observations.

Note this challenge connected with this game:  Write the Last Page!

The Odyssey has her living with Menalaos in Sparta once again.  It's got to be pretty awkward between them.

My Little Pony doesn't shy away from Greek mythological themes at all; I think of Tartarus, for example, hydras, minotaurs, and of course, if we are willing to accept Equestria Girls as MLP canon, sirens. 

All I will say to that is that Tolkien's thoughts on ancient Greek literature are no mystery:  ("Certainly I have not been nourished by English Literature, in which I do not suppose I am better read than you; for the simple reason that I have never found much there in which to rest my heart (or heart and head together). I was brought up in the Classics, and first discovered the sensation of literary pleasure in Homer.") 

But if your objection to Homer is that his depiction of the classical gods may inspire humans to act poorly, then yes, you're in good company with Plato in The Republic.  ("God is always to be represented as he truly is, whatever be the sort of poetry, epic, lyric or tragic, in which the representation is given.") Plato thought Homer degraded people's perception of the divine and the heroic by making them so terribly flawed and immoral. But I suppose people have been having that particular conversation about fiction in general for a long time.

It's super different, because it's in a regular iambic verse form.  So it bounces along metrically in a way that translators who use prose or a less regular form doesn't.  That's just the form.

To me, it feels more modern than Fagles' translation (which I love) and feels much easier to read in the sense that the sentences feel a little shorter and the syntax feels less complex.  It's quite good.  I'm a fan so far.

> Who might really be the best of the Greeks, based on what we’ve read so far? 

The thing I like best about this question is that you can recycle it for nearly every single one of the 24 books of The Iliad, and it's always a relevant question, and the epic is constantly revising what "best" might mean and who might qualify, and then pulling the carpet up from under you when you think you've pinned it down.  

Avery is victim blaming!

Having been at war for nearly ten years has got to have done some serious damage to these men, and at a certain point, it's about who is dishonoring whom.   It's also worth remembering that "the woman that got stolen" is the whole impetus of this war.  So there's a kind of neat thematic element there, too.  What madness and what violence and what will people go through to strut around and show that you can't take their woman/property? 

A single thing like Paris making off with Helen can escalate in steps and become a ten-year war that destroys a civilization.  What can this one single, seemingly petty, thing avalanche into?

They can't get at the Trojans (yet) to properly come to arms with them the way they want, but there's a fight RIGHT HERE they can have.  They are tired, angry, their supporters are looking on, and feel like they have to justify the blood and time they've already spent here.

It's been a while since I've read it, but IIRC, the serious romantic drama between Aphrodite and Adonis is largely Roman, from Ovid.  I think the Greek version (in Apollodorus) is way, way, way less emotionally invested.  But I may be misremembering.

"Attached" is a pretty good word for what some of the gods do, regarding mortals they are interested in, but yes, for the most part, you can get really tripped up by using the word "god" for these characters.  They aren't omnipotent or omninescient or omnipresent, and they sure aren't all-loving.  They eat and sleep and bleed are frequently stupid and misled by emotion.  They are like us, but bigger.

They do get attached, but I always think of it as getting attached the way you might get attached to an interesting bug that you see trying to do something like cross a puddle or lift a big leaf.  You watch them, you might move a stick to help them, and you might move them somewhere else, but in the end, they are a bug to you.  Then you leave, and you might step on them by accident as you go.  The gods are, at the end of the day, going to be around forever.  So many of the very closest, famous relationships between gods and mortals are marked by the inability to have any sense of what it means to be mortal even when they are close--I'm thinking of Athena and Odysseus here.  *But* the relationship between Thetis and Achilles is something kind of different in The Iliad.  I wonder if it's because Thetis isn't a big shot Olympian.

Part of the interesting conversation to be had is whether or not plans leading to disaster necessarily equals bad advice.  And that has to do with what we see as the Greeks' goals here in the first place.  If the goal is "win in the most efficient possible way" that's one thing; if the goal is to achieve everlasting glory, that's another thing altogether.  But we can talk more about that when we read more, and when we eventually get to the conversation with Achilles in The Odyssey next year, which Malk will also be running.