KING MINOS’S BULLSHIT COVER-UP 🐂💩🏛
THE ORIGIN OF THE MINOTAUR
This story began, improbably enough, with Noel “No” Balls — Champion Chicken Fighter.
I had been experimenting with generative AI, trying to animate two people having a chicken fight. It sounds simple until you ask a machine to keep two intertwined bodies anatomically intact from one frame to the next.
It wasn't going particularly well.
Arms wandered. Legs multiplied. Bodies occasionally forgot who they belonged to.
We started looking for another approach. Somewhere in that process, the conversation turned to creatures that combined human and animal anatomy. I mentioned a centaur. ChatGPT corrected me: that was the human-and-horse creature.
Then another name surfaced.
The Minotaur.
Neither of us was very far into the subject yet. This was a period of discovery, and almost immediately that discovery took a strange turn.
ChatGPT generated an image.
The creature on the screen had something close to the full body of a bull, with distinctly human features above.
It wasn't what I had expected.
But I loved it.
Something about that image grabbed me immediately. My imagination took off before I had time to worry about whether we had gotten the mythology right.
One word came to mind:
Mythology.
Greek, I thought. Maybe Roman. But my instinct was Greek.
And it was.
That connection reached further back than I realized. I had encountered Greek mythology in high school more than three decades earlier. Much of the detail had disappeared, but apparently the doorway hadn't.
The image had brought me back to it.
Then the research began.
We discovered that our strange creature wasn't the traditional Minotaur at all. Somewhere in our experimentation, we had effectively reversed its anatomy.
But by then, correcting the mistake was almost beside the point.
What began as an experiment with an image was the catalyst that opened the door to Greek mythology and new possibilities.
The farther we went, the more there was to discover—and the more there was to create and share.
The Minotaur led us into ancient Crete, and the deeper we went, the stranger and richer the story became. Eventually we arrived at Daedalus and one of the most extraordinary inventions in mythology:
a wooden cow.
At that point, how could we possibly leave?
There was history here, but there was also a remarkable story—desire and consequence, ingenuity and deception, tragedy and absurdity. Some moments were genuinely funny. Others left something behind to consider without insisting upon what anyone should think.
And somewhere between the ancient stories and our own imagination, something else began to happen.
We started telling stories of our own.
The mythology gives us a foundation. We'll follow it, learn from it and try to understand what these stories have carried across thousands of years.
But we're not stopping there.
There are still images to create, stories to tell, possibilities to explore—and, somewhere deep inside a Labyrinth, perhaps a few surprises the ancient Greeks never got around to mentioning.
But first, the story of how the Minotaur came to be.
🎬
DAEDALUS AND THE WOODEN COW 🐄🔨🐂
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DdnlmP3OyOX/?stkn=MWFnNmJjdHc2aHZsOQ==
🎬
KING MINOS’S BULLSHIT COVER-UP 🐂💩🏛
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DdmxovFp9-5/?stkn=MTlpOGN1ZGY5cnk0ag==
🎬
CRETE’S MAIN EVENT: THE BULLFIGHT 🐂⚔️
https://www.instagram.com/reel/Ddm7T7spDgL/?stkn=dzZ4enNqbTdha3dn
🎬
THE MINOTAUR’S PAYBACK 🐂⚔️💪👊
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DdnTvLVO52D/?stkn=NDVjY2R2Nm5sdXc5
