DEAR READER
Cosmic Funnies
Claire Keane
Mike Driver
we're not kids anymore.
⁂
Game of Thrones Daily
taylor price
YOU ARE THE REASON
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
Discoholic 🪩
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
Not today Justin
pixel skylines
AnasAbdin
No title available
shark vs the universe
JVL
No title available
seen from United States
seen from Brazil
seen from United States
seen from Türkiye
seen from China
seen from Türkiye
seen from Netherlands
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Singapore
seen from United States
seen from South Korea
seen from Germany
seen from Slovakia
seen from Malaysia
seen from France
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from Indonesia
@otterskin
photographybyhenrik on ig | source
@woodelf68
The top of his head looks so soft.
@otterskin
Having pet a crow, it is indeed very soft.
His name was Loki. He was a rescue rehabilitating in an art gallery. He stood on my head and tried to steal my silver buttons off my coat
Once Upon a Studio (2023), dir. Dan Abraham, Trent Correy
It's been a rough decade for Disney Animation, and an embarrassing centennial. But this short was the silver lining around the cloud. I particularly loved how every feature Disney animated film was honoured, with some unexpected films and characters getting a spotlight, alongside some very deepcut references (I had to look up that Robin Williams Lost Boy special about the art of animation after failing to recognize his character!). I may not like every Disney animated film, but I appreciate each one and the hard work of the animators behind each entry. To see everyone honoured from Pete's Dragon, Alidar, Gurgi, Bernard the Mouse, Raya, Oliver, General Hathi, Louis the Alligator, Dumbo, Casey At Bat, Chernabog, Quasimodo, Princess Eilonwy, Elsa, Milo Thatch, Tantor, Baymax, Splot, Jim Hawkins, the Silly Symphony Dancing Skeletons, Mama Odie, Timon and Pumbaa, to a good chunk of the 101 Dalmatians is to see all the hard work of an army of artists over a hundred years honoured.
It's wonderful to see that, for once, some part of Disney loves and honours that storied past, the highs and lows, and doesn't discriminate. It's all Disney, whether it made money or not.
Looking ahead, the road is still rocky for Disney feature animation. Some shake-ups are probably required to avoid falling into another prolonged Dark Age. But whether or not that happens, or they have to suffer through further decline, I hope that the two hundred year centennial celebrates all of those works, too.
favourite disney animated movies — 1/5
ATLANTIS: THE LOST EMPIRE (2001)
(1) (2) (3)
I just rewatched this again. Every time I watch it, I pick at the plotholes all over again and come up with wild explanation to paper them over. But the visuals look better and better with every watch, and Vizzini ages like a fine wine. Definition of a break-out character.
Why are all the Disney flops my favourites? Seriously...Fantasia, Sleeping Beauty, Treasure Planet, Atlantis, Strange World...I feel like my taste is the kiss of death to the House of Mouse.
Anyway, I hope they make more wonderful mistakes like this film again.
by Clint Cearley
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
It's back, bay-bee. Part 2 is rolling out.
After the Battle of the Bifröst, Loki awakens in a strange prison cell with an even stranger jailer, while Odin remains lost in visions of the past.
Summary of the story so far:
Odin's raven, Muninn, is dead. With the death of memory, Odin has become unmoored in time in his mind. In his brief fits of sanity, he attempted to protect Loki from the truth and himself - only for a surprise attack from the Queeg to interrupt those carefully laid plans, resulting in Loki's exposure as a jötunn to all, including himself. Labeled as the traitor, Loki has been imprisoned.
The attack caused Odin to become trapped in one of his earliest traumatic memories, reliving the time his brother, Cul, was kidnapped by dark elves, while he, though only a young child, managed to outwit his own frost giant captors and send them to their deaths in Asgard's Gardens. Now, Odin cannot wake from the past, even though he is sorely needed in the present.
Historical Holiday Traditions We Really Need To Bring Back
Here comes Santa Claus, and also a bunch of annual holiday Things we do to ensure he commits a truly boggling act of breaking and entering and leaves goods underneath the large plant in the living room.
Because I’ve always got a hankerin’ for the days of yore, here are some historical holiday traditions we really need to bring back:
1. Everything that happened on Saturnalia
Saturnalia was the ancient Roman winter festival held on December 25th–which is why we celebrate Christmas on that day and not on the day historians speculate Jesus was actually born, which was probably in the spring.
Saturnalia was bonkers. As the name suggests, it celebrated the god Saturn, who represented wealth and liberty and generally having a great time.
Above: Their party is way cooler than yours could ever hope to be.
During Saturnalia, masters would serve their slaves, because it was the one day during the year when everybody agreed that freedom for all is great, actually, let’s just do that. Everyone wore a coned hat called the pilleus to denote that they were all bros and equal, and also to disguise the fact that they hadn’t brushed their hair after partying hard all week, probably.
Gambling was allowed on Saturnalia, so all of Rome basically turned into ancient Vegas, complete with Caesar’s Palace, except with the actual Caesar and his palace because he was, you know. Alive.
The most famous part (besides getting drunk off your rocker) was gift-giving–usually gag gifts. Historians have records of people giving each other some truly impressive white elephant gifts for Saturnalia, including: a parrot, balls, toothpicks, a pig, one single sausage, spoons, and deliberately awful books of poetry.
Above: Me, except all the time.
Partygoers also crowned a King of Saturnalia, which was a predecessor to the King of Fools popular in medieval festivals. The king was basically the head idiot who delivered absurd commands to everyone there, like, “Sing naked!” or “run around screaming for an hour,” or “slap your butt cheeks real hard in front of your crush; DO IT, Brutus.”
Oh, wait. Everyone was already doing all that. Hell yes.
(Quick clarification: early celebrations of Saturnalia did feature human sacrifice, so let’s just leave that bit out and instead wear the pointy hats and sing naked, okay? Io Saturnalia, everybody.)
2. Leaving out treats for Sleipnir in the hopes of avoiding Odin’s complete disregard for your property
The whole “leave out cookies and milk for Santa” thing comes from a much older tradition of trying to appease old guys with white beards. In Norse mythology, Odin, who was sort of the head god but preferred to be on a perpetual road trip instead, took an annual nighttime ride through the winter sky called the Wild Hunt.
Above: The holidays, now with 300% more heavy metal.
Variations of the Wild Hunt story exist in a bunch of European folklore–in Odin’s case, he usually brought along a bunch of supernatural buddies, like spirits and other gods and Valkyries and ghost dogs, who, the Vikings said, you could hear howling and barking as the group approached (GOOD DOGGOS).
That was the thing, though; you never actually saw Odin’s hunt–you only heard it. And hearing it did not spark the same sense of childish glee you felt when you thought you heard Santa’s sleigh bells approaching as a kid–instead, the Vikings said, you should be afraid. Be VERY afraid.
Because Odin could be kind of a dick.
Odin was also known as the Allfather, and like any father, he hated asking for directions. GPS who? I’m the Allfather, I’m riding the same way I always ride.
And that was pretty much it: “I took this road last year and I’m taking it again this year.”
“But,” someone would pipe up from the back, “there are houses on the road now–we’re gonna run right into them. We could just take a different path; there’s actually a detour off the–”
“Nope,” Odin would say. “They know the rules. My road, my hunt, my rules. We’re going this way.”
So if you were unlucky enough to have built your house along one of Odin’s favorite road trip sky-ways, he wouldn’t just plow right past you.
He would burn your entire house down–and your family along with it.
Kids playing in the yard? Torch ‘em; they should have known better. Grandma knitting while she waits for her gingerbread Einherjar to finish baking? Sucks to be her; my road, my rules, my beard, I’m the Allfather, bitch.
Above: Santa, but so much worse.
To be fair to Odin, he could be a cool guy sometimes. He just turned into any dad when he was on a road trip and wanted to MAKE GOOD TIME, DAMN IT, I AM NOT STOPPING; YOU SHOULD HAVE PEED BEFORE WE LEFT.
To ensure they didn’t incur Odin’s road trip wrath, the Vikings had a few ways of smoothing things over with Dad.
They would leave Odin offerings on the road, like pieces of steel (??? okay ???) or bread for his dogs, or food for his giant, eight-legged horse, Sleipnir, because the only true way to a man’s heart is through his pet.
People would generally leave veggies and oats and other horse-y things out for Sleipnir, whose eight legs made him the fastest flying horse in the world and also made him the only horse to ever win Asgard’s coveted tap dancing championship.
(Side note: EIGHT legs…EIGHT tiny reindeer…eh? Eh? See how we got here? Thanks, nightmare horse!)
Above: An excellent prancer AND dancer.
And if Odin was feeling particularly charitable and not in the mood for horrific acts of arson, children would also leave their shoes out for him–it was said that he’d put gifts in your boots to ring in a happy new year.
If all that didn’t work and the Vikings heard the hunt approaching, they would resort to throwing themselves on the ground and covering their heads while the massive party sped above them like a giant Halloween rager.
So this holiday season, leave your boots out for Odin and some carrots out for his giant spider horse or you and your entire family will die in a fiery inferno, the end.
3. Yule Logs
Speaking of Scandinavia, another Northern European winter solstice tradition was the yule log. Today, if you google “yule log,” something like this will pop up:
…which isn’t an actual log, but is instead log-shaped food that you shove into your mouth along with 500 other cakes at the same time because it’s CHRISTMAS, and I’m having ME TIME; so WHAT if I ate the whole jar of Nutella by myself, alone, in the dark at 3 am?
But that log cake is actually inspired by actual logs of yore that Celtic, Germanic, and Scandinavian peoples decorated with fragrant plants like holly, ivy, pinecones, and other Stuff That Smells Nice before tossing the log into the fire.
This served a few purposes:
It smelled nice, and Bath and Body Works scented candles hadn’t been invented yet.
It had religious and/or spiritual significance as a way to mark the winter solstice.
It was a symbolic way of ringing in the new year and kicking out the old.
Common belief held that the ashes of a yule log could ward off lightning strikes and bad energy.
Winter cold. Fire warm.
Everybody loves to watch things burn. (See: Odin.)
The yule log cakes we eat today got their start in 19th century Paris, when bakers thought it was a cute idea to resurrect an ancient pagan tradition in the form of a delicious dessert, and boy, howdy, were they right.
In any case, I’m 100% down with eating a chocolate yule log while burning an actual yule log in my backyard because everybody loves to watch things burn; winter cold, fire warm; and hnnnngggg pine tree smell hnnnnggg.
(Quick note: The word “yule” is the name of a traditional pagan winter festival, still celebrated culturally or religiously in modern pagan practice. It’s also another name for Odin. He had a bunch of other names, one of the most well-known being jólfaðr, which is Old Norse for “Yule father.” If you would like to royally piss him off, or if you are Loki, feel free to call him “Yule Daddy.”)
4. Upside down Christmas trees
I just found out that apparently, upside down Christmas trees are a hot new trend with HGTV types this year, so I guess this is one historical trend we did bring back, meaning it doesn’t really belong on this list, but I’m gonna talk about it, anyway.
Side note: Oh, my god, that BANNISTER. I NEED.
Historians aren’t actually sure where the inverted Christmas tree thing came from, but we know people were bringing home trees and then hanging them upside down in the living room as early as the 7th century. We have a couple theories as to why people turned trees on their heads:
Logistically, it’s way easier to hang a giant pine tree from your rafters upside down by its trunk and roots. You just hoist that baby up there, wind some rope around the rafter and the trunk, and boom. Start decorating.
A Christian tradition says that one day in the 7th century, a Benedictine monk named Saint Boniface stumbled across a group of pagans worshipping an oak tree. So, instead of minding his own damn business, he cut the tree down and replaced it with a fir tree. While the pagans were like, “Dude, what the hell?” Boniface used the triangular shape of the fir tree to explain the concept of the holy trinity to the pagans. Some versions have him planting it right-side up, others having him displaying a fir tree upside down. Either way, it’s still a triangle that’s a solid but ultimately very rude way of explaining God. Word’s still out on whether anyone was converted or just rightly pissed off that this random guy strolled into their place of worship, chopped down their sacred tree, and plopped HIS tree down instead. Please do not do that this holiday season.
Eastern Europeans lay claim to the upside-down tree phenomenon with a tradition called podłazniczek in Poland–people hung the tree from the ceiling and decorated it with fruits and nuts and seeds and ribbons and other festive doodads.
(God, who lives in these houses? Look at that. That’s like a swanky version of Gaston’s hunting lodge. Where do I get one? Which enchanted castle do I have to stumble into to chill out in a Christmas living room like that?)
Today, at least in the West, upside-down trees are making a comeback because…I don’t know. Chip and Joanna Gaines said so.
Some folks say it’s a surefire way to keep your cats from clawing their way through the tree and then puking up fir needles for weeks afterward, which checks out for me.
5. Incredibly weird Victorian Christmas cards
So back in the 19th century, the Christmas card industry was really getting fired up. Victorians loved their mail, let me tell you. They loved sending it. They loved getting it. They loved writing it. They loved opening it. They loved those sexy wax seals you use to keep all that sweet, sweet mail inside that sizzling envelope. (Those things are incredibly sexy. Have you ever made a wax seal? Oh, man, it’s hot.)
The problem, though, was that while the Victorians arguably helped standardize many of the holiday traditions we know and love today (Christmas trees, caroling, Dickens everything, spending too much money, etc.) back in 1800-whenever, a lot of that Christmas symbolism was, um…still under construction. No one had really agreed on which visual holiday cues worked and which…didn’t.
Meaning everyone just kind of made up their own holiday symbols. Which resulted in monstrous aberrations like this card:
What the hell is that? A beet? Is that a beet? Or a turnip? Why is it…oh, God, why does it have a man’s head? Why does the man beet have insect claws?
What is it that he’s holding? A cookie? Cardboard? A terra cotta planter?
And then there’s this one:
“A Merry Christmas to you,” it says, while depicting a brutal frog murder/mugging.
What are you trying to tell me? Are you threatening me with this card? Is that it? Is this a threat? How the hell am I supposed to interpret this? “Merry Christmas, hide your money or you’re dead, you stupid bitch.”
Also, why is the dead frog naked? Did the other frog steal his clothes after the murder? WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WITH THIS?
Victorian holiday cards also doubled as early absurdist Internet memes, apparently, because how else do I explain this?
Is this some sort of tiny animal Santa? A mouse riding a lobster? Like, the mouse, I get. Mice are fine. Disney built an empire on a mouse. And look, he’s got a little list of things he’s presumably going to bring you: Peace, joy, health, happiness. (In French. Oh, wait, is that that Patton Oswalt rat?)
But a LOBSTER? What’s with the lobster? It’s basically a sea scorpion. Why in the name of all that is good and holy would you saddle up a LOBSTER? I hate it. I hate it so, so much. Just scurrying around the floor with more legs than are strictly necessary, smelling like the seafood section of Smith’s, snapping its giant claws.
This whole card is a health inspector’s worst nightmare. It really is.
I gotta say, though, I am a fan of this one:
Presumably, that polar bear is going in for a hug because nothing stamps out a polar bear’s innate desire to rip your face from your skull than candy canes and Coke and Christmas spirit.
This next one is actually fantastic, but for all the wrong reasons:
I know everyone overuses “same” these days but geez, LOOK at that kid. I can HEAR it. SAME.
If you’ve ever been in a shopping mall stuffed with kids, nothing sums it up better than this card. This is like the perverse version of those Anne Geddes portraits that were everywhere in the late 90s. “Make wee Jacob sit in the tea pot; everyone will–Jacob, STOP, look at Mommy; I said LOOK. AT. MOMMY–everyone will love it.”
Actually, you know what? Every other Christmas card is cancelled. This is the only card we will be using from now on. This is it.
Wait, no. We can also use this one:
Merry Christmas. Here’s a fuckin’…just a dead fuckin’ bird.
Well I can’t beat this. Enjoy, followers!
I think I'll reblog this every year. It's just too good.
Merry Christmas and Happy Yule you crazy bastards!!!
Coming to your house tonight!
REBLOG THE CHRISTMAS OTTER IN 10 SECONDS FOR BOUNTIFUL GIFTS AND A MERRY CHRISTMAS
Well...I kinda HAD to reblog it, didn't I?
Odin by PumpkinPie92
@kindnessemitsagoldenlight
Odin at Mimir’s Well, from Padraic Colum’s The Children of Odin by Willy Pogany (1920)
My favorite superhero, Ken Branagh, directing Thor (2011)
Iron Man: What's wrong with him? Was he dropped on his head a lot as a baby?
Loki: Bold of you to assume I was ever held.
Frigga: [in a disembodied voice from Asgard] Bullshit! You had to be held constantly or you would cry!
Odin: [in a similarly disembodied voice] Also, those five times I dropped Thor as a baby were an accident. Your mother decided I should stop holding children after that.
Five times that Odin dropped Thor:
Was startled by baby Thor shrieking really loudly in his ear.
Tried to hand Thor off to servant after a sudden Diaper Event and was too hasty in letting go.
Playing "Toss Thor into the air" when he got home from the war, depth perception gone due to lack of an eye, missed the catch.
Was startled awake in the nursery late at night by Frigga and lost his grip on the baby who'd finally fallen asleep on his chest
An accident with the baby oil bottle left Thor the equivalent of a greased pig; Odin underestimated just how slippery Thor was going to be when he picked him up. (He didn't fall very far! And he was giggling the whole time!)
Asgardian Holiday! Then these naughty boys are gonna get their ass kicked:D
Thor is either totally fearless or totally lacking in common sense.
Blasting off again!
If you are cold so is he,
Let him in, pour him a drink and treat you guest well...
But dont trust a word he tell.
