I saw Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and realized I couldn’t remember which parts were Homer and which parts were Nolan. So I built ΝΟΣΤΟΣ, a sparknotes version of the poem: 22 chapters in chronological order, each with a plain-language summary, a verbatim quote from Butler’s 1900 translation, and the fleet tally as twelve ships and six hundred men whittle down to one man on a raft.
Everything is rendered as blue ballpoint pen on paper. The route inks itself onto a real Natural Earth coastline as you scroll, solid to Cape Malea and dashed guesswork after, since the traditional island identifications are contested. The sea is a three.js swell pushed through a Bayer ordered-dither so every pixel is either paper or ink, and the quotes handwrite themselves as you scroll past.
It works on your phone, which is where a refresher like this actually gets read:
The art pipeline
All 21 scene illustrations are Midjourney, held together by a single style reference (--sref 109954890), which is what makes every scene look like the same hand with the same pen. Even with the sref, no two generations come back the same color: some lean purple, some navy, some wash out toward gray, and the paper tone drifts between them. So the pipeline normalizes every image to one canonical palette. A script reads each image’s own histogram to find its true darks and lights, stretches its levels to match, then remaps everything through a tritone LUT to exactly three inks: paper, mid blue, deep blue. Whatever colors Midjourney picked, every scene comes out the other side as the same pen on the same paper.
The pipeline runs on the default download filenames, which contain the prompt: I drop my picks into a raw folder, and the script matches each one to its scene by prompt keywords, then emits two webp sizes plus a manifest the app reads at boot. Red ink exists in exactly two places in the whole piece: the slaughter of the suitors, and the ΤΕΛΟΣ seal at the end.
Links
Live at the-odyssey.pages.dev.