[a-book-of-creatures]

Honestly the biggest disappointment I had researching ABC was that medieval authors did not, in fact, see the creatures they were describing and were trying their best to describe them with their limited knowledge while going “what the fuck… what the fuck…”

[a-book-of-creatures]

Instead all those creatures you know came about from transcription and translation errors from copying Greco-Roman sources (who themselves got them from travelers’ tales from Persia and India - rhino -> unicorn, tiger -> manticore, python -> dragon, and so on).

[downinmybeastheart]

So unicorns are real

[a-book-of-creatures]

behold… a unicorn

[gallusrostromegalus]

I always thought animals in medieval manuscripts looked like the result of having to draw say. A Tree Kangaroo, but your only source for what it looked like was your friend who heard it from a fellow who knows a man who swears he saw one once, whilst very drunk and lost, and I am SO PLEASED  to find out this is, in fact, the case.

[glamourweaver]

Questing Beast

- Neck of a snake

- body of a leopard

- haunches of a lion

- feet off a hart (deer)

So is it

Or….

[hupperts]

[bluebeetletedkord]

[lastnightspants]

[saint-batrick]

that photo is one of the sexiest things i have ever seen.

[dstrybys]

the phantom: sing for me my angel of music!!!

9 year old me honestly believing i had both the vocal range and operatic stylings of miss christine daaé:

[marisatomay]

heartwarming that my dad went out of his way to ask me how I’m doing mentally now that it’s almost winter again but i wish he had also continued his annual tradition of sending me this onion article no context

[timballisto]

someone take the plot of the pirates of the carribean and make will turner a girl. like. her mother dies and she’s like damn, crossing the goddamn ocean as a girl under the age of 13 to find my long-lost father is super dangerous i better go incognito. and so she pretends to be a boy. she fully intends to switch back to being a girl in the carribean, but then the pearl attacks and will is fished out of the ocean. she’s scrawny and her hair is cropped short so no one even questions will’s gender until she wakes up and she’s like… this is awkward. but she prefers pretending to be a man because this way she can learn a trade and moon after elizabeth swann in peace. when the pearl attacks port royale, barbossa and the crew are looking for a girl turner, and so they think elizabeth is definitely the one they need. they aren’t even looking for wil(hemina) turner, cross-dressing blacksmith.

will’s awkwardness with miss swann stems from her gender and the impossibility of elizabeth loving her back if she ever knew the truth. and… goddamn it i don’t want to write this i wanna read it.

[dateagirlwhosuggestion]

date a girl who is a home and an adventure all at once

[seeklight-deactivated20210703]

Date a girl who doubles as a haunted house

[nenimkee-wanwee-deactivated2021]

Thank you for coming to my ted talk

[connerys]

Cinderella (1950)

[enchanteddreameruniverse]

This. This moment is the most important in the movie. This is when the Prince falls for her - he was infatuated before but he clearly thought that the reason Cinderella was around him was because he was the Prince, but when he discovered she has no clue, he realised that she stayed and talked and spent the whole night with him because she likes who he was as a person - not his title. Not only that but he liked her; we don’t know what they talked about, but we can imagine it must have been interesting and nice to last a whole night so we know she just have said something that made him want to stay around her too. That’s why he wanted to find her, not cause she was pretty (I mean the guy couldn’t even remember her face and went off a shoe for God’s sake - which gives me a theory that the Prince has Prosopagnosia AKA face blindness) but because she liked him not his title, and he liked whoever she was, rich or poor.

[thesevenumbrellas]

The prince has face blindness and dumbass disease ok? He’s trying his best!

[teaboot]

I love the weirdly specific rules that go with answering a riddle. Like, “I Have Two Eyes But I Cannot See: What Am I?” And the answer’s supposed to be the word ‘iridescent’ because ‘two *i*’s’ right, but like. Why can’t the answer be like… A guy with really bad cataracts. Someone wearing a blindfold. My uncle’s dog. Like why does it gotta be deep

[teaboot]

“I have a face but no eyes lips or nose, what am I?” Slenderman. Next

[teaboot]

It walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon and three legs in the evening. What is it? A dog with a muscular disease.

What has a head, a tail, is brown, and has no legs? Snake.

What disappears when you say it’s name? my brother when it’s his turn to get the trash

[skyykkeli]

I think you have missed the meaning of the riddles

[teaboot]

Listen. Listen if I’m trapped between a wall of sentient fire and a goblin mage who will only reveal the one true path across the forbidden glade if I answer his riddles three, I’m not going to waste time struggling for the answer with the deepest life lesson. I’m gonna pick an answer that fits the criteria and I’m gonna stick with it. “A poor man has it and a rich man needs it” it’s a flashlight. They’re in a cave. The poor man is a tour guide. Next Question before my ass burns off, Por Favour

[deaf-fellas-partner]

This is the real way how ravenclaws get into their rooms

[gilalevana]

The secret to the ravenclaw riddles is that you don’t actually need to know “the answer”, you just need to be able to defend the answer you give.

[legisaskerator]

that’s the definition of being an English major

[kyraneko]

The result of the Ravenclaw common room door is a House full of students who can make up bullshit on the spot and defend it to the death using only three braincells and a complete absence of fucks, and the resulting agony this produces in the teachers is PRECISELY what Rowena Ravenclaw wanted.

[spectralarchers]

This was in the papers here in Denmark recently, and I feel like the rest of the world should know too:

"Greenland wants to buy the USA back"

Yesterday, the Greenlandic Prime Minister, Kim Kielsen offered to buy the United States.

"It was Leif Erikson who discovered the Americas, and his father, Erik the Red, who discovered Greenland and settled here. Therefore, it's only natural for us to get the United States back," says Kim Kielsen.

He hasn't settled on a price yet, but thinks that it should be quite low, considering the United States' colossal national debt.

"And if we're counting Tru mp as a part of the deal, the price will be even lower," he says.

[kangofu-cb]

I, for one, welcome our new Greenlander overlords.

[loonyloopylisa]

Seconded

[kontrazvedka-deactivated2019031]

[mommy4sissyslut]

this fucking tea

[dreadedloreenkid]

[questionthewitness]

constantly torn between being seduced by a masked, gentlemanly thief in Victorian era England or being the masked, gentlemanly thief in Victorian era England

[jeza-red]

is there a problem with a romance between two masked gentlemanly thieves in Victorian England?

[squeeful]

tinder profile: mask'd for mask'd

[questionthewitness]

constantly torn between being seduced by a masked, gentlemanly thief in Victorian era England or being the masked, gentlemanly thief in Victorian era England

[jeza-red]

is there a problem with a romance between two masked gentlemanly thieves in Victorian England?

[squeeful]

tinder profile: mask'd for mask'd

[hilarioushumorfromouterspace]

[bassiter]

[slow-riot-deactivated20200720]

Thinking a lot about how people have liked to meme on late-life Johnny Cash for “God’s Gonna Cut You Down” and his “Hurt” cover but man, I think his last few years were amazing. He was a man who was always on the right side of things, pro-union, anti-prison, and then at the end of his life he just got weird and apocalyptic, looking back on his own life and staring death in the face. That shit rules. He went out with dignity, which can be said about a lot of people, but more than that, he went out with ambition. “You can have it all, my empire of dirt” sounds melodramatic coming from 29 year old Trent Reznor singing about drugs, but coming from a 70 year old man who was one of the faces of his entire goddamn genre, who had fought for change his entire life and never seen any real progress? That’s fucking devastating.

[filmsfoodandfandom]

“I wore black because I liked it. I still do, and wearing it still means something to me. It’s still my symbol of rebellion – against a stagnant status quo, against our hypocritical houses of God, against people whose minds are closed to others’ ideas.“— Johnny Cash

[marzipanandminutiae]

reading letters from 1818 is wild

“it’s that time of the year when I get colds for no apparent reason again” have some Clairitin hon

[marzipanandminutiae]

But also we’re not becoming allergic to everything nowadays like certain white moms fear. Allergies have always existed. They were just talked about differently

Like “oh clams always ~turn my stomach~”. Or “what a pity he was taken from us at age 5”

[rosslynpaladin]

“Well we didn’t have all this fancy chronic illness stuff in the Olden Days, what did people do then??”

They died, Ashleigh. 

[explorerrowan]

This is a picture tracking bullet holes on Allied planes that encountered Nazi anti-aircraft fire in WW2.

At first, the military wanted to reinforce those areas, because obviously that’s where the ground crews observed the most damage on returning planes. Until Hungarian-born Jewish mathematician Abraham Wald pointed out that this was the damage on the planes that made it home, and the Allies should armor the areas where there are no dots at all, because those are the places where the planes won’t survive when hit. This phenomenon is called survivorship bias, a logic error where you focus on things that survived when you should really be looking at things that didn’t.

We have higher rates of mental illness now? Maybe that’s because we’ve stopped killing people for being “possessed” or “witches.” Higher rate of allergies? Anaphylaxis kills, and does so really fast if you don’t know what’s happening. Higher claims of rape? Maybe victims are less afraid of coming forward. These problems were all happening before, but now we’ve reinforced the medical and social structures needed to help these people survive. And we still have a long way to go.

[twodotsknowwhy]

This is one of my favorite anecdotes to show how clever rewording of statistics can make them say the opposite of what they mean:

Every time a state makes riding a motorcycle without a helmet illegal, the number of ER patients seriously injured in motorcycle accidents skyrockets. Every single time.

When you phrase it just right, it makes it sound like it’s more dangerous to ride a motorcycle with a helmet than without one. Of course, the reality is that before those laws, those patients were going to the morgue, not the ER.