@queenofperv / queenofperv.tumblr.com
when youre inadvertently 1% too nice to a straight guy you can usually pinpoint the exact moment where he decides you must be acting that way because you want to fuck down on him crazy style and it is at this point that one would be well advised to have a cyanide capsule under a false tooth or an equivalent fast acting response
The hilarious thing about that medieval bestiary thing that’s ALL OVER MY DASH is that real medieval beliefs about animals were like ten times weirder than anything joked about in it.
Like, mice were believed to be clods of dirt that grew legs and a tail.
Worms were also believed to spontaneously generate from dead bodies. No reproduction needed, they just happened.
Bees were a kind of bird, and came out of livestock (oxen specifically.)
Bears were believed to be born shapeless, and had to be “licked into shape” by their mother’s tongue. (Yes, that is exactly where that phrase came from.)
Goat blood was believed to be hot enough to dissolve diamond, even though they had enough goats to disprove this.
Pelicans, supposedly, had terrible tempers and would beat their own young to death, then grieve so intensely that they’d wound themselves and their blood would revive the dead babies.
Seriously, this shit is wild. Look it up. It’s worth your time.
(I’m sorry for hijacking your post, OP, but I got really excited about this and I couldn’t help myself.)
Medieval bestiaries are super fucking weird, there is really no getting around it. I mean, the descriptions above are testimony of that. Let’s take a closer look at the Aberdeen Bestiary (England, c. 1200):
Here is an image of a bear licking her formless cubs “into shape”. The author of the manuscript describes the cubs as “tiny lumps of flesh, white in colour, with no eyes” who regain their shape from the licking of the mother and from cuddling (!). Also, bears apparently heal themselves by eating ants. The more you know.
Dogs get a very long description in the manuscript. Most importantly though, puppies are said to cure “inner wounds”!
Bees, who were in fact considered a kind of bird, are said to have a model society, ruled by a king (which they elected, mind you, this is a bee democracy. a communist bee democracy. wait what?) and possessing multiple armies. They are indeed also born from the corpses of oxen. If you feel like “producing” bees yourself, you can beat calves to death and wait until worms form in their blood. These worms will later become bees. Why not, right?
Aside from “real” animals, bestiaries were often also filled with imaginary ones. (some of these were inspired by classical mythology, such as the Minotaur, Chimera and Cereberus) Examples include:
The Bonnacon, an Asian beast resembling a bull but with horns that curl inwards and the mane of a lion. Don’t chase this bastard, because he will poop dung that burns like fire to defend himself. (also it looks as though it has a tattoo on its upper arm?)
The Dragon, here fighting its mortal enemy: an elephant. Because obviously.
And lastly, meet the Yale! A black horse-like creature with two “unusually long” horns on top of its head, that are adjustable. According to the manuscript, they “move as the needs of fighting require. The yale advances one of them as it fights, folding the other back, so that if the tip of the first is damaged by a blow, it is replaced by the point of the second.” A+ on practicality there.
Bear in mind that in medieval times, nothing happened without a reason and things certainly didn’t get written down without a specific goal. Since most scribes and intellectuals in the (early) middle ages were members of the clergy, the bestiaries make slightly more sense if we remember the moralizing and educating function they had. Allegories and metaphors were basically medieval fetishes and the animal world was a lovely way to teach people about the Bible and about morals.
Slightly more sense that is, overall they’re still WEIRD AS FUCK.
WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS? WHAT IS THIS?? WHY DOES THIS HAVE SO MANY NOTES??? It’s fUCKING HOT DOGS WITH FAKE nAILS??? WHO TOOK THE TIME TO DO THIS????
aesthetic
i am kind of sad ok
this cat’s name is Princess Monster Truck
thank you
hey guys, hope your skin is clear and you get a text from someone you like real soon.
also that your lunch tastes good, you find twenty dollars on the ground, and that thing coming up that you were dreading turns out not so bad
Fantasy worlds always have large, beautiful moons, sometimes a few of them in pretty colours. We should have more fantasy worlds that have like 112 piece of crap tiny lumpy moons that are horrible and pointless.
They have a whole astrology system based on their awful moons and eclipses are bullshit because it just looks like a piece of gravel being tossed past a light.
There's a 113th moon that nobody knows about because its orbit almost exactly matches a larger moon that it's directly behind, but the speed isn't exact, and when it starts to emerge from behind the other moon it causes a mass freakout and fifteen major wars that kill almost a tenth of the planet's population.
If you write it, I'll read it!
Do you know how many things I am writing right now.
‘While bats can only sense the outer shapes and textures of their targets, dolphins can peer inside theirs. If a dolphin echolocates on you, it will perceive your lungs and your skeleton. It can likely sense shrapnel in war veterans and fetuses in pregnant women. It can pick out the air-filled swim bladders that allow fish, their main prey, to control their buoyancy.
It can almost certainly tell different species apart based on the shape of those air bladders. And it can tell if a fish has something weird inside it, like a metal hook. In Hawaii, false killer whales often pluck tuna off fishing lines, and “they ’ll know where the hook is inside that fish,” Aude Pacini, who studies these animals, tells me. “They can ‘see’ things that you and I would never consider unless we had an X-ray machine or an MRI scanner.”
This penetrating perception is so unusual that scientists have barely begun to consider its implications. The beaked whales, for example, are odontocetes that look dolphin-esque on the outside—but on the inside, their skulls bear a strange assortment of crests, ridges, and bumps, many of which are only found in males.
Pavel Gol’din has suggested that these structures might be the equivalent of deer antlers—showy ornaments that are used to attract mates. Such ornaments would normally protrude from the body in a visible and conspicuous way, but that’s unnecessary for animals that are living medical scanners.’
-Ed Yong, An Immense World
Cetacean echolocation is one of those things that boggles your mind once you really start to think about the implications. They can see each others' hearts beating fast with fear or excitement. They can see if another dolphin is healthy, or pregnant; how the fetus is doing; if they have ingested debris. Their echolocation is also incredibly precise: a bottlenose dolphin could discriminate between cilinders differing in wall thickness by just 0.23 mm (0.009 inch) from 8 meters away!! And they certainly notice when something is off.
I'm not sure if I ever shared this story before here, but in Curacao, when I was allowed to assist in a guest interaction programme, there was suddenly consternation in the pool behind us. A guest had entered the water and the dolphins were going crazy, paying no heed to the trainers anymore. The lead trainer that was with me gave the dolphins to me to watch over while she went to help. When she came back she told me what had happened. The guest that had caused so much uproar had left the water again and was asked if he had done anything to upset the dolphins. He hadn't, and he couldn't imagine what was wrong... until he mentioned he had a pacemaker. The younger dolphins in the pool had never seen someone with a pacemaker before and apparently it rocked their world.
It was such a wild experience, and offered such a cool insight into how dolphins experience their world. I'll never forget it.
(USAmerican trying to imagine a societal environment) Okay, so picture a highway,
inability to correctly perceive 3d objects is in fact far more dangerous when someone is driving a car next to you then when they're like, sending emails to you.
can we focus on the gnome for a second
wait sorry i was not wearing my glasses. that is a cat
these are the people i have to share a highway with
i need (abruptly stops talking & stares at some random fixed point with a vacant expression)
No YouTuber will ever top the phrase "A powerful rat named Charles Entertainment Cheese."
"A California-themed amusement park in the already California-themed California" is also a banger and comes from the same channel.
How quickly we forget "You would have to pay an industrial engineer to create a complex computer simulation of a theme park populated with agents, all with unique preferences, riding attractions of varying capacities in order to compare and contrast wait times, number of rides ridden, and other factors with and without a virtual queue system just to get to the bottom of this incredibly niche curiosity" followed immediately by
"You've already been listening to his music"
Yknow when I first started listening to tma I thought Jon was kind of a dick. And I still kind of think that but now that I’m in season 2 I’m starting to think he needs to be walked. Someone needs to take that man out for daily walks and feed and water him and make sure he has adequate enrichment. He probably has a vitamin d deficiency at the VERY least and while I don’t think it would fix him I do think he needs to go outside.
