aeternatv

[aeternatv]

Today I met 6 irish draught horses. One was a FOAL already taller than me!! Another put her head on her shoulder and I swear to god her head was the size of my torso. I have been around horses but these ones were so crazy large. I am not a short person but I was DWARFED. Also according to Wikipedia they have a caste system? And then there's the Irish Draught Sport Horse?? Quoth my partner "like you can have a sport version of a car?" Anyway. I thought you'd like to know. Any Killie thoughts on the Irish draught horse? I have gained a new perspective on how horses are so large and that little jock is SMALL

OH HO HO you lucky beast!! I’m so glad you told me this. Seriously, thank you.

💀

Omg the Irish Draught. Typical horse breed story: Ireland, as usual, produces some of the best Bone, in horses, on planet Earth. Bone that is prized around the world. Bone that is snatched up by the sheikhs and emperors of the world to play genetics-based gacha games with. You can build almost any muscle you like on an athlete, but a horse athlete does better when they start with a good skeleton to hang it on, and for thousands of years Ireland has excelled in the production of certain high-value traits. Good Bone.

Ireland typically completely drops the ball on doing anything with this insane production of a prime resource, making a vague face, and saying “it’s what we call a horse” and when asked for specifics may stare at you like you’re stupid and eventually admit, “a big horse.”

Thus leaving Americans to sneak in like vultures, snatching the Good Bone, taking it seriously, and shouting “this is a BRAND now.”

THE IRISH DRAUGHT!!! Beautiful, practical, marvellous bone! A fine coldblood - that’s a heavy European “draft” type, the butch kind of horse, as opposed to the greyhound desert horses that are “hot blooded.”

Mixing the hotblooded Arab lines with European native breeds - including the Irish Hobby - produced the strong bone and pared-down athleticism of the Thoroughbred. The studbooks were then closed, and Thoroughbreds today may only be descended from registered Thoroughbreds. They are athletic, energetic, greyhound horses - the fastest domestic animals, a feat of bioengineering, a direct challenge to God.

But they’re a bit breakable and mad, being stripped down so ferociously over generations to the essentials of running. In the relentless push for producing Speed, breeding loses the focus on things like Good Bone, a Kind Eye, Cross-Country Stamina, and Strong Constitution. It’s like a game that maxes out the “sprint” stat for speedruns, and produces a player character that’s perfect at speedruns, but if you want to sit down for a tabletop roleplaying game with friends, instantly breaks their ankle and bursts into flames. Can you keep the sprinty style and good characteristics, but still have someone that can play other sports and games?

So if you personally want a tough and sporty horse, boiling with athletic ability, but sane and strong and sober - you cross the Thoroughbred with a - well, with a steady, consistent coldblood. Ideally, one who has been honed over generations to be a friendly, clever tractor. A big, kind masterpiece of a different sort entirely; something of pure and powerful practicality. something that patches the deficiencies of the Thoroughbred character, something with fabulous Bone. Ideally something that isn’t too inbred itself; something powerful, practical, but not a total tank; some sturdy bastard that’s been kicking around, quietly doing a job, for centuries. Good bone - but not the weighty grandeur of the Shire or Ardennes - we want a bit of secret fire, something that will hunt. Something that will kick over the traces and jump, over wild country.

Hey, what do you know - there’s the Irish Draught.

Crossing the Thoroughbred with the Irish Draught produces the Irish Sport Horse. This is an athlete that doesn’t just sprint. Fast, flexible, steady and clever, with Thoroughbred bred-to-be-an-athlete combined with Irish Draught’s legendary constitution, you see the Irish Sport in the Olympics, taking gold medals. They do very well as a practical all-rounder. Hence the name: the Irish Sport.

But here’s where the tricky part comes in. Irish horse people never codified the Irish Draught “properly.” So the Irish Sport often has infusions of other native breeds… as does any creature described casually as an Irish Draught. If you ask the native owners they just say What The Fuck Do You Mean: It’s A Big Horse. But then, if you’re an eager American who genotypes your Irish Sport, you might come back with… CONNEMARA PONY?! And when you inquire, the breeders tend to say things like “well, you see, we look at them with our eyes; and then if it’s a big one, it’s a Draught, and if it’s a small one, it’s a Pony. What’s the problem?”

“The problem,” Americans say, “is the total lack of branding.”

so Americans have been leading the cause. The ship has sailed to rebrand the Irish Sport as “thoroughbred + purebred registered Irish Draught ONLY.” The Irish Sport is a bit of a mix.

But the Irish DRAUGHT Sport Horse is when you take a “purebred” Irish Draught - insert joke about how you find one of these, but it’s the top tier of the “caste system” - and cross it to a Thoroughbred, and get a PEDIGREE. That is what Americans people are trying to do with the concept Irish Draught Sport Horse.

…. But literally everyone calls them Irish Sports anyway. LOL.

And the Irish Draught, despite not being used so much for its intended purposes any more, remains important and influential partly because of its ability to produce athletes.

At any rate, yes, FUCK, Killie is tiny!!

He’s short by any standard, and this is just what jockeys are like, but occasionally it does look a bit wild. Here you go, you little sod. Here’s a MONSTER. Ride it with your terrifyingly athletic thighs and the power of your MIND.

Killie loves a good Irish Draught, though they’re not in his sphere of work. His horrid English mother breeds and keeps Irish Sports for foxhunting. (One of them in his childhood was named Wellington, and this was very slightly political and nasty of Helena.)

He doesn’t get to do much cross-country but there’s a lot to be said for a willing Irish Sport, and if asked to choose a horse for his own pleasure, (after being paralysed by the concept), he wouldn’t pick any other breed.

I’m so glad you shared this with me. Thank you.

[aeternatv]

youtube poop? what about youtube pee? ever think about that?

youtube pee is those million+ subscriber "video remix" youtubers who steal the YTP schtick but don't use the label, do it worse, and whose target demo is middle school children

[aeternatv]

Why is it that chasers get their own pride flag

But people who love bears don't?

This is a tragedy. This is outrageous.

[aeternatv]

My mom has tick-borne encephalitis. She's a shell of herself at the moment.

This is a reminder that there is a vaccine (that she did get and still she's been sleeping about 18 hours a day for a week so far) and you should definitely get it if you live anywhere that's highlighted in red on this map and you go outside and/or have pets that go outside, because this virus is truly terrifying, trust me.

Source : Im, J. H., Baek, J. H., Durey, A., Kwon, H. Y., Chung, M. H., & Lee, J. S. (2020). Geographic distribution of Tick-borne encephalitis virus complex. Journal of vector borne diseases, 57(1), 14–22.

[aeternatv]

not to be a hater but people on here will post pics of genuinely bad tattoos and not even realize that they're bad...not talking about subject matter at all but the trend of the super light touch + fine line + relying on extremely subtle differences in lighting means a tattoo is going to age like garbage. and then we get people going on r/tattooadvice 1 month after their appointment like "my tattoo is so faded i can barely tell what it is, is this normal??!!!"

pro tip if the artist you're considering going to never posts healed pics of their work, that's a red flag

[aeternatv]

I want to share a plot twist from a thing that I was, at one point, going to write. I think the plot twist was the only thing that I was really all that jazzed about, and it wouldn't have been enough to justify the whole thing.

The premise is, there's a high school robotics team that's in the school's van with their teacher, coming home from a robotics meet where they took third place. We have a small ensemble cast of four teenaged robot builders and their teacher; they're diverse people with different backgrounds, yadda yadda, they each took on a specific role in the team to have specialized skills.

And then they get transported to a fantasy world.

From there, each of their specialties translates into magical powers of a different sort, so the project manager gets some kind of cool summon power, and the programmer gets, uh, you know, I never got as far as fleshing out any magic systems. But they get them as the chapters go on and after the first two there's this anticipation building, because there were five people in the van. And this does come to pass, except that the final kid is the odd one out. He didn't really have a role on the team, he was their goof, they all liked him but he wasn't exactly contributing, and besides, he's homeschooled and only on their team through special allowance.

So they start to feel bad about that, and he says "haha, yeah, don't worry about it guys" but they can see he's anxious and wary. And they're a team with this one kind of useless member who doesn't have fantastical powers like the rest of them, and is just a tiny bit out of sync with the rest of them.

Then there's a big battle, and they all use their special powers except for the homeschooled kid, who has grown more distant from them as the chapters have progressed. They're working in sync, the bad guys are going down ... and then the tide turns, and it all starts falling apart as they get taken out one by one, their creations smashed and magic running dry.

So with all hope lost, the homeschooled kid comes out of where he's been hiding, scoops a sword up off the ground, and advances on the enemy. His friends shout at him not to, they know he's got nothing, they know this is futile and likely to get him killed. But he takes this sword and when he reaches the enemy he gets into a perfect fighting stance, then proceeds to lay waste with the sword in a series of precise moves, all humor gone from him, no hesitation, remorse, or uncertainty.

And when he's finished, breathing hard but miraculously whole, he turns to his friends, and there's a moment of confusion and silence before he says, "well gosh, guys, I guess swordplay is my special skill!"

But something is up. Swordplay is not like their unique magic systems. And when did he get it? How did he get it? If that's his skill, it's not following the same rules.

Eventually, not too long after this, we get our big twist: the homeschooled kid is not actually in isekai scenario, he's from this world. He's only been on Earth for the past few years, raised there to keep him safe. He knows swordplay because he's been studying the blade practically from birth, and this whole time every weird suggestion he's made has actually been because he's been ineffectually trying to steer the group based on what he knows. And the isekai scenario wasn't some random accident that pulled their van into another world, it was magic that was targeting him specifically, with his friends bestowed with power because of their connection to him.

Anyway, that's it, that's the twist.

I think this is one of those things that needs some room to breathe, so has to go into something novel or at least novella length: you need to lay down the clues and all the things that are obvious in retrospect. But it's simply not enough on its own. My mind keeps going back to the twist, but not the surrounding story, and I think it's the only thing from this that I was actually in love with.

(You don't see group isekai stories often, but I expect that one of them has done this twist, and I'm just not enough of a media consumer to have come across it.)

[aeternatv]

what was up with the period circa 2010 when unpaid internships were big. that was crazy. like i think they werent a major thing either before or since the years 2005-2015. because they are patently insane. bills! i guess it was the gfc? heady times

[aeternatv]

I'm nonbinary, transmasc and use he/it pronouns. (she/her in public/professional/medical situations) My whole family knows this.

My dad refuses to use it/its for me. He's a transmedicalist binary trans man, and thinks it/its is "dehumanizing" even though using MY PRONOUNS affects literally no one and it's not my god damn problem if it "makes him uncomfortable".

Unfortunately, he constantly refers to me with they/them pronouns. I haven't used they/them in a few years. I've corrected him tons of times. He rarely uses he/him for me.

Both my sibling and my dad once got unreasonably upset because I told them I don't like a lot of gender-neutral terms, e.g. "sibling". They said my preference for masc terms doesn't matter because it's fine to use neutral terms for everyone, which is just ridiculous.

I'm fully convinced they both believe that I HAVE to be fine with all this because I'm nonbinary.

this is exorsexism.

[aeternatv]

ubi, universal basic income

[aeternatv]

The point of fiction is actually to put that guy in a situation™️, and he might try to tell you the point is to then get him out of the situation, WRONG, second situation

[aeternatv]

[aeternatv]

[aeternatv]

“But people changing their pronouns is such a new thing, I’m from a different time” If my 90 year old family friend who grew up in WWII-era Germany understood and respected me being trans after being told the first time, you can too. It’s not that hard.

[aeternatv]

"Teenagers are children who need to be protected from seeing bad things on the internet" is already a case of extended-childhood, relative to most of history in most places in the world (afaik the word "teenager" didn't even exist in English until the 1940s). Extending that even further to include people in their early 20s does feel like an inevitable outcome of the brain-development nonsense being so widely accepted though

[aeternatv]

It would be funny if nuclear waste warning messages become an attraction for future historical linguists.

I mean look at this thing:

A parallel text in 7 languages, with 4 different scripts between them! And pictograms! All designed to be preserved intact!