Friday Art Attack

Pictures for this week. It's been nice to remember this series and do it again. I've got so much digital art stashed away. Much of it is mediocre, but I kept it for some reason, and it's nice to pull it out every so often.

I believe this is only a detail of what is otherwise a larger image, of the Triumph parading Queen Zenobia through Rome after her defeat. Although having a reputation for beauty and chastity, unlike her fellow Seleucid-descended queen during Roman years Cleopatra, she also is almost certainly responsible for the assassination of her husband and step-son, which allowed her to step in as regent on behalf of her own young son, and rule the so-called Syrian Empire or Palmyrene Empire, a very brief splinter group from Rome during the general chaos of the Crisis of the Third Century. This naked power grab backfired shortly, of course—Palmyra was recaptured by Aurelius, and when it rebelled a second time shortly thereafter, the city-state was destroyed completely. Although Zenobia's ultimate fate is unknown, and there are romanticized fantasies about her charming her way out of trouble in Rome, most likely she was ignominously put to death for treason.

Larry Elmore's classic cover art for the expanded Star Frontiers game. I'm not a huge fan of Star Frontiers, but it was one of the very first forays of the RPG market into space opera in the wake of the success of Star Wars beyond Traveller itself, and the first by TSR. Although I didn't really love that setting, I always thought this was one heckuva cover art. I wouldn't mind a framed print of it at my house one of these days. Elmore himself sells prints of that. This, along with the Basic, Expert and Companion set covers would make for a nice rec room wall decoration set. Now, if only Wayne Reynolds would offer the same, I'd be ready to roll. 

One could argue that space opera is really the true home of Lovecraftiana, I think.

Although I'm not sure I'm in complete agreement of turning stories of Herakles into  pseudo-manga style artwork, or at least manga-influenced comic book artwork, this is still a pretty nifty image. The mythological fidelity is a bit dubious. Although Herakles was well known for the use of a club, most sources talk specifically about him decapitating the hydra with either a sword or a sickle, not bashing its heads with his club.

In image of the piratey themed area of Eberron. Although the palm trees make it feel piratey because of our association of the Golden Age of Piracy with either the Spanish Main in the Caribbean, or the Pirate Round in the Indian Ocean—both of which are tropical areas—the Lhazaar Principalities aren't really exactly tropical in Eberron. I'm going to call that a slight fail on the art side. Good image taken out of context, however.

Nice image, but this lich either has one of the worst hairstyles in the world, or he has very weirdly oriented curled horns.

James Gurney's Dinotopia had an oddly and disappointing kumbaya hippyness going on, but the idea of people living in this subtropical Mediterranean paradise with domesticated dinosaurs was just an awesome set of visuals nonetheless. I highly recommend picking up the books and flipping through them but not even bothering to read the text. It'll only disappoint you, I'm sure.

The Master. Even when he was just sketching around with pencils and less fantastical subjects, he was still better than his imitators and competitors both. I mean really; nobody has ever compared, even today, I don't think. I love Frazetta's work.

A Livyatan, a Miocene whale related to the sperm whale, but more hypercarnivorous, and considered "the largest tetrapod predator" yet known. The species name is melvillei, and you can probably guess why.

A less D&D-ish interpretation of a lizardman.

Lolth killing some elves who look bronze age in their equipment, for some reason. This isn't one of WAR's best pieces, but it's a good example of his style.

The older southern province of Laramidia tyrannosaur Lythronax. There is still not agreement among dinosaur paleontologists on the origin and dispersal of tyrannosaurs. The latest study (from 2020 by Jared Voris) suggests three provinces of tyrannosaur geography; east Asia, northern Laramidia and southern Laramidia, with the most advanced radiation taking place in Asia. This would make T. rex itself not a descendent of any of the tyrannosaurs from the southern province, but rather from Asia, who spread into northern Laramidia displacing albertosaurs and daspletosaurs, rather than being a descendent of Daspletosaurus (an earlier theory) or the southern tyrannosaurine dinosaurs like Tetraphoneus or Lythronax after all.

A black man on black and white culture

https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/white-people-s-war-on-western-civ/

A few quotes:

White Americans are usually quick to blame themselves for the state of race relations, and despite their high propensity for tolerance, they are unjustly characterized as racists. Across the country school districts are lowering standards to appease minority activists, yet it appears that whites can do nothing to placate their anger. What is also quite ironic is that whenever black professors proclaim racist sentiments, they are often enabled by their white colleagues, citing free speech. Anti-white racism is acceptable to the point of being virtuous, while whites are never allowed to defend themselves from racism charges.

To some, the nebbish behavior of whites needs explaining. But we ought not to be surprised at the pathological altruism of whites. Conservatives like to brag that Western culture holds freedom and individual expression in high esteem. If white people as a whole have greater respect for individual agency and are less ethnocentric than other groups, then they will generally be more inclined to tolerate dissenting opinions, even to the detriment of their own interests.

And another. 

As such, white intellectuals have become partners in the quest to destroy the cultural heritage of the West. Blinded by pathological altruism, they are unable to acknowledge that a civilization without a culture must collapse. [...]  But the real issue is that radical non-whites and their liberal peers want to annihilate the Western canon. Contrary to the naïve perceptions of most white people, movements to decolonize curriculum are not efforts to create an intellectually diverse environment. Rather, they reflect contempt for Western civilization. 

And another.

For instance, several leading universities have devoted departments to the politically inspired discipline of African studies. Due to the name, most would assume these departments teach students about African states like Benin and Oyo, and their own histories of imperialism and slavery. Instead, they fixate on Europe’s relationship with Africa and glorify African primitivism.

The main objective of such courses is a politically motived push to engender hatred for Western civilization. [...] Moreover, the politicization of education continues unabated since white people care more about the feelings of misguided grievance mongers than the survival of their culture. Only white people are silly enough to think that Caucasian philosophers should be removed from the curriculum of a majority white society. [ed note: they're not misguided. They're evil and they hate white people and want to exploit them for their own benefit. It's naive to call them misguided.]

Universities in China would not tolerate white Americans telling them to make their courses less Asian. Yet strangely some think that it is acceptable to demand that American universities dump the Western canon.  

Same guy wrote another article. He's actually got a whole corpus of interesting stuff.  https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/blog/why-republicans-struggle-to-gain-the-black-vote/ 

Acts of contrition can never endear the Republican Party to black Americans. Republicans have assumed the opposite for decades, thinking that blacks will reward them with support for their energetic pandering.

What Republicans fail to realize is that black people view voting as an expression of group solidarity. This solidarity is crucial to the identity of black Americans, and even though many blacks identify as conservative, voting for Republicans is thought to violate their identity. Those who do violate this identity are excluded for failing to uphold sacred traditions in the black community.

Although many blacks identify as conservative, they remain loyal to the Democratic Party, to the bewilderment of analysts. To black Americans, voting does not aim at empowering the individual—it is seen as expressing the interests of the group. If blacks believe Republicans are hostile to their goals, then they will vote for Democrats, even when policies advertised by the Democratic Party may prove to be detrimental to their economic well-being.

This group voting mentality is especially difficult in the ever-present mentality of victimhood. Black activists and white liberals want us to accept the cult of black victimization, tying this closely to black voting patterns, thus making it difficult for Republicans to appeal to black voters.

Black victimhood is what the word racism as it's usually used in America means. It's a con. Or maybe it's almost more like a cult. Either way, the entire thing is a hoax. It doesn't exist, and its only purpose is to extort blackgeld from naive and nice white people who assume that ethnic minorities are as fair-minded as they are, so they give them benefits of the doubt that have been proven over and over and over again to be misplaced. The article linked describes this in more detail:

Unlike the radical separatism advocated by Huey Newton and the Nation of Islam, black victimhood functions as a group adaptation mechanism, by allowing black activists to impose demands on the state. Black separatists are usually maligned by the mainstream, but their vision is more liberating than that of black liberals and their white companions. Separatists want black people to be free from white institutions, whereas liberals envision a society where whites are responsible for looking after and coddling blacks.

As advocates of capitalism, Republicans differ in their medium for empowering blacks, but like separatists, they also advocate black autonomy. Yet because blacks tend to be collectivistic, and have been socialized by the wider culture to imagine themselves as victims, preaching the message of self-reliance to black Americans may appear quite challenging. [...]

The plight of poor blacks is paraded by black intellectuals to justify their privileges at the expense of all Americans. Black activists fear independent black Americans, since they pose a risk to their material interests.  If blacks eschew victimhood, then activists cannot use their condition as a tool to extract resources from white institutions. Clearly, such circumstances obviate the services of activists who are handsomely paid to design anti-racist policies.

The truth is that victimhood is intertwined with the politics of black solidarity. Unless Republicans abandon the message of self-help, blacks will never perceive them as an attractive option to Democrats, and it is a waste of time for Republicans to specifically target black voters. 

There are two solutions to peaceful coexistence between America and the black nation embedded within our borders. Both of them have slim chances of actually coming true without radical—and in fact harrowing—events bringing them to pass.

1)  Set the black nation up somewhere where they can order society to their own liking, without interference from America and without them being able to interfere with America in turn. Whether this is a model like Lincoln's "back to Liberia" approach, like his "Jamaica or Haiti-like Central America or Caribbean approach" or whether it's more like ceding the inner city ghettos to them in a model a bit like that of the Indian reservations (except a bit stricter. White people don't interfere much in Indian affairs on the res, but they certainly feel free to interfere in ours off the res.) probably doesn't really matter too much. The key is "you do you and we'll do us, and we won't get in each other's way." This is the good fences make good neighbors approach; we can have peaceful and even friendly coexistence based on separation, and not interfering in the way that we each respectively set up our societies. Of course, blacks in America don't want to have anything to do with this other than a few "radical" ideologues, as mentioned above. Black identity is a negative identity; they literally have no identity if you take away their ability to claim to be oppressed victims of white privilege, as well as the ability to mooch of of white people because of their black privilege. Black people in America who reject this identity, as implied above, tend to over time because less black and eventually just kind of assimilate into America. Or at least they would if the advantages of claiming a black identity weren't so obvious and manifest. People like Meghan Markle, who is—what, 1/8 black? claim a black identity because its a prestige identity compared to a white identity. People like Rachel Dolezol and Shawn King claim a black identity even though they're completely white by genetics, because it's such a prestige identity. (This is similar to how liar and con artist Elizabeth Warren crashed and burned when her calls of being "native" "American" were disproved. Any non-white identity is a prestige identity in America these days, because the ruling caste is defined by their hatred of white people, Western civilization, and most especially Christianity and the freedom to practice it.)

2) The widespread adoption of the full Gospel of Jesus Christ among the majority of people living within America, and the purging of any aspect of the cultures and identities—white, black, red or otherwise—that are out of harmony with the Gospel. Given that the scriptures strongly suggest that this won't and in fact can't happen until the coming of Christ Himself and the destruction of the wicked and their burning at His coming, then it seems banking on this bailing us out of our predicament without us having to make hard decisions about how to manage the problem we've found ourselves in seems like wishful thinking at best. We made the foolish decisions that caused this problem to manifest, I suspect the Lord expects us to lie in the bed we've made for a while. Then, maybe if we're righteous and humble enough, which we certainly are not now, then he'll deliver us from the bondage that we find ourselves in.

Friday Art Attack

Let's start with some happy retro-futurist sci-fi work to begin with. I don't really like cities, but I'd live here. Maybe. If I could easily still get to the mountains and the desert that I love. Looks like the coast is just a mile or two in the distance, though.

 A mean looking servitor daemon, at least in Dark Heritage or Fantasy Hack.

A couple more Tomorrowland-like pleasant retro-futurist images.

One curious development in D&D in the last decade or two is the proliferation of very bizarre "iconic" characters illustrated in the art. These aren't as bad as some; a platinum blonde halfling chick, a 4e-style tiefling, and a dwarf.

Actually, I don't know that that's any more bizarre than what we had on the opening artwork for the Cook Expert set, for that matter. But it certainly is a development in the game. Paizo in particular have milked it.

Who said realistic paleoart of dinosaurs and their "ilk" can't be both realistic and cute at the same time?

Part rat, part baboon, part man, all nasty. Another potential interpretation of the broad servitor daemon stats.

Everything about this character is odd. I'm not even sure what race he's supposed to be; some kind of dwarf, wearing weird overlapping turtle armor? Pretty cool image, though.

I sometimes throw some images of painted minis in along with the art. These Warhammer ghosts of some kind or another with a real grim reaper-like vibe are pretty cool.

One of the iconic greater daemons from Warhammer, the Keeper of Secrets with an unusual alternate hairstyle, maybe.

Some wolfman stuff.

The Vikings didn't really live up north far enough to have polar bears. The idea of them being from the frigid north is not really accurate. Scania, the Norwegian fjords, and Denmark all have fairly mild climates in spite of their latitudes because of the warm water currents in the nearby oceans. The climate and ecosystem is actually very similar to that of the Pacific Northwest. Think of Seattle and Vancouver more than Hudson Bay.

What if?

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/sportsnews/article-9492525/Chelsea-drawing-plans-LEAVE-European-Super-League.html

Can you imagine what would have happened if conservatives took conserving the traditions, culture, and ways of their people as seriously as soccer hooligans took their fandom?

Can you imagine what would have happened if Christians took maintaing their faith as seriously as soccer hooligans took their fandom?

Vox Day asked those questions first, but I think it's important enough to ask them again.

D&D through the ages

There are a lot of discussions about old-fashioned gaming vs modern gaming. Some of them are substantive in the sense that they use objective, measurable comparisons, but the majority of them are more subjective, and have to do with the presentation or approach or something like that. Because it's subjective and not measurable, it's often difficult to determine if these differences actually exist, or if it's just in the eye of the beholder (no pun intended.) And regardless of the presentation or "vibe" or approach that the rulebooks themselves seem to have, naturally the actual experience would have varied considerably from one DM with one group to another DM with another group, or even the same DM with another group, or the same group with another DM. In general, I'd suggest that most of these types of subjective changes happened because the customer base wanted them to happen, or something like them to happen, because they found certain elements of the earlier game frustrating or not to their expectation. Presumably, the revised versions of the game cater to the greater demand from the market.

Of course, that's part of what the whole OSR thing is about. Many such gamers feel like the changes to the game have gone too far, and they liked most of what was already there better than what they have now and are attempting to roll back the changes, at least in their own groups. I suspect that there's also a fairly broad coalition, if you will, of gamers who are roughly my generation who have mixed reactions; they are sympathetic to some of the aims of the OSR, but equally sympathetic to the modern gamer. This is part of what I mean when I say that I'm old-fashioned, but I'm not old-school. I like the very rules lite approach that is highly dependent on GM rulings, for instance, that is the hallmark of the OD&D gamestyle and which was carried forward (mostly) in the B/X books and that line. Which contrasted sharply with the direction that AD&D was going, for instance. I'm a fan of lower-powered, "lower fantasy" (although I'm using that loosely the way that it is often mis-used in these types of discussions) characters who need to be a bit fearful when they come across monster spoor, rather than carefully balanced encounters that players are meant to overcome. This is an old fashioned play paradigm, but I equally despise the notion of making identical characters Ringo, Mingo, Bingo and Dingo because the first encounter with a goblin killed you three times before you could get past it and actually enter the dungeon. (Which you spawned, as it were, pretty much right next to. Sometimes the old-schoolers who gripe about video-game aesthetics are in denial about how old-school games were actually played by most.)

In any case, I'd like to show you two pictures. These are probably quite familiar. They also showcase a very similar concept, but they do so in a very different way; the Erol Otis cover (I'm not even sure that that is a dragon, given that it's coming up out of the water) ambushing what would likely be two PCs looks like a desperate situation, while the Wayne Reynolds one of a green dragon fighting four PCs looks less like one; the fighter leading the charge of a stereotypical 4-man PC group while shouting huzzah. I think that there definitely is a difference in approach there, and I've tried to describe that by migrating towards the former. Maybe even migrating beyond the former, by calling my preferred gaming approach dark fantasy, sword & sanity, fantasy Yog-Sothothery, a fantasy/horror hybrid, etc. 

I'm not sure what the Wayne Reynolds piece was for. I remember when it was released by WotC as a hi-res image file, and I'm sure it was the cover to something. I found a different version that seems a bit more faded (the original version was much more vivid and saturated—and maybe flipped the other way; I can't remember now.)

Horses and mammoths

I strongly suspect that the Ice Age extinction event of 10,000 years ago in North America wasn't really like that at all. There's loads of evidence that many of these animals survived much longer, even on to the very eve of white man seeing them—or even in the case of horses, that they never went extinct at all and that the horses that the Injuns rode on the prairie were descended from horses that they'd always had, not horses that they'd captured from the Spanish just a few generations earlier. However, because it doesn't fit the paradigm, that evidence is disregarded and even worse—discarded. So now it's no longer even around to be reinterpreted by someone who's maybe not quite so beholden to the model. It's not my purpose or desire to acquaint you with the evidence, if you're not already. It's my experience that people are usually unwilling to entertain alternative narratives to the mainstream narrative unless they do the work themselves to find the evidence. Although if could be I have the causality backwards; people are unwilling to do the work to find evidence for alternative narratives unless they're already willing to entertain them. Either way, people generally accept the narratives that they're fed, especially if they come from mainstream sources, and are dismissive of any evidence that contradicts that narrative, if they even know that it exists at all. But I will say that because hard evidence that could support a survivalist model no longer exists or has been ignored and discarded and is no longer available, the evidence is in the form of oral history and circumstantial logical conclusions. The former include, for example, this collection of accounts of mammoth sightings, and this collection of elephant-like artifacts that come from a time period where mammoths and mastodons were supposedly extinct already for thousands of years. There's much, much more, and if they start to sound a bit like reports of Bigfoot sightings sometimes, that's fair, I suppose, with at least two major exceptions: 1) sightings by people who wouldn't have any reason to be familiar with elephants but which can describe elephant-like creatures, like early reports by Indians in the 1500-1600s from the American colonies frontier, and 2) unlike Bigfoot, we know that mammoths, mastodons, horses, etc. all did live in North America. It's a question of when they went extinct, not if they ever lived there at all. The latter, on the other hand, is stuff like reports from Daniel Boone of Big Bone Lick, where they made temporary shelters out of mammoth (or mastodon) bones. The narrative story is that they were leftover from the Pleistocene, or that they fossilized, but both are unlikely; if the bones were exposed and could be extracted without considerable work from a stone matrix, then they wouldn't have been fossilized. If they weren't fossilized, there's no way that they survived for thousands of years exposed to the elements like that. The inevitable conclusion is that they must have been much more fresh than the narrative asserts is possible. 

But what I'm a little bit more interested in right now is the horse. There were many, many species of horse in the New World (and the Old) earlier, but some recent genetic evidence suggests that actually this interpretation was fallacious; there was only one species of horse in the New World during the Rancholabrean NALMA, although there may well have been numerous subspecies. And that this species is not a "horse", i.e. member of the equid family, but the actual horse—subspecies of the same animal as Przewalski's horse or the tarpan, which were domesticated and became what we think of as the horse today. (This is assuming Hagerman's horse had been more or less replaced by this point; otherwise, Hagerman's horse, Equus simplicidens, actually is probably a different animal that's more zebra-like.) Other animals like E. giganteus, coversidens, scotti, lambei, etc. should be interpreted as subspecies. The subgenus (Amerhippus) is done away with—although the genus Hippidion, while probably not a valid genus, is at least a proper lineage. Other non-caballoid lineages, which do have proper species designations are the various hemionic lineages (asses and donkeys) and the zebras.

Now, this is a rather radical approach, and you never know. After all, science also can't come to unity on the intepretation of Przewalski's horse; is it a separate species? A subspecies? Or just a breed that's been feral for a long time? (That last interpretation is fairly new, but it seems to be the most commonly accepted today.) To some degree, this all becomes a question of semantics, though—whether to call an animal Equus (Amerhippus) scotti or Equus ferus scotti is inside baseball to the taxonimists, and if the narrative told by genetic data is the same, it's a close relative of the same animal that was domesticated in the Old World and became our horse. We know also from genetic data that there were at least three separate horse domestication events in the Old World, but that only one of them still has surviving lineages among domestic and feral horses; that of the east European steppe; i.e., the Yamnaya or Indo-European domestication. The modern horse is, in fact, relatively inbred due to this domestication and breeding, and has only a very few y-DNA lineages extant in particular. In the natural state, although wild horses all probably had a much more similar physical appearance—like that of the Przewalski's horse, which also matches cave paintings from France at Lascaux—they had more genetic diversity. It was only through selective breeding that other physical traits, which were otherwise recessive and which would have appeared only rarely in the natural stock (many are, in fact, maladaptive in some ways) are able to propagate and become common. White coats being a notable example of this, for instance. 

There seems to be a relationship between horses and lions as well. Lions in Africa will eat all kinds of things, of course, including various antelope, wildebeest, warthogs, and even Cape buffalo, giraffes and young elephants on occasion, but they preferentially prey on zebras and wildebeest, who tend to herd together. On the American savanas of the Rancholabrean (keep in mind that geographically, the Rancholabrean was quite different than today. The jet stream was lower, pluvial lakes filled much of what is the Great Basin desert today, and oak savanas covered what is now open prairie or even semi-desert or desert) lions seem to have done the same with horses and buffalo. The American buffalo, especially the "antique buffalo" is a much larger animal than the wildebeest, but then again, the American lion was on average a good 25% larger than the African lion today too. 

I imagine that these wild horses had primitive markings, much like the Przewalski's horse or the cave paintings, or for that matter, like the konik or Heck horse breeds, which are either very primitive in their physical appearance, or were purposefully bred to resemble Ice Age wild horses in the case of the Heck horse. Dun or grullo coats, face masks, frosting on the mane and tail, leg bars, dorsal stripe, ear marks, possible pangare, etc.

The stereotypical Indian pony might be a good example of what they were like, since most likely that was the breeding stock many of them came from. The idea that an Indian pony was bred from Spanish stock, which was a much larger breed of horse, in just a few generations, and that the Indians became a horse centric culture to the same degree that the Huns or the Mongols did, and with the same skill, in just three or four generations, and had thousand upon thousands of heads of horse—it's really quite an absurd just-so story if you think about it very much at all.

Friday Art Attack

For some reason, I lost the thread of doing these Friday Art Attack posts. I revisited the tag last night, and decided that it's time that I got back in the saddle. I also realized that for whatever reason, I'd repeated a fair number of pieces, either because I hadn't always paid great attention to what I'd used before and because sometimes I have duplicates under different filenames of what is essentially (or even exactly) the same image. Anyway, here we go again.

Some good old fashioned retro science fiction. I love this kind of stuff and I think it's a travesty that this future was taken from us.

One of the things that Tolkien does very well that is sometimes overlooked in the fantasy field is the loving descriptions of the setting. Tolkien based Middle-earth on the Europe that he knew and loved and that love shows through in every aspect of the work.

Some poster Old Republic art. I recently totally lost the plot on playing this game. I haven't done more than an hour or two of playing in at least two weeks.

Some more Star Wars fan art; a Maulish type character.

With regards to the simple landscape I offered earlier, it often is enough to create an intimidation factor, which almost becomes its own character, in a sense. If it's done well. As a fan of outdoor recreation, especially hiking alone and stuff like that, I guess maybe I kind of naturally get it, because I have a similar love for the vast empty landscapes of the American West.

A pseudo-mythic kind of thing going on here; hekatonkheires or something, with ...what, Valkyries riding on flying Sleipnirs? That's a weird mish-mash of all kinds of mythology.

I always like to include a few age of pulp artworks, although this German translation of some Edmond Hamilton is an unusual choice. Not sure where I found this one anymore, to be honest.

This, on the other hand, is I suspect fairly well known, being some concept art for the first season of The Mandalorian.

I think this one stands without comment. It's just a gigantic status of strange and alien aspect and looks like some kind of object of idolatrous worship or something.

I don't believe this actually dates from the age of pulp, rather I think it's a deliberate neo-pulpist style.

Not sure what this is, but it might be the battle of Kadesh. Certainly it's an Egyptian chariot archer of some note fighting... somebody else. The bald guy is lacking much of distinguishing characteristics, but he could be a Hittite, I suppose.

If this isn't the quintessential Warhammer Blood Dragon vampire, I don't know what is. I don't know that that's actually the provenance of this art, but it fits the stereotype perfectly. Of course, my understanding is that New Warhammer doesn't have vampire bloodlines anymore. Not that I was a huge fan of Warhammer, but I thought their setting was one of their best things that they had going for them. Blowing it up completely and replacing it with a totally different setting always seemed like a real headscratcher of a move to me.

Some Luis Royo, just because.

New info on dire wolves

I'm not sure exactly how new this information is, but it dates to 2021, at least, and if I just heard about it, chances are people who are even more casually interested in paleontology than I am haven't yet. 

The history of the dog family, Canidae, is an interesting one. Like the camel family and the horse family, the dog family originates in the Americas before crossing the Berengian land bridge relatively late, and then becoming more well-known through specimens that developed in the Old World. In some cases, these Old World developments then crossed back into the New World and are better known as natives to the New World in this form that underwent Eurasian development first, like the horse and the wolf, for instance. The actual wolf, Canis lupus, is a rather late-appearing Eurasian development that later spread into the New World. While they were common to North America as the first Americans knew it, they are now rather more rare, having come between Americans and their domesticated animals like cattle and sheep, and been seen as competitors. (And Mexicans—let's not forget that they've made their wolf subspecies locally pretty much extinct, which we notably did not completely do. And it was the efforts of American conservationists who prompted the "save the Mexican lobo" movement.) Their range and numbers are now rather more restricted, obviously. In addition to this, they never seem to have moved south of central Mexico in the New World, however—the canid species of South America are somewhat diverse and divergent, while the northern canids are mostly fairly closely related species within the Canis genus: various species of wolves (gray wolf, eastern wolf, red wolf), the coyote. Among them were several extinct species, such as America's dire wolf (Canis dirus), Arbruster's wolf (Canis armbrusteri) which was seen as ancestral to the dire wolf, and China's Canis chihliensis, which may have been ancestral to both Arbruster's wolf and the gray wolf, making the gray wolf and the dire wolf sister lineages of sorts. (And, of course, the domestic dog and the Australian dingo are believed to be descended from domesticated wolves as well.) Closely related to these lineages are animals like the jackals, especially the golden jackal, and slightly more distantly, the African hunting dog and the Indian dhole. 

All of these together make up a lineage of "wolf-like" dogs, which is believed to have originated in Africa and spread to the rest of Eurasia from there, and from Eurasia back into North America where, ironically, the greater dog family initially was from. This "wolf-like" lineage is contrasted with the "fox-like" lineage (which naturally enough, includes most of the foxes that we know of. Also with the more diverse South American lineages with it's bush dogs and maned wolves, and finally there a number of other animals that don't fit neatly into these three bigger lineages, like the raccoon dog of Japan, Africa's bat-eared fox, and curiously, the familiar American gray fox. That fourth group is a bit of a puzzler, though, and some recent cladograms integrate them in to one or more of the existing three monophyletic lineages. It does appear that at least a few of them may not pass muster as one of those lineages though (the gray fox being the most likely) and stand as an independent free agent of sorts. 

If I can be permitted a paragraph or two of digression—and of course I can, because it's my blog—all of these three (or four) lineages belong to a greater lineage within the dog family that goes back ~34 million years to the early Oligocene. None of them left the Americas before ~7 million years ago. For much of that time, and they were kind of in the shadow of another dog-family lineage, the Borophagines, which are now extinct. These were various sized and quite diverse animals, and include the largest of the canine species—big, burly nearly bear-sized critters like Epicyon being among the most notable. They are sometimes called "bone-crushing" dogs because many of their species had hyena-like adaptations for better carcass utilization, i.e. very strong jaws and molars that would break bones and thus enable at least parts of the bones to be eaten and digested, especially the marrow. It's curious that this diverse and broad group of animals played the cursorial hunting role in the New World where the hyena-family played the same role in the Old World, and this niche protection was pretty well established prior to the Berengian land bridge formation. The first dogs to cross over were primitive fox and wolf-like creatures, not Borophagines, however, where they were able to develop into today's wolves, foxes and more before returning "home" to the Americas. The so-called "hunting hyena" was an example of fauna going the other way. While we think today of the dogs, especially the wolf-like lineage, as being very similar animals and wide-spread and successful, things were considerably different until quite recently; the dog family was much more diverse, with the remnants of a totally different lineage of canines still putting forth some of its best efforts as recently as the late Pliocene, in the form of Borophagus diversidens for example, and hyenas weren't limited to being an odd animal or two in Africa; they were a much more diverse and widespread group until the very end of the Ice Age. With the disappearance of the mammoth steppe ecosystem, the cave hyenas' population crashed and they finally went extinct shortly after the ice retreated and the boreal forests extended over much of what was mammoth steppe. This allowed the wolves to spread out from their formerly smaller forested homes and become more widespread across Eurasia. The cave hyenas successfully kept them from spreading until ecological change made their own numbers take a nose-dive. They may even have been successful at limiting the spread of paleolithic man for a time, although that's a bit more speculative.

None of these extinctions should be seen as anything other than the kind of cyclical bad luck that comes up from time to time, though. Neither the hyenas and the borophagines, although drastically limited in the case of the former or extinct in the case of the latter, were unsuccessful in any meaningful way. They corresponded morphologically very closely to each other in an interesting way, and even some members of the modern dog lineages have mimicked their body plan and morphology, specifically the dire wolf, which also had much larger and stronger jaws and teeth than today's wolf. If the hyenas and borophagines weren't successful, why is that body plan being imitated over and over again? Rather, what we see right now is a kind of "post apocalyptic" scenario, where only the most generalist animals among the cursorial hunters remain. The wolf-like lineage just isn't all that specialized, and we can assume that the way things are going, in a few million years they'd be imitating the hyena and borophagine adaptations again, because they're just that good. They just haven't done so yet because they're still the "early" generalist examples of their lineages. Anyway... tangent over.

Recent DNA evidence is tearing up our old morphological models of descent of the modern canines, however. We now believe that all of the African lineages diverged separately from the Eurasian lineages, for instance, and many of the African species have been "promoted" to sister species rather than subspecies or regional morphs. The entire wolf-like lineage is now seen to be likely rooted in Africa originally, where there's more diversity of the lineage even today. Although that's less important than the big news; while sequencing a few dire wolf samples from which DNA evidence was able to be extracted, it was discovered that the dire wolf's last common ancestor with the gray wolf was much older than we thought; in fact, the dire wolf is the most distantly related to all other wolf-like lineage animals. It is basically a sister-group to everyone else combined. That's the technical term; more flippantly yet also more accurately, it's the fifth or sixth cousin group; the one that's so distantly related you're not quite sure why they're even at the family reunion at all because they're right on the verge of being too distant to be invited. The dire wolf probably developed from Armbruster's wolf, but Armbruster's wolf did not likely develop from the Chinese Canis chihliensis at all, but was rather a completely and totally home-grown alternative that was native to the Americas and always was. All of this in spite of a morphologically very similar skeleton. 

A side effect of this is that the restorations that we usually see where the dire wolf just looks like a little bit beefier wolf, are almost certainly wrong. The soft tissue model of the wolf; shape of the ears, fur, etc. should not be assumed to be a good model to use for the dire wolf, given that the dire wolf is not really all that closely related to the gray wolf after all. The African hunting dog is more closely related to the gray wolf than the dire wolf, and yet it has a completely different ear shape and pelage. The dire wolf was probably as divergent physically. This very recent artwork by the king of mammal age paleoart, Mauricio Anton takes this idea with a totally different take on how dire wolves might have looked. This piece shows two familiar-looking gray wolves getting into a bit of conflict with a pack of morphologically distinct dire wolves over the carcass of an Ice Age buffalo (Bison antiquus. Antique bison?) in the oak savanas of the late Pleistocene southern California that are probably now chaparral or even desert today. In fact, exactly that ecological change is what likely caused the dire wolf's downfall, opening up the possibility for the gray wolf to expand over the territory. Very similar to what happend in the Old World with the cave hyena. 

Compare that to a piece he did a few years earlier below. The focus is really on the La Brea Smilodon's more than the dire wolves, but the dire wolves in the back chasing the "antique buffalos" are what you get when you assume that they are a closely related sister-group to the gray wolf; at a casual glance, you can't tell the difference between that interpretation of a dire wolf and an actual gray wolf. The image above is both more intriguing to fans of big animals as well as more much more likely based on this latest study.

According to this new paper, the dire wolf is no longer Canis dirus, because it's too divergent to fit into even the most generous definition of the genus Canis. An older name has been resurrected; Aenocyon dirus. This is similar to how genetic sequencing has suggested that the American lion was distinct enough to be a totally different species from the Old World lion after all, so it's now back to being Panthera atrox, although even more extreme; not only is the dire wolf a different species, but a completely different genus. 

Two quick epilogue comments on this. The first one is a caution. Archaeogenetic or paleogenetic data is a quickly moving field, and you have to be a little bit careful about assuming that because a conclusion is made today that it will stand. In the human genome, until just about two years ago we were told, for instance, that the inhabitants of Great Britain (and its diaspora nations like Americans, Canadians, South Africans, Australians, New Zealanders, etc.) showed genetic continuity all the way back to the late Paleolithic, with only slight visibility of the Anglo-Saxon invasion and no visibility at all for the Roman, Viking and Norman invasions. This has been completely reversed by a few newer studies, where we're now saying that there was almost complete genetic replacement when the Neolithic farmers arrived on the isles and replaced the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, and then an even more dramatic genetic turnover when the early Bronze Age Bell Beaker culture arrived. Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Viking and more arrivals are now visible, at least in some areas. And even in the last few months, new papers have questioned some details of this new consensus already. We know quite a bit more about the human genome through history, or at least we think we do, than we do of wolves or other animals, and if we're seeing that kind of churn in our interpretation of human populations based on more data than we have for animal populations, then that should be a cautionary tale for our acceptance of interpretations of animal genetics. The interpretation could reverse again, or go a completely different and unexpected direction before it all settles down again. Not saying to be sceptical of this new interpretation; it is the best we've got right now, just saying don't be surprised if it changes again before it's done.

Secondly, for Dark•Heritage Mk. IV, I really wanted to have a Pleistocene megafauna to give the wilderness a somewhat more adventurous, wild, "safari" like vibe. I was careful to try not to get too deep into esoteric details that nobody would really notice; i.e., was there really any value in making a distinction between Camelus and Camelops, or Bison bison vs Bison antiquus, or various "horses" native to North America like the Hagerman horse, Scott's horse and the Yukon wild horse vs. Eurasian horses†? No, there's not. So, a horse is a horse is a horse, even if it's really as divergent from a horse as a zebra or a wild ass. A buffalo is a buffalo regardless of whether it's the modern buffalo vs the long-horned buffalo or the "antique buffalo" etc. But with the dire wolf, I wanted something different. I specifically wanted something that was a cursorial hunter, but bulkier, maybe meaner, more plains and savana dwelling rather than forest-dwelling, and something that was visually distinct enough to be readily differentiatable at a glance. Believing that the dire wolf was too wolf-like to play this role, I'd gone back to the Pliocene-Pleistocene boundary where the last borophagine dog went extinct and pulled them "forward." However, now I don't have to. With this new data, the dire wolf (or maybe I should call it the dire "wolf") is perfect for my "bone dog" role (short for bone-crushing dog, which I thought sounded too long for everyday usage.) Now, granted, does it really matter if I think in the back of my mind that the Dark•Heritage bone dogs are now Aenocyon dirus instead of Borophagus diversidens? It's not like anyone in the setting would make that distinction, which means that in terms of any and all description I use, it makes no difference at all either. It really only affects me personally, because I'm the only one who knows. The dire "wolf" might even have been capable of cracking bones, although probably not as well as Borophagus could. But somehow it makes it feel better. I've made less of a big deal out of that for DH5, but it's still a thing.

† I'm not actually convinced of the extinction of much of the megafauna as long ago as people say. There's tons of oral history about elephants on the northeast from the 1700s from guys who talked to Injuns and whatnot. I also think this paper makes a convincing argument that the Plains Indians horsemen had horses all along. The idea that they somehow developed this expert horse-centric culture only a generation or two after catching a few stray Spaniard horses is kind of absurd, if you really think about it.

http://curlyhorses.com/documents/AboriginalNorthAmericanHorse.pdf

Artists and their own work

I'm always amused when I hear of unexpected timelessness in works of art. By this I mean two things. The first is amply illustrated by Pyotr Ilych Tchaikovsky, one of the most famous composers of the Romantic era from Tsarist Russia. Tchaikovsky was commissioned to compose what is today popularly known as "The 1812 Overture" for the 1880 dedication of the Cathedral of Christ, which had been commissioned way back when the victory of 1812 was still relatively fresh, by Tsar Alexander I. (Sadly, the original was torn down a few decades later by Stalin, in one of the worst acts of cultural vandalism, a hallmark of Marxists then and now. It has, however since been rebuilt.) It was written fairly quickly, and Tchaikovsky himself was not a fan of it, saying that it would be, "Very loud and noisy, but [without] artistic merit, because I wrote it without warmth and without love."

But artists should not be the authoritative commentators on their own work. The 1812 Overture is, of course, one of the most popular titles of the "classical" music repertoire, and made his estate a fair bit of money. Popularity is, of course, not necessarily an indication of merit, but popularity that lasts decades and spans many nations and peoples, ususally indicates a kind of timeless greatness that few works of art are able to achieve. Sometimes this itself is seen as undesireable; there certainly exists a kind of snobbish exclusiveness to art appreciation in which if a work doesn't gain widespread approval of the "masses" then that's seen as indicative of some kind of quality, but that's really just pretentiousness, snobbery and is really quite childish and stupid, in my opinion. Widespread appeal is not something to be shunned, unless you confuse widespread appeal with novelty or faddish appeal. The two things are really quite different. Maybe Tchaikovsky himself thought his work was bourgeois or low-brow, but it was enduringly popular and ultimately a timeless classic.

In fact, much of what we now consider high-brow entertainment from a bygone era was originally low brow entertainment anyway. Shakespeare and Dickens are almost synonymous with "Great English Literature™" but both were wildly entertaining to the masses at the time. In fact, I sometimes wonder if their migration to being percieved as high brow has more to do with the fact that as the culture and language have changed, they've become a bit more difficult to appreciate today, so it appeals to the snob who only wants to like stuff that the bourgeousie doesn't. (Which, really, is the only explanation at all for the advent of "modern art" and all of its associated perambulations.)

A little closer to home, I'm amused by stories of how OMD's best hit, "If You Leave" was literally written as an emergency overnight and became their biggest hit, especially in America. OMD themselves seem to be alternatively annoyed by this and willing to embrace it. But the reality is that that situation isn't too unusual; a lot of bands don't actually much like or appreciate their own biggest hits, the ones that go on to have an enduring audience years or even decades after their release. Sometimes like in the case of Tchaikovsky and OMD, it may be related to how little time they spent on writing it, relatively speaking. Honestly, though, I truly believe that the constraint of not having time or opportunity for overthinking often makes art (or literature or music) much better. This is in line with something that's always stuck with me from Dean Wesley Smith's famous advice about writing at pulp speed and killing the sacred cows of writing. (https://www.deanwesleysmith.com/killing-the-top-ten-sacred-covers-of-publishing-3-rewriting/) Spending more time on something usually has very quickly diminishing returns for improving the quality of something. Or, to use the phrase from the link: "No matter how much  you stir a steaming pile of crap, it's still a steaming pile of crap." If the work is good, it's probably pretty good right out the gate and doesn't need nearly as much rework as you think. If it's not, spending more time on it isn't likely to make it much better.

Basic geography

I always liked the concept of the TV show Supernatural. I was a pretty big fan for the first few seasons, I lost the plot a bit during the writer's strike and never really recovered to see what the devil they were doing in the fifth season. I know that it ran for a total of, what—fifteen seasons or something crazy like that before finally ending just a year or two ago. Sometimes a show isn't well-served by continuing to run after it peaks and kinda does what it sets out to do, cf. The X-Files. Although arguably that show never actually got around to doing what it set out to do. 

Anyway, because I liked the premise of the show quite a bit, and I think that in particular the first few seasons explored it quite well before getting dragged into the "we can't get off the ride because it's too popular" trap as well as the weird soap opera thing that seems to happen to every dumb show on the CW (at least, as far as I know, Supernatural never got woke and tried to make Sam or Dean gay or trans or recast one of them as a black person or something idiotic like that) I started watching it again this weekend. I was spending a lot of time at home waiting for my wife and son to get back in town, my daughter was often at work, and when I wasn't watching General Conference, I wanted something to do. Anyway, I had to laugh a bit at a detail in the very second episode. Sam and Dean are leaving somewhere in California to go to coordinates that are called Blackwater Ridge in Colorado, also referecing Lost Creek. I don't know what Blackwater Ridge is other than a place that was probably made up for the show, but the Lost Creek is an actual Wilderness area in Colorado.

Anyway, there's this scene early on in the episode where Sam wakes up from a dream and he's sitting in the passenger seat. You can see that they are in a thickly forested and very green area, and Dean tells him that they're just outside of Grand Junction, Colorado.

Here's a couple of pictures that I took two years ago while hiking just outside of Grand Junction Colorado...

In fact, in that second, I'm looking out across the valley at Grand Junction itself. As you can hopefully clearly see, Grand Junction is not at all a thickly forested, green area. It fact, it has the exact same kind of scenery one usually associates with the rock-climbing and mountain biking mecca of nearby Moab, Utah; red-rock desert, sage brush, and the trees are stumpy little Utah junipers and pinyon pines, not big, tall, boreal forests. 

There is, however, a Black Ridge Wilderness Area near Grand Junction—similar to the Blackwater Ridge noted above, but it's also red-rock desert scenery and is famous for its arches, not unlike Arches National Park—it is the second highest concentration of them outside of the national park, in fact. But it's nowhere near Lost Creek Wilderness, which is on the other side of the Rockies between Denver and Colorado Springs.

But whatever; let's assume for the sake of argument that Grand Junction and the Lost Creek Wilderness area are smack dab in the middle of some generic Colorado Rockies. The episode spends a fair amount of time in the woods, and it does make reference to the mining heritage of Colorado. Of course, the woods shown are extremely green, mossy and ferny, and no evergreen woods in Colorado look anything like that. In fact, the woods shown are very clearly PNW woods of some kind. Lost Creek has red rock formations, loads of aspens and some high altitude pines, and is generally Rocky Mountain dry. Knowing that Supernatural was primarily filmed in and around Vancouver of course sets this straight, but anyone who's been to the PNW and to Colorado and spent any time at all outside will immediately recognize the difference.

Anyway, I'm not so stick-in-the-mud that I will take issue with the rainy Pacific Northwest forests standing in for Colorado Rocky Mountain forests, but it was the gratuitous reference to a clearly desert biome location that kind of made me laugh, though. Not sure why they threw that in at all, when it wasn't really necessary. I guess you could maybe make the case that they were passing through Grand Junction on their way there, which would be reasonable, but they implied heavily that they were basically in the area when they were in Grand Junction, which wouldn't be true at all.

Which Ring?

This will be a fairly quick post. I mentioned a few days ago that I really loved classical music... but not opera. Nonetheless, some of Wagner's operas have the best symphonic orchestral music to them that exists in the entire world of symphonic orchestral music. For many decades (at least) there has been demand for someone to go take the 18 hour or so performances of Der Ring des Nibelungen opera and turn it into a shorter orchestral kind of thing, and I've seen many, many extracts and selections without vocals over the years, including many that were recorded before I was born (and I turn 50 next year.) Heck, the first "extracts" arrangements were done during Wagner's lifetime and with his blessing. However, the notion of a "potted Ring" as it's sometimes called, where the selections are actually placed in order and attempt to tell the story of the Ring, somewhat, is a newer phenomena, the earliest arrangement being done in the late 80s, and the other three considerably more recently than even that.

I'm going to try and very succinctly and quickly talk about the merits of each arrangement (or at least of the performance and recording that I have of it). Some of them are still easily obtained on CD, all of them are easily obtained on mp3 from Amazon. I'll include the links to each as I discuss it.

4. The de Vlieger arrangement ("An Orchestral Adventure") performed by the Baltic Sea Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Kristjan Järvi.

https://www.amazon.com/Wagner-Orchestral-Adventure-Kristjan-J%C3%A4rvi/dp/B01LYCKXKL/ref=tmm_msc_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1617312320&sr=8-9

Now, let me state first off that I like all of these recordings and I like all of these arrangements, but there has to be an order to them somehow, and of the four, this is my least favorite. It's also the shortest, which means that it is the "harshest" arrangement in terms of how much was cut, which is part of it, although the speed at which the performance happens is partly visible in that run-time as well. Occasionally, it feels too fast, especially in the earliest Rheingold section.

I also have to point out that it's the recording I've had the least amount of time to digest. Buying it, as I did, as mp3, meant that getting gapless playback between the sections is maybe a bit harder, and the tracks do run together. I tried to fix that somewhat by opening the mp3s in Audacity, zooming in as much as I could, and trimming the beginning and end silences that buffer each track, sometimes even combining tracks to go for the smoother transition. This isn't a perfect solution, but it mostly works. However, for whatever reason the de Vlieger arrangements are much easier to find, so I could have gotten this on CD (and I may yet) so that I can get that gapless playback more easily. 

It's also worth pointing out that in addition to Kristjan Järvi's recording with the Baltic Sea Philharmonic, there are three other performances of this that you can get. For whatever reason, this arrangement is the easiest to find in mulitple varieties. I don't know anything about the other three versions other than that they're out there, and that their run-times tend to be a little bit longer than this one, in spite of being the exact same arrangement. I've also heard some who are more intimate with the actual full-length opera (or operas; let's be real; if it takes four nights for the full performance, it's four linked operas in one) say that it follows the story of the Ring better than the similar-length Maazel arrangement. I can't entirely comment on that, not having ever heard nor desired to hear the entire opera—nor being able to follow the specifics of the story if I did, since I don't speak German. I felt that it was rushed, even so, especially in the beginning. It's a good arrangement, but if you can swing it, I recommend others.

I should note that because this is the one that's the least familiar to me, it may be partly why it's down so low. I like the longer ones, because they're longer and have more of the music, and I like the Maazel one because I know it better, have had it longer, am more familiar with it, and therefore it sounds more "right" to me. This may not be fair to the de Vlieger arrangement, which those familiar with the full opera often suggest is a better arrangement than even the Maazel one. And de Vlieger did "potted" versions of three other Wagner operas: Parsifal, Tannhäuser and Tristan & Isolde. They seem to be well done too, although I have little to compare them to other than the overtures and a handful of other selections I've heard here and there.

3. The Tarkmann arrangement ("The Ring—symphonic") performed by the Nordwestdeutsche Philharmonie, conducted by Daniel Klajner.

https://www.amazon.com/Ring-Symphonic-Orchestra-Andreas-Tarkmann/dp/B01CR9JIZO/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=tarkmann+ring+symphonic&qid=1617286987&sr=8-1

This one is a two-disc arrangement, and therefore adds a good 50% more music than the de Vlieger or Maazel arrangements, and the half hour or so of new music that it adds compared to those is not necessarily the same half hour as the other longer Dressler arrangement adds. For this reason, I find it a better choice than the de Vlieger one, but it's a close call in many ways. I like that each of the four constituent parts of the opera are divided up into separate chunks, which eases gapless playback. However, if doesn't necessarily sound as gapless, because the "cuts" aren't often handled very deftly, and sometimes you're jumping from one piece of the opera to another, and it's altogether too obvious that you're jumping. I'd rather have a natural end and then a gap then a gapless yet clunky transition, which I do feel like we get a bit with this one. 

I also feel like the arrangement itself is maybe just a bit flat sometimes. I think, although I haven't really done a careful side by side (by side by side) listen-through of all four arrangements, that there is some vital big moment somewhere that's missing... but I can't quite put my finger on it. 

I believe that there's another performance of this out there somewhere, although this is the one that seems easiest to get. It is also available as a double CD or SACD, as well as digital mp3 download, as you can see if you follow the link. 

2. The Maazel arrangement ("The 'Ring' Without Words") performed by the Berliner Philharmoniker, conducted by Lorin Maazel

https://www.amazon.com/Wagner-Maazel-Berlin-Philharmonic-Orchestra/dp/B00150VWX8/ref=tmm_msc_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

This is the first such orchestral Ring synthesis made, and Maazel, the arranger, conducted it as well with his normal orchestra, at the label's suggestion, I believe. Telarc, the label, is rather well-known for their magnificent sound quality, and that's one of the top draws to this. To me, it's the first Ring distillation that I heard, and therefore feels more "right" to me, as mentioned above. The Dressler version feels like an extended director's cut of the Maazel version; those who complain that the narrative is a bit choppier in favor of the moods in Maazel's version will usually admit that Dressler reinstates the narrative flow while taking nothing away from the Maazel version, while the de Vlieger and Tarkmann versions are simply different interpretations of the full opera altogether. Granted, nobody is likely to leave out the really well-known pieces that have been sampled, arranged for orchestra (instead of opera) and recorded as disconnected sections going all the way back to Hermann Zumpe's version which was done in Wagner's lifetime. Those parts are well enough known that no Ring distillation that fails to include them will sound like a Ring distillation to most people. This includes some of the Rhinemaidens stuff from the Das Rheingold section, the Ride of the Valkyries of course, and the Magic Fire Music theme from the Die Walküre section, maybe the Forest Murmers from the Siegfried section, and fairly large chunks of the Götterdämmerung section. Once all of those sections are included, you're a good two-thirds to three-fourths of the way done with a CD-sized (60-70 minute) synthesis, leaving you little time to play with bridging elements or other portions that you want to highlight. 

I freely admit that my preference for this arrangement over the de Vlieger arrangement may not last as I become more familiar with the latter. It may; the foreshortened Rhine music of de Vlieger was an immediate turn-off to me because I was used to the longer version that both the Dressler and Maazel versions use, but what can you say? No matter what you do, there are going to be drastic cuts in synthesizing 18 hours or so of operatic music to about an hour or even an hour and a half of orchestral music.

1. The Dressler arrangement ("Der Symphonische Ring") performed by the Duisburger Philharmoniker, conducted by Jonathan Darlington

https://www.amazon.com/Living-Concert-Wagner-Symphonische-Ring/dp/B00FSF8KD6/ref=tmm_msc_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1617036079&sr=1-1

The CD version of this is prohibitively hard to find, so it's nice that Amazon offers us an mp3 alternative. I feel like I've made enough references to this one as I've gone through the others that there's little to say now that I get to it that I haven't already said. The Maazel is the first, the de Vlieger and Tarkmann interpretations go in slightly different directions, but the Dressler version sounds like an extended director's cut of the Maazel arrangement. Regardless of how you feel about the pacing of the Lord of the Rings movies, once you watch and own the extended versions, are you really going to go back and see the theatrical ones again?

Although I'm ranking them as if they had the same opportunity to reach the top spot, which isn't really true. In addition to having a first-come familiarity bias for the Maazel version that transfers to the Dressler, I also prefer the longer ones without as much stuff cut. Regardless of any other quality considerations, the Dressler was bound to be the one that floated to the top as my preferred version, if I had to have just one.

Which, admittedly, I don't. I have all four of these. I know I can listen to, on YouTube music, although I haven't done so yet, two other recordings of the de Vlieger arrangement. The ability to have more than one interpretation is perfect. Ideally, I'd create a greatest hits Frankenstein, taking Dressler as the starting point, maybe, and adding themes from the Tarkmann version that the Dressler doesn't have, for instance. But that may be more work than I'm willing to spend on figuring out what to use and where to put it; especially considering that the Dressler version flows largely together with few cuts, because Dressler created brief bridges to make the sections flow together. More likely, I'll just listen to all of the versions from time to time and enjoy the differences.