u/ThrowRA39495

I've fallen down a Trojan War rabbit hole recently(Thanks Nolan) and I've realized I don't actually understand what we mean when we talk about the "canon" version of this story. Most people, myself included until recently, have this vague idea that the Trojan War story we all know basically comes from Homer. But the more I read, the more obvious it becomes that it really doesn't.

The Iliad covers a tiny period near the end of the war. It doesn't give us the Judgment of Paris as the complete story we usually know, the sacrifice of Iphigenia, Achilles at Skyros, the Trojan Horse, the actual fall of Troy, Achilles' famous invulnerable heel, and plenty of other things that most people would consider basic Trojan War lore. Yet somehow all of these traditions have merged in popular culture into one enormous narrative that we casually associate with Homer.

What confuses me even more is how selective this process seems to have been. Take the Mysian campaign. In the wider Epic Cycle, before the Greeks successfully reach Troy, they launch an earlier expedition and land in Mysia, apparently mistaking it for Trojan territory. They fight Telephus, Achilles wounds him, the Greeks are scattered and eventually return home. According to the later mythographic chronology, eight years then pass before they assemble again. Telephus eventually comes to Greece because his wound cannot heal, Achilles heals him, and Telephus helps the Greeks find their way to Troy.

That's not exactly a minor deleted scene. The Greeks literally invade the wrong country before invading Troy. And yet almost nobody who casually knows the Trojan War seems to know this happened. This creates many plot holes as it makes everyone 8+ years older.

Meanwhile, basically everyone knows that Achilles was invulnerable because Thetis dipped him in the Styx while holding him by the heel. Except that isn't Homer either. As far as I understand it, that specific version of Achilles' invulnerability is extremely late compared with Homer and is associated with sources such as Statius, writing in the 1st century AD! While the Mysian campaign is likely 50-100 years after homer ,part of the Epic cycle.

And that's where I start getting confused about what we actually mean by "canon." How has something written something like seven or eight centuries after the traditional dating of Homer become so culturally dominant that Achilles' heel is probably one of the most famous details in all of Greek mythology, while an entire failed Greek expedition preserved as part of the archaic Trojan tradition has basically disappeared?

Mysia is only one example. The more you reconstruct the Trojan War we think we know, the stranger the source list becomes. You have Homer, then the lost poems of the Epic Cycle such as the Cypria, Aethiopis, Little Iliad, Sack of Ilium, Nostoi and Telegony. Then you have lyric poets and other archaic traditions, followed by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, who sometimes preserve older material and sometimes give us radically different versions. Then come mythographers trying to organize all of it, later Greek writers, and Roman authors such as Virgil, Ovid and Statius. Somehow pieces from all of these periods have been thrown together and produced what we now think of as the "standard Trojan War."

This also creates some hilarious problems if you try to treat everything as one internally consistent fictional universe. For example, if you incorporate the Mysian expedition and the eight-year interval into the same chronology as Homer's Odyssey, suddenly the clean 10 years at Troy + 10 years wandering = Odysseus was gone for 20 years becomes much more complicated. You start wondering whether Odysseus was involved in Trojan-related expeditions for something closer to 28 years, what exactly happened during the interval, when Telemachus was conceived, how old everyone should be, and so on.

Which leads to the question I'm actually interested in: did the ancient Greeks themselves have anything resembling a canonical Trojan War timeline? If someone in 5th-century Athens heard "the Trojan War," was there a broadly understood sequence of events that almost everyone accepted, with poets and playwrights merely choosing which parts to dramatize? Or could two Greeks genuinely know substantially different versions of what happened and consider both legitimate?

And then there is the even stranger question of when this process actually stops. Statius is writing about Achilles around the first century AD, many centuries after Homer, and material from that later tradition can apparently become part of what a modern person considers basic Achilles lore. So when does the Trojan mythological universe close? Does it ever?

Could a writer in the 3rd century AD introduce a new episode about Achilles and, if that story became influential enough, would we now call that "Greek mythology"? What about the 5th century AD? The Byzantine period? The Middle Ages? At what point do scholars stop calling something "a variant of the Achilles myth" and start calling it later reception, adaptation or essentially fan fiction using Achilles as a character?

This is especially confusing because our modern pseudo-canon seems incredibly selective. Statius' Achilles heel gets in, Euripides' Helen living in Egypt mostly doesn't, the Mysian campaign mostly doesn't, the sacrifice of Iphigenia absolutely does, the Trojan Horse obviously does, and Homer's name somehow gets retroactively attached to the whole package.

So I'm starting to think there are really three different things that we casually collapse into one. There is the Homeric version, meaning what the Iliad and Odyssey actually say. Then there is the enormous ancient Trojan mythological tradition, including the Epic Cycle, archaic poetry, tragedy, mythographers, local traditions, Hellenistic literature and Roman retellings. And finally there is the modern "Trojan War canon," which seems to be a greatest-hits compilation assembled from whichever versions happened to become culturally dominant.

And that final category is what fascinates me. Where did this pseudo-canon actually come from? Was there a particular ancient synthesis, mythographer or later educational tradition that had an outsized influence on the story we inherited? Or is our "standard Trojan War" genuinely just the result of 2,500+ years of cultural selection, Roman literature, medieval transmission, Renaissance classicism and modern adaptations gradually deciding which pieces were memorable enough to survive?

Thank you all for your time reading this

I've fallen down a Trojan War rabbit hole recently(Thanks Nolan) and I've realized I don't actually understand what we mean when we talk about the "canon" version of this story. Most people, myself included until recently, have this vague idea that the Trojan War story we all know basically comes from Homer. But the more I read, the more obvious it becomes that it really doesn't.

The Iliad covers a tiny period near the end of the war. It doesn't give us the Judgment of Paris as the complete story we usually know, the sacrifice of Iphigenia, Achilles at Skyros, the Trojan Horse, the actual fall of Troy, Achilles' famous invulnerable heel, and plenty of other things that most people would consider basic Trojan War lore. Yet somehow all of these traditions have merged in popular culture into one enormous narrative that we casually associate with Homer.

What confuses me even more is how selective this process seems to have been. Take the Mysian campaign. In the wider Epic Cycle, before the Greeks successfully reach Troy, they launch an earlier expedition and land in Mysia, apparently mistaking it for Trojan territory. They fight Telephus, Achilles wounds him, the Greeks are scattered and eventually return home. According to the later mythographic chronology, eight years then pass before they assemble again. Telephus eventually comes to Greece because his wound cannot heal, Achilles heals him, and Telephus helps the Greeks find their way to Troy.

That's not exactly a minor deleted scene. The Greeks literally invade the wrong country before invading Troy. And yet almost nobody who casually knows the Trojan War seems to know this happened. This creates many plot holes as it makes everyone 8+ years older.

Meanwhile, basically everyone knows that Achilles was invulnerable because Thetis dipped him in the Styx while holding him by the heel. Except that isn't Homer either. As far as I understand it, that specific version of Achilles' invulnerability is extremely late compared with Homer and is associated with sources such as Statius, writing in the 1st century AD! While the Mysian campaign is likely 50-100 years after homer ,part of the Epic cycle.

And that's where I start getting confused about what we actually mean by "canon." How has something written something like seven or eight centuries after the traditional dating of Homer become so culturally dominant that Achilles' heel is probably one of the most famous details in all of Greek mythology, while an entire failed Greek expedition preserved as part of the archaic Trojan tradition has basically disappeared?

Mysia is only one example. The more you reconstruct the Trojan War we think we know, the stranger the source list becomes. You have Homer, then the lost poems of the Epic Cycle such as the Cypria, Aethiopis, Little Iliad, Sack of Ilium, Nostoi and Telegony. Then you have lyric poets and other archaic traditions, followed by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, who sometimes preserve older material and sometimes give us radically different versions. Then come mythographers trying to organize all of it, later Greek writers, and Roman authors such as Virgil, Ovid and Statius. Somehow pieces from all of these periods have been thrown together and produced what we now think of as the "standard Trojan War."

This also creates some hilarious problems if you try to treat everything as one internally consistent fictional universe. For example, if you incorporate the Mysian expedition and the eight-year interval into the same chronology as Homer's Odyssey, suddenly the clean 10 years at Troy + 10 years wandering = Odysseus was gone for 20 years becomes much more complicated. You start wondering whether Odysseus was involved in Trojan-related expeditions for something closer to 28 years, what exactly happened during the interval, when Telemachus was conceived, how old everyone should be, and so on.

Which leads to the question I'm actually interested in: did the ancient Greeks themselves have anything resembling a canonical Trojan War timeline? If someone in 5th-century Athens heard "the Trojan War," was there a broadly understood sequence of events that almost everyone accepted, with poets and playwrights merely choosing which parts to dramatize? Or could two Greeks genuinely know substantially different versions of what happened and consider both legitimate?

And then there is the even stranger question of when this process actually stops. Statius is writing about Achilles around the first century AD, many centuries after Homer, and material from that later tradition can apparently become part of what a modern person considers basic Achilles lore. So when does the Trojan mythological universe close? Does it ever?

Could a writer in the 3rd century AD introduce a new episode about Achilles and, if that story became influential enough, would we now call that "Greek mythology"? What about the 5th century AD? The Byzantine period? The Middle Ages? At what point do scholars stop calling something "a variant of the Achilles myth" and start calling it later reception, adaptation or essentially fan fiction using Achilles as a character?

This is especially confusing because our modern pseudo-canon seems incredibly selective. Statius' Achilles heel gets in, Euripides' Helen living in Egypt mostly doesn't, the Mysian campaign mostly doesn't, the sacrifice of Iphigenia absolutely does, the Trojan Horse obviously does, and Homer's name somehow gets retroactively attached to the whole package.

So I'm starting to think there are really three different things that we casually collapse into one. There is the Homeric version, meaning what the Iliad and Odyssey actually say. Then there is the enormous ancient Trojan mythological tradition, including the Epic Cycle, archaic poetry, tragedy, mythographers, local traditions, Hellenistic literature and Roman retellings. And finally there is the modern "Trojan War canon," which seems to be a greatest-hits compilation assembled from whichever versions happened to become culturally dominant.

And that final category is what fascinates me. Where did this pseudo-canon actually come from? Was there a particular ancient synthesis, mythographer or later educational tradition that had an outsized influence on the story we inherited? Or is our "standard Trojan War" genuinely just the result of 2,500+ years of cultural selection, Roman literature, medieval transmission, Renaissance classicism and modern adaptations gradually deciding which pieces were memorable enough to survive?

Thank you all for your time reading this

​

How would you describe Dispatch? Let me give it a try

Dispatch is basically a superhero telltale inspired choice narrative game where you manage a team of dysfunctional heroes, make choices, send people to emergencies, deal with office politics, relationships, consequences, and all the messy human stuff humans are known for

Can you see the resemblance? That format feels almost painfully perfect for Invincible.

Imagine an Invincible game where you work under Cecil and the GDA(or I guess you play as Cecil?), managing missions, assigning heroes, making ugly decisions, and dealing with the fallout.

You could send the Guardians of the Globe, Atom Eve, Rex Splode, Monster Girl, Robot, Bulletproof, or new original heroes to different crises happening at the same time. A Viltrumite-related incident in one district. A kaiju attack somewhere else. A hostage situation. A public relations disaster. A hero having a breakdown. A mission where the “correct” option saves lives but destroys trust. Typical Tuesday,

The gameplay could mix narrative choices, dispatch-style tactical decisions, relationship management, and moral consequences. Do you prioritize civilians, secrecy, hero safety, political pressure, or long-term strategy? Do you tell Mark the truth? Do you cover something up as Cecil? Do you sacrifice public trust to stop something worse? the list goes on...

And before the inevitable “so you just want a Dispatch copycat?” comments arrive: no. That argument is kind of lazy.

No one bats an eye when RPGs have dialogue trees, classes, inventories, companions, skill checks, and quests. No one says every tactical RPG is copying XCOM. No one says every choice-based narrative game is illegally cloning Telltale. Genres are built when multiple creators explore the same structure in different worlds.

If anything, Dispatch itself can be seen as part of the Telltale-style lineage: narrative choices, episodic pacing, character drama, consequences, and a strong focus on dialogue. It just adds its own superhero management angle.

An Invincible version could push the idea in a much darker, more brutal, more morally complicated direction. Dispatch is workplace superhero comedy. Invincible could be superhero crisis management horror-drama with jokes five seconds before someone gets folded into a lava cake.

For those who don't know( how can you?) Dispatch is basically a superhero telltale inspired choice narrative game where you manage a team of dysfunctional heroes, make choices, send people to emergencies, deal with office politics, relationships, consequences, and all the messy human stuff humans are known for

Can you see the resemblance? That format feels almost painfully perfect for Invincible.

Imagine an Invincible game where you work under Cecil and the GDA(or I guess you play as Cecil?), managing missions, assigning heroes, making ugly decisions, and dealing with the fallout.

You could send the Guardians of the Globe, Atom Eve, Rex Splode, Monster Girl, Robot, Bulletproof, or new original heroes to different crises happening at the same time. A Viltrumite-related incident in one district. A kaiju attack somewhere else. A hostage situation. A public relations disaster. A hero having a breakdown. A mission where the “correct” option saves lives but destroys trust. Typical Tuesday,

The gameplay could mix narrative choices, dispatch-style tactical decisions, relationship management, and moral consequences. Do you prioritize civilians, secrecy, hero safety, political pressure, or long-term strategy? Do you tell Mark the truth? Do you cover something up as Cecil? Do you sacrifice public trust to stop something worse? the list goes on...

And before the inevitable “so you just want a Dispatch copycat?” comments arrive: no. That argument is kind of lazy.

No one bats an eye when RPGs have dialogue trees, classes, inventories, companions, skill checks, and quests. No one says every tactical RPG is copying XCOM. No one says every choice-based narrative game is illegally cloning Telltale. Genres are built when multiple creators explore the same structure in different worlds.

If anything, Dispatch itself can be seen as part of the Telltale-style lineage: narrative choices, episodic pacing, character drama, consequences, and a strong focus on dialogue. It just adds its own superhero management angle.

An Invincible version could push the idea in a much darker, more brutal, more morally complicated direction. Dispatch is workplace superhero comedy. Invincible could be superhero crisis management horror-drama with jokes five seconds before someone gets folded into a lava cake.

Mayhem is already a fun mode, but I think it could go much harder if it borrowed some of the best systems from Arena-style gameplay instead of staying too “normal.” Who doesnt like more chaos?

I’d love to see three things added:

First, Prismatic Items. They create huge build-defining moments and make each match feel different. Mayhem should lean into that. If the whole point is madness, then let players hit absurd item spikes and build around them.

Second, random Champion Bonus Circles, similar to the system where you choose between different champion-themed effects. Idk how they could be implemented though. Maybe as a vote taking place real time?

Third, leveling Augments. Augments are one of the best ways to make casual modes replayable because they give players mini power spikes and change how each champion plays. Let us upgrade them over time or choose stronger versions as the game progresses. That would make the mode feel like it actually evolves instead of being the same fight loop from start to finish.

TLDR: CHAOS!

I honestly think we are approaching the point where, once Chinese models reach the same level of performance, reliability, and speed as something like 5.3 Codex, the tooling stack for experienced software developers becomes basically complete.

Not “complete” in the marketing-bullshit sense where every startup claims their wrapper will “redefine software engineering,” I mean complete in the practical sense: if a model can handle real coding work across domains with strong reasoning, low latency, good context handling, and reliable tool use, then most experienced developers probably do not need much more.

In my own usage, I have not really hit major blockers across:

RAG and LLM systems

web development

mobile development

DevOps

machine learning

debugging and refactoring

architecture planning

documentation

integration work

So I guess we just wait till we could enjoy nicer limits?

Codex currently feels like it is optimized around speed, but the problem is that speed is not always what everyone needs.

I would genuinely prefer having a Slow Mode option too that runs at half the speed but also burns roughly half the usage. Basically:

Fast Mode: current behavior, faster responses, higher usage burn
Slow Mode: slower responses, lower usage burn

Not every task needs instant execution. Sometimes I am debugging, reviewing, refactoring, writing tests,reading docs etc. I would happily wait longer per task if it meant my usage lasted longer. Because right now with the current limits, I cant get use it for more than 3-4 hours (gpt 5.4 medium) especially now that codex 5.3 was removed...

Hello, fellow Gen Z here (23 years old). As a huge fan of Pink Floyd, I recently got a turntable and a vinyl as a gift. And not just any vinyl either, but one of my favorite albums of all time.

So naturally, I grabbed a beer, smoked a cigar, and listened to the whole thing front to back. The experience was unreal. Every track flowed beautifully, and honestly, hearing it on vinyl felt completely different from streaming.

Then my favorite song of all time started: Wish You Were Here.

But something immediately felt off.

“This isn’t David Gilmour’s voice,” I thought. “Wait… is this Roger Waters?”

The vocals sounded darker, rougher, more raw. And honestly, you could argue the song fits that tone really well. But I grew up listening to David Gilmour’s vocals on Spotify and digital versions, so hearing this caught me completely off guard.

At first I thought maybe I accidentally got some alternate version, deluxe edition, remaster, or weird pressing. But nope. I checked the vinyl and it seems to be the standard release.

So now I’m genuinely confused:

Was “Wish You Were Here” originally sung by Roger Waters back in 1975, or am I completely tripping?