melly-fox - Tumblr blog

[melly-fox]

horses are inherently funny because they come in so many sizes. like draft horses

this looks so fake. this horses skull is bigger than the dudes entire torso. this horses NECK is thicker than the dudes entire BODY.

and then at the opposite end of the spectrum you have shit like this shetland pony which ALSO looks fake

what the hell happened to this thing who bred this line of ponies to be so ridiculous

[melly-fox]

Best thing I’ve seen all day

[melly-fox]

Watching Przewalski's horses run free on the Kazakhstan steppe for the first time in 200 years

[melly-fox]

The autoclave is designed to kill schmucks I think

[melly-fox]

[melly-fox]

started reading the lymond chronicles and I truly have no idea what’s going on but I do like the funny words this guy is speaking to me

[melly-fox]

The poster for "The Two Towers" that I drew a long time ago

[melly-fox]

Another banger from /r/stupiddovenests - at least the tag is appropriate this time

[melly-fox]

foal for fun

[melly-fox]

Made it to 10 Boober comics!

Have a big post of kitties. I think I’ll be making a little book when I make some more!

EDIT: Was not expecting this many notes. If any of you guys would be interested in anything else I do, check out my art fb!

[melly-fox]

A totally strange and incorrect interpretation of what the first fish to crawl onto land might have looked like...

from "Dinosauri giganti da scorprire" (Italy, 1992)

illustration by Chris Foss

[melly-fox]

Ok update on the Star Trek doors. Found this article that says use of the Special Door Opening Stagehand actually seems to have persisted thru most of Star Trek even after we got auto doors because motion activated ones would just be opening and closing willing nilly for any movement in the vicinity.

What this means is the blooper videos like the one attached to this article span the entirety of Trek, and they are so much funnier than I even remembered. I truly respect the absolute unwavering faith Shatner had in the Door Crew because he faceplants harder than anyone else when they fail.

I don't know how strictly accurate this is, but one of the things I find shocking about watching historical dramas is how many people there are around all the time---according to Madame de... (1953) a well-off French household in the Belle Epoque maintains a workforce of at least 3, and the glittering opera has staff just to open doors. According to Shogun (2024) you can expect a deep bench just to mind your household, and again, people who exist to open doors.

Could people....not open doors in the past? Were doors tricky, before the standardization of hinges? Because otherwise, the wealthy used to pay a whole bunch of people to do it for them in multiple contexts, and I find myself baffled.

[melly-fox]

This is some great historical context, but also the first thing I thought of was how we have so many automatic doors now and also how in the original Star Trek, they had to have a couple guys in the walls ready to pull the doors open to make them look like they were automatic (guys who would occasionally miss their cue and cause people to walk face first into the doors). As a millennial who grew up with automatic doors in every grocery store, it never once occurred to me that we didn't have them yet in the 60s, and they were one of the futuristic technologies.

I don't know how strictly accurate this is, but one of the things I find shocking about watching historical dramas is how many people there are around all the time---according to Madame de... (1953) a well-off French household in the Belle Epoque maintains a workforce of at least 3, and the glittering opera has staff just to open doors. According to Shogun (2024) you can expect a deep bench just to mind your household, and again, people who exist to open doors.

Could people....not open doors in the past? Were doors tricky, before the standardization of hinges? Because otherwise, the wealthy used to pay a whole bunch of people to do it for them in multiple contexts, and I find myself baffled.

[melly-fox]

In Patricia C. Wrede's Frontier Magic series, the protagonist's magic just doesn't really work the way the rest of the European/East coast trained magicians' work, so to get by in school, she learns to twist and mess with her spells to make it look like it's working the same way as everyone else's.

For example, to build a complex spell, she has trouble balancing the various elements until they click together, so she uses extra magic outside of the spell to shore it up artificially. Which means she develops a very different understanding of spells from her traditionally taught peers. For her it's not about keeping your magic rigidly organized to make a discrete spell. Instead she focuses on the overall shape and feel of the spells and where the power needs to be and uses extra power to fill in the gaps where she can't make her magic follow the "correct" protocol. So she becomes super skilled at examining the frameworks of magic and understanding where power is going and what function it's serving.

At the end of Book 1, her self taught method of pushing her magic into alignment allows her to save the day because of her unique viewpoint. By the end of the trilogy, as she works with more diverse magicians, she ends up making a major scientific/magical breakthrough that changes people's fundamental understanding of magic.

These books are so cool with such an interesting and unique approach to magic; Eff's descriptions of how she visualizes magic are fascinating. Plus it takes place in a fantasy version of the 1800s where some animals and plants also have magical abilities, and it's both fantastical and realistic about how such a world would affect the people living in it.

All throughout childhood, while my peers were socializing and making friends, I studied the blade read so many books that I am now almost legally blind, which left me with vast and deeply instinctual understanding of English grammar - and next to no ability to explain how it actually works. Friends will often ask me to proofread their writing and then get very mad when I say things like, "You need to completely reverse this sentence and cut this clause entirely; no, I'm sorry, i don't know why, I just know that the way it is now ITCHES 😭"

Now, what I want to see is a fantasy story where this plays out with MAGICAL grammar. Someone from a backwater town deeply steeped in folk magic arrives at Wizard Uni where all their fellow students are like "What do you mean, we should add another '𝞯∘⋇𝞿' to the incancation because it 'sounds better'? What do you mean, 'it could just be a regional thing'?? WHAT DO YOU MEAN, 'THIS SPELL JUST FEELS LIKE IT NEEDS A LIVE RAT'????"

[melly-fox]

did i tell u guys i got into an argument on twitter bc i said foxes are dogs and someone tried to bring up their actual fuckin. classification or whatever and i just said “foxes are dogs cause they are fluffye” and they kept arguing with me. the entire time i was like “you will not survive the immigration to tumblr you are lucky we are not there right now”