March 16, 2025 - White-chinned Woodcreeper (Dendrocincla merula) These woodcreepers are found in lowland forests and wetlands across northern South America. They eat mostly arthropods, along with some small vertebrates, capturing prey in short flights as it flees ant swarms and sometimes peccaries. Little is known about their breeding behavior, though they are thought to nest in cavities and females likely care for the chicks alone.
Wish I had some huge contrarian takes on the ancient historians but I don't really. Their reputation is usually close enough to accurate. Thucydides really is more perceptive and talented than his successors. Plutarch really does favor moralizing at the expense of historical accuracy. And so on.
I do think that some historians are overrated as historians just because they're our best source for a given time. Diodorus Siculus and Livy are a good comparison here. They both wrote massive comprehensive histories built on the works of others with little original research of their own. In terms of quality, their writing is good when they have good sources to epitomize but otherwise not so much. Maybe Livy is somewhat more talented than Diodorus but I don't think it's by a massive amount. But Livy is our main surviving source for the first half millennium of Roman history while much of what survives of Diodorus is duplicated elsewhere. So Livy gets talked about much more (understandable) and praised more too (also understandable but ultimately a little unfair).
There's a tendency when talking about pre-modern writers to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they knew what they were doing, which is probably a healthy attitude for a historian to take but also I do think that the median surviving ancient historian was mediocre at their job, and not just grading on an unfair modern curve. Older assessments of historians tend to be a bit more frank in their assessments, but in more recent decades translators like to rediscover and rehabilitate these guys. Again, not always a bad instinct, but it's something you have to adjust for as a reader.
But even so, generally the historians that get talked about the most are also the ones you should be reading. Even if they aren't always as skilled as claimed, they're still *essential*, which is ultimately the more important thing.
The one work that really doesn't get talked about enough is Diodorus Siculus Books 16-20 about Philip II, Alexander, and the civil wars after Alexander's death. It's such an exciting time and such a fun read!
im getting sick of people thinking they just awawa and scream
If Tumblr's API had a method for programmatically updating a blog's avatar I would be so annoying with it.
So it turns out that Tumblr's API actually does support updating avatars, it's just undocumented. Thanks to @wasabipesto for providing the details.
so... you just gonna change your avatar at regular intervals?
Not regular intervals, no. I'm thinking of writing a script that will turn my avatar into a cat for a randomly selected five-minute stretch of each hour, for a start.
What do you mean that Forgotten Realms is a romantic fantasy setting masquerading as high fantasy?
(With reference to this post there.)
Exactly what it says on the tin β the Forgotten Realms is clearly principally inspired by romantic fantasy, not high fantasy.
In this context, when I say "romantic fantasy", I'm referring to a specific, relatively short-lived genre of fantasy literature that was wildly popular in the 1980s and 1990s, but abruptly fell almost entirely off the map after about 1998, due to a variety of economic and cultural factors which are way too complicated to go into in a Tumblr post. This is distinct from the more contemporary usage of "romance novels with fantasy settings", though there's definitely a lot of overlap.
If you're looking for a romantic fantasy reading list, Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar series β especially the early stuff β is probably the easiest to get your hands on these days; it's practically the only example that still has any real name recognition in 2025, for all that Lackey was a latecomer to the genre. Other names worth checking out include Margaret Ball, Carole Nelson Douglas, Tanya Huff, Holly Lisle, Jennifer Roberson, and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, off the top of my head, though not all of them worked exclusively within the genre.
(Elizabeth Moon is an interesting edge case, in that her stuff is principally military science fiction, but very much adheres to the forms of romantic fantasy. Her Deed of Paksenarrion trilogy, one of her few pure fantasy works, is a fun snapshot of an era because it was written explicitly in response to what Moon perceived as the shortcomings of the fantasy worldbuilding on display in then-contemporary Dungeons & Dragons settings, and hit the shelves at just about exactly the same time as the earliest Forgotten Realms material.)
Question, what exactly is the difference? Google just wants to show me Romantasy.
Well, the trick is that genres are creative conversations, not checklists of tropes, so the real answer to that question is "it's the type of fantasy that was being written by this specific group of popular fantasy authors, most of whom personally knew and frequently collaborated with each other, during this specific period of time".
That said, there are a few recurring features that can be identified. Not all of these will be present in every example of the genre, of course, and whether they add up to a distinct strand of fantasy or a subgenre of high fantasy or what-have-you is a debate I'd prefer to leave to those who have more time on their hands, but to hit some high points:
Obi-Wan wears like 53 layer of robes so everyone assumes heβs kinda soft especially compared to hisΒ βin the prime of his youthβ former Padawan but then one day he goes shirtless to spar and heβs shredded, he has an 8 pack. Clones and Jedi alike are choking on drinks and tripping into walls. Ahsoka is covering her eyes and screaming because thatβs basically her grandpa. Anakin has to throw a robe over Obi-Wan like The Birth of Venus.Β
I BLAME YOU ALL
Why isnβt this in the Met or the Louve, I ask kindly.
POV you're eating fries and there's a lil guy who wants you to share.
today we are going to learn about horses
horse fact 1: horses are partially exoskeletal
horse fact 2: horses are partially trees
horse fact 3: got frogs in em
these are all the facts we have about horses.
OP that's not even a full horse. You've literally only looked at the feet.
maybe one day we will be brave enough to lift our eyes and look, trembling, at the rest of the horse. not today, though. today, these are all the facts we have about horses.
today we are going to learn about horses
horse fact 1: horses are partially exoskeletal
horse fact 2: horses are partially trees
horse fact 3: got frogs in em
these are all the facts we have about horses.
OP that's not even a full horse. You've literally only looked at the feet.
maybe one day we will be brave enough to lift our eyes and look, trembling, at the rest of the horse. not today, though. today, these are all the facts we have about horses.
note: I have used round brackets to indicate things I am unsure about as opposed to round brackets since it seems they have used square brackets in some segments. I think it'll be obvious what's THEIR round brackets and what's MINE tho
Might update tomorrow when I'm not as tired if I go over it again and notice some errors or read some stuff I couldn't before, otherwise I might type out everything else I can see in that portion of the video
I encourage everyone to look at the screenshots or video themselves to see if they can read something themselves more accurately than I have. You can see the leak here.
My mind reals at the idea that people couldve been playing music like this 4000 years ago
Every time I hear someone say they hate Bruxish I love her even more
I'm not even joking either this thing was one of my first shinies ever in Sun and Moon and I absolutely love it. If Bruxish has 0 fans I'm dead!!!!!!!
made by a member of AWAY and posted on their behalf with permission
reblog this shit for sample size btw. or ill get you.
baby wants smoko
(for those of you who have been living under a rock since late 2019, automattic owns tumblr)
