#performing objects

[goblinpumpkin]

Puppets, Objects, and Modernity: “The Thing That Isn’t There

February 16, 2022

Note: A lecture by John Bell that i enjoyed.

[elodieunderglass]

And one amang, an Iyrysch man,

Uppone his hoby swyftly ran…

WAIT HANG ON - slamming the brakes on drawing this stupid picture - do you nerds even KNOW the etymology of the word “hobby”? The thing you do for pleasure? The thing you have too many of? The thing you spend too much money on and share with your friends? The thing tumblr probably is to you? Those hobbies?

It comes from a now-kind-of-extinct breed of Irish pony-horse. It was called the Irish Hobby. Supposedly the hobby got its name from the Gaelic word obann, or swift. They definitely were. They’d obann your pants clean off.

Fast tough little bastards, built for rough terrain and renowned for their speed and stamina, hobby horses belonged to the Celts, and their highly annoying style of mounted warfare. but their conquerors liked hobby horses a lot, kept them, used them for themselves, and found them useful enough, despite the fact that they also had famously useful things like mounted knights or horse archers. A lightweight Irish warrior, mounted on a hobby horse, was called a hobelar.

Reportedly and in depictions, hobelars rode without stirrups. Or saddles. Or bridles. Or - well - this is all sounding very improbable, because the hobelars COULDNT have just been charging around basically bare-assed on naked ponies, screaming, and somehow in the process undoing the composure of actual mounted armoured knights. Knights who, I remind you, had stirrups. Stirrups are useful! It’s quite likely the hobelars had some gear. And clothes. and weapons. And the ponies probably had some tack - I am picturing a bellyband that you could at least hang a saddlebag on, and a neck rope for catching the bloody thing, even if not a saddle. But the overall impression, somehow created by people on darling little ponies, was apparently quite striking and fearful.

I mean. God Forbid People Have Hobbies.

Anyway after a while, whatever people became the British had eventually conquered all of the rough terrain that hobbies were best at, and horse archers just got sexier, and mounted knights became aristos, and all the bog and forest people had been subdued, so it was time to sunset the hobelars. but WAIT! Hobby horses are still tremendously fun and appealing! They’re so fast! and you can ride them without a saddle! Sure, they’re not up to the weight of a mounted knight, or indeed a lot of guys… but surely we can still find a use for a hobby or two? In the back garden? Somewhere?

At which point an English king decided to keep hobby horses just for fun. No military application. No further development of the technology. Not for fun. Just as expensive, pleasurable, pets. Just for the joy of the thing.

And that is how hobby (activity done purely for pleasure) comes from hobby horse (small horse) possibly from obann (swift.) they’re very interesting and you should look all this up for yourself! because it sure sounds like Elodie doing a bit, doesn’t it?

Today, Irish Hobbies are functionally nonexistent. References for drawing include the Kerry Bog Pony, the Connemara, and (I personally think) Dartmoors and Exmoors. They’re said to have lent their speed to the Irish Hunter/Sport Horse and from there to the Thoroughbred, but every damn horse in the world claims relation to the Thoroughbred, and they can’t be THAT thoroughly bred.

At any rate - you can never have enough hobbies. Just be glad that yours aren’t expensive beasts with minds of their own, eating their heads off in the pasture! …Unless they are. In which case, you’re part of a proud tradition.

[eyeoftheeagle]

🎉 super show 🥳

[dropdome]

Closet Corner, Skip Arnold 1987

(x)

[iliveunderarock]

screenshot redraw from the project sekai boys' fire flower cover!!! the mv was so prettyyyy

[anghraine]

One of the weirder parts of being formally tested for autism as an adult—apart from the hellscape of hours of math hell—was that they kept asking me for my conclusions or opinions about things I had very little knowledge of. These weren't basic facts you'd expect someone to pick up in the course of a standard US education, and I kept repeating that I would have to do actual research to form opinions on subjects I had no significant information about.

Obviously, "not opinionated" isn't a major problem for me when I do have a reasonable amount of information, but my eventual diagnosis specifically mentioned that I kept repeating that I would have to do more research to acquire the necessary baseline of data for forming opinions on [whatever], and that the phrasing of my various refusals tended to be identical or very similar (I didn't see any need to alter my wording when I was simply repeating the same position over and over).

*cough*

Anyway this is also about Star Trek. (Surprise.) I knew Spock would be relatable before we started the grand TOS watch, but did not expect him to be the most relatable character on television ever, and his continual refusals to deliver opinions without enough data for informed theories was actually a big part of this.

[lunarifie]

The Hollow Rewrite concept art of ‘The Circus’

[hallorangifs]

GOOD GIRL JANE (2022) dir. sarah elizabeth mintz

[hyfinart]

popeeee

[gummi-stims]

💡

[finnoahsource]

Finn Wolfhard performing at The Independent in San Francisco for The Objection! Tour 8/6/25

📸: Dana Jacobs

[gayestpokemon]

request by @sp1derc1der !!

drag queen maxie is my own au, dancer maxie is @plutonious, and of course the massive dragon is spider's draco scaled au

and this is also one of my aus lmao (probably the dumbest one ive ever come up with) (maxie gets turned into a wingull and no one knows its him LMAOOOOO)

[finelythreadedsky]

heyy. I have a bit of a silly question, but I haven't been able to find enough information to get over it. I've been trying to learn more about how theatre took place in Greece, and all sources I looked at so far mention that in each of the the three days of the festival of the city dionisias, the contesting playwrights would present three tragedies and one satyr play each. but I'm not clear yet on how many playwrights that meant exactly, nor in how were these playwrights were chosen to be there. if it was only one a day, do you know if there were other competitions beforehand to filter them out, or should we assume there weren't a lot of people able to compete at that level anyway? or if more than one playwright presented per day (seems odd since it would mean at least 8 works a day, which is a lot), do we have an estimate on how many they would be? sorryy if this is like. a really stupid question. but no one has been clear on it in the texts I've been looking at.

I don't have any specific ancient texts or modern scholarship to direct you to as sources on this, but here's a rundown:

The Dionysia had three days of tragic performance and three tragedians competing with four plays each. On each day, one playwright presented his work in the form of three tragedies plus one satyr play, so one playwright and four plays per day. There's some disagreement over what time the proceedings likely started/ended, but the performances probably took about 4-5 hours each day. So we're not thinking of the audience as sitting in the theater from sunrise to sundown, but we should probably also assume a fair amount of coming and going as well as snacking and talking in the audience during the plays. At the end of the third day prizes would be awarded. I would assume that the playwrights drew lots for going first/second/third, and I also suspect that it might have been seen as an advantage to go either last or first, though I'm not sure which. (And then the next day, the four competing comic playwrights presented one comedy each, all on the same day.)

We do know that the archon chose which playwrights would compete in tragedy at the Dionysia and allotted them funding and a chorus, but we don't know exactly how this choice was made, and the mechanism was probably different at different points in time. It was likely pretty informal at the beginning of the fifth century and become more formalized later on, once playwriting became a more established profession with a lot of prestige, and also once certain families had established it as their family business. I would imagine that c. 490 or so, the archon and the handful of working 'tragic' writers (probably something closer to amateurs) likely all knew each other, and the archon might have just picked three he liked or whose work in previous years had been good, maybe with some indication of the subject they were planning. From at least the second half of the fifth century and likely for the majority of it, would-be competitors probably submitted some sort of proposal to the archon, whether this was titles, full or partial draft scripts, outlines of their proposed plays, or maybe the playwright performing a sample monologue, and the archon chose which three would receive a performance slot in the festival and the funding to train a chorus. The winner from the previous year may have been guaranteed one of the three spots. But the archon would not have been able to see performances of these plays in order to judge whether or not to include them in the festival, except for what the playwright (or a friend) might be able to perform himself, since a playwright had to be approved by the archon before he would get personnel like a producer/sponsor, a chorus, or, in the later years of the fifth century, potentially his lead actor(s).

[reijndeers]

dpmo

[anghraine]

Just thinking about Spock's obvious annoyance and jealousy upon finding Kirk kissing Helen in "The Dagger of the Mind"—which only happens as a result of Helen and Dr. Adams implanting false memories and feelings in Kirk's mind. And Spock actually knows all about the mindfuck machine at that point, and saving Kirk from it/Adams is why he's there in the first place, and his look of annoyed judgment happens after Helen says, "This isn't right! Dr. Adams did this to you!"

The episode ends with a visibly shaken Kirk returning to the bridge, talking about how he can actually believe in death from loneliness, and staring blankly into the distance with McCoy right behind him. Then Kirk looks at Spock (who is physically further away) and smiles, visibly brightening after Spock smiles faintly back.

I'm also thinking about how upset Kirk is by Spock's spore-addled interest in Leila in "This Side of Paradise," and even more by Spock's disinterest in him. Leila herself will eventually admit that she knows Spock would never enter into a relationship with her except via the sex pollen/docility spores, and previous to all this, she said Spock would be given no choice in all this. Spore-influenced Spock also begs Kirk to join them ("It's a true Eden, Jim. There's belonging and love [...] you'll come around sooner or later. Join us. Please"), and Kirk instead hatches a plan to force him out of the effects of the spores.

Afterwards, Spock bleakly tells Leila, "I have a responsibility to this ship, to that man on the bridge. I am what I am, Leila, and if there are self-made purgatories, then we all have to live in them." He admits to Kirk that falling under the artificial tranquillity of the spores is the closest thing to happiness he's ever experienced.

Kirk is more outwardly cheerful, expressive, and easy-going than Spock, occasionally admitting that he's lonely, but not much more, apart from the implications of how he explains romantic love in "Metamorphosis" ("Is he important to you, more important than anything? Is he as though he were a part of you? [...] By your feeling for him, you are condemning him to an existence he will find unbearable. [...] You may keep him here forever, but you will always be separate, apart from him"). It's only when he gets literal amnesia that he can admit that he's pretty sure he's never experienced happiness before.

The seething jealousy even in obvious dub-con circumstances and quiet, restrained unhappiness pervading their lives just feels like—well, so much. There are so many other cases, too, like when McCoy jokes about Spock falling for a computer (not an android, a literal computer) and Kirk gets visibly upset and jealous until Spock tells him in front of everyone that Kirk is irreplaceable, obviously. Spock spends an entire episode miserably jealous of an actual android love interest of Kirk's, and after McCoy tells him he fundamentally can't understand the agonies and triumphs of love Kirk experienced with the android, Spock waits for McCoy to leave then deletes his rival from Kirk's mind while he sleeps.

They aren't well, but they sure are something!

[gooberryy2]

crossover 2