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slowly still transferring work I’ve been doing lately here, twitter seemed to love these Princess Zelda designs I did (I just was hit with inspiration for what my version of Zelda would look like)
lotsofsnakes
thankyouma-am
Fun fact, not a yawn, popping it’s jaw back together after eating
lotsofsnakes
this is indeed a yawn as he did not eat prior to this gif, as i am his owner
The other day, I went down the rabbit hole of "cute donkeys" and came up with my head full of things I didn't know about mules (the hybrid offspring of a horse and a donkey), and why they were once so coveted as work animals.
Brace for info dump, while enjoying this lovely photo of a trio of draft mules.
The explanation is hybrid vigour, when hybrid offspring have enhanced traits compared to its parents:
Mules are stronger, hardier, healthier, have better enduranve, harder hooves, sturdier skin and can handle extreme weather better than horses or donkeys. They are also more patient, more intelligent, and easier to handle than either of their parent species. Horses may be faster, but that's about the single thing they're better at than a mule of the same size.
So mules, being all around nicer to work with and getting you more work for the same amount of feed, and with less hassle, were preferred for just about every job purpose.
Habby du Magnou, a Poitevin Mulassier mare, and her daughter Lady du Magnou, a rare Poitevin mule
But since horses have 64 chromosomes and donkeys have 62, mules end up with 63 chromosomes, which means they are almost invariably sterile. That's because biology gets very confused when trying to split an uneven number of chromosomes neatly in half to create germ cells. There are a few documented exceptions of fertile mule mares (never stallions), but they are very, very rare. So you have to keep crossbreeding the two parent species to produce them, usually by breeding a donkey sire (jack) to a horse dam (mare). This is because it's easier for a 32 chromosome egg to incorporate a 31 chromosome sperm into a viable zygote (fertilised egg) than vice versa.
Because of this, there was (and still is) in France a breed of absolutely massive draft horses, the Poitevin Mulassier, and a breed of big-ass donkeys (pun intended, but honestly, it's arguably the largest donkey in the world, and it's shaggy like Highland cattle), the Baudet du Pitou, two breeds whose main purpose was to breed the enormous and super-strong Poitevin mule.
The Poitevin mule
This absolute unit was the must-have work-animal for all kinds of farm and industrial work for centuries, and a significant French export, until mechanisation made these magnificent creatures obsolete.
With no demand for the Poitevin mule , its parent breeds dwindled, almost to the brink of extinction. Determined conservation efforts during the last few decades are slowly bringing their numbers back up, but they're very far from their heyday, when some 20,000 Poitevin mules were born annually.
The Poitevin Mulassier
Both the parent breeds are still endangered, which means most of the current effort is directed into bringing up the numbers of Poitevin horses and Pitou donkeys. This means breeding horses to horses and donkeys to donkeys, with very few breeding opportunities allowed to produce the Poitevin mule. Only about 20 of those are born each year.
The Baudet du Pitou
On Monday night in South London, armed police trapped a black man named Chris Kaba inside a car and executed him through the windshield. He was 24 years old. Today, a protest march demanding justice for his murder was broadcast on Sky News, who reframed it as a moving tribute to the queen by thousands of grieving subjects.
Some of the lowest, most despicable shit I've ever seen from the British media and believe me when I say I've some depraved stuff in the past.
I’m enjoying the memes and all but dear lord I cannot get over how unfair it is that she had the best of medical care and will have a stupidly and outrageously expensive funeral when so many old people die alone and unmourned of completely preventable circumstances.
They were deemed expendable over Covid. They die in heatwaves. They die because ambulances take 14 hours to get to them when they have falls. They die in the cold. They starve. There’s a cost of living crisis, this country is a hellscape, and one old fucker with blood on her hands is going to fuck us all over one more time from her coffin while other old people -
die.
And yes I’m focussing on the old here! They’re the direct comparison and they just get. forgotten and left behind and ignored and disregarded. Their premature deaths are still tragedies. Everyone should get the chance to die mindblowingly old, with great medical care, comfortably and surrounded by family.
if we want to stop the patriarchal concept of surnames being passed down the male line, we have a few options options that i’d be 100% fine with:
- children get whichever surname is cooler, to eliminate uncool surnames over the generations
- children get whichever surname is rarer, to achieve a utopian future in a few centuries where all surnames are more or less equally common
- children’s surnames are randomly generated: say, heads for parent #1’s surname, tails for parent #2’s surname
- parents pick the first names first, and then a court decides which surname fits it better. so if a couple named mr. madison and mr. liu want to name their daughter alison, she’ll get the surname liu, because alison madison sounds ridiculous
- everyone stops having children right now
6) both parents’ surnames are combined into a new name, in the same vein as portmanteau ship-names
7) We adopt elvish naming customs and have upwards of three names for each individual, none of which are surnames and all of which may be translated to any other language for any reason at any point in our lives. This has no advantages but will really annoy every government on earth and I just think it’d be really funny to watch them figure out the paperwork for that
I once completed a name change for a Miss White, she was getting married to Mr. Black
They both changed their name to Mr and Mrs. Grey
I looooove looking for foreshadowing. Oh, you mentioned how if such-and-such thing goes wrong it will mean death? That same threat is probably gonna happen later! What’s that, a one-line reference to so-and-so who had something weird happen to them a long time ago? I’ll be looking for when learning about their experience makes a big plot twist later on! There’s a description of an experimental piece of equipment the characters were working on before the plot took off? Golly gee, I wonder when they’ll get to use it! I love finding the clues the author leaves about how the plot will finish.
I also love when I miss that a detail was foreshadowing! It’s so much fun being out-plotted by the author!
Precisely!
If you want to be educated on the "welfare queen" stereotype in a hilarious and informative and thorough manner, I will once again recommend this episode of You're Wrong About
