HORSE DISTURBER @taraxippos - Tumblr Blog

Personal and reblogs blog. 18+. I'm 28. They/them or anything I don't care.

-likes/follows from @serpentface (main art blog)

-I like wildlife biology and ancient history

-I don't tag triggers by default so tread carefully (no judgment I just don't). If you have something major feel free to ask and I will try to accommodate.

#doont mind me just creating a minimalist pinned post

memories-of-ancients

A daily game that challenges our understanding of human cultures. Ten objects. 5,000 years of human history. Guess where and when each artif

An interesting game where you are presented with 10 artifacts from the MET. You have to place where the artifact is from and what time period it is from. Each artifact scores up to 10,000 points, and you lose points the further away your guess is and how far off in time you are. You can only play once a day. Thanks to @baebeylik for showing this to me.

Today I scored really well. Yesterday ... not so much.

Anthropeum.com · Jun 8 2026 🟩🟦🟦🟩🟩🟩🟥🟦🟦🟩 79,001 · top 3% of players today!

#84701 top 1% I feel awesome. The only ones I aced were the oba and marble bust though #And the marble bust one has a forgiving + obvious geography range and pretty intuitive time range #The stringed instrument completely threw me location wise I wouldn't have even gotten the general region right without a hint #It's such a distinct shape too

dovvvvv

this is how charli xcx sounds to straight men

itsbilby

I looked the book up. the main character's name is Tookie De La Crème

#I read the 'crowdefeatsbooks' review linked in the notes and like. For a bit I've been thinking about how idk if I've ever experienced a #'good bad book' that hits in the same way a 'good bad movie' does where my feelings are just full appreciation for something #that utterly fails at its medium in a fun/compelling/earnest way and I think this is a candidate. It sounds dreamlike and I feel like I'd #finish reading it feeling empty and weird. I don't think I can survive Modelland ngl

creditednature

Coyote's Turkey lunch that got away, Coyote Hills Regional Park Fremont, CA - Description and photos by Rudy578

#animals

I was hooked enough by The Awesome Internet Carnival to want to see the finale but I’m not like a Fan nor is anyone I follow and I wasn’t paying close attention to release dates, so the only way I could have known that the feature length finale was just released a few days ago is, in retrospect, an unusual uptick of posts on my dashboard going like “she amazing digital suck me” and etc

s-nnoh

someone made a website where you can declare your favorite pokemon & why. let's all see if every pokemon is someone's favorite... Together

sonicxshadowgenerations

:) every pokemon is someone's favorite

#Have to go with a normie answer of typhlosion. they have been my bestfriend through many trials and tribulations

Books I've read since May 18th reviews

Firebringer: "wait didn't this happen in Watership Down"

Watership Down: Watership Down

The Last Unicorn: still my favorite book

The Winter King: Solid, really engaging, might qualify as my favorite historical fiction book I've read in recent years if it can be counted as 'historical fiction' but that's a stretch. Whole series is hit and miss and there's a lot of aspects that I have major gripes with, but levels out on 'I like it'. Confused at the postulated minuscule size of armies in post-Roman Britain.

Enemy of God: Good

Excalibur: Not as good as the other two but still preddy solid

Clan of the Cave Bear: please write a formal apology to Homo neanderthalensis

Shaman: Didn't know how to feel about this the first time and still don't, I'm gonna say "enjoyed it"/"preddy good"'/"leaps high above the low bar of 'better fiction taking place in ice age Europe than the Earth's Children series'", you did not have to make these people call semen 'spurtmilk' especially since the word was going to be used so often but you did and that's jsut how it is. Really like the depiction of neanderthals in this one, it rings true to me personally as to what homo sapiens/homo neanderthalensis interactions might have actually been like (meaning "varied").

The Song of Achilles: If this book was a person I would kill them on sight. I wouldn't be able to control myself. I would black out and then wake up 48 hours later covered in blood and dirt with bits of human flesh stuck under my fingernails and lodged in between my teeth. I'd go to take a shower and scrub myself off, watching blood curl its way down the drain, and I would know exactly what I'd done. And I would feel nothing.

The last quarter or so of the Iliad (not pictured): 2.5/10 similes too long

The King Must Die: I like the approach and a lot of the concepts but I was never hooked on anything Beyond the conceptual. That cover art is cool.

Thank you for the very long answer to my prev ask :) It now brought to mind another, far nicher Greek Myth Retelling in a Historically Grounded (kind of) Way before it was cool which is Mary Renault's work - the mask of apollo, the king must die, the bull from the sea, the persian boy ... I really, really liked her books about Theseus and Minoan culture and I'm curious if you've ever picked them up

I KNOW Mary Renault is a familiar name to me in more than just an "I heard this author exists" way, I wonder if I read anything from her in highschool or something but I don't remember. I just read "The King Must Die" to check it out.

I did really like the general approach, IK a lot of things postulated in this book about Cretan society are informed by Sir Arthur Evans' Uh "Imaginative" interpretations of the palace at Knossos and are thus outdated, but it was still fun to see how the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur was reconfigured into something grounded. I think a lot of other books I've read who take that same general approach kinda feel like they're just checking off boxes of 'here's how this and that facet of the myth could be Real' in a way that feels I guess very perfunctory? just going down a list trying to find the most realistic point of comparison, as if mythology is just history after going through a couple rounds of telephone game, no imagination involved, no other purpose to the storytellers besides being a fully literal description of the past. Which also has a way of making the "real" story feel disjointed. And most of the main points didn't feel like that to me. "7 boys and 7 girls from Athens taken to feed the minotaur" being interpreted as "boys and girls from kingdoms throughout Crete's sphere of influence given as tribute and enslaved as ceremonial bullfighters at Knossos" was really cool, I love that concept. The way we're presented the "reality" and made to connect the dots to how it translated to myth over the course of centuries mostly feels very graceful. There were still bits that had the "checking off the box" quality for me (like I don't think we need a clean replacement for Pasiphae and the white bull, we don't really need the whole nine yards of "Minos spared a bull fighter because he was unwilling to sacrifice him and Pasiphae had an affair with him that involved hiding in a model of a bovine" when we could just say Pasiphae was thought to have had an affair with her husband's favorite bull fighter and Asterion was a bastard, and imagine how and why the gaps between that and the myth filled themselves) but on the whole it didn't feel like you were getting beat over the head with "HERE'S HOW IT COULD BE REAL".

I've read (much pulpier) prehistory historical fiction books from like the 80s, which came in the wake of the 2nd wave feminist movement and the pop archeology notion of "peaceful matriarchal earth goddess-worshipping culture overthrown by warlike patriarchal sky god-worshipping culture" as the grand arc of prehistory (read: European history) and it was really interesting to see the same idea in its gestation (albeit more grounded and not mythologized as a primordial fall from the Eden of peaceful goddess matriarchy; both groups share deities and cultural features and neither is peaceful) in a book from 1952 before later feminist movement-influenced authors ran with it and got silly about it in other ways. Also seeing this basic concept from the patriarchal sky god-worshipping culture POV (with intent that it is such, rather than this happening purely by default) was new to me.

There was this thing where like, plot significant events would either happen with little to no build up, or breeze by so fucking fast while being described with the most circumlocutory phrasing (or not at all) that I'd repeatedly be like "wait what" and have to go back and reread a passage several times to be sure what happened. Which I'm at least not used to having to do? I think the bit at the end where Theseus is startled by Something in Ariadne's hand was the worst offender. IDK if I'm just stupid or what, like I could put two and two together based on the scene/chapter and the entire book that she had participated in the Dionysian rites and that the King was probably killed by the maenads specifically, so it was probably something or other from him, but MAN is it vague to the point of not hitting for me, and it was like that a lot throughout the book. I wasn't that compelled by this Theseus or the story in general, but it kept me reading.

I also found the bit with the proto-Christian anticipating the arrival of proto-Jesus really funny, Yahweh wasn't even the subject of monolatry (much less exclusive monotheism) until a good ways into the iron age iirc? I'm pretty sure the timeline doesn't match up with the beginnings of Jewish messianism either, or the actual Philistines existing as a discrete group, much less as an exonym for ethnoreligious outgroups. I have no idea where the research on the history of the Abrahamic deity stood in 1952 and how much of a leap this was, it's just funny like what the fuck is this guy up to. Time traveler.

HE SHRINKS HIS ORGANS

Kindof insane what we did to strawberries

#On the left you’ll see the biggest wild strawberry from this year’s yard harvest #I suppose most domesticated fruits are like this but not all. Like wild raspberries aren’t That much smaller than cultivated ones

shithowdy

it's 1pm at the marsh! come on down, we've got

𝓃𝑜𝓉𝒽𝒾𝓃𝑔 𝒷𝓊𝓉 𝒷𝓁𝒶𝒸𝓀𝒷𝒾𝓇𝒹𝓈!!!

#art

caesarsaladinn

if you're ever wondering what popular media is getting wrong about basically any premodern society, the answer is that there are never enough lawsuits

caesarsaladinn

there's a common idea that in the olden days all disputes were resolved through violence, but even in settings where that was true, people would still sue each other about it.