Some HDR images using software available on Linux. This is the Cambridge Water Works building next to the fresh pond.



I used the auto bracket feature on my camera. It takes three shots: one with normal exposure, one over exposed, and one under exposed. The images can then be merged into an HDR format like openexr. Then the HDR image is tone mapped and saved as a jpeg.

Here are two of the fresh pond,

Notes on Book 9 of The Iliad here

This book is the dramatic embassy to Achilles. Favorite sentence,

He may offer me ten or even twenty times what he has now done, nay--not though it be all that he has in the world, both now or ever shall have; he may promise me the wealth of Orchomenus or of Egyptian Thebes, which is the richest city in the whole world, for it has a hundred gates through each of which two hundred men may drive at once with their chariots and horses; he may offer me gifts as the sands of the sea or the dust of the plain in multitude, but even so he shall not move me till I have been revenged in full for the bitter wrong he has done me.

because it shows just how bitter Achilles is.

Over on livingepic the embassy to Achilles is mentioned in The mysterious dual: the smoking gun of epic interactivity. I posted this question,

This is somewhat of a tangent, but what would you say the sense was for the original audiences when considering what Achilles should do in response to Agamemnon's embassy? Was Achilles viewed at all favorably for his actions? Or was he seen as petty?

Roger Travis's response:

My own view is that the bard who first improvised the withdrawal of Achilles from battle must have done it in order to ask the very same questions--that is, is it ever OK to desert? is it OK to desert over a slavegirl? The luxury of stories and of games (or maybe of the PPP) is that the bard and his audience, and the developer and his gamers, can ask the question without having to find an answer right away, or ever.

You'll find Homerists all over the map on this question, though, from some who support Achilles completely to others who think that even though Agamemnon's a jerk the epic is trying to persuade you that Achilles could never be justified.

I actually don't find it hard to imagine a game getting to this level of meaning, perhaps along the lines of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect: the rudimentary light/dark systems in those games seem to me to begin to give the player the ability to ask what feels justified and what feels unjustified in certain kinds of situations.