— Unknown

The next five days on Tumblr:

This is the real photo

Who on God’s green earth photoshopped their butt cracks to be larger and smaller. Why would anyone do this.

- Friedrich Hölderlin, La morte di Empedocle

Except every goat is just waiting its turn to die of pneumonia

Sorry I’m not over “if a dog barked in Kazakhstan”.

My entirely half-assed understanding of Why Horses Explode If You Look At Them Funny, As Explained To Me By My Aunt That Raises Horses After Her Third Glass Of Wine:

Horses don’t got enough toes.

So, back right after the dinosaurs fucked off and joined the choir invisible, the first ancestors of horses were scampering about, little capybara-looking things called Eohippus, and they had four toes per limb:

They functioned pretty well, as near as we can tell from the fossil record, but they were mostly messing around in the leaf litter of dense forests, where one does not necessarily need to be fast but one should be nimble, and the 4 toes per limb worked out pretty good.

But the descendants of Eophippus moved out of the forest where there was lots of cover and onto the open plains, where there was better forage and visibility, but nowhere to hide, so the proto-horses that could ZOOM the fastest and out run thier predators (or, at least, their other herd members) tended to do well.  Here’s the thing- having lots of toes means your foot touches the ground longer when you run, and it spreads a lot of your momentum to the sides.  Great if you want to pivot and dodge, terrible if you want to ZOOM.  So losing toes started being a major advantage for proto-horses:

The Problem with having fewer toes and running Really Fucking Fast is that it kind of fucks your everything else up.

When a horse runs at full gallop, it sort of... stops actively breathing, letting the slosh of it’s guts move its lungs, which is tremendously calorically efficient and means their breathing doesn’t fall out of sync.  But it also means that the abdominal lining of a horse is weirdly flexible in ways that lead to way more hernias and intestinal tangling than other ungulates.  It also has a relatively weak diaphragm for something it’s size, so ANY kind of respiratory infection is a Major Fucking Problem because the horse has weak lungs.

When a Horse runs Real Fucking Fast, it also develops a bit of a fluid dynamics problem- most mammals have the blood going out of thier heart real fast and coming back from the far reaches of the toes much slower and it’s structure reflects that.  But since there is Only The One Toe, horse blood comes flying back up the veins toward the heart way the fuck faster than veins are meant to handle, which means horses had to evolve special veins that constrict to slow the Blood Down, which you will recognize as a Major Cardiovascular Disease in most mammals. This Poorly-regulated blood speed problems means horses are prone to heart problems, burst veins, embolisms, and hemophilia.  Also they have apparently a billion blood types and I’m not sure how that’s related but I am sure that’s another Hot Mess they have to deal with.

ALSO, the Blood-Going-Too-Fast issue and being Just Huge Motherfuckers means horses have trouble distributing oxygen properly, and have compensated by creating fucked up bones that replicate the way birds store air in thier bones but much, much shittier.  So if a horse breaks it’s leg, not only is it suffering a Major Structural Issue (also also- breaking a toe is much more serious when that toe is YOUR WHOLE DAMN FOOT AND HALF YOUR LEG), it’s also hving a hemmorhage and might be sort of suffocating a little.

ALSO ALSO, the fast that horses had to deal with Extremely Fast Predators for most of thier evolution means that they are now afflicted with evolutionarily-adaptive Anxiety, which is not great for thier already barely-functioning hearts, and makes them, frankly, fucking mental.  Part of the reason horses are so aggro is that if deinied the opportunity to ZOOM, it’s options left are “Kill everyone and Then Yourself” or “The same but skip step one and Just Fucking Die”.  The other reason is that a horse is in a race against itself- it’s gotta breed before it falls apart, so a Horse basically has a permanent terrorboner.

TL;DR: Horses don’t have enough toes and that makes them very, very fast, but also sickly, structurally unsound, have wildly OP blood that sometimes kills them, and drives them fucking insane.

To add to that, you have an animal that’s 400kg plus and extremely fast and nimble, hence needing a lot of energy, but its only food source in its natural environment is dry steppe grass which is basically all fibre and few nutrients. Since the horse’s main survival strategy is flight, it doesn’t lie down to ruminate like cows and sheep do, but insdead its intestines have to ... just deal with it. Horse intestines are highly specialised, but as a consequence also very fickle. Also, since steppe grass is so low in nutrients, horses have to eat basically all their free time and barely have any need for a “I’ve eaten enough let’s stop” protection mechanism. Also also, horses can’t vomit (and usually not even burp), so anything that goes in has to pass through, whether that’s a good idea or not.

i wish tumblr would stop telling me things about horses

I love tumblr because it explains the most interesting thing in the most unhinged way I have ever come accross in my life

“If I could kill myself for like a year- I’d do it today. If I could kill myself and be dead for like till 18 months from now I would do it. But when you kill yourself you are dead forever and we don’t need to be dead forever yet.”

-Bo Burnham (Inside, 2021)

i can’t talk shit about the pirates of the caribbean films as if elizabeth swann becoming pirate king didn’t hand my entire ass to me and make me the gay i am today

these 2 looks basically defined my sexuality and i’m not afraid to admit it

things pirates of the caribbean got right:

1. will and elizabeth’s love story

2. elizabeth becoming pirate king

3. avoiding sexualizing elizabeth or the other female pirate characters in the first 3 films by allowing them to wear period-accurate pirate outfits that aren’t tailored to be revealing and impractical for ‘sex appeal’ just because they’re women

4. hans zimmer’s entire score but especially the iconic ‘he’s a pirate’ main theme

5. When the movie came out, morally-gray characters like Jack were actually not really a thing yet in pop culture, and it’s not Pirates’ fault that there are a ton of stupid shitty copycats out there.

6. I run a corseting panel at cons and literally use Elizabeth’s lace-up scene as a video clip of what historical corseting was actually like, because the only thing they got wrong in this scene is that tightlacing wouldn’t be a thing for about another 200 years (and you couldn’t tightlace with the corset style Elizabeth is wearing anyway). It’s one of the most accurate corseting scenes I’ve ever seen.

7. Will’s hat.

8. That scene with all the pirates on the gallows where that little boy starts singing Hoist the Colours? Yeah, that’s fucking legendary. The rest of AWE was kind of a trash fire, but that scene gave me goosebumps.

9. There’s this great shot in the first one where they really drive home the class differences inherent in this time period by having the governor talking about progress and civilization to Elizabeth in their carriage, and then they cut to a shot outside the carriage where a beggar gets splashed by mud from the wheel. It’s a perfect way to underline that everything is not, in fact, a nice little upper-class fairytale, and to give some weight to Will’s storyline, because he has a lot more in common with that beggar than with the governor.

10. For its time, the CGI was fucking amazing.

11. And let’s not forget the work of the makeup department, which had to actually invent new ways of putting on makeup for this movie.

12. The governor’s death scene. Holy shit.

13. They could have gone with a Jack/Will/Elizabeth love triangle, but they didn’t. There are some hints Jack is in love (or at least in lust) with Elizabeth, but he recognizes that she loves Will, and that’s that.

14. You’ve got to admit that wedding was unique.

15. The introduction of fantasy elements to historical fiction outside of Tolkein-esque fantasy, and how it contributed to and expanded the Fantasy Media boom we’re still enjoying today.

1. They had a woman of colour play a goddess.

2. They had a woman pirate right in the first film, when the tradition is to only show male ones (hell, the PotC ride at Disney had a wench auction scene until recently). And it was a female pirate of colour at that!

3. Elizabeth may not have known how to fight in the first film, but she wasn’t helpless either. Her first instinct was to fight, but she also had the brains to recognize when it was best to hide instead. Plus when given the chance she stabbed Barbosa that one time.

4. Elizabeth’s lack of fighting ability was not simply because she was a woman, it was clear it was due to her societal circumstances, since we saw other women of different socioeconomic backgrounds being able to fight (and when given the opportunity to learn Elizabeth took to fighting like a duck on water).

5. The Hoist the Colours scene where we see pirates of multiple ethnicities and their varying flags, reminding us that pirates came in all shapes and sizes and weren’t just white men.

6. One of the Pirate Lords being yet ANOTHER woman of colour. She may not have had much of a speaking role if memory serves, but even her presence is already a big deal.

7. The pirates accepting their King is a woman without much fuss.

Pirates is amazing I will not here a bad word

Davy Jones CGI is legendary and a ton better than some of the stuff done today 😄

I’m pretty sure that female Chinese pirate was a nod to a real, documented female pirate king who was Chinese and had a whole fleet of ships at her disposal but I can’t remember her name rn

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ching_Shih

My favorite part about the Bretheren Court voting wasn’t that they were against Elizabeth for becoming King as a woman and newcomer. They were pissed at Jack for being a chaotic neutral who broke the decades long tradition of an egotistical stalemate by voting for someone besides himself.

Also, the deleted scenes from Black Pearl and At World’s End that divulge more of Jack’s troubled past, like how he was branded as a pirate by the East Indian Trading Company because he stole a ship full of slaves and freed them.

“People aren’t cargo, mate.”

Love these movies.

“I’m almost 50, and here is the best thing I have learned so far: every strange thing you’ve ever been into, every failed hobby or forgotten instrument, everything you have ever learned will come back to you, will serve you when you need it. No love, however brief, is wasted.” @louisethebaker on Twitter

"No love, however brief, is wasted."

— Albert Camus

Tits: out

Pants: ripped

Mahmood: avenged

Juries in Europe: In conclusion, we think a nice ballad in French should win ☺️

The public:

tumblr only toxic for miserable ppl i be on this bitch havin a ball