backWaTEr, STReam and hOSE

It just occurred to me that I kind of arbitrarily started referring to “first age” “second age” and “third age” tumblr one day because I realized during a discord conversation that it really can be divided up very effectively between a couple major events that changed the fabric of the site’s culture almost overnight, but nobody but me ever refers to them that way, so by way of explanation:

First Age: everything before Dashcon. Art communities were still largely thriving on the internet and social media still mostly existed out from under corporate monopolies, and people were just wildly guessing about how to use it. We were in the last hurrah of the internet wild west and lolcats were still a thing. Tumblr was just a fun and quirky place, we were blissfully writing unironic posts about tumblr university and fandom vs hipster and the “I like your shoelaces” thing, Hank Green wrote a goddamn song about tumblr, we were all like Adam and Eve dwelling in Eden unaware of their sin. Potterheads grab your wands.

Second Age: post-Dashcon, but pre-Purge. We have all eaten the fruit of knowledge and there is no going back. There are no more secret code or tumblr university posts because everyone knows firsthand how badly that would go. Fandom culture is forever changed. We are now aware that we live in a hellish cringetopia but have absolutely no plans to leave, because by now a combination of monopolies and a sneaky rise in purity culture has the internet by the throat (but not in a kinky way, that would scare off advertisers) so there aren’t a lot of better options, and at least our relatives can’t find us here. A lot of artists now have their primary presence on tumblr. The lax policies regarding nsfw and controversial content mean it’s a good space for queer creators and sex workers despite the many shortcomings we’re now aware of. The porn bot plague really kicks into full gear to the point that every time our follower counts go up we’re ready with the block/spam button like the uncles from Secondhand Lions picking off traveling salesmen. The drama starts to get really fucking weird, with classics such as the human pet guy and the bone-stealing witch.

Basically when me and my bro were little, once, my mom had been making us supper. and she left the room for a minute for something, and when she came back, my brother was standing on a chair, and I was passing him green beans, which he was setting on the blades of the ceiling fan.

Now, when my mother saw this, she did what any respectable parent would do, and told us to sit our butts down and wait til our dad gets home.

Not much later, dad got home from work, ready to sit down to supper.

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- Neck of a snake

- body of a leopard

- haunches of a lion

- feet off a hart (deer)

So is it

Or….

these beasties. For a long time, science had them down as going extinct 200 thousand years ago, but then we found some bones from 36 thousand years ago. Which, y’know, is quite a difference. Since you can bet that any skeleton we find is not literally the last one of its kind to live, many creatures have date ranges unknowably far outside the evidence.

In South Asia there were cultures that described a man-beast/troll forrest giant  who’s knuckles dragged the ground, and everybody from the west was sure it was superstitious mumbo jumbo, but you know what used to live there?

And did you know that some of the earliest white colonizers of the Americas heard accounts that there were natives still alive who had seen and hunted and eaten a great hairy beast, shaggy like the buffalo but much bigger, with a long thin nose like a snake and two giant fangs… so, like, mammoths, you know? but they were totally discounted because europeans of the time were like, elephants live in Africa and aren’t hairy, you can’t fool us, pranksters!

And it’s not just living animals that were badly described, or which descriptions got exaggerated over the course of centuries or through translation errors. Sometimes, people finding fossil bones of extinct animals might have also influenced some myths!

By now this is pretty well-known but it has been theorised that the Greek myth of the cyclops was started when people found Deinotherium skulls. Now you might say, uh, how is it possible to think a cousin of the elephant is a huge human dude with one eye?

Well-

- the big nasal opening kinda looks like an eye if you have no idea what kind of animal had this kind of skull (you can read more about this theory in this old National Geographic article if you like).

Here’s a less well-known one; the griffin is a mythological hybrid with the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle. The earliest traces of this myth come from ancient Iranian and ancient Egyptian art, from more than 3000 BC. In Iranian mythology, it’s called شیردال‌ (shirdal, “lion eagle”). Now, it’s been the subject of some debate and it’s not confirmed, but there’s a theory that people might have seen some Protoceratops and Psittacosaurus fossils in Asia and might have interpreted it as “a lion with an eagle’s head”: