Shady and Co.

hearing: the ear detects the vibrations of the air

i did see some users in the notes who were concerned about her looking 'scrawny', or wondering if she's maybe a juvenile -- far from it! at 15, joanne is very much considered a geriatric tiger; she's a grandma. she is, however, a sumatran tiger (panthera tigris sumatrae) -- sumatrans are the smallest extant subspecies of tiger, built more for the sweltering jungles of sumatra than the blistering cold of the amur river or the dense forests and mangrove swamps of south asia.

there was once a little boy.

he is born disabled. his body hurts, and he can’t walk properly the way the other children do. he doesn’t understand why. he’s a little boy. but he plays with wooden boats and pulls toys on a string.

somebody makes him a tunic. they sew ducks onto it in red and green and yellow and blue. the bright colours of a child.

the little boy is eight years old, and he’s going to be king now. there’s a big ceremony about it. he doesn’t really fully understand what’s going on, because he’s eight, but he wears the tunic with the brightly coloured ducks for the occasion because he loves it. look at his ducks! aren’t they great?

he is a child. the adults around him manipulate and coax him to gain more power for themselves. he still plays with toys.

as a teenager, not yet an adult, he fathers children. they do not survive. he’s not even old enough to have full agency in his job and is still being manipulated, but he had babies and they died.

he does not make it to his twenties. at eighteen or nineteen years old he dies, and is buried. his babies, so tiny, are buried with him.

and so is his tunic with the little ducks that he loved so much he kept it long after it no longer fit.

yeah i think that like. especially with historical figures in your mind people who were kings and queens or important nobles were adults. even if you know how old they were it doesn’t really click. it doesn’t seem real

but then you get something like a little tunic with brightly coloured ducks on it and it hits you like a fucking truck that this really was a little kid and no matter how far removed you are a little kid is still a little kid. their brains didn’t develop any quicker back then. he was just as developed/mature mentally as any 8 year old now. he had cartoonish animals on his clothes and he played with toy boats and probably terrorised the local cat population.

tutankhamun was a child and he didn’t make it to adulthood because he was unfortunate enough to be a very important child

his dad died when he was 8. he saw his own babies die when he was still just a boy himself.

tutankhamun had a little pair of sandals with ducks on them. he had earrings decorated with ducks. he kept those, and other items of childhood clothing. some toys. keepsakes. things he loved, and treasured. he kept them all in a little wooden chest. the chest… was carved with ducks.

and that little duck chest, filled with things he kept from his childhood, was buried with him. maybe he was keeping them for the little babies who did not make it. maybe they just reminded him of good days and fun times.

WITH PLEASURE

(greyscale makes it hard but the duck head is on the right above the toe strap. always takes me a while to find it too)

The patterns between them, to either side of what looks like lilypad/lotus flower petals, could very well be “ducks as seen from above.” There is a beak on the lower edge, a clear “head” shape above/behind it, darker ovals that look like folded wings, and a body/tail. I didn’t see the red circled ducks first, I saw the “swimming on a pond” ducks amongst the lotus flowers.

and with your help it can rack up 700k notes on tumblr in 2024

Photos taken by Our Land Images

i have often wondered this, bc it threw me off enormously as a child, bc the rivers I had personal experience with were the Huron river in Michigan and the Soque river here in north Georgia, pictured:

And I was thus utterly baffled by stories where rivers were these massive and incredibly dangerous things that were impossible to ford. I was always like... like, I believe you, but I have no way of envisioning this based on the rivers I have met.

Now as an adult, the largest river I've met personally is the Colorado, which is indeed a different scale than the ones I'm more personally acquainted with, but also I have now seen footage of, for example, the fucking Yellow river:

Pictured above: The River

Pictured below: a long bumpy pond or something, idk

Image ids: top- Columbia River flowing under the Cable Bridge and train bridge between Pasco, WA and Kennewick, WA. Bottom- Yakima River as it flows through a gorge with a gravel bed, tributary creek, and wildflowers in bloom.