Very Bad Wizards

Welcome to The Lotus Eaters! This is part 2 of our 12 part series on Homer's Odyssey that will be released every Thursday. The series was supported by our Patreon community, but we are now making it available to everyone who would like to listen to our discussions to accompany their reading of The Odyssey. We hope you enjoy!
Episode Notes: 
Tamler and David finish up the Telemachy (the saga of Odysseus' son, Telemachus) in their discussion of books 3 & 4 of The Odyssey. (Oh yeah, we get an appearance from THAT Helen of Troy).

Welcome to The Lotus Eaters! This is part 1 of our 12 part series on Homer's Odyssey that will be released every Thursday. The series was supported by our Patreon community, but we are now making it available to everyone who would like to listen to our discussions to accompany their reading of The Odyssey. We hope you enjoy! [Note that this discussion of Books 1 & 2 was already published as the main segment of Episode 321, but this contains only the discussion of the Odyssey in order to make The Lotus Eaters series complete and standalone.]
Episode Notes:
David and Tamler begin their long journey home to Homer's Odyssey, the tale of king Odysseus' 10 year journey home after the Trojan war (maybe the greatest story ever told). We dive into the first two books, which focus on Odysseus' 20-year-old son Telemachus, the swarm of suitors who have descended on Odysseus' house during his long absence in the hopes of marrying his clever and beautiful wife Penelope, and the goddess Athena, whose plan to get Odysseus home to Ithaca is finally set into motion.

Dropping this a week early - after completing a 12-part series on Homer's Odyssey for our beloved Patreon supporters, we now dive into Christopher Nolan's version of this epic tale. We're mixed on the movie. David enjoyed the spectacle, Tamler had some nice things to say about Anne Hathaway's Penelope but overall...well you'll see. And don't skip through the listener support/promo segment or you'll miss an exciting announcement.
Join our Patreon! [patreon.com]
Nolan's "The Odyssey" [wikipedia.org]
Emily Wilson's Translation of The Odyssey [amazon.com afilliate link]
Emily Wilson's review of Nolan's "The Odyssey" [lrb.co.uk]

First it was a book, then it was a groundbreaking movie… that's right it's Solaris. After having discussed the Stanislaw Lem novel in the previous episode, David and Tamler try to make contact with Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 classic film. We talk about all the ways Tarkovsky's adaptation reflects and diverges from the source material. We also discuss how to interpret the ending, opening act (not featured in the novel), the five-minute driving scene, and contrast it with Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Plus, we take an AI Compass survey to determine what type of AI archetype we are. 
The AI Compass (quiz) [github.io] 
Tarkovsky's "Solaris" [wikipedia.org]

David and Tamler tackle the first half of the VBW Madness topic tournament winner, Stanislaw Lem's science fiction masterpiece, Solaris, about a mysterious ocean planet that resists all attempts to understand and communicate with it. We talk about the epistemological obstacles that obscure the meaning of the ocean's behavior, the "guests" that appear to the researchers drawn from their buried memories, Lem's critique of science and lots more.
Plus, there's an inexplicable dearth of research into male preferences for breasts or buttocks and their correlation with egalitarian and materialist values. But once again it's evolutionary psychology to the rescue.
Mehmetoglu, M. (2026). Buttocks or Breasts? Identifying Latent Subgroups in Male Preferences for Female Bodily Features. Evolutionary Psychology, 24(2), 14747049261452897. [pubmed.gov]
Solaris by Stanislaw Lem (trans. by Bill Johnston) [amazon.com affiliate link]