She Deserved Better

*insert Backrooms reference here*

Okay where to start…first of all, the trunk isn’t too far off from reality, yeah the opening is too big and too round but they still got the wrinkles on the trunk correct so I’ll give them props for that. They got the tusks pretty close too. As for everything else? Well…yeah 😬

First of all, that tiny round ear…no elephant in the world has ears that shape, they make it look like this elephant lost his real ears in a terrible accident and had to get mouse ears transplanted onto him for whatever reason.

And the body…why’s the chest so square??? He looks like he can’t even raise his head. Tbh his body almost looks like a horse (except for his feet, which I’ll get to later), he even has a horse tail. Could the person who described elephants to the artist have used horses as a comparison maybe? That comparison wouldn’t make sense considering an elephant’s body looks nothing like a horse but idk…maybe the body wasn’t described to them so the artist just made a guess. But yeah, elephants don’t have long, thin, rectangular bodies, elephants are ROUND, baby.

Anyway, I find it amusing that the artist gave them toes and little claws. Elephants actually do have toes irl, if you look at an elephant’s skeleton you can see their feet actually have a pretty similar bone structure to a human foot (including toe bones), but we obviously can’t see them due to the stumpy shape of their foot. They do have toenails though, but definitely no claws.

So yeah, they did an okay job with the trunk and the tusks but everyone else…not so much.

Since this post is about elephants, I’m just gonna comment on the elephant here and leave the dragon out if it.

Anyway, like the caption says, this guy has no ears and a castle on his back. Let’s talk about the lack of ears first: jeez, you think the first guy having tiny mouse ears was bad? At least he has ears, this poor guy has none 😔

As for the castle on his back, is there some kind of mythology to that or did the artist just think it sounded grand to have a castle sitting on top of such a massive animal? If it’s the latter then that would make sense because they’re totally right, that’s awesome as hell lmao.

This one has a rounder body shape compared to the first one so that’s definitely an improvement. They still didn’t get it quite right though, it makes me think of a pig more than an elephant, it even has a curly tail. The feet are stumpier this time but the legs make me think of a horse, especially the hind leg. It does look like they added toenails to the elephant’s feet, so at least they kinda got that right, even if they are drawn pretty awkwardly (I also just looked up how many toenails elephants have: African savanna elephants have 14 (4 on the front feet and 3 on the back), Asian elephants have 18 (5 on the front feet and 4 on the back), and African forest elephants have 18 (5 on the front feet, 4 on the back).

This guy also has human-shaped eyes that are obviously way too big for him, but honestly I’m okay with that because it makes him look adorable lol. The way he’s looking up and frowning makes him look annoyed though, I wonder if he’s unhappy about having a castle on his back or if he’s annoyed by the dragon. Maybe both lol.

This trunk is smoother than the first elephant and has a similar round opening, also the lower lip is too long. The tusks are shaped pretty well, but it looks like they’re jutting out of his chin instead of his jaw lol.

Overall, definitely another very inaccurate design but still very cute.

Again, I’m only gonna comment on the elephants here.

First of all, even though those trumpet-shaped trunks are obviously inaccurate, I don’t mind at all because that’s clever as hell lol. Especially since the humans are playing trumpets of their own. The artist must’ve been aware that elephants make a trumpeting sound.

Everything else is once again wrong. Those tusks look more like a wild boar’s tusks or like two large fangs, an elephant’s are waaaaay longer than that.

The artist was almost close to making the ears look accurate to an Asian elephant’s ears but unfortunately they came out looking more like floppy dog ears. The forehead shape also makes me think of Asian elephants.

These elephants have long necks, something elephants very clearly don’t have. These body makes me think of a pig once again, their feet even look like pig trotters.

Obviously very inaccurate overall, but still a cool creature design (especially the trumpet trunk).

Another instance where the trunks look like trumpets lol. Strangely enough, their ears look trumpet-shaped as well, albeit very short ones. Now I’m imagining elephants that trumpet out of their trunks and ears lmao. That would actually be pretty cool, I’m ngl.

The tusks on these guys are pretty accurate. The lower lips are once again too long though.

The heads on these guys are way too small for their bodies, a problem every elephant in this post has had so far except for the earless guy with the castle on his back. An elephant’s massive head is one of the most noticeable things about them so it’s funny seeing how small they are in a majority of medieval manuscripts.

The bodies once again make me think of a pig, although here the legs are too long and they have tiny paws like a dog or a cat. An elephant’s big stumpy feet and big toenails are also one of the most noticeable things about them, why were the people who described elephants to these artists so bad at describing things lol.

The rails are pretty accurate though.

Once again very inaccurate, but I also wanna point out how cute it is that the bottom picture has a mom cuddling with her baby.

i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3

unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it

i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map

i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs

this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.

crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.

What they did have was a single spare bed in the small, comfortable, quiet, wildly expensive facility for girls with eating disorders.

They asked each of the young women currently living there if it was acceptable that I might occupy a bed in one of the rooms for a while, just the long weekend while I was waiting for a doctor's evaluation. I hadn't been violent, I had gone with the cops without putting up any fight at all, and I was still and I was small and all those things were sufficient for me to be deemed safe. So up they sent me, to somewhere high in Western Psych, above the smells and sounds of the denser-packed wards, above where the care workers were harried and frustrated, to a gentle space with seven or eight young women in it.

I was five foot three, and I weighed about 115 pounds. I was underweight for my frame, as a fair amount of that weight was martial arts muscle; I would probably have been ten pounds heavier if I were healthy, with the amount of activity I got.

I was at least two inches shorter than pretty much every other young woman there, six or seven inches shorter than one of them, and I had at least thirty pounds on several of them. The tallest was not allowed to walk, she had to sit in a wheelchair and be pushed around, because her condition was so advanced that the motion would undo what good her hard work had done.

And over the course of the four or five days I was there, multiple of them came up to me alone to quietly tell me that I had the *perfect* body, and they wished they could be as skinny as I was. That I needed to live, because I was beautiful, and if they were as beautiful as I was, they wouldn't need to be here.

Their eyes were on me all the time, in the hours that I wasn't sleeping. I spent a lot of time sleeping, and we took our meals separately (I not needing to be monitored while I ate, and not having my food weighed), but we spent a fair amount of time sitting around in the little shared living room space, talking about movies and magazines and books we'd loved, talking about our families. I didn't talk about my family; they didn't pry.

They were all so fucking nice.

And I could have broken any one of them over my narrow knee. They each thought they were bigger than I was.

Their brains lied to them, every time they looked at a mirror. Every time they looked down at their own thighs. What they saw was not what I could see. They had bright, beautiful eyes in dark hollows, and I could count their vertebrae, could see their ribs winging when they breathed, could see the motion of every tendon on the backs of their hands.

They weren't celebrities. They weren't being paid to have particular bodies, nor were they deep in the toxic sea of having strangers take photos of them to sell to gossip rags if they stepped out of doors in old jeans. They had families and loved ones who were doing everything that they could to protect them, to uplift them and help them be healthy. They were just everyday people--a nurse, a couple of students, a couple of recent college grads, a young woman who had decided it was time to really get help because she wanted to be a mother--and still they'd been so injured by the neverending fucking deluge of body-image bullshit that they were dying of it.

They FORM the towers! They FORM the pentagon! They FORM the planes and FLY the planes into the structures!

There's not a lot of stories you can use cheerleading to tell. "Towers falling over" is the perfect narrative.

We can't let cheerleaders be the curator of the 9/11 tale?