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My cheeky friend Hans:

"I'm down for Capybara Day, Mongoose Day, Honey Badger Day, and the rare but magical Coelacanth Day."

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Bad idea: Age gap discourse but in a fantasy land where there's multiple races who have vastly different lifespans and life styles.

Is it wrong for a 27 year old human to date a 140 year old stone elf, considering most stone elves don't get out of diapers till their 30s?

Is it wrong for a 80 year old dwarf to date a two year old fire wisp, when fire wisps only live up to 5 years (between the eruptions) and have memories of their past lives, so in a way they're "born" at age 400,000+? That octogenarian dwarf is way younger than the fire wisp that's only physically younger than some of the socks the dwarf has!

Is it wrong for a chronomancer who was never born to date, well, anyone? They are zero years old and infinity years old and negative one hundred and seventeen years old all at once. They look like an old human, sure, with the long white beard and the wrinkly skin, but as far as anyone can tell, they've always looked like that. We've seen the cave paintings.

Is it wrong for a 30 year old lizardman (that's old in lizardman years) to date a human who is 60 years old in biological years (because of aging spells), 26 years old in lived-experience years, but only 13 years old in calendar years? (ie, they were born 13 years ago, but spent some of that time in sideways timelines, so they've lived more years than have passed in their home timeline?)

Is it wrong for a 12,000 year old dragon date a pile of 400 kobolds when kobolds only live like 10 years on average, but reach full maturity in one year? And if you disagree, can you do anything about it? You do know what happened to the last policeman who tried to arrest a dragon, right? Their city is still smoldering, 50 years later.

Is it wrong for anyone to date the time worm? It's the same age, every year. So the age gap can only intensify. If you start dating the time worm when you're both the same age, when do you break it off because you've become too much older than them?

And most confusing of all... What about the fairies? They could be anything between a thousand and a day old, they would lie about their age either way, and they can look like whatever they want. There's fairies we know for a fact have been around since the founding of The City of Towers, who met the silent mother herself, and also look like they're at most ten years old. Is it wrong to date them, or just really uncomfortable for everyone who sees it? And on the other side there's fairies who are "born" (hatched? They come from plants, I'm not sure what the verb even would be. Seeded? Sprouted, maybe) this week who are already appearing like middle-aged men and dancing with widows in what looks like a scheme to run off with her fortune but they never take the money, because what would a fairy want with worthless metal discs? Maybe fairies have a hive mind or genetic memory or reincarnation with full memories, they'd never tell you or give you a straight (or consistent) answer anyway.

Stone golems are really the only inter-race dating situation anyone can agree on. They're unthinking & unmoving solid rock during the day, so those hours don't count. Thus their "real age" is a nice even half of their true age. So if you meet a stone golem who was dug out 30 years ago, watch out: that's a 15 year old, and if you're a 25 year human, that's too young for you, even though their dig-date is five years before your birth-date.

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I’ve searched high and low for the wonderful original post because this is amazing and deserves to be rebloged but I hope this is good enough. As thundercrumbs said GET OFF THAT MANS FACE!

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it really is so uncomfortable being a trans man in cis centric conversations of feminism. I just wonder. do they know about people like me? do they care? if I brought it up to them, how would they react? Do they expect me to be their human shield?

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A sphinx moth enjoying moonflowers in the garden.

Cochise County, Arizona, September 2023.

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i just found out tumblr was storing over three GIGABYTES of cookies on my device without me knowing and that's why it's been running so fucking slow recently... incredible. anyways everyone go clear your fucking cookies. don't let this website run a goddamn video game's worth of disc space in the background for no good reason.

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fell for the oldest trick in the book

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yeah that's a dart frog okay

#dendrobatidae

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It's like squamate biology where there are true wyverns but also a bunch of other dragons that convergently lost their other two legs but are still called dragons, a group of burrowing wyrms descended from dragons that also lost them but are considered neither wyverns nor dragons, and sea serpents that turned them all into flippers and no one knows whether they still count as legs or not.

the dragons and wyverns thing makes me so unreasonably mad i’m sorry

actual biology: whales are fish because they evolved from mammals which evolved from reptiles which evolved from fish. everything is much more complicated than the simple boxes our brains like. what classifies a species is somewhat arbitrary human concept

losers: that’s a wyvern because it has 2 legs and 2 wings, dragon is incorrect >:(

#squamata #dragons #in order they're stand-ins for snakes legless lizards amphisbaenians and mosasaurs

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Working on new stickers and patch designs!!

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you can't support the normalization of the usage of singular they/them pronouns and then say you don't support people who want to normalize it/its because it's "too weird," as if using singular they/them pronouns isn't clearly weird to a lot of people.

you can't refuse to acknowledge an identity because it's "weird," they're all "weird" in the eyes of cisheteronormative society. people who use neopronouns like it/its, ze/hir, xe/xem, thon/thons and others don't deserve to have to settle for they/them if that's not what they use. it doesn't matter if something is "weird" or not. let go of the compulsive need to assimilate and just let people express themselves freely

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japan: every time a really weird fossil animal comes out we make art and models of it for 20 years and put it in our manga and documentaries and-

america: we've been jerking off tyrannosaurus for the last 100 years and we do not plan to stop any time soon

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Interaction between species other than predator/prey

Prehistoric ecosystems and plants! Grasslands are super recent

Things I want to see more in paleoart

(Mostly just a list of things I plan to draw in the future lol)

More scars and not just on carnivores.

Dinosaurs being silly (all animals are silly sometimes)

More colourful sauropods

Genera that aren't well known

The type of paleoart that's basically a eulogy to extinct species. I can't quite describe it rn but it makes me experience shrimp emotions.

(feel free to add things that you want to see more in the notes as well)

(also please note that this is just a list of things I want to see more of, I don't want to see less of other things that aren't on this list.)

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"Here are your tortured poets. All from Mahmoud Darwish to Dr. Refat Alareer to Khaled Juma, these are tortured poets. Tortured by longing for a home they can never return to, tortured by the world they were born to for BEING BORN. Palestine, home to the tortured poets department." [@/folkoftheshelf on X. April 20th, 2024.]

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you will always be a moid

i will always be...

amoeboid

#deal with it

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this is what i'm doing with my tumblr mutuals

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Sorry if this is a silly question but is it ok if I follow you if I’m a Tolkien blog? I completely agree with your criticism of racism and racial/bioessentialism in Tolkien and fantasy inspired by him and attempt to critique those themes when applicable but if you’d be more comfortable if I did not follow I completely understand!

Oh you're probably here from that post that I worded a little clunky. To clarify: I am a huge Tolkien fan boy and I have an entire shelf in my house dedicated to all of his works, reference books included. I don't have some of the newer releases from his estate and the recent audio books are on my wishlist, but otherwise I own pretty much everything published with his name on it. So, in short, a Tolkien blog would simply be a fellow fan :]

I had a roommate for a while that hated Tolkien, in her opinion his works are irredeemable due to the sexism, racism, and related age of his works. I do agree that there is discussion to be had about the sexism and racism, as well as the constraints of his time, and how as the modern-day father of fantasy many derivative works don't put in the work required to perhaps fixing things he himself discussed as problems with his works in his many letters and journals- of which I have published copies on aforementioned bookshelf.

HOWEVER I think "irredeemable" is too far a step, not just because I'm a fan of his works, but because I think it's really not his fault that people inspired by his writing chose not to engage with fixing the problems the man himself admits to not being satisfied with. Most of his fame came after his death, so it's not like he was alive to fix it, and also when shitty people took the wrong message from his works we also have proof he told them to fuck off and that he hated that they touched his stuff.

The reason I'm online in the first place is because at a ripe 11 years old I wanted to talk to other Tolkien fans. 20 years later, I'm still of the same mindset.