Worth Fighting For @theaethaerial - Tumblr Blog

stuck baby

Characters who choose death but are forced to live, my beloveds.

Characters who have to come to terms with a second chance at life they never asked for, my darlings.

Characters who move forward on the trembling legs of a newborn fawn through the overwhelming, blinding crush of an existence they fully forsook but which was thrust back upon their unwilling beings, my obsessions.

swagophile

I had a dream that Joe Biden kept trying to sneak back into the white house to become the president again and he had a variety of silly disguises like in one he was wearing a big moustache and top hat and introduced himself as Job Iden and tried to sell trump snake oil and trump was super interested until his moustache fell off and then JD vance was like "wait a minute.. that's joe biden!!" amd he was like "welp, gotta run, see ya later jack!" and then all the evil white house staff were shaking their heads cus joe biden almost sneaked into the white house and the newest aid was there and she was like "That was a close call, Mr President" and his new aide was actually kamala harris wearing a big cartoon wig and they were all too distracted by joe biden to notice

mortallycrispygardener

shiftingbonesofapoltergeist-dea

I'm sorry WHAT

smallerontheoutside

'lazy people don't feel guilty about not doing anything' is insane to me and I have been trying to make my brain believe it for a long time, it shocked me to my core when I first heard it

astropithecus

An important corollary to "if you were faking your mental illness, you could stop whenever you wanted."

theomenroom

when applied to drinks, "dry" means "without sugar". therefore it follows that sugary drinks can be called "wet". the meanings of the terms "hot" and "cold" when applied to drinks are obvious. thus the aspect of any drink can be determined.

for instance, green tea, freshly steeped and served without additives, is hot and dry, and therefore has an aspect of fire.

a mocha, on the other hand, while hot, is sweet, and therefore wet, and thus has an an aspect of air.

lemonade, which is wet and cold, has a water aspect.

finally, the drink which most epitomizes the earth aspect, being both cold and dry, is vodka

theartingace

Horses are really fragile animals. Is it still a death sentence for a centaur if one of their equine limbs gets hurt? Or can they help it somehow?

Oh god, now I'm thinking of amputees and how those would work

Horses are SUPER fragile, or maybe more like delicately balanced.. but particularly their crazy spindle-legs which centaurs get to deal with! But a big part of why hurt legs are a death sentence for horses has less to do with “It kills them” and more to do with quality of life, which a centaur can get around! A horse with a broken leg doesn’t understand it can’t put ANY weight on that leg for an extended period and will attempt to go about their daily life and act normally, which basically guarantees re-injuring the bad leg and a high chance of injuring the other 3 legs as they try to cope with the change in balance and weight distribution. It all leads to a really poor quality of life with almost no chance of truly healing properly. The story of all they did trying to save Barbaro the racehorse is a long sad story that illustrates a lot of the issues even with modern veterinary medicine with trying to deal with a broken leg in horses.

Thankfully with centaurs, They understand the need for healing, are able to manage their own quality of life and have the gear to support themselves in the time it takes for the injury to heal!

Also perfectly good for long term use in the case of aging, amputation, or general disability! Which is common with the front legs and lower backs of centaurs given the unusual stresses caused by their body-plans. They were created with thicker and more robust front legs to cope with the permanent added weight of the torso instead of a horse head, but injury and disability in that area is still very common!

Injuries to the hind are less common and usually less severe, and given the hind legs bear less direct weight than the front they can usually get away with wraps and limping until it gets back to weight-bearing. Something like a rear amputation or ruptured tendon would probably require a custom harness/brace attached to a wheel like these and/or basically a peg leg!

yeah, although the psychological aspect is part of it, physically horses are very heavy animals and if one leg isn’t weight bearing, one or the other feet are likely to founder from the strain of carrying the rest of the body weight - the internal support of the hoof deteriorates & the foot bone rotates downward ( in itself is a very painful & potentially fatal condition). its why you don’t see any amputee horses around, their size means they really need four legs.

however!! these amazing wheelchairs would really do the trick! god they look good!!

(side note, knowing the size + weight of horses heads compared to human head & torso, i cant help but wonder if there really would be extra weight from the human part at all or if they’d actually be lighter on the front end??)

asmuchasidliketo

Okay so. Let’s begin by the weight of the human part of a centaur.

A quick research gave me access to a list of different human body parts relative to total weights on this site. Summing it up, I found that for a 150 lbs (68 kgs) human the torso + head + arms is about 110 lbs (50 kgs).

That was the easy part.

I looked up the same things for horses but only found guides to weigh your horse, and a scientific paper that may have the answer, but it’s behind a paywall and I’m not coughing up 15€ to maybe get the answer I need.

Then I remembered I have a Facebook friend who’s passionate about horses, and has access to a lot of scientific literature. I asked her. I presented the question as something pretty weird, as I don’t know if people other than I are interested by strange scientific inquiries.

She loved it.

So here is the data :

- If we take in account the center of gravity of a horse, behind the shoulders, we know that its position varies a lot based on the position of the head + neck block (the higher the head gets, the more the gravity center moves towards the rump), so – laws of physics – the head + neck block is an important part of the weigh of the horse, with a leverage effect.

- Also, the position of the center of gravity tells us that 50 % of the horse’s weigh is before that point : head, neck, shoulders, front legs. Even when comparing a strong torso + arms and a slender neck, it means that for a 1,000 lbs (450 kgs) horse the “front block” is about 500 lbs (225 kgs).

This doesn’t give us the weigh of the neck + head block, but it tells us that with the shoulders and front legs (that a centaur keeps) it’s nearly five times the weigh of the human part. And I doubt the front legs of a horse weigh that heavy (to give a vague idea, both legs of a 150 lbs human weigh about 52 lbs – 23 kgs).

Another thing about centaur anatomy (from the same trusted source) : in a centaur, the torso is (most of the time) held straight, so the center of gravity is closer to the rump than for a horse and the distribution of the weigh on the four legs is probably more even (for a horse about two thirds of the weigh is borne by the front legs). However back pathologies like kissing spines could happen more often, since equine anatomy means that horses need to lower their neck to limit the risk of back wounds.

That’s all folks, I hope my translation to English isn’t too bad!

sufficientlylargen

One thing that I rarely see in posts about centaurs is considerations of how scale works between the human and horse parts. Most illustrations of centaurs seem to assume light riding horses, but what about, say, a one-ton Shire centaur?

If you remove a Shire horse’s head and neck and replace it with an average human torso then its front half is gonna be MUCH lighter, and also it’s maybe gonna look a little ridiculous… Or do we just assume that Shire centaurs have human parts proportional to, say, a ten foot (3m) tall heavily built human?

theartingace

Omg somehow i missed all this great discussion happening here??! I love that @asmuchasidliketo did the math!!? That’s amazing! Not long after i made this post i started wondering the same thing about the weight of a human torso vs horse head and neck. I assumed the human torso would weigh more on the centaur because it would be like having a permanent rider but then realized even small horses like those I typically model my centaur bodies off of have heads almost as big as their rider’s torsos in pictures- and that doesn’t even account for the leverage effect and weight of the neck! So the lack of not only that big ol head’s weight but also the leverage of it being held out a solid 3-5 feet from the top of the shoulder would almost certainly make everything WAY lighter than the added human torso- even if the torso is larger than the typical rider of a horse of the same size as I tend to do when proportioning my centaurs.

(An older proportion sheet I worked up a while back for @sufficientlylargen - I have an old post on this but I may do a whole other post because I have EVEN MORE thoughts on size limits at least for my own headworld’s centaurs) Because the size of the human half that feels right to me is definitely larger than a rider of the same sized horse would typically be (for the long term health and safety of the horse) but even so, it’s still way less straight up bone weight being held up at a much more upright angle which means less leverage pressure on the (lower)shoulders. Which, I agree that would probably make them more prone to kissing spine than poor knees! Though centaurs would be more aware of the issue as it would likely be common and stretching and preventative movement would likely be implemented to mitigate some of it. But just like humans with bad backs -because everyone in their twenties thinks lifting with their back and sitting like a shrimp will never come back to bite them- it would likely be the most common issue of aging. So any which way it still results in the same need for mobility aids but it’s fun to be able to better pinpoint what the more likely issue with their crazy bodyplan is!

fangyrling

quick reminder that you're actually not obliged to feel any empathy for someone who would have described your death as 'necessary' if the exact same thing had happened to you

sockablock

Knowing a fic author through AO3 is like attending someone’s thesis presentation and politely clapping at the end, knowing a fic author through this hellsite is like going over to their house at 3AM to watch them eat mayonnaise out of a jar

derinthescarletpescatarian

Sometimes I attend somebody’s thesis presentation and I’m so impressed that I follow them home to watch them eat mayonnaise out of a jar at 3am.

itsmyturnonthegender

Sometimes I watch someone eat mayonnaise out of a jar at 3am with such fervour I am compelled to attend their thesis presentation

bucketofdeltav

Sometimes I look at a thesis presentation and I go ‘I know exactly how much mayonnaise you had to eat out of the jar at 3 am to pull this shit off’

drunkromanogers

Steve: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

thewitchway

I wouldn’t ship these two romantically for a million dollars.

Their friendship and mutual respect means everything to me.

parrhesiac

You have to understand: this is like the Golden Retriever they put in with the Cheetahs. Steve is the twitchy one, at all times. He is not the Golden Retriever, it doesn’t matter that he’s big and blond. His “flight” response does not exist. His “fight” response used to be outsize to his abilities, and then they gave him a body that could handle it. He needs a barometer for when a situation is actually “fight.” Natasha has the training, Natasha is used to making it appear like no situation is “fight” up until she murks you. Natasha is the Golden Retriever. If she is chill, he can relax. (He doesn’t, always, but that’s more proof.)

apolloendymion

since mrs, ms, and mr are all descended from the latin word magister, i propose the gender neutral version should be mg, short for "mage"

apolloendymion

some people think this is a shitpost so i want to clarify that i am dead fucking serious. make mage the official gender neutral honorific NOW. i want it on my passport. i want it on my bank account. i want doctors and judges to use it for me. i don't care if it sounds a little silly. people thought "missus" sounded crass at first. call me mg.

apolloendymion

benefits of mg:

easy to pronounce, even for children (though kids 4 & younger may pronounce it more like "mayd" or "maygh")

ONE SYLLABLE!!! ("individual" is too goddamn LONG.) you have to be able to say it quickly and casually

ends in a soft vowel sound, so it'll flow right into the next word ("ind" halts the whole sentence)

fits neatly into the existing structure as a relative of master/mistress that can be abbreviated down to an m and one other letter

distinct enough that it can't be mistaken for either gendered term (if you call me mix I'll kill you. it sounds like miss with extra steps)

wizard.

drawbacks:

there aren't any

yes, i know about milligrams and magnesium. i don't give a shit. ms can also mean microsoft. who cares.