#War Horse Productions

[legionofpotatoes]

star wars outlaws

[the-l0st-lore]

Man we are EATING today

[drsonnet]

للنشر: الرصيف البحري العائم الذي تصطنعه #أمريكا و حلفاؤها في #غزة..ماهو إلا حصان طروادة (خدعة) و دعاية رخيصة بدعوى المساعدات الإنسانية من أمريكا المجرمة التي تشارك في إبادة شعب #غزة مع #إسرائيل.

The floating pier manufactured by #US and its allies in #Gaza… is nothing but a Trojan horse and cheap propaganda under the pretext of humanitarian aid from the criminal America, which is participating in the annihilation of the people of #Gaza along with #Israel.

Trojan horse, huge hollow wooden horse constructed by the Greeks to gain entrance into Troy during the Trojan War. 

#Gaza #GazaFamine #GazaGenocide #Biden2024 @LatuffCartoons

[pelideswhore]

achilles’ issues come from having too many fathers, neoptolemus’ issues come from having none. hope this clears things up.

[nickyroethemarinebiologist]

Okay but what if Temeraire was a musical

[euniexenoblade]

not to beat a dead horse but it's so sad to see people act like gay and trans identities are very ultra specific with no wiggle room. it looks less like you have an expression and more like youre living a product demographic.

In the past, up through the 90s and even into the early 2000s, LGBT groups around the country (and world) had their own histories, their own terms, their own expressions, and the mainstream national "we're the good gays" product that politicians and corporations sell us has largely erased those. Lesbians were exploring gender and identifying as things other than "woman" as far back as the 70s if not sooner, many different groups had different terms that covered similar things, it just really sucks to see unique identities fade away as this Americanized approved LGBT narrative conquers the world.

You shouldn't care about bi lesbians, you shouldn't be having some bi vs pan war, you shouldn't be shitting on genders and pronouns you don't get, you should be living your life as your truest self and fucking who you want. Gotta stop letting Pride sponsored by Coors Light tell you who you are.

[vintagegeekculture]

I remember a friend of mine had some LPs that were Star Wars themed disco albums, and it brought back a very weird memory from back in the 70s (yes, I'm old!) of listening to a Star Wars disco mashup on the radio. What was all that about? I also remember something like that for Close Encounters, too.

You remember correctly, and this went on for a long while. In 1983, disk jockeys around the country played a record that involved an Ewok rapping the plot of Return of the Jedi in Ewokese. This made it to #60 in the Billboard Top 100.

This is hard to explain to people who weren’t there….but in the wake of Star Wars in the late 70s and early 80s, scifi was so beloved and mainstream that the orchestral music for nerdy scifi and fantasy movies about outer space were remixed and sampled into Giorgio Moroder-esque Italo-Disco dance numbers. And the most astonishing thing is, instead of being consigned to convention acts the way “horse famous” Brony dubstep acts are, this received national airplay on the radio, reached the pop music charts, and were played in discotheques. And incredibly, this continued for years and expanded from Star Wars into Star Trek, Wizard of Oz, Black Hole, Close Encounters….

All of this was the work of one specific person: Meco (or Dominico Monardo). The term “ahead of their time” is thrown around a lot, but Meco really was: a combination producer-songwriter and Italo-Disco pioneer in the style of Giorgio Moroder, he did several things that are now absolutely standard: he used remixes and sampling before hiphop made that standard for musicians, he wrote “fandom music” on a Moog synthesizer decades before Bronies turned their conventions into cringey dubstep concerts with songs like “Everypony Dance Now.”

It's stunning to me that Meco has not been rediscovered, considering every single trend in the culture essentially went his way.

The most startling thing about Meco’s Star Wars disco album, the one that got the ball rolling on this trend, is this: I always assumed it was some kind of cash in created by a record label mandate, a label executive’s completely cynical choice to hop on a hot new trend. That isn’t a crazy thing to think at all, since Star Wars is and always has been the most merchandized and sold out scifi property ever. But it wasn’t! You see, it was all the product of a single man’s specific vision: Meco had to convince his record label to make the record because they were skeptical.

When Meco went to see Star Wars in 1977 on Opening Day (what an experience that must have been) with his friend and fellow Italian chest hair/gold medallion enthusiast Tony Bongiovi, he was already an experienced producer-songwriter who had worked with Gloria Gaynor, Diana Ross, and formed DCA, the Disco Corporation of America. If you've ever listened to Diana Ross's "I'm Coming Out," Meco actually played the trombone solo in that song. Seeing the Star Wars movie for the first time, though Meco thought the movie was nothing short of a religious experience. Originally, he wanted to do Star Wars music as a b-side on a Gloria Gaynor album, but expanded the idea into an entire album.

In Meco’s own words:

"When I think about what I did, nobody came to me, nobody said 'Meco, why don't you do this.' Nobody says 'Here's some money go make a record of this movie.' It was just my own... It was magical, it was just out of this world when all that happened."

Not only did this album hit platinum, not only did it actually outsell the Star Wars soundtrack, his remix of the Star Wars theme also went to #1 in the charts. It’s actually the best selling instrumental single of all time. A record, that, incidentally, it holds to this day.

Dick Clark, host of American Bandstand, had this to say about Meco:

"In 1977, Meco Monardo accomplished something no one else has ever done to the best of my knowledge. He was the first one in history to out-sell the soundtrack of a motion picture with his own distinctive version of a film's music. The music was totally danceable, and broke new ground. It's no wonder the STAR WARS THEME went to # 1. I loved his treatment of music from THE WIZARD OF OZ. Again, Meco created something innovative. The fun and the excitement gave a whole new feel to that totally familiar and well-loved music."

Like a lot of studio producers, Meco had an insane work ethic and hit when the iron was hot: he did an album about Close Encounters that exact same year, but also did a Star Wars Christmas Album, one of the strangest pieces of Star Wars kitsch around.

One of the most interesting things about the Star Wars Christmas album is that one of the songs, “R2D2’s Wish You a Merry Christmas” is the first professional vocals by John Bon Jovi, who was Meco’s friend Tony Bongiovi’s seventeen year old younger cousin (he was initially known as John Bongiovi). It's incredible to hear a squeaky voiced teen Bon Jovi on a kitsch album about a robot Christmas.

1978-1979 was really his best year. Meco made an Italo-Disco remix album entirely devoted to Superman, and at this point, Meco had the pull to get access to John Williams's sheet music for the score before the music even came out. In my personal opinion it's the best of them because he has to recreate it entirely with his own instruments, leading to a very unique sound.

He also did an album based on the Wizard of Oz:

And a combination album of Star Trek/Black Hole. It's probably the earliest remixing date of Goldsmith pieces of music: the Motion Picture Theme (which is now associated with the Next Generation - hearing it done in Italodisco is uncanny) and the Klingon Theme:

Incidentally, I think the design here of the Meco Enterprise, which had to be modified for legal reasons, would make a wonderful canon starship if anyone wants to be inspired by it. It reminds me of the same concept that would be used in the very next film for the Reliant-class of ships.

Meco eventually retired from music in 1985, but unfortunately he is no longer with us, as he passed into the next dimension in 2023. I think he showed us that creativity is often about transformation, and was inspired to make his art by a legitimate awe of space, the cosmos, and human imagination that the scifi movies of the 1970s and 80s provoke.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Amazon’s financial shell game let it create an “impossible” monopoly

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in TUCSON (Mar 9-10), then San Francisco (Mar 13), Anaheim, and more!

For the pro-monopoly crowd that absolutely dominated antitrust law from the Carter administration until 2020, Amazon presents a genuinely puzzling paradox: the company's monopoly power was never supposed to emerge, and if it did, it should have crumbled immediately.

Pro-monopoly economists embody Ely Devons's famous aphorism that "If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/27/economism/#what-would-i-do-if-i-were-a-horse

Rather than using the way the world actually works as their starting point for how to think about it, they build elaborate models out of abstract principles like "rational actors." The resulting mathematical models are so abstractly elegant that it's easy to forget that they're just imaginative exercises, disconnected from reality:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/03/all-models-are-wrong/#some-are-useful

These models predicted that it would be impossible for Amazon to attain monopoly power. Even if they became a monopoly – in the sense of dominating sales of various kinds of goods – the company still wouldn't get monopoly power.

For example, if Amazon tried to take over a category by selling goods below cost ("predatory pricing"), then rivals could just wait until the company got tired of losing money and put prices back up, and then those rivals could go back to competing. And if Amazon tried to keep the loss-leader going indefinitely by "cross-subsidizing" the losses with high-margin profits from some other part of its business, rivals could sell those high margin goods at a lower margin, which would lure away Amazon customers and cut the supply lines for the price war it was fighting with its discounted products.

That's what the model predicted, but it's not what happened in the real world. In the real world, Amazon was able use its access to the capital markets to embark on scorched-earth predatory pricing campaigns. When diapers.com refused to sell out to Amazon, the company casually committed $100m to selling diapers below cost. Diapers.com went bust, Amazon bought it for pennies on the dollar and shut it down:

https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/13/18563379/amazon-predatory-pricing-antitrust-law

Investors got the message: don't compete with Amazon. They can remain predatory longer than you can remain solvent.

Now, not everyone shared the antitrust establishment's confidence that Amazon couldn't create a durable monopoly with market power. In 2017, Lina Khan – then a third year law student – published "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox," a landmark paper arguing that Amazon had all the tools it needed to amass monopoly power:

https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox

Today, Khan is chair of the FTC, and has brought a case against Amazon that builds on some of the theories from that paper. One outcome of that suit is an unprecedented look at Amazon's internal operations. But, as the Institute for Local Self-Reliance's Stacy Mitchell describes in a piece for The Atlantic, key pieces of information have been totally redacted in the court exhibits:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/amazon-profits-antitrust-ftc/677580/

The most important missing datum: how much money Amazon makes from each of its lines of business. Amazon's own story is that it basically breaks even on its retail operation, and keeps the whole business afloat with profits from its AWS cloud computing division. This is an important narrative, because if it's true, then Amazon can't be forcing up retail prices, which is the crux of the FTC's case against the company.

Here's what we know for sure about Amazon's retail business. First: merchants can't live without Amazon. The majority of US households have Prime, and 90% of Prime households start their ecommerce searches on Amazon; if they find what they're looking for, they buy it and stop. Thus, merchants who don't sell on Amazon just don't sell. This is called "monopsony power" and it's a lot easier to maintain than monopoly power. For most manufacturers, a 10% overnight drop in sales is a catastrophe, so a retailer that commands even a 10% market-share can extract huge concessions from its suppliers. Amazon's share of most categories of goods is a lot higher than 10%!

What kind of monopsony power does Amazon wield? Well, for one thing, it is able to levy a huge tax on its sellers. Add up all the junk-fees Amazon charges its platform sellers and it comes out to 45-51%:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/#commissar-bezos

Competitive businesses just don't have 45% margins! No one can afford to kick that much back to Amazon. What is a merchant to do? Sell on Amazon and you lose money on every sale. Don't sell on Amazon and you don't get any business.

The only answer: raise prices on Amazon. After all, Prime customers – the majority of Amazon's retail business – don't shop for competitive prices. If Amazon wants a 45% vig, you can raise your Amazon prices by a third and just about break even.

But Amazon is wise to that: they have a "most favored nation" rule that punishes suppliers who sell goods more cheaply in rival stores, or even on their own site. The punishments vary, from banishing your products to page ten million of search-results to simply kicking you off the platform. With publishers, Amazon reserves the right to lower the prices they set when listing their books, to match the lowest price on the web, and paying publishers less for each sale.

That means that suppliers who sell on Amazon (which is anyone who wants to stay in business) have to dramatically hike their prices on Amazon, and when they do, they also have to hike their prices everywhere else (no wonder Prime customers don't bother to search elsewhere for a better deal!).

Now, Amazon says this is all wrong. That 45-51% vig they claim from business customers is barely enough to break even. The company's profits – they insist – come from selling AWS cloud service. The retail operation is just a public service they provide to us with cross-subsidy from those fat AWS margins.

This is a hell of a claim. Last year, Amazon raked in $130 billion in seller fees. In other words: they booked more revenue from junk fees than Bank of America made through its whole operation. Amazon's junk fees add up to more than all of Meta's revenues:

https://s2.q4cdn.com/299287126/files/doc_financials/2023/q4/AMZN-Q4-2023-Earnings-Release.pdf

Amazon claims that none of this is profit – it's just covering their operating expenses. According to Amazon, its non-AWS units combined have a one percent profit margin.

Now, this is an eye-popping claim indeed. Amazon is a public company, which means that it has to make thorough quarterly and annual financial disclosures breaking down its profit and loss. You'd think that somewhere in those disclosures, we'd find some details.

You'd think so, but you'd be wrong. Amazon's disclosures do not break out profits and losses by segment. SEC rules actually require the company to make these per-segment disclosures:

https://scholarship.law.stjohns.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3524&context=lawreview#:~:text=If%20a%20company%20has%20more,income%20taxes%20and%20extraordinary%20items.

That rule was enacted in 1966, out of concern that companies could use cross-subsidies to fund predatory pricing and other anticompetitive practices. But over the years, the SEC just…stopped enforcing the rule. Companies have "near total managerial discretion" to lump business units together and group their profits and losses in bloated, undifferentiated balance-sheet items:

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose/publications/2021/dec/crouching-tiger-hidden-dragons

As Mitchell points you, it's not just Amazon that flouts this rule. We don't know how much money Google makes on Youtube, or how much Apple makes from the App Store (Apple told a federal judge that this number doesn't exist). Warren Buffett – with significant interest in hundreds of companies across dozens of markets – only breaks out seven segments of profit-and-loss for Berkshire Hathaway.

Recall that there is one category of data from the FTC's antitrust case against Amazon that has been completely redacted. One guess which category that is! Yup, the profit-and-loss for its retail operation and other lines of business.

These redactions are the judge's fault, but the real fault lies with the SEC. Amazon is a public company. In exchange for access to the capital markets, it owes the public certain disclosures, which are set out in the SEC's rulebook. The SEC lets Amazon – and other gigantic companies – get away with a degree of secrecy that should disqualify it from offering stock to the public. As Mitchell says, SEC chairman Gary Gensler should adopt "new rules that more concretely define what qualifies as a segment and remove the discretion given to executives."

Amazon is the poster-child for monopoly run amok. As Yanis Varoufakis writes in Technofeudalism, Amazon has actually become a post-capitalist enterprise. Amazon doesn't make profits (money derived from selling goods); it makes rents (money charged to people who are seeking to make a profit):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

Profits are the defining characteristic of a capitalist economy; rents are the defining characteristic of feudalism. Amazon looks like a bazaar where thousands of merchants offer goods for sale to the public, but look harder and you discover that all those stallholders are totally controlled by Amazon. Amazon decides what goods they can sell, how much they cost, and whether a customer ever sees them. And then Amazon takes $0.45-51 out of every dollar. Amazon's "marketplace" isn't like a flea market, it's more like the interconnected shops on Disneyland's Main Street, USA: the sign over the door might say "20th Century Music Company" or "Emporium," but they're all just one store, run by one company.

And because Amazon has so much control over its sellers, it is able to exercise power over its buyers. Amazon's search results push down the best deals on the platform and promote results from more expensive, lower-quality items whose sellers have paid a fortune for an "ad" (not really an ad, but rather the top spot in search listings):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/29/aethelred-the-unready/#not-one-penny-for-tribute

This is "Amazon's pricing paradox." Amazon can claim that it offers low-priced, high-quality goods on the platform, but it makes $38b/year pushing those good deals way, way down in its search results. The top result for your Amazon search averages 29% more expensive than the best deal Amazon offers. Buy something from those first four spots and you'll pay a 25% premium. On average, you need to pick the seventeenth item on the search results page to get the best deal:

https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/faculty_scholarship/3645/

For 40 years, pro-monopoly economists claimed that it would be impossible for Amazon to attain monopoly power over buyers and sellers. Today, Amazon exercises that power so thoroughly that its junk-fee revenues alone exceed the total revenues of Bank of America. Amazon's story – that these fees barely stretch to covering its costs – assumes a nearly inconceivable level of credulity in its audience. Regrettably – for the human race – there is a cohort of senior, highly respected economists who possess this degree of credulity and more.

Of course, there's an easy way to settle the argument: Amazon could just comply with SEC regs and break out its P&L for its e-commerce operation. I assure you, they're not hiding this data because they think you'll be pleasantly surprised when they do and they don't want to spoil the moment.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/01/managerial-discretion/#junk-fees

Image: Doc Searls (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/docsearls/4863121221/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[999-roses]

japanese stereotypes about chinese women have much to do with the use of comfort women during imperial japan's occupation of china,, which ended in 1945

it's crazy how often japanese artists portray chinese women as hypersexualized stereotypes. they always have the bao hair buns and wear extremely high cut cheongsams that they do kung fu in or whatever. and then westerners see this in anime and video games and think there's nothing wrong with it so they reproduce the stereotypes in their own art. like hello???

[so-i-did-this-thing]

What is All Creatures Great & Small about?

Hi!

ACGAS started off as a book series by James Herriott (pen name). It is a fictionalized autobiography of a British veterinarian mostly in 1930s-40s (later eras do happen) rural England. His writing style is very accessible and full of humor, but at the same time, can get very graphic about the realities of his practice. (Content warning for a lot of animal death.)

It's a lovely snippet of pre-war and wartime England through a mostly small-scale agricultural lens. While I'm unsure if the author had specific themes in mind, a big one is the resiliency of the Dales farmers in the face of tremendous change (automation, war, etc.)

The books focus a lot on various animal cases and sparked a love for the career in a lot of vets even today. (I myself considered large animal practice as a teen, specifically horses.)

The books got adapted into a long running series in 1978 (when the inspiration for many of the characters were still alive!). The adaptation works more like a series of vingettes, with some continuity (the main character gets married and has kids, another character graduates from college, etc.).

The revival 2020 series (currently wrapping season 5) treats the material as a setting for a more traditional period comic-drama. Details are shifted around or outright changed, and the focus is on characters. But the original DNA is all there. If there's an overall arc in the new series, it's how found family is making the characters better versions of themselves.

I recommend all 3 incarnations as some cozy, comfort media, but suggest they be treated as their own things. On their strengths: The books are a great look into an agricultural world that doesn't exist anymore. The 1978 series is full of delightful characters and brings scenes from the books to life. The 2020 series invests you in the lives of the characters and how they change over time. (Fwiw, both series have strong production connections to the original author and descendants, and the actors understand the importance of the legacy they are carrying on. There is a lot of love on screen.)

Anyway, I have loved this series for 37 years now and am delighted to see it pique folks' interest.

[gingermintpepper]

Okay, let's finally talk about EPIC's Apollo

I feel very compelled to say, first of all, that I do not dislike Epic. In fact, I am very fond of Epic and have been following its production and status very eagerly! I attend all the launch streams, I watch all of Herrans' update videos; I am, at the end of the day, a fan and I want it to be known that my words are spoken out of love and passion as much as they are spoken from a place of critique.

So really, what my problem with Epic's Apollo?

In the briefest possible terms; the choice to have Apollo be defined by his musical aspect in God Games is thematically strange. And not in the 'oh well in the Odyssey, Apollo was important to Odysseus and his family so it's weird that that wasn't kept in Epic' strange, strange in the sense that Odysseus' character arc since My Goodbye has been getting more and more obviously Apollonian and so it is positively bizarre that when we get to meet Apollo, the god seems entirely disinterested in him and his affairs. So much so that he is not even defined by any station that would indicate that he has been watching over and protecting Odysseus and his family.

What do I mean by 'Odysseus has been following an Apollonian arc'? I'm so glad you asked!

Remember Them is the last song in which Odysseus explicitly uses his sword until Mutiny where he must use it to defend himself against Eurylochus' blade. He uses it to help enact the plan to conquer Polyphemus and, due to Polites dying in that battle, Polites who wished for Odysseus to put the blade down entirely and embrace a post-war life, Odysseus also retires his sword. This is an action that symbolically separates him from Athena - and the image of Odysseus as a traditional warrior set for him in Horse and Infant - as much as My Goodbye physically separates him from the goddess and her war-ways - from this point onwards, Odysseus will no longer be leaning on Athena's wisdom or methods to solve his problems. Likewise, he will no longer be able to rely on her protection.

Odysseus thusly solves most of his upcoming problems through diplomacy and avoidance. He approaches Aeolus - a strange and ambiguous god (both in gender and in motivation) and appeals to them for help. Circe too, he approaches not with wishes to conquer or for revenge, but for the safe returning of his men and an alternate way forward. In all of these scenarios, there is some Apollonian element which is subtly interweaved alongside the influence of other gods; it is with a bow and arrows that Polyphemus' sheep is slain (and thus it is this Apollonian element which is at the root of Odysseus' spat with Poseidon), it is a vision of Penelope that warns Odysseus that his men are about to open Aeolus' wind-bag, Circe's peace offering to Odysseus is to refer him to a prophet of Apollo who has since died.

In this way, Apollo is walking alongside Odysseus for all of his journey after Athena departs - even in the Underworld, he is guiding him. It is Tiresias' proclamation that is the last straw for Odysseus, it is by the power of a mouthpiece of Apollo that Odysseus decides to embrace his ruthlessness. It is with the bow and arrow that Odysseus subdues the siren who sought to trick him, likewise, Odysseus does not attempt to undermine or escape the fate of paying Scylla's passage price - he knows of the doom about to befall the six men and quite unlike the rest of the journey until this point, he does not fight against it. This all comes to a head on Thrinacia where it is a blade which sacrifices the sun god's cow and brings destruction upon the crew once more.

My point with all of this is that when I heard the teasers for God Games years ago, it made perfect sense to me that Apollo would be Round One - he is not Odysseus' adversary and has no reason to oppose Athena's wish to free him. From other teasers about what will happen in the climax of Epic, Apollo will still be walking alongside Odysseus - it is Apollo's bow that Penelope will give the suitors to string. Likewise, it is Apollo's bow that will prove Odysseus' legitimacy and identity. That bow will be the power by which Odysseus hunts his adversaries and cleans out his palace - it is Apollo who is the avatar of Odysseus' ruthlessness, not Athena.

So tell me, truly, what was the point of having Apollo raise a non-argument in God Games? Why have him appear unconcerned, aloof and slightly oblivious? Why have him appear in his capacity as the Lord of Music at all?? And if the intention was never to make Apollo an active player in Odysseus' life like he was in the Odyssey, why keep Odysseus as a primary archer?

The answer of course is that Apollo is inextricable from the fabric of the Odyssey - his influence and favour exudes from Odysseus just as much as Athena's. In Athena's ten year sulk, it would have been Apollo who kept Telemachus and Penelope safe. It would have been Apollo protecting Odysseus from Poseidon's gaze as he travelled the seas (according to the Odyssey anyway)

Forgive me for not being excited about something that I thought was being purposefully set up. I was extremely ecstatic about all of the little Apollonian details that litter the sagas because I know where this story ends up (loosely) but all God Games did was reveal that maybe those Apollonian details were not intentional at all, but merely the ghost of the Apollo who persistently haunts those he favours, even if he cannot explicitly come to their aide in an adaptation.

[katerinaaqu]

Did Odysseus have horses or not? (An Iliad and Odyssey Analysis)

This little thing came from a post made by @wolfythewitch and my response in regards to some Cephallenian horses that can still be found to Kephallonia to this day: see here So here is a more extensive analysis on the question of horses and Ithaca or the kingdom of the Cephallenians in general

So as we know from antiquity, horses are known to be a sign of nobility, proof of status and of course a valuable animal for work such as farming or war. Horses play a very important role in the homeric poems with of course the most infamous example of all the Trojan Horse that was the symbol of Troy and became its destruction. Many heroes have had the pseudonym "tamer of horses" including Diomedes and Hector.

It seems also that horses are linked most to some of the richest and most powerful kingdoms are shown to have beautiful or good horses. For example except for Troy that as also linked to god Poseidon and thus to the sumbol of Horse, we also see Argos be famous for the horses (and king Diomedes earning his name from it) or even Sparta (Menelaus providing horses to Telemachus which are praised) and Pylos when Nestor also provides Telemachus and Peisistratus with horses.

But what about Ithaca?

As mentioned above and as others mentioned before me, it seems that Ithaca, the tiny rugged place Odysseus speaks about does not seem to have terrains that are capable of hosting horses like wide plains or wide and smooth roads where horses can trot freely or graze. The existence of animals for work as well seems to be touched in post-homeric sources such as Hyginus Fabulae where we see the infamous story of Odysseus pretending madness. He ties to his plow a donkey and a cow instead. Both of the animals are more frequent for plowing fields or carrying loads especially donkeys and mules that are still famous in Greece and greek islands and they are known for being capable of marching across the wild terrains and uphill paths.

Ironically, or not so much, Ithaca seems to have a lack of horses according to Telemachus himself for when Menelaus offers him parting gifts, including horses, Telemachus replies to him thus:

However the horses I shall not take with me to Ithaca but I shall leave them to you, with your permission (lit: to your glory): for you are a king of wide fields, rich in clove and galingale and plenty of wheat that is dicocum and white. However in Ithaca there are neither wide roads nor grassy meadows; place that is fit for goats to walk and graze on rather than horses. For no island that leans in the salt (here: sea) is fit for riding and grazing horses: Ithaca least of all.

(Translation by me)

So here Telemachus seems to imply that not only most of silands have unfriendly terrain for horses but also that Ithaca is "least of all". Now there are a couple of things here that are toned out:

Ithaca is described as a ragged place by Odysseus as well when he speaks on his homeland to the Phaeaces and even nowadays it is indeed true that Ithaca has more mountain plains than wide fields given how small the island is as well and in general Greece is over 80% mountains anyways.

Homer makes Telemachus speak on how Ithaca is the "least of all" suitable for horses. Probably that is a small hyperbole. For starters maybe one could speak on "least of all" in the islands of the Ionian sea instead, which Telemachus probably is familiar with because islands in the Aegean sea are much dryer and uphill than the islands on the Ionian sea so it is probably a hyperbole used by Homer to show how unsuitable Ithaca is for riding horses or comparing them to islands of the Ionian sea instead (because see for example an image of Folegandros which has even less greenery for horses to feed on:

However the image that Ithaca is probably boarderline hostile for horses and riding is also linked to the fact on how Ithaca is often perceived as a land rich in certain products such as olives or fruit trees (due to the mild climate) but a generally poorer island and kingdom compared to others like Mycenae, Argos or Sparta. When Telemachus visits Sparta is is mesmerized by her beauty and richness.

Even if we do have examples in Ithaca that show that Ithaca is not a weak or penniless kingdom (Penelope sits on a chair with ivory which is an exotic material very hard to find or Odysseus leaves for war wearing a crimson woolen mantle that is decorated with a golden brooch. Both gold and the color crimson were extremely valuable. For example crimson pigmentation is found only at the shells that come from the east so it would require good economy to obtain) Ithaca is by general idea a poorer and less powerful kingdom than the rest (Odysseus is one of the kings that brings the least amount of ships with him at the number of 12 and around 603 men in total including himself)

The absense of horses or the hint that Ithaca does not breed horses at all, according to some readings of the passage, is also linked to the lack of powerful status for the kingdom. The kingdom itself is not one of the great powerful kingdoms of Greece like his peers from Mycenae or Argos and the fact that a status symbol like Horses is absent is rather interesting way to show that. In fact Ithaca seems to gain fame by its people rather than its political power.

(See how Odysseus calls the island κουροτρόφο aka "nurturer of men". Odysseus implies that the importance of his kingdom is not to the status symbols but to its people and their braveness)

But can we really talk on complete absence of horses in Odysseus's life?

Cephallonia's Semi-wild Horses:

As I mentioned to the post I reblogged under @wolfythewitch post we do seem to have a breed of horses to the area. The horses are being left to roam about according to an ancient custom because Cephallonia has no much space to keep them so the farmers do tame them but leave them roam free to the plains and now they are part of the national park of Aenus mountain:

These horses have been adapted to ride perfectly well to the rough rocky terrains of the mountain. Now of course the breed was probably imported from the mainland (most likely from Pindos mountains). Cephallonia has also been suggested as the location of the homeric Ithaca (and the giver of name of his kingdom) due to the fact that it deprives from homeric description that Cephallonia was "the most far western island" or, as I would probably be willing to believe, that maybe the land of modern Ithaca and Cephallonia were connected by land at that time (take that hypothesis with a grain of salt but I think it is highly possible) other locations suggested were even Lefkas for they discovered Mycenaean remains there

It is of course unclear when these horses enter the terrain. Itis possible that the horses arrive way after the bronze age that Odysseus ellegedly lived or even after Homer's time even, if Homer doesn't mention them or mentions that horses are not possible to grow in Ithaca.

It could also be, though, that homer completely dispatches horses from Ithaca to that degree again to point out the difference of status between Ithaca and Sparta. And, another totally wild guess, is also interesting how the animal symbol of Poseidon is absent from the island of Ithaca to the poem that speaks about the hubris of Odysseus against Poseidon and the god's wrath against him! Food for thought! XD

No horses in Ithaca doesn't necessarily mean Cephallinians had no horses at all:

Another thing that people often forget is that Odysseus was not king of Ithaca only. The kingdom of Cephallenians was a kingdom that spread over several islands AND part of the mainland where modern day Aitoloakarnania is:

The kingdom is not limited to the island of Ithaca only. Acarnania is also a wide area. Horses can possibly be bred there and also be providing the islands if needed. It is interesting because Odysseus is not only in posession of a chariot in the Iliad but he also seems perfectly capable of riding horses. In the Iliad for example both he and Diomedes steal the Thracian Horses in rhapsody 10:

So she spoke and he (Diomedes) recognized the goddess's voice and swiftly jumped on the horses: Odysseus smote them with his bow and they trotted towards the fast ships of the Achaeans

(Translation by me)

Interestingly Homer uses the 3rd singular of the verb: ἐπεβήσετο (he rode) but then proceeds using the 3rd plural ἐπέτοντο (they flew/rode away). So what could it be? Could it be perhaps that Odysseus jumped on the horse behind Diomedes and smote it with his bow to start trotting away? In that case we could speak indeed on the fact that clearly Diomedes was a better rider than Odysseus given that he is more familiar with horses. However if both of them ride away that means that Odysseus is not completely oblivious of horses he just doesn't seem to be so capable with them indeed. In fact the first is rather confirmed at the passage that follows soon after:

Then Odysseus beloved to Zeus restrained the quick horses, while the son of Tydeus jumped on the ground, placing the bloody spoils to the hands of Odysseus and once more he rode the horses; hitting them with a whip and nothing stopped them from flying to the hollow ships, as they so much wished to be.

(Translation by me)

So in this scene Diomedes seems to be the protagonist, being more knowledgable on horses (he is the one who rides first and trots) while Odysseus plays a more auxiliary role (steeds and holds the horses or holds the spoils in hand) but he doesnt seem completely oblivious to the exietence or treatment of horses. He both knows how to restrain and steer them but he is also in posession of a chariot with which he fights in the Iliad and covers the retreat of Diomedes and later that same chariot comes to pick him up from the battle (see rhapsody 11).

Conclusions:

So Homer seems to be sticking to the notion that horses are not widedly used in Ithaca or the rest of the kingdom due to its rough terrain. Not only does Telemachus speak of it but we also see the image in Iliad where Odysseus is clearly not as capable rider as Diomedes given how while they trot away. Of course needs to be noted how the horses are often depicted unbriddled and without a saddle in the artwork so it is also interesting to think that Odysseus wouldn't be able to ride without equipment while Diomedes who is more familiar with horses he has no problem.

Odysseus seems to stick more to chariots than horse riding which also indicates that he is not familiar with horse riding to that extent or that he is not particularly confident in it, however he seems capable of doing it.

The existence of the horse breed in Cephallonia as well as the fact that the kingdom also involves the mainland could indicate that horses were not unknown to the Cephallenians just not widedly used. Odysseus speaks many times on horses and their beauty and strength so he is familiar with them and he can judge (bet he also learnt a bunch from his fellow kings like Diomedes and the idea of Diomedes showing Odysseus even more stuff about horses sounds a cute image doesn't it!?) but from the incidents such as the one from the Iliad, suggest that he is not confident rider.

His knowledge seems less extensive compared to his knowledge on other stuff such as sheep and goats (he praises the flock of Polyphemus for example, elemet that I also used to my retelling/one-shot fic "Escape from Cyclops Island: Hubris") or stars and navigation so indeed even if he does have knowledge on riding or chariots he is not very confident in it.

So I tend to be somewhere in the middle; I don't believe that the Cephallinians had no horses at all or that they had no idea on horses (Telemachus himself has some knowledge after all since he mentions immediately to Menelaus that his gift would be unsuitable for his land) it is just that if they can host horses it is just some very sturdy and adaptable ones like the ones used at mountain passages and even those were not widedly used. They would probably have more mules or donkeys for transportation like it happens to mountain terrains and use more cattle as farming animals. The use of horses must have been very scarce to the point of providing them general knowledge but not as widedly used as in other places

But what do you guys think? Let me know!

[neil-gaiman]

Hi Neil,

Not a question. The Ocean At The End Of The Lane opened at the King’s Theatre in Glasgow tonight. I am just home from From the production. My mind is blown. It is deeply, deeply moving. I am loving the way theatre has been going with the puppetry since War Horse. Last year I saw The Lion Witch and the Wardrobe and My Neighbour Tortoro. Ocean easily holds its own against all of them. Both magical and terrifying. If I was able to produce tears, I would have created my own ocean.

My dad died when I was 17 due to his heart and my husband the same in 14. While the ending may not be what people want, it was the ending that needed to be. My favourite play for the last 25 years has been The Woman In Black. It no longer holds that position. Thank you so much for this. It was truly an experience that I will not long forget.

I'm sorry for your losses and overjoyed that you loved The Ocean at the End of the Lane.

[canmom]

the Spirited Away theatrical adaptation

today I went with @birdfriender to see the stage production of Spirited Away, produced by Toho, currently on tour in London.

and like. holy shit??

you might say how the hell could you adapt a film like spirited away to stage. the answer is: incredibly inventive stagecraft, puppetry, costumes and especially choreography.

I was completely blown away by how this play flowed across the stage. set transitions were masked with lighting to direct attention, with the descending screen, with the rotating central platform that managed to function as nearly every part of the bathhouse. stairs, rotating bridges, creative use of size to indicate perspective (like the tiny train that circles the stage), and just the way the crew would move the props with a flourish -

but also the puppetry, like man! the way characters like Kamaji, Yubaba's giant head (used only at moments of intense emotion), and No Face would be operated by entire teams of puppeteers - it was extraordinary. the puppetry director was Toby Olié who's worked on a million different things including War Horse and you can really see them applying all these tricks accumulated over the years...

the show is remarkably faithful to the film; a few scenes are slightly abridged but every sequence I remembered was there and deliver with style. where it does need to pause and breathe, like in the famous train scene, it does. and like... it is fascinating to see an adaptation from animation to theatre. seeing how Mone Kamishiraishi (Chihiro) would stumble and bumb into walls just as she would under the pen of Shinya Ohira. or how a memorable sequence in the film could be represented symbolically: a collapsing pipe as a string of segments pulled on a string, a flower garden by dancers in flower outfits.

some of my fave sequences involved wooden panels carried by dancers, choreographed so the characters would weave between them, or they'd rotate to represent elevators on different floors. it was also fascinating to see how they'd symbolically represent things it would be impossible to stage, often representing fluids with fabric sheets. a transformation could be shown with actors swapping places with a flourish. at other times, it feels like stage magic tricks are in use, like a flash of light drawing your attention to a rope that was there all along. sometimes the puppeteers will be on stage, wearing simple beige outfits that mark them as not being 'present' as they manipulate the soot sprites and frogs and so on.

they also made effective, sparing use of a large projector screen, which descended at certain points, primarily for the driving scene at the beginning and the train scene. this actually didn't use scenes from the movie, but more of a soft, painterly style applied over... probably animated video? hard to say with the blurring, could be live footage. it reminded me of the use of similar screens in the later YoRHa plays, although it was a minor element here.

we weren't allowed to take photos (i took this one during the final bow anyway) and I would have been too busy watching to take them anyway, but this teaser shows briefly a number of the coolest setups. still, it's so much more when you see the whole thing flowing along without interruption.

and it was very interesting to me looking at this kind of show - big stage, directly homaging an animated film - from the eyes of someone who knows a lot more about film and animation than I do about theatre.

compared to film, you simply do not have closeups; the closest thing is when the puppeteers bring out the segments of Yubaba's giant floating head, but this is used sparingly. so everything is basically a long shot. however, because the acuity of a human eye is much greater than that of a camera, even from near the back of the theatre you can make out a lot of details that you wouldn't be able to make out with an equivalent camera shot. this allows compositions where there is loads going on at stage at once, with the eye being drawn to different areas by lighting and movement.

I do feel like there are definitely things to learn for animators from this kind of stage choreography. so many times I thought like, wow, that's so clever. like how chihiro riding haku was shown by splitting the dragon puppet into segments and putting her on the shoulders of one of the puppeteers.

and everything was done with such style too. if something shuffles off stage, you know it will be done with a wiggle and a flourish. small things but they add so much.

presumably because this seems like an incredibly involved show, there are multiple performers for each major character: four Chihiros, and three Hakus, Yubabas, Kamajis and so on. I'm not sure the exact lineup tonight beyond Chihiro. the exception is Kaonashi (No Face), who is played only by Hikaru Yamano, who gives an incredible performance, sidling and flexing around the stage in all sorts of strange ways that really get across the character's whole deal despite literally performing under a white mask and concealing robe. it's kinda amazing.

another fantastic casting is fundoshi dancer Yuya Igarashi as Kashira (the stack of three big heads that serve Yubaba, and speak only in wordless grunts). he basically has his real head as one of the three, and he has two more heads on his hands, and moves them around in incredibly energetic and funny ways. it's a brilliant way to interpret this, somehow feeling perfectly appropriate to have a buff guy in a red loincloth moving them around.

Yubaba's actress tonight would have been either Mari Natsuki or Hitomi Harukaze; either way she did an incredible job, it was really cool seeing a more human-proportioned version of the character and she brought a lot of energy and authority to the role.

the whole cast did a fucking amazing job honestly. I wish I knew more about theatre acting so I could comment more specifically on the tricks they were doing, but you definitely felt Chihiro's emotions

the production is in Japanese; English subtitles were shown on two screens on either side of the stage. the translation was on the 'honorifics included' end of that scale, but absolutely clear and idiomatic. the format worked - it was generally not hard to follow the action and glance at the subtitles, even though they were further away than they would be in film - and it definitely filled the theatre. I really hope this leads to more Japanese theatrical productions going on tour like this. wish i'd been able to see the Totoro one a few months ago.

definitely this kind of theatre must depend on a fairly obscene budget of the kind that only comes to biiiiig properties like, say, an adaptation of a beloved Studio Ghibli movie (one family turned up in cosplay) - there's a lot to be said for less extravagant staging. at the same time... this really was something.

i gotta go to the theatre more

[squiddy-god]

Twst cowboy/western AU

Omg ok so I have so many thoughts here we goooo!!! 

Tw: western Au! Mental illness, guns and gangs, I think that's it- this is a pretty wholesome au soooo

New tags! Town of Night Raven, twisted western, twst western!Au

Ok this au takes place in like the 1890’s in the small western town of Night Raven 

I'll go in order of the boys 

Riddle Rosehearts 

Managed to move away from his mama and go here, he still writes her but he's dead to her and it crushes him

He's a good ole english boy turned cowboy and night Raven is the only town that would take him 

He runs the town's stables and looks after the horses, acting as a sort of vet for their illnesses. Takes house calls to peoples farms so he can fix up their animals.

He has quite the temper and kicks like a horse himself 

Trey Clover 

Local dentist and doctor. 

Friends with Riddle but ain't much for horses

Definitely has this work cut out for him in this mess of a town. 

Came from the big city and knew Riddle as a kid before he moved back to London

Was shocked to see him in night Raven looking like he'd been dragged through hell 

Ace trapola 

Moved west for money and settled in night Raven only to never leave 

Causes a bunch of trouble for the law, always galavanting around town and getting in bar fights

Works at the stable with Riddle and deuce but barely is there to work and just messes around with the horses 

Punched riddle once when he first came to town and has not hit him since considering that Riddle got a lot better at fist fighting since you first came in

Deuce spade 

Used to be a gang outlaw before he came to night Raven and decide he wanted a quiet life to make his mama proud 

Hardest worker at the stables and dose all the lifting

Part time ranch hand out at the big farm Crowley owns 

Leona kingscolar

Runs a gang of outlaws and reeks quite a bit of havoc on night Raven

Came from a wealthy family but left the big city's to make his own path

Succeeded, his territory is pretty big in the West and he just needs night Raven to make it complete 

Only problem is night Raven has waring gang factions

A quick shot and a good rider

Ruggie bucci 

Used to be a street thief to support his town before Leona took over and things got better

Has been his errand boy and enforcer ever since 

Still steals but mostly from rich blokes he finds on the side of the rodes

He's a better shot than Leona, always has two 6 shots and a knife on him. 

Jack howl 

Honestly never wanted to be in a gang but Leona wouldn't leave him alone.

Only joined cause his family lives in a town Leona controls. 

Mostly works as a farm hand for Crowley because of his muscle

Is the one to break up epels bar fights all the time 

Has a mean right hook 

Azul ahsengrotto 

Runs the morstro saloon that he uses to conduct his under the table business. 

He co-owns it with vil

Octovinell is his gang, with jade too his right and Floyd to enforce his rules, 

Active in the night Raven gang wars but mostly just the dirty money he sweeps under the table for arms dealing and such 

jade leech 

Infamous leech brothers 

Escaped convicts that azul took in when they were first forming the gang. 

Handles most of the product side of things for the “business” and runs the front of the house with vil

Spent most of his early life taking care of Floyd and his troubled mind 

Floyd 

Troubled mind growing up, 

They ended up as orphans before they where 12 and had to fend for themselves

Killed three men in a town and ran, from place to place

7 bodies in total before they where caught and thrown in jail. 

Escaped and joined azuls gang at 17 and have been with him ever since. 

Relatively charming young man if you ignore the teeth and glare he sports in a bad mood 

Kalim al-hasim 

Moved west for peace and quiet and decided to bring Jamil along with him 

He's the kind but sort of naive shop owner

Runs the general goods store and has a real knack for business 

Partners with Crowley's farm to supply the store of most produce. 

If you need something bought or sold you either talk to kalim or azul 

Jamil Viper 

Resents kalim for dragging him west 

But he does like the freedom of the western deserts 

Works at kalims shop and chases off any of their more unruly customers (see : Leona and azuls gangs) 

Definitely learned how to shoot and became one of the best shots in town. 

Has his own horse named saffron who's just the most beautiful red! 

Vil schroheint 

Co-owns the salon with azul and runs the front of the house with jade! 

He's absolutely gorgeous, has a slight German accent and often gets mistaken for a lady. 

Was a singer and actor in Germany

Definitely a more effeminate man but after they watched him beat the snot out of some unruly customer they don't mention it. 

Rook calls him gorgeous. And that's it. 

Always mad at epel for bar fights 

Rook hunt 

Definitely a hunter

Always sells his game at kalims shop and always has the best catches

Most avoid him because he's an odd Fellow but no one can deny his skill at hunting. 

Follows vil around so much his nickname has become “the saloon owners dog” 

Epel felimer 

Farm hand at Crowley ranch after he quit working for vil. 

In this au he's a bit taller and more muscular

Realistically he's a strong farm boy, good at bucking hay and climbing trees. 

Mostly tends to the Apple trees but he also herds in the cattle 

Gets in a lot of bar fights 

Vil thinks he's too crass with his thick accent 

Idia shroud 

Rich city guy that moved here unwillingly 

But he's here and he's scared of the gangs

Mostly keeps to himself and is pretty paranoid 

Reads books like crazy, his little house is more of a library then it is a home- well ok it is the local bookstore but his room and or this are on the second story

Used to be quite the gunSlinger before ortho

Ortho shroud 

Takes care of his troubled brother and runs most of the errands! 

Brings home stray cats for idia and always plays with the dogs! 

He's a sweet boy who all but begs people to teach him to shot so he can be just like his big brother but no one budges 

Malleus draconia 

The marshal

With his black Stetson and those horns it has on it makes him look like the bloody devil

And to some he is. 

Really disomnia is more of a benevolent gang, but they enforce the law and keep things mostly peaceful 

Malleus himself is a sweet man but a scary one

All outlaws with territory bigger than leona could ever hope 

Lilia vanrouge 

Outlaw and ex mercenary before he settled down with disomnia 

Malleus right hand 

Fought in the war before he became a hired gun, then an old friend called in a favor and he raised malleus and settled down. 

Joined the gang malleus formed and was right into the thick of it. 

Now he's really settled, just a older gentleman raising his adopted son silver now. 

Silver vanrouge 

 The poor baby he found 

Technically Lilia is the one who made him an orphan but- he felt so bad he adopted silver. 

Now he's a strong young man who loves his pops 

A member of disomnia and works in the town as part of law enforcement occasionally

Besides that he helps Lilia with his little farm. A few cows and some goats, sheep and chickens. 

Nothing much but it still what he loves. 

Sebek zigvolt 

Joined disomnia after seeing Lilia and melleus in a shoot out and becoming an instant devotee 

Works full time as law enforcement. 

Has a penchant for trying to break up bar fights but ends up getting roped into them on accident. 

Denies it but he's so gentle with the horses it's insane to think it's the same boy always yelling and shouting. 

Dire Crowley 

Mayor of the town and a shady one too. 

Pays off all three gangs so they don't kill each other 

Runs a big farm on the outskirts of town that supplies a lot of work. 

Comes into town often but no one likes him much

Definitely a few skeletons in the closet. 

[theophagie]

We lost a Blitz blush and a horse whip in the war (the production process)

(Stolas lost the dick)