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DEAR READER
Claire Keane
Cosmic Funnies

Love Begins

pixel skylines

★
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her

"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
todays bird
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
trying on a metaphor
noise dept.

祝日 / Permanent Vacation

Discoholic 🪩
Keni
we're not kids anymore.

Kaledo Art
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
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@theflyingmong
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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…”
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).
So unicorns are real
behold… a unicorn
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.
Questing Beast
- Neck of a snake
- body of a leopard
- haunches of a lion
- feet off a hart (deer)
So is it
Or….
don’t forget that some of the legendary creatures they were describing were from other people’s mythos which were passed down in the oral tradition for gods know how long. You know what existed in Eurasia right around the time we were domesticating wolves into dogs?
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!
Anyway, the point is between the early writing game of telephone description thing talked about by OP, and the discounting of native cultural accuracy, I’m pretty sure most legendary creatures are in fact real animals one way or another
It can’t explain every single legendary creature, but yes, this is super important. Because History relies on written sources, it tends to sweep oral tradition under the rug, even if there’s a lot of interesting informations in it.
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”:
Check the “origin” part of the wikipedia page for “griffin” if you want to find more sources for this theory and for the arguments against it! Again, it’s just a theory, but I think it’s super cool.
This is a pretty well accepted theory for why dragons (or animals we group as like dragons, eg wyverns and drakes) are seen in mythos almost worldwide - because people found dinosaur bones, looked at them, and went “oh fuck what’s that? some big…. lizardy thing?” and then created dragons.
Also many deagon legends are simply exaggerations of well-known living reptiles like snakes and crocodilians.a
It also explains why dragons can look so different in the myths of the various regions.
In asia, Dragons tend to look very long and snake like:
One of the most common dinosaurs that used to like in the asia region, so would have been the most common fossils found by people:
The Mamenchisaurus, this thing is just all neck and tail! You find just half a fossilised skeleton of this monster, you can easily end up thinking of a long snake-like beast.
South America also has legends snake-like dragons among some of its peoples:
What fossils from pre-historic south America could be found?
The Titanoboa, which can easily grow to be 40 feet long.
In North America there is the Piasa Bird
Which wikipedia tells me comes from “ the large Mississippian culture city of Cahokia,” it’s describes as
What fossils could have been found in that region:
Pterosaur, and Triceratops. Features of both sets of skeletons could have been merged into one legendary creature.
Then we get our European style dragon:
One of the most common fossils that could have been found was a Cetiosaurus
which, despite being a herbivore, looked to have a mouth of sharp looking teeth, consistant with a dragons.
Dragons amongst the peoples of Africa are even more varied, but most revolve around some kind of giant snake-like creature. As a quick example, we’ll take Dan Ayido Hwedo commonly found in West African mythology.
Fossils in that area could have been included the Aegyptosaurus:
A quick google search tells me that most Sauropods: well known for being long necked and long tailed, are found in Africa.
If you found only a half complete skeleton of this thing; which is likely, because it’s rare to find a complete dinosaur skeleton, you could easily think of a giant snake monster.
@spiritspodcast
This has a similar energy to looking at the myth of the changelings, as in “the fey have stolen my baby child and replaced them with an imposter, i know that because now they act weird, they don’t mix with the other kids and make strange noises and movements”.
Because nowadays we can just say “yeah, that’s just autism actually”.
@holding-infinity-and-a-book this feels like something you would like <3
*takes off my leather jacket to reveal a second, secret leather jacket underneath*
you mean, skin?
What an absolutely terrifying addition to my post. Thank you.
What’s new pussycat?
OwO OwO OwO
It’s Not Unuwusual
The “how many planks can you replace in a boat before it’s not the same boat anymore” puzzle, except “how many mods can you install on Skyrim before you’re not playing Skyrim anymore”
The Skyrim of Theseus is my favorite philosophical quandary.

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Every session, we have one incredibly weird question. These are just a few.
Bard: can someone die of a weed overdose?
Dm, an EMT: no.
Me: you’re telling me that no one has ever died of a weed overdose?
Dm: nope
(Another session)
Me: do geese have a good sense of smell?
Dm: why the fork would I know?
Fighter: I’d assume not, birds typically don’t.
Me: so I looked it up, and they actually do. Comparable to humans actually.
Dm: *sighs* okay fine, the goose sniffs out the dude like a bloodhound.
(Yet another session)
Me: can sharks eat bread?
Ranger: considering they eat license plates and turn out fine, I’d say so.
(Different session, same chaos)
Me: IM SAYING, IS THE OCEAN A SOUP?
Druid: WHY THE FORK WOULD YOU NEED TO KNOW
Me: BECAUSE I NEED TO OUTSMART A WIZARD TO GET MY KNIFE BACK.
I did not get my knife back.
Cats and train miniature
*gestures to giant cats impeding our railways* THIS is the future liberals want.
my only advice to all the girls out there is to wear weird shit. just do it
Benefits
Men are more likely to be put off and thus, leave you alone.
Women who are also weird may be inclined to start up conversations with you and befriend you.
Little girls will feel safer around you because they are also weird.
Small children may ask you if you are a fairy/princess/mermaid, and that's just a really good feeling.
You get that much closer to being a fairy/princess/mermaid.
6. You make your inner child happy and every time you do that, you heal.
Tony Hawk’s Twitter is a gold mine honestly
We Stan this San Diego Man
this
C o m e d yy
Some recent gems:
And of course there’s
#where is race war tony hawk tweet thats my fav (via @laughingfish)
I gotchu, bro:
i’m wheezgJmf stoP

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KATRINA’S REWATCH OF TOS IN THE YEAR 2021
STAR TREK: THE ORIGINAL SERIES S1E03 | Where No Man Has Gone Before
This show was the funniest fucking thing
He never elaborated on this and it kills me
If I remember correctly it eventually got out.
Apparently this was a rehearsal for the scene, so the extinguisher was a prop one (hence the moment Miranda sassy looks at the camera/crew for how he was acting her in panic), so they went on to it.
But someone had switched the extinguisher to the actual fire thrower that would be used on the scene (I dont remember if was proposital or not or simply a mistake because they were meant to be identical).
So this is their actual reaction, cause when he pressed the valve, he really wasnt expecting to fire come out, neither was Miranda, so their reaction is 100% genuine and they did freak out as on tape.
The thing went out so well they were unable to reenact their reactions or surprise as the first time on rehearsal, so the rehearsal scene was kept and put it into the actual episode.
Are you telling me Miranda was eating that carrot with whip cream for fun and not because the scene called for it.
A little girl in my 4th grade class came up to me after recess and said, “I got married at recess!” and I said “Oh? I didn’t know anyone was ordained under the age of twelve.” and she asked me what ordained meant and I explained and then she said “Oh, well, no, my wife and I were married by the slide, but we’ll be happy together anyway.”
So apparently on school playgrounds, slides are already legalizing same-sex marriage.
They warned us it would be a slippery slope.
An eye-opening perspective (Source)
My Argentinean housemate just got a book on proper American accents and I’ve never felt more attacked
like why’s it gotta be so accurate

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I made some fake frozen dinners for lazy people
Sometimes, this is five star depression dining
Lent
This comic was inspired by @gyolove‘s post about Kurt observing Lent and what he might give up. Huge thanks to @evilsnowswan for the German translations!
Continued in Part 2